More from Central Market!

Hello Everyone!

Remember how I told you I was working at Central Market? Well I've got some more pictures of things that I have done there.

When I was hired, I had to actually learn a lot of things that I wasn't used to and I didn't really know how to do. chalkboards were my big responsibility and the thing that I had to learn the fastest. I still don't really enjoy chalkboards because of my own brain problems. I have this issue where if I'm supposed to be drawing something I get too excited and really rush through the writing part to get to the pictures. Big problem. I've been trying to slow down and really think of le
ttering as part of the drawing. Most of the time I succeed, some times I don't. Here's a recent, very successful chalkboard that I finished. I got to spend a little extra time on this one and I was able to draw like I normally do.









I always thought that I was strictly a 2-D artist. I hated sculpture classes and ceramics. I hated working in 3-D. Then I got really into watching the specials about how they make stuff for movies and tv shows. Oh man, I really wanted to try some of that stuff. Especially since working here at Central Market taught me how to distress pink foam boards so that they really, seriously look like wood. It is so cool! So I was watching Hell On Wheels with my mom and we watched a special talking about how they made the town and how they built the train. They built a train! I was dumbfounded. I wanted to make a train, too. Then Christmas rolled around and we got an email from Division that they needed something to walk around with and hand out candy canes. Amanda, the lead in the Art Dept, said she was thinking that we should build a toy train to go on a shopping cart. I almost lost it. I snatched the project away from her and got busy building a train. It was so silly, I used a bunch of left over foam board and concrete tubes and laminator rolls. This is what I came up with.








Not as cool as the Hell On Wheels train but not bad for my first try at building something so complex. And I only had three days to finish it.















I really shouldn't have let my work know that I could do something like that because after that I had to make a dragon for Asian New Year. He ended up being around 24 ft long and they hung him over the prepared foods wall. Then they got me to make an alligator that was 5 ft standing plus a tail. That took me closer to a week to make out of cardboard and tape. He was set outside for two weeks and surprisingly he stood up pretty well to the weather and customers. We got him back upstairs the other day and he's got quite a bit of paint flaking off and his arm is now at a very odd angle but overall, he still looks pretty okay.

For Easter I quickly put together some fuzzy bunny ears for the candy department and recreated an image for a women's day poster in Adobe Illustrator. The next big event was Passport Italy. We made a ridiculous amount of stuff for that. I especially liked my Mouth Of Truth but someone stole it so I don't have it. I have pictures though and I will post them soon. I just don't want to do all that uploading right now.


Kelsey

Crazy Ex-Boyfriends

I know it's been forever since I posted a snippet of story on here but I started this today and I wanted to put it out there in the vastness of the internet just in case. This is super rough and basically an outline but this is where one of my main characters breaks up with his crazy boyfriend because his boyfriend tried to hurt his guinea pigs... Well, and was crazy and abusive...

The whole time that I was writing this I was listening to The Main Ingredient's "Everybody Plays the Fool" which is why is shows up in the story snippet. 

 Michael-

Emile threw a vase at Michael’s head a week before Christmas in one of his fits of hysteria. The vase smashed against the guinea cage and Michael finally decided to called it quits. Emile could hurt him all he wanted but the piggies were off limits.

      Emile didn’t want to hear that they were breaking up. His fit got worse and he ended up going for the guinea pigs in earnest. Michael shielded them with his own body while Emile scratched and slapped at him. Michael refused to hit him, even to defend himself. He tried talking but Emile was too far gone to hear him.

      Emile slapped Michael in the face when he brought his head up to try and sooth him and his ring gashed open Michael’s cheek, right along his cheek bone. Emile withdrew a moment at the sight of blood on Michael’s face. He clasped his hands to his own face and gasped. A spot of blood landed on Samson and he shuddered in Michael’s hand.

      Michael backed away from Emile and slipped into the bathroom where he shut and locked to door. Michael gently laid the piggies in the bathtub with a towel before going over to wash his face. He ran the water to let it get warm and just tried not to think of the piggies squealing in the bathtub either because they thought they were getting a bath or they didn’t know where he went and the sounds of Emile on the other side of the door, sobbing an apology.

      The washrag was warm when he brought it to his face and dabbed at the cut. It wasn’t all that bad but he didn’t want anyone seeing him like that. It would start rumors. He stripped off his shirt and looked over the mess of scratches that Emile had left on his torso. No taking his shirt off on stage for a while either. He cleaned his scratches until the sounds of Emile desolate crying were almost gone.

      It had become so quite after all the ruckus that Michael could begin to hear Artemis at the back of his mind. She had dropped a box of cereal when Michael was struck and was cleaning up the mess and worrying about him at the same time.Her soft, clam voice helped to sooth his heart and gave him courage to finally talk to Emile.

      “Emile,” Michael called in his calmest voice.  Through the door he heard scrapping and banging as Emile stood up off the floor where he had fallen while sobbing. “I really think you should go.”

      “Michael please,” Emile gasped in his thickly accented speech. “I love you!” The desperation in his voice made Michael want to believe him.

      “I’m sorry, but you need to leave. I can’t deal with this anymore.” Emile’s sobbing started again.

      “I’ll give you the money for a hotel tonight and you can come by for all of your stuff tomorrow when I’m out.”

      “Michael, Michael, Michael…” Emile kept repeating between sobs. “I love you.  Michael, I love you.”

      “I know,” Michael said, walking over to the door and resting his head against it. His cheek still stung and the piggies in the bathtub were chirping quietly. “But that’s not enough.”

      Michael left his head against the door and listened as Emile wandered around the apartment and collected a few of his things. His sniffels sounded so sad and Michael caught tears running down his cheeks. He didn’t begin to relax even after he heard Emile shut the door behind him. He stayed like that for so long he didn’t realize that the sound he was hearing was in his own head and not in his apartment.

      There was the crackle of a record starting and an audience clapping. Then the sweet tones of The Main Ingredient came floating to him. Artemis had pulled out her record player and was playing “Everybody Plays the Fool” for him.  She hummed along as she spun around her living room. She was barefoot and loved the feel of rubbing her toes in the shag carpet. Her ceiling fan was on low she had her old and rattlely space heater buzzed by her hideously stripped arm chair. Michael remembered when she picked it up off the side of the road almost four years ago. She only sang the chorus to the song in her soft, off key voice.

      Michael slipped his shoes off in the bathroom and opened the bathroom door. He stepped out into his own living room and tried to think about the feel of the carpet and the song only he could hear. He started humming the light notes and smiling without thinking about it.

      “Fallin' in love is such an easy thing to do /But there's no guarantee that the one you love, is gonna love you,” Michael sang under his breath in a magical duet with Artemis and he knew he had the beginnings of a new song.

 Well, there you have it. The short snippet of my story. I really hope that those self publishers don't start calling again. This is so OBVIOUSLY not ready to publish. Unless I had a solid deadline. If I had a solid deadline, this sucker would be done in a week!

 I will also leave this super cute picture of some guinea pigs in coffee cups here...

From Beyond The Grave Comes A New Blog Post!

It's been forever but I've been really busy. I'll share some of the things I've been doing at work and maybe something else that I've written in the next couple of days.

"Why am I back on here?" you ask. Yesterday I listened to the messages on the home phone and there was a message from a publishing company. I thought at first the person said Random House and I almost fainted. Then we listened to it a few more times and they actually said Author's House Which is a totally different company all together. Author's House is a self publishing company and I think they were just fishing for someone else to spend money on them. I really don't want to self publish.

I really to actually have a manuscript before I consider shopping it around versus self publishing. That's why I got back on here. I haven't actually touched a computer (other than at work) in months. I've been writing in spirals and notebooks but nothing typed up and official looking. I got on here because I need to have a book good enough so that I can confidently turn down an offer from a self publisher.


For the work projects I promised. I have been doing some pretty fun stuff recently like making a Chinese dragon, an alligator and a train. 

One of the first construction projects that I did after starting at Central Market was for the cheese event that was going on. Someone came up and wanted an enormous cheese wheel and I said, sure, I can do that.

So I made these two delicious looking cheese wheels. This was also right when I started learning how to hand letter. That was actually what took the longest on these, the words. The images took me around an hour each.

The red gouda wheel is about 3.5-4  feet tall and the French brie is only two feet. I really love the picture on the brie and they kept this cheese up even after the event.

For Christmas they tied a bow on it...

Now the biggest and newest thing that I learned to do at work is chalkboards!

I know they are all the rage on Pinterest and shit but I didn't care about that when I applied for the job. I just knew there was no way something that bored and moderately crafty stay-at-home-moms could do that I couldn't.

So the first few days I spent getting my ass handed to me while I failed at making chalkboards. I was especially bad at the fonts. So I spent about two days perfecting my co-worker's writing by obsessively writing the alphabet and then sentences in her personal font in all different sizes. I looked like a serial killer but now I can just whip out her writing style. I am still not near as good as she is but I can fake it pretty well.

These pics are the first boards that did all by myself. The pie pumpkins chalkboard I did when we had a lot of free time and I was trying out how to use the chalk makers to blend and draw in my usual style. This happened. I obviously concentrated very hard on the lady and not so much on the pumpkin. Even though I really should have been working on the pumpkin because I'm going to have more need to draw vegetables than ladies at a grocery store.

But now I also know how to blend and shade like a beast! I didn't tell anyone but the other art dept. members how long that board took (only around three hours) and I think we were listening to a program about Easter Island... Looking at the chalkboard makes me think of the Easter Island heads so that's probably what I was listening to.

I did that a lot in college, listening or watching tv while painting, to where I could tell you what was happening when I was painting certain areas. "That top corner with those clouds was when they were crossing the mountain and trying to avoid detection by the dragon riders..."

Well, I'm tired of this post and I can talk about the rest of the stuff I've been doing later.

Peace

KB

Good news, everybody!

This is Snow White and HIS Prince Charming.

I have found the perfect model for my sweet Michael! No more trying to draw him out of my head (which is a pain, let me tell you). The problem now is, how do I get in contact with him? How do I get him to pose for me without seeming creepy? How do I go about using him as my model legally? Does it even matter if none of this ever gets published?

Yeah, lots of things.

This isn't some random guy though. This boy is the cousin of my best friend who I have been using as a model for around a decade. Ah! I was wondering what kind of pictures I could post with this blog and I didn't have any for the story but I can post the pictures I have done of my best friend, Gabe, over the years.

First few layers of paint on Prince Gabe.

Base drawing for the painting.

A really old painting I did in high school. That's his tongue that's making the mouth look funny. He was being Miley Cyrus before it was cool.

Gabe as Little John and my brother as Robin Hood. We had a really cool photo shoot in the park for this one.

I met Gabe's cousin at Gabe's brother's wedding. I helped Gabe do a lot of the best man duties and at the after party at his parents' house I saw this guy across the room and it was like a scene from West Side Story except that it wasn't love (it wouldn't work out for me anyway, he walked into the wedding wearing the most fabulous blue velvet dinner jacket, if you know what I mean...) it was seeing someone that you had created in your head suddenly appearing before your eyes.

Just a doodle of Gabe as a prince.

We had a weird few minutes as I just keep staring (yes, full on staring at him. I was very, very rude but I was also very, very tired so I wasn't really watching my actions) and then I told Gabe that I needed his cousin as my model. Gabe, being so like himself, thought it was just so funny that he called his cousin over and was like, "this is my friend Kelsey and she wants to draw your body. Bye."

I hate him sometimes. I then had to take a few moments to explain to this absolutely adorable gay boy about my story and why I needed a model and why he was just perfect. He actually looks a lot like Gabe but skinner in the face and body and he has the same racial ambiguity that Gabe possesses. And he had a great sense of flair (note the blue velvet dinner jacket comment from above) which, of course, is needed for a pop singer.

In progress painting of Gabe in a towel that I painted to go up in a gay bar here in Dallas.

I just texted Gabe and made him promise to hook me up with his cousin (I'm actually really jealous of how close he is with all of his cousins. I'd like to justify it by saying that's just how his family is because they're Hispanic but that's probably not all of it. My family just sucks. I was going to finish that sentence as "with communication" or "at keeping up with one another" or "at caring about each other" but "my family just sucks" is pretty succinct and perfect.)

The finished painting. Boom! 22 hrs! And then when I pulled this out of my car, we cracked the glass :(

Anyway that got a little dark there. Oops. To (sort of) lighten the mood, here is a bit of my story about Artemis and her everyday life. This is just one of those moments where she's awesome and doesn't even realize it herself.

Artemis     

Artemis ran the ticket exchange at the local Chucky Cheese. She only made minimum wage but she got free, old pizza and as many temporary tattoos as she wanted. This week it was a daisy with a smiley face in the center that she placed on her left wrist. She usually stood behind the counter, or sat if she could steal a tall stool, and mechanically traded tickets for prizes.

      Every once in a while a dad of one of the kids would eyeball her in her blue polo and khaki pants but she didn’t really mind. They never bothered her like the oil field boys. She worked with a bunch of them every day at the office where they barely noticed her but at night, as the ticket taker at a children’s arcade, she became a hot commodity. She assumed it was because they thought she was younger when working at Chucky Cheese or maybe it was because they had had a couple of beers by the time they got to her booth.

      She occasionally had to take to the floor and put more tickets in a machine or fix the coin slot. Sometimes she couldn’t believe the things that went wrong with the games. Saturday she was sketching her mystery man in her small sketchbook with a fat, black 8B pencil. It was perfect to get the high contrast and soft look she saw in her head. His eyes were closed and his head was down. He looked to be biting his lower lip in concentration and his brows were ever so slightly creased. His hair framed his face with only a few curly strands falling across his forehead. Artemis was really wanted to touch his cheek through her drawing, feel his skin and the slight stubble that she knew was there.

      A tiny hand tapped the glass counter next to her drawing. Artemis looked up at the tiny girl standing there with a rat’s nest of plain brown hair, enormous hazel eyes and a pizza stained pink and yellow striped shirt.

      “Can I help you? Do you have tickets to exchange?” Artemis asked in her nicest, kid-helping voice as she closed her book and slid it under the counter.

      “The machine over there won’t give me my tickets.” The little girl pointed over to the far back corner of the arcade.

      “Alright,” Artemis said as she pulled the keys out from under her station and grabbed the box of ticket refills. “Can you take me to it?”

      The little girl ran off toward the machine and Artemis followed more slowly. She ran up to the Zombie Murder Massacre game, probably the bloodiest shooting game they had there.

      “It won’t give me my tickets.” The little girl said again pushing all the buttons on the game.

      “I know, just give me a second.” Artemis unlocked the game and started to fiddle around with the insides. She pulled the tickets out, fixed the kink that had formed in the line, checked the coin slot and filled the tickets all the way up just because she didn’t want to have to come back out to the game later. The machine started spewing out the tickets as soon as she fed the tickets back in the right way and as soon as it was done the little girl yanked them out and ran off with her hands full of the pink tickets. Artemis closed the door and relocked it.

      Artemis didn’t really mind going out on the floor. The little kids ran into you like you weren’t there and every time you went out there all the little kids would complain about how this machine or that took their coins or wouldn’t give them their tickets. Artemis was trying to decide which machine could use the rest of her box of tickets when some little kid slammed into her leg and started coughing. Artemis patted him on the back but he started wheezing and grabbed at his throat.

      Artemis squatted down and tried looking in his mouth. He must have inhaled a small toy because she couldn’t see anything in his mouth. She quite expertly turned him around and pounded him so hard that the offending toy popped right out and skidded across the shiny concrete floor. The little kid looked a little winded and there were tears in his eyes but he soon saw his friends and ran off to join them without realizing how close he had come to death.

      Artemis stood up, gathered her tickets, and walked back to her counter. She passed by the small toy and picked it up. It was a power ring with a little green star in the center. Artemis had tried talking to the management about the small prizes they gave away and how they were possible choking hazards. She dropped the toy in a trash can as she rounded the corner back to her station, pulled out her sketchbook and started on a new drawing of her mystery man.  



Anyway. That was kind of a long one. If you made it this far, congrats!

Nighty night all.
KB