Etsy Store Grand Opening! + Bonus Marker Fox
I’ve finally gotten around to officially selling my prints online. Click the banner above to enter my new Etsy shop or just go to http://www.etsy.com/shop/AnsateJones/. On a trial run right now to see if there’s interest, but more to come!
And just to celebrate, have a fox I drew with markers last night:
ARE YA READY FOR SOME NIN PICTURES from… like… 3 1/2 years ago?
Yeah, so I went to what ended up being one of the last NIN tours ever: The Lights in the Sky show in Sacramento, December 2008. Trent had intimated he’d never come back to Sac after the With Teeth fiasco last time, so I wasn’t gonna miss this. I was not disappointed. As a plus, they let me bring in my camera equipment because NIN rocks. All these were taken with my zoom lens; we were midway to the stage.
sutter fort and sonoma, ’07
trip to sutter fort and wine tasting in sonoma, 2007. i don’t really have too much to say about these. there were only a few from each set i really liked. i think my newer camera is biasing me a great deal.
sutter fort
non-excessive use of photoshop blur to account for fixed aperture, ftw
past the mission
(taken by ken)
i turn one way, you can’t get out
sonoma
cute cat in the parking lot of one of the wineries
(taken by ken)
ok, even i think i look pretty in this one.
pass the dishes
aaaand pretty drunk by this point.
recently went back to sonoma for my birthday, where i took tons more pictures and went to many more places, so stay tuned.
whole earth festival 2007
every spring the experimental college puts on a hippie festival called whole earth. in 07 sara and karl joined us and we explored it together. i had a lot of fun last week fixing these up in photoshop, because they were (and may be still) all so godawful.
karl really blows, ya know?
the acroyoga was very neat (and the girls pretty hot):
i really want to know if you can figure out what i’ve done to this picture.
also whether you like this crop or the full, surreal “flying feet” version.
and then some people (including jay!) put on a wheelbarrow dance for us.
this kid rocks.
apply on ken’s ass!
karl vs. a pine cone.
even more old home pics
my lame attempt at a family portrait. i don’t think kitsune would tolerate one the same way gidge did.
heyyy it’s the goat skull joe gave us and was subsequently stolen!
right after we buried it
i have put this one up before but recently redid the curves on it
defies explanation
playing pictionary
this is how gidget played
the pig files
here are some old pictures of our guinea pigs, stark and scully.
first off, a series we’re building on that showcases guinea pigs in their first and truest roles: as food animals.
ok now onto kinder things…
and a happy halloween from 2006:
state fair 2005
i don’t think i ever posted this but here are some pictures from ken’s and my first trip to the ca state fair back in ’05:
the fair, in a nutshell
TEH STAIT FAR WELCOMS U
livestock nursery
we got to hold baby piggies at the nursery. well actually the same baby piggy. ken tends to hold baby piggies gently…
while i apparently tend to form impromptu hiphop groups with them, their caretakers and random passersby.
the guy wouldn’t just let me milk the goat alone. i wasn’t doing a bad job, honestly. I HAD MILKED BEFORE YOU KNOW.
WET AND WILD live animal showcase orwhateveritwascalled
i got to hold my favorite owl! hee!
this is what happens when you raise your hand for the mystery animal.
insert obvious inappropriate joke here
arts
best art piece ever
the caption says “one in the same”. uh. right.
petting zoo!
Generous Llama doesn’t mind giving shade to the needy.
the audacity of some of these hungry animals was just outrageous. here’s a deer performing the famous human trick, “checking to see if there’s anything left in the vending machine”.
the goats, though, were clearly worse.
“here deer. plz don’t eat my hand plz”
nothing can cheer up Sad Kanga.
assorted fair attractions
there are some frightening county exhibits at this thing. like, yeah, i really want to come to your county so that i can be nommed by this FRIGHTENING SUN-ORANGE THING.
…
animul exhibits
that’s it!
skiing at boreal
i think this was boreal anyway. 2007. see, i’m working on these things little by little.
this reminds me of an x-files episode– terma i think? where the ufo rose up out of the ice?
boreal does night skiing. it rocked 🙂
we even saw a bear.
a g-g-g-g-g-ghost!
so i don’t normally believe in this paranormal crap but i get the funniest feeling there’s something… off about my scanner. like something… or someone rather, i guess… is haunting it. i took these pictures using a special camera and was blown away by the results! i think i even know the guy; did a portrait of him once. hugh…. lorry?
i wonder what he wants? maybe when i scanned in his portrait some of his essence got captured as well?
what do you guys think?
2 SHIRTZ
something nobody will understand until i explain it to them, probably:
(by ken)
close-up detail (also by ken)
i had to handpaint some of this, especially the red lettering, *with a paperclip* but don’t go thinking that’s anywhere near amazing because the truth is i was forced to since i tend to make really crappy screens. i learned many things about screenprinting through the two-quarter process of failing on this one over and over:
1) if someone is selling you a huge screen at a low price, you might as well make sure first that it’s not so huge that it can’t comfortably fit in the craft center lab, press, dryer, UV area, pressure washer sink, and/or shirt press mechanism.
2) even if by some ungodly method in which you probably sold your soul and your firstborn child to the clutches of satan you manage to actually get the screen to fit in the press, make sure that you have actually printed in such a manner that the image can be easily transferred onto the shirt in the most appropriate area. don’t, say, emulse the images bottom facing out onto the very edge of a gigantic screen because that means your choices will be either putting the image on the bottom of the shirt upside-down, or missing the shirt entirely. PLAN WHERE TO PUT YOUR IMAGES THROUGH CAREFUL MEASUREMENT AND LOGICAL THOUGHT.
3) for the love of all things good and successful in life, wash your screen after every color use if you are printing multicolor. that stuff dries fast. say you do a test print and then decide to print for real? by the time you are ready to do so the holes in the screen will be gunked up with ink and nothing will get through. and then you will cry and pitch a fit like i did because the craft center is closing and you have to take three times as long to clean out your screen since the paint is now like varnish, and you didn’t even get a shirt made out of the deal.
4) if you are not using a shirt press because you’re stupid and your screen doesn’t fit correctly into it, make sure your squeegee passes are real damn good because once you lift that screen to “check” it’s going to be nigh impossible to put it down again in the exact same spot.
5) don’t come to the craft center an hour or two before closing on the last day of the quarter if you’re making a design this complicated with a screen that doesn’t fit and an image that is printed wrong. you will not finish and you’ll annoy the staff by making them stick around longer than they intended because you are still washing your screen.
6) bring an assistant, particularly an experienced screenprinter– OR an engineer. ken was remarkably level-headed and made many helpful suggestions during the process. he also was a very good screen holder.
oh i also made this a while ago, but never put pictures up til now:
much easier to make, trust me.
close-up detail
sorry those ones are so silly and very myspace, i was desperate to get pictures of this thing because it’s my favorite shirt in the world now.
love in the time of depression (jan 07)
less than a month after gidget died, ken had to go visit his family. i didn’t want to be alone for the weekend, so i decided to go inflict myself upon sara and karl and fluffy, who are good enough friends that i usually feel 200 times better in their presence.
at chinese. i think this might have been my first introduction to fluffy’s fiancee.
fluffy ordered this… thing that was pretty much um. well, remember the “rocketship” cookies in death to smoochy? er, yeah. i wanted a better picture of him with it, but i think for some reason he was embarrassed to be photographed in its presence because he very quickly devoured the thing.
i swear this is like the perfect match.
we went to a playground.
some of us were more excited than others.
we are trying to be river from firefly or serenity or one of those. it looks like we are competing but really that thing was just damn hard to stand on. (by karl)
(by karl)
(by karl)
real friends will remember this picture as one on my myspace for a while. i love this picture. (by karl)
karl likes to draw.
this is what he draws.
these iguanas look like they should have been in the “closer” video from nine inch nails.
xmas 2006
eh, better late than never. these images are sort of emotionally charged for me, i guess. so it took me a while to get around to being motivated to work on them.
gidget at the rest stop, somewhere in california. we liked to let her out at them whenever we traveled; she was pretty old and didn’t go far, and i’d like to think she enjoyed being able to get out and sniff the sights, so to speak.
at the rest stop there was some sort of game bird being shipped in crates to a hunting resort. we chatted with the driver a bit, and there was a moderate amount of secret loathing welling in me while we did.
finally, chillin’ on my parents’ patio. i think i took this?
taken by my parents.
oh god this cheese. this is a family tradition, every year we have to have the cheese plate with the nut roll. this might have been the year we handmade the nut roll actually. which explains why i have a picture of it.
three generations: red, blonde and blue. taken by ken.
ken invents a new game!
one of the great things about my parents’ backyard is that it’s home to a lot of dead wildlife. when we stayed here one summer there was a dead rabbit that appeared one day and mysteriously disappeared the next. elusive creatures, dead things.
dad’s fire pot is kinda dangerous.
hills of the central valley, now with 50% more angus!
adam savage at the maker faire
part of what made the maker faire in san mateo so awesome for me this year was a talk adam savage of mythbusters fame gave about failure. rather than try to push some tired aphorisms we’ve all heard, he simply recounted some of his most depressing failures in the engineering industry. one of them, in which someone actually DEFRIENDED him because he messed up on a job, and then he had to face down a whole movie crew in the most dehumanizing professional intervention i’ve ever seen (single chair in a dark room with a spotlight? really?), really spoke to my heart. it told me that we all have the potential to be there, and it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re fuck-ups for life. it also reminded me of a recent collaborative project that totally fell through for me– where basically because two people had a problem with me and wouldn’t be straight about it, i in effect was bullied and stonewalled out of the project and lost all my work and friendships.
so yeah, that meant a lot. thanks adam.
also, he made a lot of funny faces 🙂 actually we’re considering making a video of some of these stills to “damn it feels good to be a gangsta”– for… no real reason other than that it was playing when i was showing these to ken.
anyway, you probably want to see the pictures. i took at least a hundred, but these are the “best”– the quality isn’t best because i didn’t have flash, and the things turned out pretty dark. so i learned a lot more about photoshop, and fell in love with curves:
kit-kit-kit-kitsune
we just got a new cat, named kitsune. here are some quick preliminary photos of her the first night. kit is TINY. i hope you can imagine how she got her name:
new arts new arts new arts
i’m doing a short a week. here’s the first one, shorter and dumber than usual to account for the shorter and dumber “week.” it took about 12 hours to film and edit, and was wholly inspired by something silly ken said after we watched saw v:
SawFly (or How to Build a Better Fruitfly Trap)
also, i did an art exchange recently and drew this:
and i made this scarf for mario’s xmas present:
i’ve also got some hella old stuff i did at the craft center last year that i have yet to post. and a painting i’m finishing up. and a good two years’ backlog of photos. and a professional website i am working on. hopefully i will post these things soon.
The Room
a movie about courage. a movie about mysteries. a movie about shaving cream. a movie so epically long that i had to split it into two parts to upload it to youtube.
ladies and gents and everything in between, i present to you: The Room.
y halo thar
image from the cover of american way, an in-flight magazine. when we got back from england this handsome face was all over the airplane. i stole about six of them.
thanksgiving with sara and karl, 2006
we usually spend our thanksgivings with sara and karl because they rock, and we don’t see them nearly enough. here’s our thanksgiving two years ago, with special guest stars irina (a fellow src alum) and her SO.
Karl: A Study In Shadow and Light
inadvertent advertisement for hanes
inadvertent advertisement of ken’s crotch
we gobble everything put in front of us when sara and karl cook.
lol, sara looks thrilled at whatever karl’s saying.
Thanksgiving Dinner 2006: The Lamp’s Perspective
electric knives scare the crap out of me since i read misery.
ken’s got balls.
the ball offering to karl does not go well.
aw. i think the cropping on this could be improved.
probably my favorite one. this is a typical night at sara and karl’s.
don’t worry folks, it’s a love tap.
ken assumes his favorite position of the evening.
napa: a lush’s paradise (fall 2006)
ken’s parents took us wine tasting in napa when they came out to visit. it’s a pretty impressive area with some pretty impressive wine. although heck if i can back that up, i was drunk by noon.
i think this batch of wine might have been bad.
outside of v. sattui.
inside of v. sattui.
i kind of wonder what i must look like sometimes, always electing to take photographs of the ground in such a picturesque place.
in the gondola, going to sterling vineyardz.
this was one of the prettiest wineries we went to.
(taken by ken)
i think this is one of my favorite pictures of myself. ever. (taken by ken)
my view. 😀
napa from the car!
new fanvid: can we stop?
oh, here’s the x-men fanvid i’ve been working on For Over a Year. not sure why it took me so long.* it’s about jean grey and mental instability and succumbing to the shadow self etc etc, yeah, you all hated x3 but you should watch it because i put it to the nine inch nails song, “me, i’m not.” so that automatically makes it pretty entertaining.
i also reuploaded that one youtube made me take down, after becoming emboldened by a bunch of links suggesting that a turn of the tide may eventually be in order for vidders vs copyright infringement laws foisted by whiny-ass companies that like to use other people’s work to make themselves rich but somehow can’t afford to let the fucking fans of said work pay tribute to it through, at times, some pretty damned neat transformative art.
if youtube deletes my account, i’m not going to be too fussed, because youtube makes everything look crappy. and srsly, that’s sort of my point. it’s like, grow up music and film industries: youtube is not a source for quality media so you should stop pretending it is. it is not losing you money. rather it’s exposing people To Your Product.
anyway, if you haven’t seen my vids at all you should check them out before youtube cans me, or something: my youtube channel.
but
you
can
also
download
them
off
my
non-existent
site.
as a bonus, better quality!
* other than that making fanvids out of only six or so hours total of potential footage, especially if the vids focus on one character in an ensemble cast, means one often runs out of footage. also, it was definitely a different editing style than i was used to, because trying to put clips to a nine inch nails song means one has to get a little more creative than usual if an attempt is made to follow the song as closely as possible. i mean, how do you visualize an eggbeater hooked up to an amp or whatever when all you have is a few minutes here and there of storm hugging people. it gets difficult.
a preponderance of trains: old sac 2006
a long, long time ago ken’s parents dragged us to the train museum in old sac. so i took a bunch of low quality pictures of things that amused me.
bathroom mirror myspace picture– On A Train
ken’s all “lol what’s for dinner” and the chef’s all “get out of my face, i can’t move”
this bear card is innocuously frightening. i’d expect it to show up in a stephen king novel.
this always happens to me. i go to a train museum and i end up taking dramatic pictures of a can of pork and beans. i just can’t stay focused.
next page: more train museum and assorted city non-life
srsly. don’t try using it. you’ll be sorry.
guess the homage! (taken by ken)
santa just looks totally pissed that that fat lazy elf isn’t pulling its weight, and is in fact spitefully making it even more difficult to push the little train cart along.
i couldn’t decide which one i liked better.
this is, what, the sac river? i’m not even sure. they do riverboat rides along it though.
we went to some restaurant afterwards with really gaudy ceiling lamps.
not sure quite how i feel about these last two yet. i do like how haunted the city seems at night.
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two i forgot to post
i’m not pleased with the way this one turned out. this is even the second attempt. it just comes out too graphic-novelly for my taste and you can’t easily tell it’s thom yorke. or at least i can’t.
i liked her gnarly toe. my scanner wasn’t big enough to handle the whole picture so i had to stitch two scans together with photoshop 😛
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just finished last night
i found a great technique that works for subtle gradations in soft textures, and that’s to take an HB pencil and lightly crosshatch over. it fills in the cracks left by darker pencils and fuzzes the transitions between light and dark a little.
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i think i play the slowest version of “christmas time is here” in history
i took piano lessons from age 9-18, and while living at home my playing apparently became a great source of entertainment for my mother, because every year she without fail asks me to send her cds of this stuff. occasionally i even fulfill her requests. last, last christmas (2007, ok, how would you say it) i made her this collection of covers. although it’s not my best work (e.g. you can hear pages turning, the mix is a little bassy, i only gave myself a few weeks to do this, and i sang while i played so both elements are somewhat compromised), i’ve been letting the mp3s play in rotation on my computer for a few months now and i’m kind of oddly proud of them. so i’ve put them up in case you cared.
except under unusual circumstances here and there where i just gave up, i believe these songs are one-off recordings. you’d have to ask ken.
never is a promise (fiona apple)
i don’t know how to let you go (sarah mclachlan)
christmastime is here (vince guaraldi)(instrumental)
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