Mammal 1.0

I found some older drawings and I decided to make them a little more ... technicolor.

This is the skull of an extinct mammal. I can't remember which one. The background is one of my painted tables. Color improves everything?

Plant Prisms

When the sun is low in the sky, plants seem to fill with light. It's the best time of day to visit the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Except for now -- it's covered in snow!  I bet it's still pretty, but I think I'll stay here with my photographs, my warm fuzzy cat, and my space heater.

An ant walks over a radioactive rock ...

Here's a drawing I did of an ant!  This is an oil-based marker, glitter glue, ink, Wacom, and photoshop mashup. Mixed media in the digital age :)

This drawing is for a pseudoscience comic I'm currently working on with one of my housemates. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Now it's time to get started on the 'retrovirus' illustration so ... stay tuned?

Should we go outside?

Continuing to update Botanic Garden pics .... sigh .... warmer days .......

Delightful Fish

Here are some troublemakers from the Chicago Botanic Gardens (in warmer times). Such cute little whiskers and pectoral fins!

Plants

Lilies from the Chicago Botanic Gardens. We went there after visiting the Baha'i temple. I took lots of pictures. Ho ho ho.

Fractals

One evening I thought to myself, "What should I draw?" And then I looked at the cover of one of Mr. Green's math textbooks and I thought, "Fractals. Why not?"

Here's the result, although it didn't scan well. The colors are faded, and the sparkly metallic marker don't look as sparkly and metallicky. Maybe I should stop making 3D drawings? (Nah.)

Baha'i Temple

Located in Evanston, IL and the first in North America (I learned this while playing Trivial Pursuit). It's surprisingly hard to take a good photo of it. This was my best attempt:

Dream drawings continued

Here is a sketch from another vivid dream. I had a little too much fun making this image ... it involved multiple types of markers and glitter-glue (hard to see in the scanned version). It felt a little middle school-ish, but it was fun. Due to the many layers of permanent markers, this drawing looks a little 3-D and it smells kind of toxic. Win?

Don't tell me where to bike, man

This fall I participated in a bike ride for charity up in Highland and Forest Park, which are wealthy suburbs North of Chicago. I borrowed my boss' hybrid (this was a work outing, and I currently don't own a bike) to ride the 20-mile course. I think the course markings were designed for 'fast-rider' types, and were a little too far apart for the Sunday morning bumbler (i.e. me). As a result, about 10 miles into the race, I decided I was 'lost' and took off into this little nature preserve. My route was super pretty, it ended up being longer than 20 miles (I think, but who knows), I somehow found my way back to the finish line, AND I got a medal (which maybe I didn't technically deserve? But it was for participation, and I did participate, albeit in my own way). Anyway, long story short, here are some photos from my off-trail bike "race" experience.

It's rare that I get to see the early morning sun on a Sunday. It was real pretty.

  I so do not regret leaving the trail.

The Conference Room

Here is a peculiar "marker and photoshop" sketch I did recently for a collaborative project I'm working on. I'm blaming how disturbingly it turned out on my collaborator. 

Turbulence

Here are two photos of turbulent waters.

Dream Pipes

Continuing with my sketchbook updates! I've recently started trying to draw what I remember from my visually vivid dreams. In this dream, I was in this beautiful post-apocalyptic suburban landscape. At one point I was looking at this wall that was covered in green, rusting pipes and valves that were filled with vibrantly colored flowers. This captures that the feel of this dream, but very imperfectly.

Fruiting Season

Round items (some spiky, some not) that inhabited Andersonville this fall.

Catfish

Continuing with analog sketchbook updates, here is a cloudy suckermouth armored catfish. For some reason I really love drawing fish. This dude has some odd looking pectoral fins; they almost look like little arms. It's possible (well, let's be real, it's probable) I drew them wrong. Oh well!

Matt has no pier

This is a photo from this summer out on Foster beach. It was a pleasant evening for a walk.

Fruit Bat

It has been a while since I've scanned and uploaded drawings from my "analog" sketchbook. Here is a pretty old drawing of a broad-nosed bat.  I accidentally cut off his ear when I scanned him, but I think he is still pretty charismatic. 'Lil unicorn!

Wacom the Second

This is my second Wacom attempt. It got a little out of control. Sometimes I control the Joanna filter, but usually it controls me.

August Antioch

Here are a few images I took in Antioch, IL this summer when my mom, stepfather, and brother visited me:

The cottage we stayed in was a very pretty but mildly strange place. The "pretty" aspect is (hopefully) evident from my photographs. The "strange" aspect had something to do with the many “light faith” books, like “Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul” (I read the first story and was tearing up, despite myself), or “God’s Devotions for Women” (featuring an irritating story about the virtues of Thomas Edison, who, according to what I’ve read, was a gigantic asshole). The hand-painted platitudes that adorned the walls were also a little weird, including the one in my room that read, somewhat drunkenly, “To the home of a friend is never long.”

Antioch as a whole is kind of strange. One rainy day, we went into town to find the art galleries that my mom was sure existed. Instead, we found an enormous pet store that contained, among other things, gigantic fake waterfalls (yours for a mere $3499!).  Outside, we passed so many hair salons and bars my mom remarked, “Well, if we wanted to get our hair cut and then get drunk, Antioch is the place to do it.” I miss my mom. She is one of the best.

Wacom the First

So I have a job for the first time in my life? And, like, a salary and stuff? Full-time work is tiring BUT it allows you to buy things! And, being the merry little capitalist that I am, I bought myself a Wacom. This (above) is the first thing I drew with my new Wacom. And it kind of really sucks. But who cares! Learning how to do new things is pretty fun. I call this masterpiece, "Healthcare USA."

Chicago, Filtered

A Hyde Park evening in July.

MOON

Hello, Moon.

I took this picture through a telescope at the end of August in Antioch, IL.

Pretty crazy to think that some astronauts played golf there.

(Thus ends my moon thoughts.)

Vector

I am finally starting to learn how to use Illustrator! Today I learned how to use the "pen" tool, which allows you to draw whatever shape you'd like. Pretty nifty. This is what I made:

I am probably a genius.

A Tale of Two Tables

Back in 2006 Mr. Green and I moved in together. We needed some furniture and, being graduate students, we decided to purchase everything from Ikea. Good idea, right?

Wrong. After about five years, all our Ikea furniture started to expire. The first incident involved a dinner party where, in the middle of the meal, one of our chairs cracked in half. Dine in our apartment at your own risk! Our bed frame barely survived our move last year, and I'm fairly sure that when we move later this month it will meet its final end. Our futon is long gone -- the mattress, "Munkarp," sprung a leak and its lifeblood - little squares of foam - rapidly infiltrated the rest of our apartment, like some kind of fungal infection. I'd say that Ikea is the McDonald's of furniture, but that's kind of unfair to the fast food chain -- at least McDonald's food lasts forever.

One exception has been our two wooden tables, which are still very sturdy. The wood was unfinished, though, and for a long time I was using this really ugly plastic table cloth that was supposed to be 'temporary' until I finished the tables. Which, of course, I never did.

Until now!

So, what does one do with two cheap but sturdy tables? Well, I decided I wanted to paint something on the tables to commemorate our current apartment, of which I am quite fond. I like this place for a lot of reasons. First, we've only lived here for a year, so there hasn't really been enough time for things to break or for us to get incredibly angry at either our neighbors or the building management. Second, I wrote my thesis here. I spent many afternoons thinking about chicken brains and listening to Max the beagle, who lives across the courtyard, rhythmically howl in a simultaneously irritating and endearing way. But what I love the most are the big, shady trees outside our windows. You can sit in the window and listen to the leaves rustle. I love those trees. So that is what I decided to paint on my tables.

The photo on the left is what I used as a source picture for my table paintings.

Now, when it comes to painting I am an enthusiastic amateur. I took some painting classes in high school, which were a lot of fun, and I learned about how you are supposed to paint. There are a lot of tricks and techniques, all of which I have completely forgotten. Hold on to your hats, kids, because I'm about to be rude.

My attitude towards painting and drawing today: Fuck the rules -- embrace artistic chaos!

This attitude means that my paintings/drawings never turn out exactly how I intended, which is part of the fun. To illustrate my technique (if you can call it that), here is what happened with table # 1:

1. I sketched tree branches on the bare wood with fabric markers

2. I plopped on some acrylic paint willy nilly (after having consumed the better part of a bottle of wine)

3. I applied black sharpie to make the painting look slightly less messy (I've never gotten the hang of brush strokes)

4.  I applied three layers of clear acrylic furniture polish so that I can spill my coffee all over it without any concern

And, for what it's worth, BEHOLD! The final product:

Vaguely reminiscent of trees?

Onward to table # 2. Now, when I was working on my PhD thesis this spring, I started creating something I came to call my "thesis wall." Whenever working on the thesis felt too overwhelming (this happened frequently), I would instead focus on my "decal experiment," where I made elaborate tree decals using black contact paper. While I was painting table # 1, I had this great idea: what if, for table # 2, I stuck my tree branch decals on the table, painted over them, and then peeled off the decals so that the natural wood shows through! 

My thesis wall decal experiment - I am 10 years old

So I stuck some of the above branch decals to the table and started painting.  About halfway through painting the table I ran out of white paint, and about 3/4ths of the way through I ran out of blue paint. All I had left was yellow. The table dried, and I peeled off the decals. Lo and behold, it looked really awful!

In an attempt to fix it, I drew some extra branches with fabric markers. But, when I started applying my protective, transparent acrylic furniture polish, the fabric marker ink started spreading everywhere. Oops! So I gave up and started drawing with a black sharpie. Thank goodness for sharpies -- assisting "artists" with limited skills and a "no rules!" attitude for years. 

This is how it turned out:

Ended up looking a little bit like seaweed

Anyway, now I have these two psychedelic tables. Personally, I like them. It is possible that they are tables only a mother would love. But that is OK. No rules, man. NO RULES! 

View from the 84th floor today

!!!

Astrophysics Land

This past Friday, August 10th, 2013, I had the wonderful opportunity of visiting Astrophysics Land, as a good friend of mine was defending his PhD thesis at Northwestern University. I rode up from Hyde Park with my friend and his wife, and I spent some time lurking in the Dearborn observatory.

Photo Source - My friend's office is in the circular room directly underneath the telescope.

His PhD talk was excellent. To orient us in space, he used this really fascinating virtual space map called Chromoscope. If you look at our galaxy using the visual filter you can see little black patches littered throughout the Milky Way. If you switch the filter to "microwave," the dark patches seem to glow. These patches are nebulae, or "cold Galactic interstellar clouds," and within these clouds stars are born.

My friend studies these nebulae, which is pretty rad if you ask me. Even crazier is how he studies them: he goes to McMurdo Station in Antarctica and launches a gigantic helium balloon up into the Earth's outer atmostphere. A telescope and two star cameras are attached to the balloon, which are able to measure the magnetic fields within these clouds of gas. In this way, he is able to better understand the forces that shape the formation of stars.

All this is part of a large collaboration called "BLAST," or "Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope." You can see photos of the expedition here, and I interviewed my friend for the Groks Science Radio Show, where he discussed the issues involved in attaching your thesis project to a giant balloon and launching it into almost-space from Antarctica. It's pretty crazy stuff!

To celebrate his awesome talk and successful defense, I drew a picture in the physics building lecture hall. Here is a blurry photograph of it:

Cupid is a knavish lad, thus to make females mad

Afterwards we spent some time in the Northwestern Shakespeare garden, which is really beautiful. While my friend and his wife relaxed, I wandered around taking pictures. As usual!

Nothing says "Shakespeare" like a barfing lion ...

We celebrated with dinner and cocktails at a vegetarian restaurant, and then walked back to the Dearborn observatory in the rain. I popped upstairs to see the telescope but, due to the clouds, we couldn't look through it. Such a shame - it would have been a perfect end to the day.

Goodbye, Astrophysics Land! And thanks for all the fish stars chickens.

Filtered and proud!

Mr. Green and I are moving up North! And by "North" I don't mean Canada (alas), but to a neighborhood in Chicago that is as North as Hyde Park is South. This neighborhood is Uptown/Andersonville, and so far it seems pretty rad. We were at our new place yesterday evening, and I stepped out for a moment to buy some paper towels and a bottle opener. I encountered a man on the street who told me that I had "beautiful white skin" and asked me if I was married. I also ran into a pleasant middle aged gentleman walking his chihuahua, and a lady at the CVS who had a beard and the most gigantic earrings I've ever seen. I think I'm going to like it there - it's a quirky place.

This morning I woke up early and went for an "au revoir" Hyde Park walk. I stopped off at the Medici bakery for a coffee, and meandered about taking pictures. I love early morning solitary walks because the light is amazing and nobody cares if I spend 10 minutes taking pictures of a single tree (Mr. Green and others find this behavior a bit tedious, understandably).

Here are some of my pictures:

The cat in the left image is called "Marshmallow," and I've walked past her home many, many times. I was glad to see that she is still alive and fluffy.

The photo on the right is of the abandoned church on Blackstone. It is a really impressive building, and it's a shame that they haven't turned it into a farmer's market or something.

The things I love taking pictures of the most include sunlit trees, interesting doors, reflections, and shadows. This means that, because the light is always different, I can walk down the same street a million times and there will be new things to see and photograph. This is one of the reasons why it's so irritating to go on walks with me when I've got my camera on my mind ...

I love the house on the left, which has a grand piano on its ground floor. I've often thought that it would be pleasant to live on the top floor of this building, because you could sit out on the balcony that looks so much like a tree house (to me, at least).

Now, I'm going to go off on a bit of a rant: I really hate it when people post photos online (on facebook or whatever) and brag that they haven't used an instagram filter or edited their image with photoshop. You see hashtags like "#nofilter," or people write, "I didn't alter the saturation at all!" This annoys me for two reasons.

First, I have a fairly archaic point-and-click camera (8.0 MegaPixel Canon PowerShot A580) that I love. My dad bought it for me maybe 5 years ago at Walmart. My camera, which lives in my purse, is a little beaten up. The flash stopped working years ago, which is fine, because I don't use the flash. In fact, I only use the "manual" setting, which I have set for really long exposure times. This is useful for taking blurry night shots and washed-out day shots. So the "raw" images I take are pretty hideous, and look nothing like what I perceived with my eyeballs/brain. It's only after I photoshop them that they look like what I saw. So, in a way, my "filtered" images are more "authentic" than my camera's raw images.

The second reason I hate the "#nofilter" humblebrag is because EVERYTHING IS A FILTER. The camera is a filter but, more importantly, your eyeballs and your brain are filters. To be explicit, you see the world through your eyes and that information is sent to your brain, and each stage of information transfer is essentially a filter. For example, there are only so many colors you can see  because we have only three types of color-receptive cones in our human retina, whereas the mantis shrimp has sixteen types of cones. I can't even imagine what the mantis shrimp would see if it accompanied me on my walk. From the retina, information is passed to the midbrain (sometimes), to the thalamus, and then to the visual part of your cerebral cortex. There, individual cortical areas are dedicated to processing information specifically about contrast, colors, movement, etc. And, somehow, this is all integrated to form the image of the world that you perceive.

So, when I take a photograph, I'm looking at the world through my eyes (filter), taking a picture of something I like (filter) with a camera (filter), importing it into photoshop to reduce the exposure and increase the saturation (filter), and then I post it on the internet so you can look at it with your eyes/brain (filter), and you may think to yourself, correctly, 'OMG that image is so filtered' (filter). This is the reason I called my blog, "The Joanna Filter," because everything that is posted here has been filtered through my brain. Whether it's a photograph, a drawing, or words ... this is what happens when our world is passed through the Joanna filter.

OK, rant over, time to drink more coffee and PACK PACK PACK.

Avast!

We (Mr. Green, David, Jen and I) went boating on a river with a name that I can't pronounce - the Kankakee river. But don't be fooled by the name, this river has it all, including:

• Water, trees, rocks
• Sky reflections
• Waves or, as Jen called them, water "bumps" (I think her quote was something like, "You know, it's much harder to paddle when there's all these bumps in the water.")
• Drunken flotillas of frat boys in canoes with flags
• A legion bar with $1.25 beers and $1.50 cocktails
• Turtles, frogs, and herons
• Aged weaponry
• Really tiny water falls (about 2 inches tall, but nevertheless frightening to go over)
• Gigantic flowers

It was so much fun, and I got to wear my brand new pink water shoes! Here are some pictures, and the first is of ...

 ... aged weaponry! This was in front of the legion bar and, to the right, you can see a bit of a Vietnam war era helicopter. But let's get back to ....

 ... my pink shoes! The matching pink arrow indicates the location of the tiny waterfall. At this point I was thinking to myself, "wow, this is nice, there's a bit of a current here so I don't even need to paddle!" Then I noticed the waterfall and got a little worried. But it was fine: I got stuck on a rock and had to wiggle my butt back and forth until my kayak got loose. It was a very dignified moment.

Giant flowers to the left and giant bird house to the right. What kind of bird would live in that bird mansion? Jub jub? Parakeet? Toucan Sam? Big Bird? 

Anyway. Yes. Boats. It was fun. Let's go again this weekend!!!

Lately (in pictures)

 Jackson park continues to be lovely!

I was lucky enough to get a visit from Madonna and Meagan. So nice to see them!

 This is where I've been working these days, the Willis Tower (aka the Sears Tower aka Big Willy), seen from the point. Our office has a sweet view of the various light shows put on over Lake Michigan.

 See? Sometimes the clouds fill the sky ... but the sun seems to peek through.

 Two days, different weather.

It was raining on Mr. Green up in Evanston when I took these photos. It was sunny where we were. 15 minutes later I left the Willis tower to catch the bus ... and I got drenched. The storm caught up with me. Summer!