got an A in my studio art class

Here are some of the pieces I used for my portfolio. 

The Cellar in Winter

The Haunting

Warm Neutral Cool

Briar

The Bone

Never Die When I'm Dead

Not to Be

If You Wait

All Soul's Night

 Breast

Leaving Earth

There are more pieces I was proud of, but I didn't get around to taking pictures of all of them. Anyway, it was a good class in that I turned out a lot of solid pieces, though I didn't really learn too much that I didn't already know. Which is fair, since it was supposed to be a foundations course.

I have so much more art to post! If I don't just sleep straight through the rest of this break, I'll do it.

- KP


Quote of the Day: "We'll use the Force!" "That's not how the Force works!"

anatomy of a palace

So for some reason I decided to spend even more hours in the digital lab than usual by choosing, of my own volition, to do a digital painting instead of writing a paper for my religion class. It was fun actually, except for the fact that I understand Flash waaaaay better than Photoshop at this point and am confused about why some of the tools that have the same name function so very differently. For example, the fill tool. The little paint bucket? Handles completely differently in Photoshop. Don't ask me why. I asked the internet and still couldn't figure out how to make it ignore gaps. Jesus. Anyway, here's the Palace of Illusions, from the book of the same title by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Sikri from The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.

I got this printed as a 11'-17' poster and it looks pretty awesome. Also, color printing at the Print Center on campus is super cheap and I'm going to take full advantage of that fact in the future.

Finals coming up soon. Peace out y'all.

Commander Kip
"You have a lightsaber. It's sorta like a flashlight. A cutty flashlight."
Normal is overrated!

animation projects

This class alternates between being super chill and super intense and it's sort of giving me creative whiplash a little bit. Several weeks ago, we did a five-to-seven second rotoscope in which we were supposed to change something to make it more fantastical. I did a home video of Brennie and I beating on each other with foam swords but turned us into Jedi.

The project took about 45 hours over the course of two weeks and was absolutely crazy. I actually made myself sick working on it for seven hours at a stretch multiple days in a row, but that said, I think it turned out pretty sweet.

younglings from Kasha Prinzing on Vimeo.

Then we did a week or two of derpy in-class assignments meant to teach us the basic principles of freehand animation, like staging:

arcs:

and character modelling:

These assignments were meant to only take an hour or two apiece and be super simple. I think I only spent a few hours in the digital lab outside of class that week. It was sooooo chill. But now there's this new hardcore project where we're in groups of three producing ten seconds of film apiece that focus on a common theme. We have, you guessed it, two weeks. 

I really liked that blue-haired girl I drew, who also showed up in one of our first projects, the thaumatrope. See, there she is.

Actually, both of these chicks have showed up in my notes before.

So I decided to use them for this assignment.

I'm definitely learning a lot about Flash with this project. That whole set is one very large very complex symbol, and I have a whole nother one to make for the close-up shots.

So that's where this class is going. It's a great time, and I don't even hate spending that much time drawing - in fact, I love it - but I do wish we had slightly more room in the syllabus for, y'know, sleeping.

Commander Kip
"I roll to wrangle the bantha."
Normal is overrated!

Kip's Return to the Verdant Land

That's right, y'all, there are TREES in Kansas. GREEN ones. It's pretty great.

Home for the summer, then on to the next adventure in Florence, Italy for the fall semester! I plan on making a separate travel blog to document that experience, which I will link here when the time comes.

Meanwhile, I'm missing my friends and scrambling to get a summer job and, oh yeah, unpacking. Why do I own so much junk? And Anna, I'm so sorry we made off with your entire box of summer reading. I do feel awful about that.

Things of import that happened at St. Olaf this year:

(1. I switched my primary instrument from standard piano to 7/8ths piano, which was an incredibly eye-opening experience. I was able to correct several bad physical habits in my playing since I didn't have to worry as much about stretches. Excited to tackle some rep next year that I've always wanted to play but could never reach before. Part of that journey was switching to a new teacher. This lady is such the bomb.

(2. Finished my frontloaded music theory and music history courses. I actually get to choose classes now. My final project for music history was a paper and an art project exploring Gustav Mahler's relationship with his wife by examining the Adagietto from his 5th Symphony. (View the project here.)

(3. I completed the Great Conversation program as of one week ago yesterday and that is a great feeling, lemme tell you. I instigated a dance party with this Enrique Iglesias song on the last day of class. Enjoy.



(4. Kept the party going over at Magical Steampunk Gypsies. We have big plot plans for the summer. Don't see this baby petering out anytime soon.

(5. Experienced my coldest temperature to date: -40 degrees Fahrenheit. It burns, preciouss.

(6. Had my first legal drink (and my only drink to date) thanks to the questionable influence of John Green's Looking for Alaska. As it turns out, Strawberry Hill is gross.

(7. Lived in the smallest dorm room on campus with my favorite Anna. It was cramped, but she was a trooper. We spent a significant amount of time watching each other sleep. Also, the poem game. And she got some of her poems published in the campus literary magazine! I'm so glad we're married.

(8. Matt and I celebrated our one-year anniversary back in November, as you may recall. We continue to be very much in love and are also bros. I just keep finding out more awesome things about him. The plan is for me to spend a week visiting him in Maryland near the end of the summer before I go to Italy and he goes to Budapest. Not super looking forward to eight months of long distance, but we're boss ninjas at long distance and we will be okay.


Commander Kip
"So... do you think a girl would fall for that?" "... what just happened?"
Normal is overrated!

THIS IS ART

Today my Expanded Media class is spending six hours (9am to 3pm) on four-foot-by-four-foot pallets. We're allowed to do whatever we want, but it has to be the SAME activity for all six of the hours. I'm working on Birthright, which feels good. I furnished my pallet for long-term comfort:

 

Some of the other crazy activities going on. My professor is cutting a pair of coveralls off of himself and stapling them down to his pallet.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=295791717212688&set=vb.270541553071038&type=2&theater

This is such the best. I'm so glad I'm in this class.

Loving my life right now.

Commander Kip
"A... meat... dagger."
Normal is overrated!

With my freeze ray

I will STOP the world

With my freeze ray I will

Find the time to find the words to

Tell you how

How you make

Make me feel

What's the phrase

Like a fool

Kinda sick

Special needs

Anyway

Thank you ever so much, Brenticus, for making this shirt possible. It's pretty fantastic.

I said I was gonna, and I did.

On another subject, this is Rasputin. Say hi!

Matt was a lifesaver on this one because he let me steal a bunch of his rubber bands and paper clips with which to string the little bugger. Hurray for boyfriends who conveniently let you steal their stuff!

 Rasputin was my final project in 3D Art. We had to make a "performed object" and perform it in front of the class. I made this awkward gargoyle thing and made him jump around for a while until he looked like this:

Yes, he exploded at the end. But he had a good life. It's okay. At least I didn't take Leif's suggestion and give him a gigantic penis. That would have been silly.

So, right now, there's too much Great Con happening to think about much else, but we have managed to finish Season 2 of Avatar, and the finale was epic and depressing, and apparently we're gonna have to do all of Season 3 basically in one sitting because once you start you can't stop. So that'll be happening after the Great Con final next Wednesday.

Some of us have also found time to start up a Kildahl D&D campaign on Sunday afternoons. You'll be hearing about my new character. Her name is Valandra, previously known as Exhibit 39, and she's a hippie wind elemental with sort of a "don't step on the grass" attitude. In D&D-speak, she's a Genasi Warden who was kidnapped by fortune hunters and sold to an arcane academic facility, where she was imprisoned and studied for several hundred years, watching the creatures in the cages around her getting hauled off for dissection. She eventually escaped by turning herself into a shifting whirlwind of sand and pouring through the keyhole of her cage. Now she's joined up with our ragtag band of adventurers on her way to find the sacred grove she had sworn to protect. I suspect if she runs into those fortune hunters, she wouldn't be averse to taking a few chunks out of them, but we'll see. For the record, I'mma always play tanks from now on. It's fantastic. I do actual damage when I hit stuff. I love it. Although it is weird to have such a low Charisma stat - Ileana could seduce her way in and out of anything, but Valandra can barely keep up a civil conversation. Should be interesting. Good thing we have a sexy Cleric on the team, as well as a Dragonborn with ridiculous Charisma. We'll just leave the seducing to them, I suppose.

Back to the friggen Jesus paper! Hurray, Jesus paper. *dies*

Commander Kip
"I do hope I'm interrupting something."
Normal is overrated!

birthday, hobbitgasm, & other news

All right. It is actually, officially, and unfortunately my birthday. I'm getting sick of aging now. Can't I just be nineteen indefinitely? That would be a pretty nice indefinite age. 

So, I've seen the Hobbit twice, once at school and once at home. And OH. EM. GEE. I can't even. What. It is so friggen fantastic. Check it out, there's my friend Elinor in front of the hobbit door at the theater.

I shall make sure to always sit next to Leif in movies now, because the entire time he kept flapping his hands and whisper-shrieking things like "HOBBITGASM" and "DWARFGASM" and "ELFGASM" and "WIZARDGASM" in my ear. It was the greatest. But seriously, have you seen Thorin's FACE? He has, like, the best nose ever. He comes in the door of Bag End and he's all like "I am Thorin Oakenshield" and I'm all like "Good gracious. Since when are dwarves allowed to be hot?" Apparently, ever since Thorin and Kili showed up onscreen. Who'd 'a thunk?

Remember that snippet-of-a-thing I showed you several posts back? This was the thing. It's a forty-foot Smaug made out of cardboard and zip ties, jointly created by my sculpture class for the Hobbit-themed dinner in the Caf. Boy, did we have a blast putting that beast together.

There he is lookin' saucy amidst the Caf tables.

Hello, handsome. My art professor stuck a fog machine in his schnoz.

And there's me in my elf costume. Classy, I know. See, I knew I'd have a use for my pointsy earses in college!

Also, we had a bit of snow on campus right before finals week. Anna, JC Aly, Lil'nea and I built a snowman. The snowsquirrel on his head was Anna's idea, and a brilliant one at that. We also had a pretty epic snowfight once the rest of Kildahl got back from lunch. Lol, I think I had a studio class that morning that I didn't warm up for because I was too busy playing in the snow. Also didn't eat lunch, but that's nothing new. That's Aly in the picture. She's spectacular.

More snow pictures.

Because we live on a hill and the winds are of the prevailing variety, every snowman on campus was listing rather severely by midday.

We also went midnight sledding on appropriated Caf trays and acquired a nice assortment of minor (and less minor) injuries. Poor Sarah went home with a concussion and missed all her finals. Nothing that drastic happened to me, although I did come down with a cold.

Got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for my birthday and spent it on pretty books, including The Fire Ascending and Rain and Fire by Chris D'Lacey and Princess Academy: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale. I also discovered that there are apparently six more Merlin books (T.A. Barron) that I didn't know about, released after the original five? What? Can has?! Anywhoo, I continue to sneak more books back to college by wrapping them in clothes and stuffing them waaaay down in the suitcase. It's the bringing them back home in the summer that's going to cause problems, because I'll clearly have way more than I initially took with me in the fall. Whatever, we'll deal with that later. Oh, I'm reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell at the moment, in anticipation of seeing the movie eventually, and it's pretty fantastic. I'm enjoying the timeskips rather, although not so much the devastating cliffies.

In other, less celebratory news, my poor dear dog died two days before Christmas. It was sudden and horrible. None of us were expecting it. The emergency vet said it was probably an internal blockage, as if he swallowed something and it completely stoppered up his guts. In other words, his own dumb fault. He was whiny and smelly and stupid, but I'll miss the wooly lunatic all the same. He loved us. We loved him. Even my dad admitted it.

Back to cheerier fare. The Doctor Who Christmas special was, in a word, fantastic. I made the questionable decision of watching the tail end of Angels Take Manhattan right beforehand because that's what was on the channel, and I definitely watched the first few minutes of The Snowmen through a wretched trickle Pond-related tears. Also, disillusioned Eleventh Doctor is so very painful to watch. But Clara is gorgeous and cheeky and awesome, so it's all good. Lady Arin paid me a visit yesterday, and I was delighted to discover that college has transformed her into a true Whovian, hurray! And she also watched Smith before Tennant, because we're sisters and that's how we do.

Hokay, off to do birthday things. My goals today are to finish Cloud Atlas and play through Portal. We'll see how far I get.

Commander Kip
"It's smaller on the outside!" "Now, that is a first."
Normal is overrated!

Captain Ripley's Portable Steam-Powered Communicator

Made this little beauty for class. The assignment was to make a product that would fit in one of those environmentally unfriendly plastic packages and create packaging to advertise that product. With my usual tendency towards over-complication and shenanigans, I made up an entire kid's tv show about steampunk aerial antics called Ripley's Dirigible Adventure and created a "prop" from the show. You know how they sell Thor's hammer and Hawkeye's bow in stores as kid toys? This is like that. Also, I made it out of found objects and Apoxy, because that's how I roll.  

So that was a fun assignment. Now, to practice. My jury's tomorrow. *freaking out*

Also, I'm just a ball of bruises from sledding. I have bruises on top of my bruises. It's spectacular.

Commander Kip
*garbled attempt at speech* "Yes, I English well." *mimes stabbing self* "Augh, right in the grammar!"
Normal is overrated!