Sugar Booty

Anna Karenina...

2010-09-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

...started to get REALLY good around chapter 17 or 18 of Part I, and now I am 300 pages in and becoming a little obsessed with it. Its been a little while since I was so engrossed in a book that I stayed up too late at night under the covers, forcing my eyes to stay on the sentence I was reading instead of scrolling down to catch a glimpse of what was going to happen next. Anyways, I write all of this because I (thankfully!) find myself slowly shifting into a more inspired mood now that I am reading such a vivid account of someone's fictitious life. I have been toying around with this idea for a fictional comic that I want to start for a while now, but I am nervous about inventing a complete world and personalities and emotions in such a way. Every story I have ever told came directly from my memories of my own experiences, so fiction is borderline frightening for me. Well, thats not true- the writing and drawing part will be fun- the sharing part is what is scary.

In an attempt to get myself amped up for some fall and winter drawing, I started going through some old artwork of mine and came across the photos we took of this mural I painted a couple years ago for Green Chimneys in the Bronx (fyi: GC is an organization for homeless LGBTQ youth in NYC). I am not a painter by any stretch of the imagination, but this was a fun piece to do because it just needed to be huge to cover the wall and bold to stand out and make a statement- beautiful painterly details were completely unnecessary.

I think I shall upload some pages I ripped out of my sketchbooks from set from seasons 1 and 2. I dont guess the gallery on my site is a good place to put them, but at least it will be proof that my knitting hands have not taken over complete precedence over my life in Vancouver.

freaks.

2010-03-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

i did some new artwork for "The Soup Show" which is performing throughout the month of march and which i will unfortunately be missing because i wont be leaving vancouver til april. i love that i spent hours and hours working on this project, and enjoyed every second of it, yet i dont really know what the show is about. it has something to do with three women contemplating their historical contribution to society and art versus their literal contribution. and stirring up a pot with their naked bodies. and circus freaks. are you as entranced as i was when i first heard about it?

each woman in the poster is drawn in the likeness of a woman in the show. desiree is in the first two pictures, the other women in the last Mind Reader poster are cara and erica. go see the show if you can. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is an awesome show and all the projects that they work on in tandem have been pretty excellent. you wont be sorry!

here is another project that i spent a lot of time on a couple months ago, when my good friends jessie and meredith, who are getting married in july, asked me to create some artwork that they could use for their correspondence/save-the-dates/invitations, etc. we came up with the idea that i would draw a comic of the "popping of question" and they could send their save the dates out on valentines day and have them folded up like a love note, the kind you used to send in high school (cause they are both teachers and they met teaching at the same high school in the bronx! so sweet right?)

here is the comic:

and here is the emblem with their initials:

idle hands.

2010-03-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

i do not have idle hands. which is good, cause idle hands are the tools of the devil. i dont really believe in the devil or his opposite-day doppleganger, but i dont guess i want to be associated with the devil either, at least not when it comes to my hands. which are not idle, did i mention that? i have noticed this as i have gotten older, that it is nearly impossible for me to sit for any length of time without doing something*anything*everything with my hands, my fingers.

i prefer to move them in ways that give me something to show for their efforts, like twirling tiny centimeter-long pieces of soft, wooly yarn into knitted leaves for the neck of a sweater… taking a pencil and sweeping it across stark white cardstock until i have drawn the likeness of something i have experienced…stirring and scraping food stuffs to fit into a bowl, and then into an oven, and then into my belly.

even when i have no paper or needles or paintbrushes or recipes to busy them, my fingers still find no rest. they hunt for claire’s twirly cowlicks or the warm knots in her shoulders, and they work work work, kneading and bending and brushing until she squeals in annoyance and cowers away from my hands. which are the opposite of idle.

what happens when you are alone? you may ask. alone and without the artists implements that you surround yourself with?

well, usually to keep my hands from becoming idle and with nothing else to put their energy into, i trace the patterns of my own curls, unwinding them around my pointer finger and then rewriting them, again and again, til that chunk of hair inevitably appears to stand straight off of my scalp, which i only notice when a mirror catches me.or sometimes i outline the routine of cursive letters in the air, or on my pants leg, very quietly and very faintly, so that no one looking at me would be able to tell what i was doing.

i *love* writing in imaginary cursive. sometimes i imagine that all the writing that the illusory ink from my finger has produced hangs in the air forever, and that like gretl’s breadcrumbs, if i was ever lost, or someone needed to find me, we could just follow the loops and dots and trace them back to the start of me.

but.

it just occurred to me, while writing this, that the sheer number of imaginary cursive letters i have created in this world might have a negative effect, stacking thicker and thicker and thicker as the years go by, until what i have essentially done is drawn a great imaginary wall around myself carved out of words and names (many of them misspelled), and so i cant ever be found again, and i cant ever see out again.

ahem. so here is what my non-idle hands have been obsessing over for the past few weeks (almost 2 complete knitted sweaters in less than a month!)

i am calling this the “Leaf Me Alone” sweater.

i fucked up the clover pattern on the body a few times, but im not frogging it cause i like having mostly unnoticeable mistakes rooted into the pattern for all time. im sure its symbolic in some way.

this is the “Summer Tweed Curved Front Cardigan”, whose name is not as impressive as the above “Leaf” sweater, but i cant come up with anything punchy right now. in this picture you can see the details of the button band, which is done in seed stitch, which is my absolute favorite knitting stitch:

to give my hand muscles a break, which usually get severe cramps from knitting too many hours at a time, i decided to go to a fabric store and buy some materials to make a dress for summer. i bought a really great sewing machine second hand at a store-closing sale for $40. it is a kind of sad story; this store was on the first floor of our building and it was a beautiful tea room that sold all sorts of decorative papers and expensive coffees and fine, small pieces of furniture from the orient. the woman who owned it had battled cancer for quite a while and decided to stop her therapy so that she could live the rest of her life with a better quality i suppose. anyways, in only a few weeks of returning to the store, she was gone, for real, and her daughter was given the task of selling all the beautiful, valuable items in the store for next to nothing. she said her mom loved to sew, and that she loved this sewing machine. i dont want to feel ashamed for letting this fantastic machine gather more dust in the corner, so here i go.

claire took these photos at the fabric store in vancouver:

this is the vintage pattern, material, and zipper for the dress im going to make. the material is a lightweight broadcloth, which was only $2.99 a meter at Dress Sew, the gigantic sewing store in downtown Vancouver. and for the record, i will NEVER get used to asking for meters in a fabric store. damn canadians.

MORNING

2009-09-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

next page of morning up, folks, on the big website: jasikanicole.com! will try to get the next page up sometime this week as well, but if not, definitely next week! thank you!

808 at 212

2009-09-19T20:02:00.001-07:00

alright folks, so im still in the middle of contemplating whether or not i want to keep posting pages here on the sugarbooty blogspot. this little website has been good to me, and good to high yella magic, cause its allowed there to be some dialogue between all of us that has been FUNDAMENTAL in me continuing this hobby of mine. HOWEVER, the whole goal when i started this here site for HYM was to eventually move into bigger and better digs (my actual website) and now that jasikanicole.com has been renovated into the equivalent of a duplex garden apartment co-op in clinton hill, it doesnt make much sense for me to keep shuffling back and forth between this site and the other one.

so. i need to think on it. please take a gander at the first page of 808 at 212, at www.jasikanicole.com. click on the journal page (but dont pay attention to how messy the pink-to black text is cause thats my mistake and i havent the faintest idea how to correct it yet) and it will put you up to date on the new comic and the other goings on with the drawrings. or, if you would rather just cut to the chase, click on the ARTWORK tab on my site, then down to High Yella Magic, then to the second UNTITLED link of stories (i dont yet know how to change the title yet, either. i SAID i was still learning, stop judging.)

THANK YOU!

oh its been TOO LONG...

2009-08-13T18:06:00.000-07:00

...and I have missed it here! HYM has now officially moved to my revamped, renewed and reconfigured site, jasikanicole.com! Thats where I will be posting all new pages for it as I write and draw them, and as soon as I learn how to do it myself, which Im sure will take a while since not many of my brain cells are situated around the part of my mind that utilizes HTML code. I have moved my life across the continent and havent been able to post up the pages I have drawn in forever, but hopefully I will be able to tackle my procrastinating ways sooner than later and get back to work.

For the time being, I will leave HYM here on this blogspot as well as on my website. I have been working on a different, fictional comic the past few weeks and I would love to post it up here and get feedback on it as well. Its called Closetalkers, and its about a girl, another girl, a guy, probably a couple more girls, and some more guys. And the ocean. And some drama. And it starts out on a bus. It might be crap, but I will post it up anyways, soon as its ready.

Now let me get mushy: thanks again for being readers of this blog, even though I havent updated anything in 2 million years. I just saw that I have 72(!) followers and my heart swells in gooey gushy appreciation for every single one.

Morning

2008-06-17T05:35:00.002-07:00

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

page 6

page 7

page 8

page 9

page 10

page 11

page 12 (page 13 soon to come...and by soon, i mean "one day"...)

Crayons

2008-04-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

page 6

page 7

page 8

the end.

Sedi

2007-10-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

FIN and shit.

Revlon

2007-09-11T11:20:00.000-07:00