I'm not going to be that person to remind you of every celebrity death from last year on this year's anniversary of it, but I still have to admit that David Bowie's was a major one, and seemed to set the tone for the rest of the year. Yes, ultimately he was just a person, but part of my imagination wants to believe that he really just returned to his actual planet or state of existence. That thought led to the following illustration, and through deviantArt it actually led to a few sales, a first on that site for me. Still available here. Noting some people's best-of 2016 music lists, I can't help but realize that I don't buy full albums as much as I used to, but his final album, "Blackstar," still gets a lot of play for me, and of course we are still looking for new meanings behind the songs, was it meant as an epitaph, or did it just become one? Leonard Cohen seemed to go the same route by year's end.
I have been making slow progress on a new Homunculus doll, thus far dyeing her clothes and creating a new skin for her. As usual in this process so far, I'm not sure where it's going next yet, I'll be digging through all the collected odds, ends and bones to see what she'll become next. With this I'm finding that I need to work on several projects at once by doing a little bit on each of them. A little bit of doll work, then photo work, and maybe some further work on my novels, closer to their final drafts. I don't intend for them to languish in a box somewhere. I've had too many unfinished works as it is.
Speaking of bones, near the end of summer I found a pretty intact cormorant skull on a beach. Maybe a bit too intact, with some flesh and the eyes still attached. So per instructions I obtained from someone else who works with such things, I've been soaking it in a sealed container and emptying the disgusting results weekly, hopeful that I'll end up with just bone eventually.
In my travels I regularly kept all sorts of cameras with me, other than my large DSLR; a Holga, a Polaroid, and the smartphone has become a pretty regular one too, for the Instagram accounts, of course. Thus far I've not been very pleased with the Polaroids. The shots seem a bit too pale, I don't know if it's because of the film or camera settings, but truth to tell there's not much adjusting possible with the Polaroid camera that I have.
In one of my other lives, I DJ at a goth/industrial night called "Ceremony." In October, we celebrated 20(!) years of doing what we do, on Halloween as well, so we hit club capacity pretty quickly to say the least. To commemorate the occasion, I redesigned the logo a bit, and also made it available on t-shirts. I did a limited run of others in the past, but this being modern times, this one is available online through a website called Spreadshirt, so now I didn't have to print them myself, or lug around boxes of them, or run out of sizes. I also brought back the old design for one of our events called "Goths Gone Wild," the centerpiece of which was goths wrestling in black jell-o. No joke. I'm not sure how we got away with it.
I may use this site for other t-shirt designs as well, once they come to mind.
Since the start of this year I've been involved in an online course/group about improving one's portfolio. I still have a physical one, and going through it now what stuck out for me more than anything was that since I work in many different media, photo-based and otherwise, it's not very cohesive. So I feel that I need to create separate portfolios for each style. For now I'm focusing on the photo-based work, and so far there haven't been any new pieces. Definitely need to up production this year.
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