hooker.

ezgi.

Fashionsnap.

For fashionsnap.com

Going through the judging process. Fingers crossed.

They liked my first approach.

I thought the second looks like Fendi mixed with National Geographic and didn’t like it although my aim was to try and create a snapshot frame.

The colors to be used are black blue reddish orange…

The third is.. well the third approach. A more simple cut, posh look…

Four is the charm they say… Let’s try on #4.

James -k Band.

Urban Jazzers. Still need work.

Making Of the S&S

So Sara wanted give her boyfriend a unique gift for their anniversary. She asked me to draw and paint them as an anime couple… And so I did. I won’t be uploading the hole process just two. And of course the whole thing looked so much better from my Mac.

Do Download. Do Read. My Little Bible.

This is probably the most fascinating book you’ll ever lay your eyes upon. Such beautiful illustrations,such style… I give you The Tale of Lohengrin. One of the iconic illustration is about to become permanent on my skin.

CLICK ME!

Random.

These are the randoms of this month, occupied our mind…

* If Adam and Eve were in fact created by God. Did they have belly buttons?

- Ice looked up on Early paintings and of Renaissance and gasped at the genius solutions painters came up with. Remember the leaf which censors the genitals? Well the stalk of the leaf extends right to their belly buttons, leaving no room for questioning. Of course most actually did paint the belly buttons which raises one’s brow…

* Those who are deprived of two senses are called deaf or blind, but what is the word for those who can’t smell?

- Shizuru and I decided to come up with a term… But so far nothing original.

*Do you remember HAL? It was the computer which took control in Stanley Kubrick’s film epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. It may be coincidental but alphabetically H precedes I, A precedes B, and L precedes M.  HIABLM.

-We thought that was just cool.

* Marilyn Monroe. Although she only wore perfume when she went to bed, she probably didn’t know it contained secretions from a civet’s anal glands. Hehe… Does the civet feel any better for knowing he ended up on Monroe’s skin many times more than the president? Probably not.

-Later we learned Chanel No. 5 was one of the first synthetic fragrances created way back in 1922.

* Me and ice wish we were Synaesthetes. They feel shapes, smell noises, see flavours and hear colors. Listz, Wagner, Scriabin and Goethe all saw music notes in colors. (‘D Major was yellow) Wassily Kandinsky heard sunsets and saw music.

-Shizuru we want to know what flavour you are and how your voice smells. Do you see what we mean? Gotta get our mind crosswired. Does anybody know how much it would cost?

* How to make a Dadaist Poem;

”Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors. Choose an article as long as you are planing to make your poem. Cut out the article. Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. Shake it gently. Then take out the scraps one after another in the order in which they left the bag. Copy conscientiously. The poem will be like you.”

- Ours was an interesting one. But we do not wish to share. Gomen.

A is for OX.

Gomen everyone, it’s been a while. But we were busy helping ice with her finals. So today we are back to basics! In the beggining was the word. And however may the mythologies attribute the invention of writing to deities, the truth is much more prosaic. Writing was invented by accountants… Today I’ll give mini lecture about the letter A, and Natsuki will take care of it next time I promise.

Pictograms have undergone considerable change in shape before they ended up as the letters we recognize today. began as a pictogram illustrating the head and horns of an ox. It looked like this: . Phoenician scribes wrote right to left and so drew the sideways because it was quicker. The Greeks , who adopted Phoenician letters, generally wrote left to right and so turned the around, although at one period they used a system called Boustrophedon, which translates ‘as the ox ploughs’, and which proceeded from left to right on the first line [ so pointed likewise], right to left on the second [ so pointed that way], back again on the third, and so on… Other letters also reversed themselves according to the direction. About 500 BC writing became more standarized and letters stopped changing direction. By the time that time the letter had finally settled on its horns.

Mummies, Cows, Decomposed Human Brains and the History of Colour Names

Ara… Welcome, indeed it has been a long time.(which is Ice to blame but this week she was my partner in crime so no punishment ok?) So today I’ll be straight to the point. (Btw, if you’re new to this blog please read the ”about us” page. Arigatou.) (This article is derived, summarized and put together from The Art Of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher.)

This was a scientific paper which debunked the myth that the Inuit (Eskimo) have a hundred or more words for snow- actually they have no more than the English do for rain. A similar misconception was propagated by William Gladstone, who thought Homer was colour blind because of his meagre use of colour words. Some ethnologists extended his conclusion to include the entire Greek population of that time. They were both wrong.

Names for colours enter language slowly. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue and even in the Middle Ages there was still no English word for orange. Chaucer referred to it as ‘bitwixe yellow and reed‘. Orange has always suffered an identity crisis. Today, although we can differentiate millions of shades, our vocabulary still only has about thirty colour words.

Colour words are acquired by cultures in strict sequence according to anthropologists who analysed 98 widely differing languages.

All languages have black and white.

If there are three words, the third is red.

If there are four, then it is green or yellow.

If five then whichever didn’t make four, yellow or green.

If six, it is blue.

If seven, it is brown.

If eight or more, then purple, pink, orange

and grey are added in order.

However, it’s not quite this neat. An African desert tribe has no word for green, but six for red. Italian has three words for blue: celeste, azzurro and blu. Swahili doesn’t have any, so coined bulu from English. Creek and Natchez Indians use the same name for yellow and green, as do the Highland Scots for blue and green. French has two words for brown: brun and marron, but there isn’t one in Chinese, Japanese, Welsh or (less surprisingly) Inuit. These, despite the hoax, do have at least seven words for white.

And a primitive tribe in the New Guinea Highlands still speak a black and white language and distinguish colours in terms of brightness.

Describing a colour in terms of something else has a long history. Homer wrote of ‘wine-dark’ seas, Romans called a particular blue from overseas, ultramarine, and a dye produced by whelk, purple (Porphyra). Take a herd of cows, feed them mango leaves, make a purée of the earth on which they’ve urinated day after day for months. Dry, refine, and you’ve got Indian yellow. Mummy (now unavailable) was brown produced from grinding up Egyptian corpses. Caput mortuum was a purplish-brown made of decomposed human brains. Puce is named after the supposed hue of a flea’s belly ( Latin pulex), and the blue of jeans ( bleu de Génes ) after a shade once associated with the city of Genoa. The dye magenta was invented in 1859 and named to commemorate the Battle of Magenta which occurred the same year. Crimson is derived from Sanscrit word for the bug which produced the dye – a krmi. Like many colour names turquoise is a semi-precious stone and although there is a proposal to call it grue – a combo of green and blue- I doubt it will catch on.

Paul Auster wrote a detective story populated with colourful people. The private detective is Blue who learned the tricks of the trade from Brown. White is a client who hires Blue to watch Black who lives on Orange Street. To pass the time while trailing suspects, Blue recalls cases he’s worked on in the past : the obsessions of Gold, the Gray case – who’d change his name to Green – the Redman affair, and an encounter he once had with a hooker called Violet. The names Auster picked for his protagonists weren’t arbitrary, they echo associations. For instance White is good , Black is bad, Gold is dodgy. Colours used as code names also occur in movies; The Taking of Pelham 123 and Reservoir Dogs come to mind…

WARNING: MANGA ARE READ FROM RIGHT TO LEFT, ”NOT” LEFT-TO RIGHT! Plus you may actually have to read the article to get the humor. You know what they say; You can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine.

Wine, Cheese and The Printing Press; History of J. G. Gutenberg

Yo! Ice sucks lately with all the work and stuff, becoming a boring person by the hours. Shizuru is busy with God knows which excruciating book, so basically I’m left with this blog- twice in 15 days! Suck it up, since I’m sitting and writing this blog rather than spending quality time watching anime. If you’re new to this blog please read the About Us page so that we don’t have any misunderstandings ne? Today’s lecture will be about a time and a man which led to what we have today. What we have? What do you do first thing in the morning when you wake up? ‘Read the newspaper’ – good answer. Well have you ever given any thought it’s thanks to who? I’ll tell you, and you can give your delayed gratitudes after this piece. (This lecture is derived, summarized and put together from Paul Martin Lester’s, Images with Messages and information gathered from the internet resources.)

The Lily Library on the campus of Indiana University holds a copy of what I like to call father of all type. It holds a copy of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, one of the first books ever printed with a successful commercial printing progress. There reason we praise this work so highly in praise is because the work represents the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of a revolution in communication.

Johannes Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg is believed to be the third son of wealthy parents, Friele and Else Gensfleich. Some have speculated his birth was illegimate since no official record of his birth exist, but I choose to say so what? Early in his career Gutenberg apprenticed as a gold smith. He learned metal working, engraving skills, and the arts of mirror making and decorating objects with precious stones. You may ask me why I call him Gutenberg and not Gensfleich. Well during this time he chose to drop his unflattering family name and took the name of the town of his mother’s birth, Burg Guttenberg. He was a talented young men who earned a decent name for himself in every city he visited but he was flawed when it came to the topic of money.

Although the popular assumption is that Gutenberg invented printing, that isn’t the case. His genius was in combining what was known at the time with some of his own ideas about;

1. a type mold acceptable for printing,
2. a suitable metal alloy,
3. ink manufacture,
4. paper and parchment use,
5. bookmarking, and
6. a press to make mechanical printing commercially possible.

Gutenberg wasn’t the first to use movable type as a substitute for writing by hand. In 1908 and Italian archeologist found a clay tablet on a Greek islans that indicated the use of movable type to print characters as early as 1500BCE. However Pi-Sheng probably invented movable type in China with characters made from hardened clay and wooden blocks in the ninth century. Gutenberg was well aware of the method of relief printing from woodedn blocks used all around Europe. But wood wasn’t acceptable for a mechanical printing process because it tended to warp easily. He may have learned of experiments by Propius Walkfoghel of France, who was supposedly working on ”alphabets of steel” in about 1444, but with no known result.

Gutenberg most likely used his skill as a metal worker to invent a metal alloy that was soft enough to castas an individual letter and hard enough to withstand several thousand impressions on sheets of paper, and that would not shrink when it cooled in a type mold. For the press to be successful every letter had to mantain a consistent height and width. Through hundreds of experiments, Gutenberg developed a mixture of lead, tin and antimony that satisfied his strict requirements. The ink formula that worked for Gutenberg was one developed by the Dutch artist Jan Van Eyck twenty years earlier. His ink formula called for the boiling of linseed oil and lampback or soot that produced a thick, tacky ball that could be smeared on the metal type. Although it was vastly more expensive, ( this lack of calculation in expenses and experiments caused the end of our dear Gutenberg) he preferred the use of parchment as a printing substrate. Vellum is the name for the highest quality parchment by the way my lovely readers. It is made from the skins of young or stillborn calves. Talk about animal cruelty, always a price for beauty right? Vellum is a long lasting substance that can be printed on both sides. Because it doesnt soak up printing inks and because inks are better preserved on it’s surface, it was used for the most colorful illustrations.

And of course printing requires a …. what? A press! (God my readers are genius) Well, the machine had to be sturdy enough to withstand the weight of the platen and the type itself. Presses at the time were used to produce wine, cheese, and bailing paper. And a little information I desperately want to share with you beside the topice is that Gutenberg’s tax records show that he had a wine cellar in Strasbourg that contained 420 gallons. Not surprisingly, his printing press was a modification of wine presses in use that time: It was simply a large screw that lowered a weight onto a sheet of paper or parchment against a plate of inked type. This basic design remained the same until the invention of steam-powered presses about 250 years later.

But the last pieces to the printing puzzle- the ones Gutenberg never found and that eventually like I said before caused his downfall- were the coins needed to pay for all of his experimentation during the twenty years required to perfect his printing press. In 1450 Gutenberg borrowed a large sum of money with interest and used his printing equipment as colletral. Later on he borrowed some more and inev,tably his borrower Fust grew impatient of greedy and brought suit against Gutenberg. The curt favored Fust and gave him the presses and all of the working progress, and locked Gutenberg out of his own print shop. Tradegy is that after a lifetime of work Gutenberg witnessed his success all through Europe under a different printer company; Fust&Schoeffer. Gutenberg didn’t live to see his name in the hall of people changing the course of history.