Artwork Monday: Flotsam & Jetsam

These are the five illustrations I painted for my aquarelle/ watercolour class in uni last semester. We all had to choose a theme, mainly about things in nature (no portraits allowed), and I chose things I had collected through the years and that are intrinsically tied to memories, keepsakes of journeys most of the time. While our professor would have probably liked me better if I produced more abstract pictures, I’m rather content with the outcome (I’ve got some horrible sort of perfectionist streak, so that’s extra points for being happy with my work). All of these pictures are 15 x15cm of size, drawn with pencil and finished with watercolour on 200 g/m² grained paper.

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This one is a pine cone’s scale I found at the beach in Tuscany during my graduation trip to Italy. It had rested in a small tin box together with stones from the isle of Elba, sea-washed pieces of driftwood, sandy bits of botany and other small souvenirs, patiently waiting for its moment to be of use.

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The broken adder stone is a souvenir from Denmark, together with a yardlength of rope filled with intact adder stones. I remember searching the strand for hours for these, once finding a dead young mereswine instead.

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This knotted nest of red leather string is something that has no reason for being kept, at least not consciously. Maybe it just wanted to be painted, so I did. I love the colour, though.

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The crab claw is one of many I brought back from a journey to Scotland. While we actually stayed in the midlands – hat have fond memories of their own, mainly of the honey scent of the pines and the heather combined – I loved the trips to the coast where I spent my time crawling over grey rocks and pointy stones, my hair still dripping with ice-cold water, to find those remains of small crustaceans.

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This little twig with its three acorns is a piece of the Shire, the place where my mother lives. Right behind her garden’s little wicket, where the rolling hills and golden fields lie, with the small wild plum groves, the vast blackberry thickets, there stands a small – by means of its species really small – oak I’ve spent many hours at, in the shade of its leaves, climbing over and upon its branches, playing make-believe, daydreaming. This is a piece of a place that in turn makes up a piece of who I am, it’s deep down in my bones, and it will never go away.

On Campus: Skulls & Oddities

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I’ve been lucky enough to be in fine arts for my minor subject this semester, and I loved it. We’ve got a great, whimsical collection of stuff for drawing and painting, and I’m always amazed by the things one can find by going through the old cupboards in this building.

Artwork Monday: Summer Timetable 2012

Click on the picture to go to the larger deviantArt version.

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I really like how this timetable turned out. My favourite parts are:

- The moon bunny on Monday. I think I’ll need a T-shirt with this motif.
- The cast bust representing my Greek Portraits class. I tried to make him look a little like Benedict Cumberbatch as BBC Sherlock.
- The towel that stands for Iconographics of Roman Art class. At first I wasn’t happy with the writing at all, so I added the ink “stains” which brought the whole thing sort of together.
- Also, the clothes line is a new way of putting in another height level that I really like. Hanging things is a way of storing I love anyway.

I also am very happy about the continuity I kept with the other timetables. There are several elements I repeated, about ten or so with each of the prior ones, sometimes with some little variations. Can you find some of them?

What I Actually Do At The Moment

I feel like I’ve written rather little here lately. Actually, I just checked and recognised that I’m still good with averagely one post every five days this month, but it feels less. In good times I write twice or three articles a week, so about one per week seems not so much to me.

But don’t worry, I won’t give up the blog! (Just in case you wondered. So many blogs I loved stopped updating or even shut down during the last few months, it’s like an epidemic.)

I also feel a little sorry for my projects list. It doesn’t seem to get any better with my stacking up the ideas and projects month after month and still not finishing them. Well, I’m just rather busy at the moment – I feel like I never had such an amount of homework during my university career before! I don’t say it is a lot, it just feels like it.

I’ll hopefully be back with livelier words after my presentation tomorrow which is the “what I do” from the title. I’m reading. A lot. About early bronze age axe depots. And I’m drinking coffee. As you can see above, together with my research copies.

I hope you’re having an awesome time meanwhile!

Not so Little Boxes

Aren’t these boxes great?

They aren’t only vintage, but also saved from a cruel fate in the dumpster. Our Religious Studies faculty gave them away due to minor flaws (or maybe not enough space in their library – well, it is a rather small faculty). Fact is that these boxes are examples of rather good book binding and I was able to repair the little tears in no time.

Finally no more ugly shoe-boxes for my clutter! And just in time as I wanted to get some additional ones to use the storage room of my desk better.

The Semester ends with Rain

I’ve been craving for holidays lately. Really. But now that the last exam is written, the last papers are handed in, I’m a bit melancholic. And it’s raining, too, very picturesce for my mood.

Every time before a certain time at school or university ends, I’m looking forward to it, but then, when it’s actually the day to leave for the summer, it’s weird. Parting with people you may see again three months in the future and try to be still friends with is not something you do every day. Leaving a building you’ve spent so much time in has its drop of bitterness, too. Sure, I’ll see it all in October, but still…

And I think I’ll miss my routine too, somewhat.

Small Place of Tidiness

This may be not the gypsie wagon-witch’s hut-brambly hedge-robin’s nest style you’d expect from me, but the rest of my room is such a mess (even my bike’s in here because our landlord tore down the shed!), I needed some place completely uncluttered. It’s my window sill.
As I mentioned before university’s keeping me busy, but I hold on to little projects like making lemonade syrup or baking a cake to feed on while studying.

Only 8 more days to go.

Of Celts, Boats and Gold Treasures

As I told you I went for a university excursion last weekend. It resulted in increased knowledge, immense tiredness and loads of photographs that I won’t show all at once but in a kind of thematic an chronologic order.

We started our journey south Friday morning. The Satyr forgot his shoes and went barefoot all weekend long as he was too lazy to walk back home and get some (that’s five minutes of way). At the station we met the rest of us and that was where we left the Scoundrel, too, who came with us as his train to Kassel came twenty minutes later.

What can I say, the train rides were wearisome, six hours are not that few. I brought The Diaries of Samuel Pepys – which was on my reading list anyway and which the Historian kindly lend to me – with me to read (and I got through it during these three days) and lots of sweets, too, to survive.

In the early evening we arrived in Eichstätt, a very catholic city in Bavaria with lots of nice, sugary late baroque buildings where our youth hostel – and therefore base – was set. We spent the evening at a tavern with pizza and pasta and with a guided tour around and then fell asleep quite soon as we had no time to sleep all morning on Saturday!

When the bus stopped at Manching my first thought was that I didn’t even want to hang dead over a fence in this village. But the museum was really, really grand. They have quite fantastic exhibits there, amongst other two Roman rowing boats, swords form La Tène and a treasure of unfinished bohemian coins of pure gold with a weight of nearly nine pounds.

Make that more than 100 ounces...

Well, on Sunday we went home again but not without a stop in Aschaffenburg, the town of my childhood, to visit the Celts exhibition in Johannisburg Castle where the exhibits were not as many, but very interesting, too. There was the normal museum, too, just as I remembered from the days when I was still in primary school and spend hours to imagine what it was like to live there…

Reconstructed model of an assumed celtic boat

When we came home I was incredibly tired and happy to see my own dear chamber again, as interesting as this field trip might have been. But it’s definitely not a, experience I’d like to miss.

Contented Solitude

I really love these moments when I’m all by myself, without the urge to do something for university or the like. Right now, there is such a moment with Bambi and the Satyr being at the Celtic Studies tertulia/ regulars. I thought about going there, too, but I didn’t feel the need to do so.  After I returned from the garden with Teli and we stopped by at the supermarket I got me half a pineapple. That’s quite decadent for a student like me, but sometimes I just have to do something like it. It fits the thought of doing myself something good.

Most of the seminars from another faculty (Ethnology, to be more precisely) I wanted to attend don’t start until the end of April (and I don’t even know if I can attend them as a module and therefore if I can get any credits for them), so my “working week” was pretty much over when I left the Ireland during the Middle Ages course this evening.

The day tomorrow will be spent entirely (harhar) on the making of the re-swap gift for Hats & Headdresses and the start of the real stuff for the Alice in Wonderland- swap. Well, the problem is the usual: *zombieesk countenance* Need… more… YAAAAAARN! Embroidery, that is. I can’t tell too much, as always, but anyway I’ll show the results, I promise.

Admittedly, I’m pretty tired as I didn’t sleep too well during the last nights due to various nightmares and the bad habit of thinking things like “Well, I’m awake now and I’ve got to get up in about forty minutes anyway and falling asleep again would make getting finally out of the bed even more frustrating and insufferable!”. Well, thank you very much, common sense and logical reasoning. Anyway.

Good night unto you all.

The First Sprouts

The sugar peas on the window sill are doing quite good as you may see from the title.

I’ll plant them into earth this week as I’m going to visit my family during the Easter holidays and therefore am not able to water the cotton. Putting them into the tub with wet newspaper wouldn’t work either as we don’t have windows in the bathroom and the boys aren’t here, either.

Some minutes ago Bambi dispatched the order for some DVDs and I went along and ordered my beloved Anne of Green Gables and its first sequel. :)

I’m not too chatty at the moment, as you may have noticed, due to my academic assingment that is growing quite pleasantly, by now I’ve got about a quarter of the demanded continuous text.

Along the way I am pondering about a new LARP character. No, not Steampunk this time but purest fantasy as it will be an elf. The biggest obstacle to a good character development is her name, at the moment, but I think I’ll ask IRis for help there… ;)

Well, I’ve got to increase my word count to 2000 minimum now, so

Good-bye.