Teachers vs Kids

Here's something that's been sitting for a time, since January 4th, in fact, as I had forgotten about its existence until I began archiving posts from this blog onto my laptop. So, here it is:

As you may know from my previous drawings, I went to Special Ed because of my psychotic abusive dad steering me stupid, up until the sixth grade, whereupon I was rejected from school altogether.
` This one was apparently from the second or third grade, not sure which, when I had just started going to Garfield Elementary in Medina, Ohio. On the front of it is me and the 'retard kids' as we were known. Colorful descriptions below:

Yes, those were all the kids in my class whichever year that was. We were all separated from one another via wooden dividers around our desks, so it was much like going to school in office cubicles, only less cheery.
` I remember that Candace and Tim (who I called Tom for some reason) were particularly messed up, as was tiny little Alcid, who I remember was constantly taking Ritalin and coffee throughout the day, thus stunting his growth at night.
` There was Justin, which might have been the very well-behaved Justin Huffman, in contrast with Nick, the red-haired kid who was notorious for being even a little bit worse-behaved than me. One time he collaborated with me in escaping the classroom, although one time he also poured apple sauce with milk on my head.
` Jamie was a nice kid, but was cranky from sleep deprivation because of his seizures, one of which he actually had while the teacher was explaining this to the class. (It was Mr. Maglione, so that was in the fourth Special Ed Grade. I remember him saying, "See how Jamie is making those groaning sounds, that's because he's in pain from his muscles clenching up.")
` That got me thinking often about how terrible that must be, one's life randomly interrupted on a daily basis. One time in art class I remember talking to him and he didn't answer, and I looked up to see that he had gone all stiff, so I grabbed his arm as he fell off his chair so that his head didn't crash onto the floor.
` The wasp-like one was Sirrom Sturgis, who once punched me for having a crush on him (I was making kissing sounds at him). He was notorious for throwing chairs and things, and he once broke my friend Tiffini's nose near the City Pool one day. He had a brother named Ari, who ironically had a crush on me, as I found many years later after I had been rejected from school altogether.
` Then, there's Aaron, who was a good grade school 'boyfriend' until his parents changed his diet and he stopped becoming hyperactive at lunch as I did and instead retained his composure and gave me funny looks. Still, we played games on the playground as always... until he moved to Youngstown (or was it Ashland?), and I never saw him again.
` Later on, PJ (Preston James Cook), the video game-obsessed one, would later become my 'boyfriend', although thankfully that ended with the end of my Special Ed days. Wow, he turned out to be somewhat creepy, although his mom and sister were cool as ever.

In Special Ed, Us Retards had to contend with Those Evil Teachers, which I guess were actually aides for the most part. Mr Peterson, who was always hanging out with Nick, is in the center because he was Truly Evil. Really! He dragged me down the stairs in a laundry bag! HE'S EVIL!
` Not surprisingly, he was a volunteer from the Baptist Church... OF EVIL! I even called him and Nick "Mr. Penison and Nick the Dick," and understandably, the corresponding pictures were confiscated, many Xerox copies were made for all of them to see, and I was punished accordingly.

Mrs. Baton was small, with short black hair (looking kind of like Mrs. Teavee from that creepy Willy Wonka movie), while Mrs. Barlow had long black hair and a long face, somewhat like the picture, only not actually a beak. I seem to remember both of them putting their hands over my mouth until I couldn't breathe through the snot coming out of my nose.
` Mz. Mick was sometimes called the Hairy Egg, hence the depiction. I remember she was part of a poem I made up about her, Mrs. Groh, the Evil Misleading Counselor, and the fourth grade teacher Mr. Maglione, who I sometimes called Eee-ro-plane, for no apparent reason:

Mrs. Groh doesn't grow,
Hairy eggs are stupid,
Eee-ro-planes go 'round a pole
And are kissed by a cupid.

I didn't say it was a good poem, but bear in mind, it was fourth grade after all! Let's just say, it was much better than the one involving all of the swear words I knew.

This next drawing, done in fifth grade, was meant to be in the style of an Atari game called Food Fight, and I believe it was an accurate representation of the state of our classroom:



There was Justin, Tim and Sirrom, as before, as well as Chris Cepic, another kid I had gone to class with before. Ironically, so had Phil, the guy I lived with in 2005 when I had begun blogging. That was before Chris got 'Special' and started going to my class.
` Why was Chris 'Special'? It wasn't because he had the amazing ability to draw cartoon characters that looked exactly like the ones on TV (his favorite was Darkwing Duck). No, because that's a different kind of special.
` Apparently, he was known in Phil's class as Chris Septic, because he had a spastic colon. That makes sense because I do recall that Chris bathed only once a week and also had particularly bad and uncontrollable gas, which explained the smell on his side of the room -- I remember Michael Miner complaining in his high, nasal voice, "Oh, the sbell!"
` Thus, Chris was more Special because of his intestines, not his head. Ironic twist, isn't it?

Kara Higgins was the only other girl in fifth grade, and she was nicer to me than I was to her. Together, we were shunned by the teacher Ms. Kauffman, for being not only girls but retarded girls. She didn't care whether we did schoolwork, but she did have us clean the rabbit cage.
` Yes, Kauffman was bizarrely chauvinistic against girls. She didn't like when I drew pictures, but I remember her saying of one of Chris' pictures of Darkwing Duck, "I really like the expression" and she made an enlarged copy! I wonder if she taught her daughter, who she had with Mr. Porter (who had his classroom moved next to hers), to be dependent on men, or was it just us retarded girls?
` Derrick Goggins was the skinny diabetic kid, black with huge glasses, who won the spelling bee many times, and who also often cleaned the rabbit cage as well. (Maybe because he wasn't as manly as the other boys?)
` Betrias (which was how we pronounced 'Beatrice') was the rabbit of the class. PJ and I would sometimes stab her with the pencil and she would growl, and we would say, "Sharp enough for you Betrias?" We even came up with a song, celebrating what we thought to be aberrant behavior:

Neebols, neebols,
Where'd you get those peebols?
Lay 'em, spray 'em,
Then eat 'em all up!

We didn't know back then that rabbits normally eat everything two times in a row, so we just thought that Beatrice was one really messed-up rabbit.
` Oh, and I can't forget about Jason. Except that I almost have. I had to think really hard... Jason who? Oh yes, it was Jason Brasty! He was a muscly sort of kid with light hair, as I recall. I remember one day, his face was white as a sheet, and he was holding his wrist because he had hurt it falling off a swing -- and it was actually broken, so he had to go home.

The next year, I walked into the same classroom and the now-Mrs. Kauffman said to me with a scowl, "What are you doing here again?"
` Apparently I had been rejected from Garfield Elementary, at last, and so I eventually was registered at C-FIT (Child-Family Intervention Team) at 3076 A Remsen Road, where us kids had to put up with these abusive assholes:

So, who are they? The teacher, Roger Galbraith was sometimes reasonable, but his assistant Mike Swanson was really into playing head games -- as well as wearing the same 'Kent' sweatshirt every day.
` I remember I wasn't allowed to have more than one pencil, so he took all but one of my matching set of pencils. I remember somehow I got them back and put them in my bra, thinking that getting them back would be some sort of molestation, but I was wrong -- Galbraith fearlessly snatched them out again!
` Me, being obsessive-compulsive and needing my entire set or otherwise I would have an anxiety attack, could NOT stand this and so threw my remaining pencil across the room. He retrieved it, held it out to me above his desk drawer, dropped it into the drawer and opened his hand to reveal a small 'stub' of wood, with a little pencil lead at one end and a chewed-up piece of metal at the other.
` When the principal Anne Vaner came into the room, I told her about what Mike was doing, and he said, "Oh, I'll give you your pencil back," and then he pulled exactly the same stunt, right in front of her!
` Her response? "Wull, now, Sara, there's nothing I can do about it."
` I protested, "But you're the principal!"
` But, she just told me that I was in control of everything here, so if something bad happened to me, it was because I chose it to be that way. She even told me that this was the case whenever anyone sat on me! You know, they sat on us kids? They got shut down for that, but not until after my year was over.
` Anyway, not able to write with the stub, I eventually chewed it up beyond recognition and demanded my pencils back. Of course, Mike Swanson had other plans and gave me one of those giant rectangular multi-colored crayons and asked me to write an essay with it.
` Not only was writing very difficult on lined paper, nor could I erase, but now my writing changed color every couple of letters! What a bitch!

This kind of behavior is why I depicted him as being part swan and part doughnut, which was a bad word in my class, thanks to Bill "Master Disruptor of" Bliss. ("I don't want your cheap education, you Doughnut!")
` As for Mr. Galbraith's being a mushroom, that had something to do with this horrible, scary cartoon movie where these mushroom people wanted to turn this human into a mushroom person. I had a distinctly nauseated feeling for some time, and subsequent nightmares, so that image of mushroom people really stuck with me.

There were only two rooms in this end of the school -- one was our class and one was 'the other class', taught by Mrs. Hetzal. Her students were larger and more powerful, and frequently, she had to call the police on them. On the other end of the school, we were told, were much younger kids.
` Only once did I see any small children -- there were two of them rollerblading in the gym during some special event involving Mike pitching tennis balls and us kids lining up to hit them with a racket. I sent one ball hurtling up to the ceiling and it came down right on the girl's head -- whoops! That wasn't funny, but it was funny when me and Bill hit Mike in the head!

As for the others in the picture, they helped out with managing us retard kids. I remember Allison Rafter had us cooking our breakfast, and afterward we would be forced to watch some video from the other end of the school, such as Sesame Street or The Bedrock Flintstone Kids.
` They'd turn the lights off and play the tape, whereupon I would ask to go to the bathroom and then just stay there, because I wasn't allowed to go anywhere else. This caused a lot of physical fights and me getting pinned to the bathroom floor and sat upon, all because, as a twelve-year-old, I couldn't stand Big Bird or Little Fred.
` Genetta and Genine were mother and daughter, I think, and I called them "Flower-Faces", which I thought was a big insult since flowers are sex organs, and thus something like vaginas.
` Then, there was Steph, who I remember believing she had leprosy during a wrestling match with her, which really freaked me out. I don't remember who Lori (or Laura?) the Loris was, but I recall that Colleen was the counselor and I called her 'Colleen Chevrolet Used Horses' after the cheesy commercial for Halleen Chevrolet Used Cars.

You might ask, what did I do to all these adults that they were so cruel to me? Well, I would sleep in the bean bag chair all morning since I was so sleep-deprived, and amazingly nobody would stop me, and sometimes, just to get away, I would also go crawl through an empty window pane next to a door and hang from the door so that nobody could see my legs and just hide there.
` I would also get into all sorts of physical scraps with the 'teachers', and in one such scrap, I actually ran out a side door of the school, and whoever was chasing me actually fell over as I hung onto the door and then shut it and the door locked them out!
` It was so exciting to me that I wrote lists of things I could do, like this one:



Most of us kids were unruly, so we all had our own lists of things to 'get' the teachers. Bill Bliss was notorious for his antics, and there was Big Dave ('David Dovid Salad Pizza Face'), who was a real idiot, but not worth picking on because of his size. I ran into Dave many years later, though, who was the one who told me that the school had been shut down after I had been kicked out because of the abuse.
` There was also Little Robert, who was usually well-behaved; another unruly red-haired Nick; Amar, who was from the Middle East or somewhere; Jason, who could barely read, but who I wrote simply-worded books starring a bobcat cartoon character similar to the one above; Anthony, whom I called Anch; and I think another one called Luke, and maybe more.
` All of them were boys, and besides a couple of girls in 'the other class' for a short time, I was the only girl on that end of the school! Presumably in order to make me feel better the 'teachers' told me that the previous year most of the students had been girls, but seeing as this is very unlikely, I didn't believe them. I still don't.
` Assholes. Just look at them:

Again, there's Mike and his Kent sweatshirt, the Scary and Evil Mr. G, Anne (a real 'bitch' this time), the Flower Faces, Colleen (a used car-a-pillar?), Allison Rafter (so ducking silly!) and this other lady, Sue, who for some reason I portrayed as part crustacean, part construction crane, and part French bread.
` I remember once that Mike and Mr. G were laughing about how I had behaved in front of a hidden camera (which was so badly that I don't even want to tell anyone!), and also that Mr. G once crumpled up my Best Composition Ever and threw it away and wouldn't let me get it out of the garbage before I missed my van! The same thing also happened to one of my best pictures of 'them' -- better than that one, probably!
` I also remember someone leading me into the office next to the classroom and trying to get me to drink some medication. I think it was Mike who said that my mother wanted me to take it. In recent years, I told her about this and she was shocked -- in real life, she said, they had suggested medicating me and she had laughed and said, "I don't think so, and she wouldn't take it anyway!"

My mom also told me that they had said I was a "really bad kid" and could never amount to anything, and my mom told them, "I'll let you know when Sara graduates from college."
` You know what's funny, I'm 29 and still haven't graduated from college, but it's only because of all the abuse, torture and other unbearable experiences I've had to pull myself through -- no thanks to other people who were supposed to be helping me -- not to mention I didn't start college until I was 24 and had to put up with a lot of abuse during my schooling. So, I've had a lot of things slowing me down, but as it is, I only need five more credits before I can get my transfer degree!
` I'm so close to graduating from community college, and I'm going to see an adviser about transferring to a four-year college, where I can then Fully Graduate From College! Maybe then I can look up ol' Mr. G and Mike and gloat at them. Bitchez!

I Can STILL Draw -- and it helped change my life!

I'm finally tearing through overhauling my life! It may not be going as fast as I'd like because of the enormous amount of things that I'm working on, but now that I don't constantly have crazy roommates to hold me back, I've developed techniques to finish things and a strong motivation to keep going, to the point where I have confidence that I can keep up with my goals!
` In fact, the Good Doctor Nociceptor's already written a bunch about this, which you can read here.

On October 19, long after my last post here, an amazing transformation has occurred in my brain. This one psychology professor, who finds me to be fascinating (presumably because I describe to him what it's like to pass through various stages of childhood development, as an adult) said that this transformation, or at least aspects of it, normally occurs in people who are only 2 1/2 years old.
` And to tell you the truth, I've gone through even more since then, but none so shocking as the first one I mentioned!

And what was it, and why is it significant? Well, in my past, I had a very terrifying and unpredictable life of abuse, and for a while I developed a fantasy life to escape. I'd been violated so much in so many ways and brainwashed to believe that I didn't exist because my own thoughts and perceptions weren't really happening and something else was instead.
` I hated humans, because I thought they were all horrible, and often imagined myself to be some small, furry, fictional gliding mammal, like this one:

They seemed a lot more interesting than the abusive lunatics that I knew and thought were 'normal, happy people' because I didn't know any better. I knew that animal behavior could be predicted and catalogued much of the time, but humans?
` They were always saying one thing, doing another, and telling me that what I wasn't conscious of wasn't really what I was conscious of. I was cut off from the world and everything in it... except for the fuzzy animals I liked so much!

Trying to survive in the adult world, after years more violation and abuse, and living with crazy people and trying not to jump at the slightest noise, I had figured out that earplugs helped me find my 'mental space' as long as I couldn't hear anything around me.
` For a while, this was nearly impossible because of the 24/7 loud noise I dealt with in the condemned house I'd lived in with all those crazy roommates and the fish tank motor that echoed throughout the house and kept me up all night. I literally lost my willpower and went back to 'survival habits' and low-level fight-or-flight consciousness. I was dead on the inside because I couldn't move away, and felt ashamed of myself for wanting to kill myself.
` At last, by October, I was finally living in a quiet house where people wouldn't be constantly invading my space and making me feel that my own room was their territory and that I had limited rights to it. It was my own this time, no one could take that from me.
` I had also come back to those feelings of escape and of self-identification, and drew another one of those gliding creatures:

And on October 19, I was thinking about all this, when my identity with the furry thing kind of clicked together, as if putting on a mask, and I 'turned into' myself! All or a sudden, I felt as though there was a boundary around my body, my personal space, the room around me, and the moon shining through the conifers outside my window.
` This abstraction has greatly streamlined my thinking and perception so that I don't literally have to look around the room to see what is there but can instead just remember it -- the room is 'just there' in my mind.
` Without the constant noise and space-invasion, I finally feel that the space around me will not suddenly change without warning as it has for most of my life. It's just my space. The objects that I call mine are just mine, and I feel a connection to them when I hold them in my hands.

It also helps me perceive objects contained within a space. When I think of a bag or a drawer with objects in it, or even an abstract category with items within it, I can picture it, rather than having to think about it in mental long-hand.
` It's really changed my life and everything that goes through my head is so much more efficient, straightforward, and less blundering. I also realize that I now rely on more assumptions about what seems to be certainly 'there' in the world, but at least I don't have to think so hard all the time to keep it 'together' in my mind!

Such are the human mental shortcuts that allow us to be misdirected -- but I greatly prefer them over mental strain!

More Corrigendopedia illustrations... I mean, 'drawrings'!

I told you I'd be back!

I've just been, you know, busy with college and then other web projects that have higher priority than this one. Yeah, that whole thing. And life, too. I just saw my friends at the library for the first time in weeks!

But, enough about little old me! Let's look at what else I have on the Corrigendopedia so far!

This is one of the first drawrings I put up on the Corrigendopedia; an ostrich turning his egg.

It is the illustration for the page Fast Facts and Trivia: How much of it is true? (Not much, it turns out!) It's extremely fun, if lengthy, and... let's just say, I learned more about ostriches than I ever thought could be true in my dispelling myths about them.

This 'drawring' is a harvestman or 'daddy longlegs' arachnid.

As with the ostriches and other things, I similarly learned much more than I thought possible about harvestmen (Opiliones), and all about their poisonous secretions on two glands above the mouth (it's not venom, though).
` I talk about them as well as people who have inferiority complexes in the article Opie-WHAT-o-knees? Arachnids and my personal struggle for 'just the facts'.

It's also fun. And neurotic. It'll make your ears bleed.

My final drawring for this post doesn't have an article yet, but it's about the time one of my instructors started telling the class all about pi, and then started talking about how it's the Golden Ratio, which is actually phi, so I tried to tell her they are two separate numbers, but she didn't believe me....

The ironic thing is, she was touting this book The Golden Ratio: The story of PHI, the world's most amazing number, and she was holding it in her hands, and it had a picture of a phi (along with phi-filling) on the cover and she didn't realize it!

How humiliating!

Luckily, the next day at school, she realized her error and reported this to the class. I guess you could say it was one of many 'corrigenda' I did at college, but it was the only one with such a positive outcome.

She was so cool!

As I've mentioned, the article that this picture goes to has not actually been typed in and properly written yet, but I have quite a bit of it on paper!

That's basically all I have on the Corrigendopedia for now. These drawings and their respective articles can be found in the section 'Is that a Fact?', which I am currently organizing and building onto, and may be a lot more complete in the near future.


Next post... I'm doing those drawrings I drewr from childhood! And I'm not doing them by age-group either, but instead, by subject matter.

More Drawrings for the Corrigendopedia

Ah, my Corrigendopedia project! 'Correct yourself' is the idea behind this website of mine. It is supposed to encourage people to think for themselves, so they shouldn't take my word for it!

One article, which has been partially deleted, is about the UFO hoax pulled off by Chris Russo and Joe Rudy. They liked the article so much that they actually emailed me!

To see how these pictures and more, and how this web project of mine is going, a good page to stop by is How To Figure Stuff Out, And How Not To! I don't have much there, but I'm hoping to delve into the meat of it within a month.

Illustrations for The Corrigendopedia!

For months, I've been making illustrations for The Corrigendopedia website, and... how could I not display them here? Lookit -- here's the title page heading!

Another illustration, which was going to be like a banner at the top of each page (because there's a section for that on the new layout), I finally decided to put in the Corrigending the Corrigendopedia, which is a record of all my updates for the site.

Also, don't forget the 'drawring' I made for the Preface back in August of my 'dedicated' face.' Cause I'm so dedicated.

There are more illustrations already on the site, which I will display in future posts. For now, I ought to fill you in on what's been going on since my last troubling update:
` We got the 'circus' to run away from us -- and you'd know that if you'd been keeping up with my other blogs.
` Basically, we pretended to get ourselves evicted so that the crazy roommates would stop trying to retaliate against our efforts, perhaps even after they had left, and finally the Crazy Couple and Drunk-O have left, once and for all!

Which reminds me; I'm due for another journal update on Science, Wackmobiles and Spurious Brainchildren, as well as Introspection of a Struggling Mad Scientist, but since I haven't made any 2010 updates here at all yet, I figured that updating this one first was more important!

Hope you enjoyed, and there's more where this came from (like The Corrigendopedia? Duh!). Also, there is a lot more of my artwork and thousands of fun photos you can get lost in on my Flickr site -- here are all my sets!

I'll be back soon!

Night of the Living Dodo!

Sometime in 2007 I was reading a book all about... Dodos! And it had lotsa pictures. Dodos went extinct in the 1500s, so there's no photos of them, but people did think to draw a few pictures.

And then you know what I did? I drew pictures of the pictures they drew. Brilliant, huh? Many of them aren't that great, however, the head in the upper right was drawn by a naturalist or some such who had a dead bird in his lap before it was butchered and eaten, so he had a very good model (as opposed to after being butchered and eaten).

secondhand dodo sketches

Also, the lower right hand one is copied off of this painting by Cornelius Saftleven, which you can compare with here:

I call that dodo 'Flaky'!

Of course, bones have also been found, so I lightly sketched the articulated skeleton of a dodo, then drew some flesh on it.

dodo reconstruction

Many years ago, I used to read all about dodos (Raphus cucullatus) which were large, flightless and supposedly fat (at least part of the year). Dull in color, they had greenish bill sheaths which were apparently shed each year (like 'Flaky', above).
` People who messed around on Mauritius didn't like to eat them, which must have been why they kept pigs, who did. Supposedly, pigs eating the dodo's eggs was what really finished them off.
` Dodos were also of the same family (Raphidae) as similar birds that were boring brown instead of boring gray, called solitaires (unsurprisingly also extinct) who lived on the nearby islands of Rodrigues and Reunion.
` The males had large clubs on the ends of their wings, for fighting and for rattling against their sides as a display. They also had petite-looking bills, looking more like the smaller relatives of dodos and solitaires; pigeons (which are the same kind of bird as doves).
` To be precise, dodos and solitaires are of the same order of birds as pigeons (Columbiformes), though pigeons are a different family (Columbidae). That's about all I remember at this point.

Anyway, I highly suggest that you see what's going on in my other blogs - Lucas has his own TV show, plus I have a year's worth of photos up on Flickr, and I'm organizing my Corrigendopedia website. There is something wrong with you if you don't.

My triumphant return... Release the Cyborg Puppies of Doom!

I've had interesting stories about pets, but this is the first time that it turns out a human has effectively peed on our carpet and counted on us to blame it on the cats.

Just earlier, Lou Ryan was leaving a phone message for his lawyer brother that went something like this:
` "Is it illegal to pee in a cup and then empty it on someone's carpet in a malicious manner? One of these days, I'm going to consult you about something normal...."

I'd say, that's life as normal for us. Onto my drawings...

...Back from 2006! It's Dr. Nociceptor, and she's anxiously pacing, which tends to stir up her mechanical henchmen.

restless nociceptor

Yeah. What's Nociceptor so restless over? She just may be worried that her Cyborg Puppies of Doom are going to get caught by the mean old dog catcher....

puppies are coming

Aren't they so sweet? And they're much better-trained than people who pour bottles of piss all over your house the night before the landlord comes... and then later on that day when your friend brings over his dog.

WOW. Right?

Even worse, B-Gangsta screamed at me and Johnny for hours on end, like this:
` "A cat can't pee all over the house in one night! How could you not notice one puddle, then another, then another? The whole house reeks! You're a bunch of pigs! You can live in a piss-filled house, but I won't tolerate it!"

Just because of this territory-marking, the cats haven't used the litter box since then - even though the carpets are now cleaner than when we moved in - they only use the great outdoors now.

Who would do such a thing?

It's John who works at Gold's Gym, apparently retaliating for us kicking him out for his meth consumption and making meth-pipes in the Man Shed. If his boss were to read this post, he'd have some explaining to do.
` Probably won't happen: My blogs only seem to be read by people who live far away from here, though a couple of locals have read them at least a few times.

Yeah, pretty fucked-up, isn't it? We also found some of his piss in a Smirnoff bottle in the downstairs bathroom.

In other news, don't forget to check out Lou Ryan is Killed by Psycho-Bitch With Gun, a post containing a short film which was made in 48 hours. It also has the rest of Crypticon Idol on it, too, featuring Lou Ryan as Pinhead, except for the live show from June 6. I don't know if that one's going on YouTube, but I'll tell you if it is.

Clumsy sentence structure. I have no time for such silly things as editing.

In-Class still-lifes year 2000

Looks like this post has been scheduled two months too far into the future, so that it did not come after my previous posts about the art class I took in 2000. Hence, the large gap in timing of the posts.

So, let's get to it: These still-lifes, unlike the ones in the (supposed to be) last post were done at home, these were done in the actual classroom. Back in 2000. So I was like 18 or something.

But, before we got to draw anything interesting, we had to do the Styrofoam ball!

sphereofdoom

And don't forget the cones and cylinders!

styrofoamofdoom

Next, we moved onto actual textures. I was so happy to get a seat by the shiny ducky.

shinyducky

I remember being really pissed off because so many people had smeared this one all to heck, and I could only re-draw the parts that were shiny, while the other textures I wasn't so able to re-capture.

I also had - and still have - a stuffed toy pelican wearing a beret named Pierre, a.k.a. 'Pel'. Or, if I was drooling on my shirt, 'Peppykins', as I've had him since I was two. And then I sent him off to an alien planet... the Tri-C classroom!

pierrepelican

If it looks wrong to you, tilt your head to the left. Even so, it may still not look right. And strangely, I think the photo looks better because it came out a little blurry. Weird how that works.

Postcards I've sent this past winter...

...And was too preoccupied to upload them here. And yes, my photo hosting website had in fact disappeared and so I was obliged to find another one.
` Nevertheless, here they are... this first picture is a double-whammy - a postcard of an Ambulocetus I sent to my aunt, and one of Vada I sent to my mom (to complement the one of Violet).

vada and ambu

This one is more like a 'mirror-image' whammy... I sent this one to Galen (G-man).

galen postcard

I drew it whilst being forced to serve as a designated driver, which I was very upset about considering that, for the millionth time in a row, I had been disrupted from just sitting down with hot cocoa to do a bunch of things I really needed to do... I thought I'd written about the whole thing, but don't see it on any of my blogs.

Anyway, the next one is one of those giant, plant-eating birds whose name I forget.

jake postcard

Oh yes, and I was also forced to draw this one for a relative of Lucas who is a fan of tortoises and apparently likes it when I draw caricatures of us as them. I just don't understand that sort of thing....

turtles

Anyway, got to run. Not supposed to be online, but as I'm loading up photos for someone else I thought I'd upload some for myself....

Me and Inanimate Objects, Year 2000

Once again in the art class I took in Cleveland nine years ago we got assigned to draw many inanimate objects. Upon doing a study of an egg carton, I became angry at the eggs for insulting my drawing of them, so I stabbed them all to death.

Luckily for us all, they were already dead.
destructiontoeggs

And then I got better at letting my subjects stay intact long enough to draw a decent picture of them. This is what happens when I put together an apple, a lemon and a banana....
crazyfruit

It's looking at me!!

Saving the best for last... my mom's dining room table (in the crappy dining room I grew up with), the evening when my mom invited her friend Rosie over for homemade soup!
homemadesoup

"Holy sh**", right? When I first pulled this drawing out of the portfolio, I thought to myself, "Oh my lanta, I completely forgot I did this way back when!" So, for the record, I remember now!

This was more like it...

Reasonably... yes, I hope this is reasonable! It's been a week since I had intended to post this....

Anyway, back in that class in Cleveland I took in 2000, we also got to do portraits of one another - this time, real ones, rather than crappy contour ones!
` This one is of John and his awesome shirt.

johnandpeople

The next day, it must have been, he was drawing me more, and so I was drawing him drawing me....

johndrawingme

Then, using more sophisticated techniques, I got to draw Chad. Except... it was kinda dark, so it looks more like Coppertone Chad!

artstudentschad

And of course, that's the lovely hardwood in the house I live in currently, and I don't know for how long. Maybe just another year or so - we're in the process of suing our Crazy Landlady for being so... crazy.

Anyway, got to split, so until next time... do other stuff!

Art assignments back in 2000

Oops - it's been five days, not four! Really, I lost track of what day the last one was up. Anyway, in this art class of 2000, they made us do those dreadful things called 'contour drawings'.
` The one below, of a student named Jasmine, was done without lifting the pencil from the paper... or at least that was the way it was supposed to have been done... but I really couldn't leave out her eyes!

contourjasmine

Then one day I guess we were doing sketches. It looks as if Jasmine (ponytail) was drawing our instructor, Nancy.

artclassroom

Looks as if I drew Nancy, too!

Nancy

And that one looks like... the unfinished and Jerry-rigged* kitchen I grew up with, crooked cabinets and all! It's either late at night or early morning, and I can almost register the flickering of the fluorescent tubes above the sink....

kitchen

Wow! Just clicking on it and looking at it full-size gives me the willies!

While the coil of wire hanging from the ceiling is not in view, I can almost make out the ugly blue textured wallpaper on the left behind the hanging cutting boards and the old salt and pepper shakers on the microwave!

Hmm... was the paint above the stove blue or orange? I don't remember.

There's also the teakettle on the stove, Amy's food dish on the floor, and in the left-hand corner there's a thing that says 'Olives' -- that was the cover on the blender!

And, while they are crudely rendered, I recall that right by the blender was this little shadow-box full of thimbles, while across from that by the gaping chasm in which the fridge hid, was the octagonal plate with a recipe for blueberry-orange muffins.

During my bizarre shut-in life there, I kept having delusions that the little painting of muffins, blueberries and orange pieces were actually kittens. But then, when I'd get close enough to see it clearly, I'd get kinda sad that they weren't kittens.

Enough about the silly kitchen! I'll be back... reasonably!

*Jerry = my PsychoDad.

The Art Classroom in Parma (Cleveland)

Since I was taking an art class at Tri-C back in 2000, I also drew pictures while actually in the classroom.
` This seems to have been the very first one, and mostly done for the purpose of testing out my conté, crayon.

artclassroom

Notice that in this still-life, I just had to include part of the class.

setup

And in this drawing of part of the class, I just had to include... part of the class.

thedrawers

I have entitled it, 'The Draw-ers", as in "Those Who Draw". Anyway, I told you I'd be back in four days. See you in four more!

Less back in time...

I still have many drawings from around 2000-2001, some of them quite striking. This one I call 'Inaccurate Narwhals' because it portrays two male narwhals fighting one another with their delicate, sensitive tusks.
` In real life, these whales actually use the tusk as a sensory organ, of all things, and even as tool to groom one another!

inaccurate narwhals
Yes, that's my foot, from when I took this photo recently.

The next one is just a regular ol' contour drawing except it's gigantic and features Dole bananas. I did it for the drawing class I took when I was 19.
` Woody... narwhal tusks... giant bananas... why do I get the feeling I arranged these photos with an intent to plant subliminal messages in people's brains?

weirdcontour
This one was another class project, where all the students went out of doors for once, in the sunshine, where we were surrounded by the Ferocious Tri-C geeses, beaks glistening red... from the berries they were eating.

geeses at tri-c
Also around this time I took one of many trips to Ohio State University and drew a really bad sketch of some friends of Phil's. Remember him? No? Don't worry about it.

mike and aaron sober
The badness of the sketch was really a result in my hurry to make up for this one, which was rather better:

mike and aaron drunk
On that same day, I also had drawn one of myself in the dorm's bathroom mirror. I never really liked it, but I thought it was kinda cool because it looks like Beethoven.

self portrait
Sorta. Well, that's all for now. Be back in about four days. I promise!

It's Monday...

...And I've just uploaded a crapload of art - eight posts' worth, in fact!

The below drawing was adapted from one of my many sketches of dinosaurs from the movie Jurassic Park, which I did when I was about 12 years old.
` The autograph, however, was added by paleontologist James T. Kirkland a few years later when he gave a talk about giant dromaeosaurs - it reads, "To Sarah; My raptor is bigger than Spielberg's raptor!"

Of course I couldn't spare a precious Velociraptor adaptation, so a T. rex had to do....

jimkirklandautograph
I actually did about a hundred sketches from the videotape of Jurassic Park, paused on some particular frame or other.
` This adaptation, however, was only done while looking at the sketch, not at the actual movie frame, so it's probably a lot less accurate than the sketch was.

For reference, below is a frame of the movie that is similar to the one I worked from back in 1994:

I also have here a drawing someone else did of me (obviously) from the side. That was done back when I was first loading my SEO Blog onto Science, Wackmobiles and Spurious Brainchildren....

By MB
In fact, a note of this is made of the post in which I announce the completion, where a stunning photo of myself in the Cascade Mountains with the artist ("Jonathan") has been placed.
` You should check it out!

Be back Friday.