I'm Moving

I'm moving this blog to a new URL. Why, you ask? Mostly, I'm moving because I no longer feel the need to be anonymous. Quite the opposite: If I am willing to post an opinion, thought, or idea on the internet, I should also be willing to support that idea with my name. A great deal of cruelty comes from the anonymity allowed by the internet.

Also, if I am going to post my own writing and artwork, I damn well want people to know that it's my intellectual property! I am American, after all, and raised to hold ridiculous pride over works of my creation and to abhor the crime of copyright infringement above almost all else.

Finally, I also want to associate my blog with the small but growing world of Crowlivia. Olivia Johnson is a pretty common name. Crowlivia is not. Google "crowlivia" and just about everything links back to me. I'm a power hungry despot. Obviously.

So, if you wish, you can now visit Cawing and Clawing, formerly Let's Pretend I'm Ruth Little.

Mostly, I'm impressed with Fallon's Young impression

My friend is about to turn 21. I made this image to go on the invite to her birthday gathering, and I think I'm justified in giggling every time I see it:

Paper Doll

So, I like paper dolls. I mean, studying costume design, I suppose it's natural. However, I'm tried of all the thin, idealized bodies the dolls have, so I made this one:

I realize it's still idealized, but at least it's not the idealized form we see all the time, right? ...Right? Herm.

And if she looks familiar, it's because I referenced one of my favorite paintings (and by referenced, I mean blatantly copied):

I love my town

The Portland Mercury recently blogged about some youth journalism made in part by a friend of mine. The videos remind me of how much I love Portland, and also make me want to own chickens. Because I'll take any excuse I can get to have another pet. I also want to volunteer at CHAP, an organization that brings kids to art, and when that's not possible, brings the art to the kids.

I live in an impressive city.

You can watch all the videos here. (My friend worked on the first video. In case you were wondering. And of course you were.)

I do not want to sleep. Why sleep when I could paint?

Summer

It is hard to work during the summer. I am unmotivated to do anything that originates outside myself. So here I sit at Starbucks (yes, I have heard Starbucks is evil, but they have wifi now and don't care how long you hang around) with my black tea. I have work to do. I have a paper to finish. I've been working on it since early July, and it only has to be four pages. That's time management for you.

The reason I've been working on it so long is as follows: Whenever I sit down to work on it, something distracts me. Like the internet. (Perhaps wifi isn't such a good thing.) I started out looking at Pixar's website. Anyone know how to become a concept artist? Their website doesn't delve into that and they don't leave any e-mail adresses. After that dead end, I found myself looking for tea houses in the area. (This tea thing is becoming an obsession, and I'm not that fond of the tea they serve at Starbucks. Apparently there's a tea house on Alberta. There's also a paint-your-own-pottery place up there.) And now I'm blogging: Sending words out into the ether. At least I'm typing something.

I appreciate this, though I have perhaps become too comfortable in being alone. There is joy in company and that is something of which I should remind myself, especially over the long summer.

This video gets better at the end when they realize the camera should stay on Mary.

At the End of the Earth

This is great.

Wait. It's July? What?

Okay, cool.

"When a character is born, he at once acquires such an independence, even of his own author, that the whole world can imagine him in innumerable situations other than those the author thought to place him in."

-Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

I am Intern

So, I have this internship. I have the title of "Costumes Intern," but when it comes down to it, my job is to make order out of a stock room that looks like this:

This is not actually a picture of the stockroom. Rather, it is a random picture I found when I did a google search of "messy closet." (I found it here by the way. Do not worry, I'm not trying to poach other people's pictures of messy closets. Credit where credit is due!) The photo is nevertheless quite accurate. After hours of lifting heavy coats high above my head and slouching over pants to measure their waistlines, my shoulders hurt. I am a grumpy monkey.

Grumpy monkey found here.

Oh, hot cereal

The Oatmeal is both horrifying and wonderful.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/failed_experiment

Tumblr

I have decided to start a Tumblr. It will be the place I dump all the images I find, so I don't have to inundate this blog with them. It is therefore named The Deluge. Visit it at crowlivia.tumblr.com.

Babies Babies Babies

I just saw the film Babies and I highly recommend it. Here's just about my favorite clip:

Soaping out my brows

Today, I had a little fun with hair and make up and managed to make myself look like this:

The eyebrows were the tricky bit. I have thick, dark brows, and so even after I soaped them (like it sounds, I used soap to flatten my eyebrows to make them easier to cover over), used coverup, foundation, and powder over them, they were still there. So, I penciled the new brows over anyway and used photoshop clone stamp (otherwise known as photoshop's gift to the world) to fix it up.

So now you know.

Ode to Joss Whedon

Just watched Serenity again and remembered that it was incredible. It also made me think of a speech Joss Whedon gave:

(To jump straight past Meryl Streep, go to 1:50)