Aku Aku

18 of 52: Painting With Light

Many moons ago Mie and I were lucky enough to have portraits made by Julian Cash of SuperSnail.com using a painting-with-light technique he had been working on. For this week's project I tried using the same technique. It involves setting the camera on a tripod in a dark room, then opening the shutter for a long period of time as you use various lights to draw over the scene.

I talked Mie into being my model, which wasn't too hard, and then talked her into letting me post them on the Internet, which was somewhat difficult. Here's some, the rest are in my Painting With Light Flickr set.

My two light sources were a glowing pig and a small flashlight (usually with my finger covering the bulb):

coachella line up announced

I was really hoping the Bowie or Led Zepplin rumours were true....

Here is the lineup for the 2008 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival:

April 25:
Jack Johnson, the Verve, Raconteurs, the Breeders, Fatboy Slim, Tegan & Sara, Madness, the Swell Season, the National, Animal Collective, Slightly Stoopid, Mum, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Stars, Battles, Aesop Rock, Midnight Juggernauts, Does It Offend you, Yeah?, Minus the Bear, Spank Rock, dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip, Diplo, Adam Freeland, Santo Gold, Jens Lekman, John Butler Trio, Vampire Weekend, Dan Deacon, Architecture In Helsinki, Sandra Collins, Busy P, Cut Copy, Black Lips, Datarock, Professor Murder, Reverend and the Makers, the Bees, Porter, Rogue Wave, Modeselektor, American Bang, Lucky I Am

April 26:
Portishead, Kraftwerk, Death Cab For Cutie, Cafe Tacuba, Sasha & Digweed, Rilo Kiley, Dwight Yoakam, M.I.A., Hot Chip, Cold War Kids, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, DeVotchKa, Flogging Molly, Mark Ronson, Turbonegro, Scars On Broadway, Islands, Enter Shikari, Calvin Harris, Boyz Noize, Junkie XL, Cinematic Orchestra, Jamie T, The Teenagers, VHS or Beta, Carbon/Silicon, Erol Alkan, Yo Majesty!, Little Brother, Bonde Do Role, St. Vincent, Akron Family, MGMT, Institubes DJs (Surkin, Para One and Orgasmic), James Zabiela, Sebastian, Kavinsky, Dredg, The Bird and the Bee, Grand Ole Party, New Young Pony Club, 120 Days, Yoav, Electric Touch, Uffie

April 27:
Roger Waters, Love & Rockets, My Morning Jacket, Spiritualized, Justice, Gogol Bordello, Chromeo, the Streets, Metric, Danny Tenaglia, Simian Mobile Disco, Booka Shade, Murs, Dmitri from Paris, Autolux, the Field, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Les Savy Fav, The Cool Kids, Sons & Daughters, Sia, Holy F*ck, Black Kids, Black Mountain, the Annuals, Kid Sister w/A-Trak, Man Man, Duffy, I'm from Barcelona, Manchester Orchestra, Deadmau5, the Horrors, Austin TV, Shout Out Louds, Plastiscines, Brett Dennen

16 of 52: Sculpey Chopstick Rests

Mie got me some Sculpey from an art supply store. It's this clay-like stuff that is very soft and malleable until you bake it and it hardens. I spent a couple of hours playing with it tonight. It's hard to work with. It's too soft really. In the end I couldn't do anything of a realistic nature I was satisfied with so I started going for more abstract shapes and textures. What I ended up with was a set of four chopstick rests.

Bhutto's Simmering Unrest.

My graffiti stencil featuring Benazir Bhutto was used in an online article about Pakistan: Pakistan's Simmering Unrest.

Pakistan's simmering unrest

15 of 52: First Day of School

Mie once told me a story about when she moved to Japan at age 9, an american kid who could only speak English, and was thrust into a Japanese elementary school. She had a hard time being accepted there and it changed her from being a gregarious young girl to someone who was shy and lacked self-confidence. The students there found her so strange and foreign that they would crowd around the windows of her classroom to get a peek of her.

For this week's piece I used three different images, ran them through vector magic and combined them in Illustrator then added ink and watercolor.

Images used (creative commons licensed):

• 
• 
• 

Last Sunset of 2007

The sunset on December 31st 2007 here in San Francisco was spectacular. I took a few photos, including a five photo stitched panoramic. The photos got a lot of comments on Flickr, and a lot of other people posted photos from that sunset as well. Someone went around getting all of the photo owners to add the tag sf2007sunset. It's quite a collection, check it out.

Last Sunset of 2007