self portrait « CrumpArt

May 9, 2009

Week 11. Making.

Filed under: craft,knitting,photography — Tags: clothing, making stuff, owls, self portrait, short sleeved jumpers, twitter365, yarn — Crumpet @ 11:27 am

On the first day, I rested.

On the second day, I finished o w l s. Possibly the most wonderful thing I have ever made. Rav details.

On the third day, I started taking photos of old knitwear, and began to notice a trend in my preferences. This one is Cathode — Rav details here.

On the fourth day, I tried to distract you from my love of short sleeved jumpers with macro pictures of loosely knit mohair. I made Loopy repeatedly as a thinner scarf for many people, and it was this that sparked my undying love for Debbie New and Unexpected Knitting. This one was a replacement scarf for my sister. I never gave it to her. Apparently I haven’t added this to Ravelry yet.

On the fifth day, I said “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And accidentally set my kneecaps on fire. This is Puff from Fitted Knits, another short-sleeved cardigan. Rav details.

On the sixth day, I unravelled something that was going nowhere. While wearing cheerful heart-covered socks.

And on the seventh day, there was a toe.

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May 2, 2009

Week 10. Reading.

Filed under: Random — Tags: books, reading, self portrait, slv, twitter365 — Crumpet @ 10:59 am

I may or may not have mentioned, but the new job I started almost three months ago now is at the State Library of Victoria. I’m working as a collection officer, which means I’m the person who retrieves all the books requested from the stacks. It’s pretty much the perfect job for me — there’s lots of moving around so I’m not stuck at a desk all day; it’s in the city in a wonderful building; the work is methodical, indulging my anal-retentiveness and slight OCD tendencies; it’s a relatively simple job that doesn’t drain my creativity (like my old job in advertising did); I no longer have to sign up people for store credit cards and my job security is not based on how much people spend; my boss is not evil.

And best of all, there’s the books. I love to read, but I also love books as physical objects. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, of course. So week 10 of twitter365 was dedicated to books — the ones I was reading, my favourites, the recipes I followed, the bookplates I started making… and the things that were unsorted have been resolved.

I have an idea for a book that I want to write. I’m about to start the research. I get the feeling that ~~2008~~* 2009 is my crop rotation year — where I stop focussing so much on visual artwork and pursue slightly different creative projects instead. It should be a fun ride.

*2009. 2009. 2009. Apparently I still don’t actually know what year it is.

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April 19, 2009

Week 8. Movement.

Filed under: art,photography,printmaking,reading,the weekly puppy — Tags: movement, promises promises promises, school, self portrait, twitter365, work — Crumpet @ 12:47 pm

There was a period in my life about eight weeks ago where things just didn’t seem to stop. I’d started my new job, had an art show opening and was trying to sort out starting my MFA. Constant movement.

I was also about to turn 30 and desperately needed to clean my house in preparation for the party. Of course, in my brain, that translated to clean and polish all bookshelves and catalogue all books using Delicious Library.

I did manage to squeeze in some knitting time. I don’t remember what I was knitting though. I do know it wasn’t the gloves that I promised Mr C’s mum last June…

I also snuck in a Puppy of the Week. I’ve been slack with my Puppy of the Week photos. I need to get back on that, because it’s wonderful flipping through all the photos and seeing the changes that don’t get noticed day-to-day.

In the meantime, I was busy finding out what I’d need to do for uni in terms of contact hours. It wasn’t much, as Masters is basically a Choose Your Own Adventure type of course, but I needed to go into printmaking weekly for group tutorials. Despite a discussion on the phone about part-time study being viable when I accepted my job, thanks to the wonders of flex time, I was nervous about telling my employer that I had been offered a part-time fully Commonwealth supported place in the MFA. And it turns out I was right to be nervous, as the HR department flat out refused to give me the hour and a half off each Tuesday afternoon (that I would have made up during the week with my “flex” time) that I needed to go to class. All because I’m a new employee. I was pretty upset about this, mostly because if I’d been told that on the phone, I would never have gone through the hassle of enrolling myself at uni and would have instead accepted the offer for the MFA but deferred immediately. Instead, I’d been stressing out for weeks trying to organise things, and now that I’d started the enrollment process, putting the degree off for a year was more complicated and difficult for everyone involved. Despite being very happy to have this job, being told one thing then having that flat out contradicted left a bitter aftertaste — on the day before my birthday, of all days.

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March 15, 2009

Week 7. Things over eyes.

Filed under: animation,film and tv,geekery,music,photography — Tags: buttons, coraline, eyes, freddie mercury, koumpounophobia, queen, self portrait, singstar, twitter365 — Crumpet @ 9:25 am

It was a week of hangovers, internet protests and dreams of seeing a film that I can’t because it hasn’t been released here yet.

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February 6, 2009

Melbpocalypse

Filed under: Melbourne,photography — Tags: heatwave, Melbourne, melbpocalypse, self portrait, the train tracks really did melt, twitter365 — Crumpet @ 9:08 am

Last week we loaned the telephoto lens to Steve, and got his wideangle for a few days in return. So while he was off taking pictures of blue-balled monkeys, I thought I’d make the most of the wideangle by setting “get your whole body in the frame” as my 365 theme for the week. No, really, if you look closely at that first picture, you can see that it’s me rolling across our super-wide king-sized bed that looks like a double because of the tricksy things that wideangles do.

I find composing for this sort of lens incredibly difficult. And, of course, it’s even more difficult when you’re not actually able to look through the viewfinder. But I enjoyed the challenge.

What I didn’t enjoy was that this became heatwave week. It was horrible. Between 40 and 44º Celsius for the rest of the week. 38º inside our insulation and aircon free house. And it didn’t cool down at night. Not the most sensible week to be taking full body shots, as I didn’t always have the energy or resolve to put clothes on… (more…)

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January 23, 2009

Hand over.

Filed under: art,craft,crochet,film and tv,photography,pups — Tags: greyhound, handmade, hands, heavy cameras, self portrait, sore arms, twitter365 — Crumpet @ 7:59 pm

The twitter365 week three round up.

Turns out taking decent photos of your own hands is a lot harder than you think it will be.

As I mentioned, I was at work for a lot of the week, so had the added burden of less than stellar* light for some of the pictures. Like this one, taken at 10:44pm, as soon as I got home from work one night.

I have a soft spot for this next one. It’s taken against my bathroom wall, in a patch where the morning sunlight shines through a textured glass brick, throwing up all sorts of fun overlapping, wrinkled light. Yes, greyhounds really do have necks that long. Again, I didn’t have much time with this… it was taken in the minutes between showering and leaving for work in the morning.

I’d tried taking some pictures of my hands in various poses, but it turns out that hands often look incredibly ugly and lifeless in photos. Well, the ones that I was taking, anyway. I promise I don’t have ugly hands. My solution to this problem was to pull out the macro lens.

This next one is the photo I tried to take at the start of the week. It was an incredibly difficult shot to capture, what with my moving hands, the self-timer and the problem of focussing. I’m making a gift for my new niece or nephew, due in February. I still haven’t started the second sock.

Handwork that fits in my palm. It’s less than the width of three fingers.

Finally, all week long I’ve been pondering Doubt, most notably the cleanliness and length of my fingernails.

*Quite literally, really.

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January 9, 2009

First with the head.

Filed under: art,geekery,photography — Tags: doing things better, editing, flickr, photography, self portrait, twitter, twitter365 — Crumpet @ 11:49 am

Generally, I don’t take many photos of people, and I have even less of myself. So on a whim, I decided to take part in the Twitter365 project (I’m @crumpet on Twitter, of course.) The photos don’t have to be strict self-portraits, but I’m going that way as I find the confines of it a challenge. How do I take a photo of myself every day for a year and have each and every photo be interesting? I’ve been reading a lot of Merlin Mann’s writing recently, and as a result, am brewing up my seemingly annual post about talent Vs hard work. I have the feeling that this project is part of that. Doing something each day and working my arse off to try and make it something I’m proud of.

Week one has been all about kinnearing my face. For all of these photos (well, except for the first one, taken on a whim with Photo Booth when I found the project), I set the camera to full manual mode and took a hundred or more random shots of myself. Then I went through winnowed down to one.

Each of these has been post-processed in some way. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Some people would think this is not true to the self-portrait ethos. That the only way one can present the “truth” is to show the subject straight out of the camera. But truth is fluid. Every second of every day we edit ourselves either consciously or subconsciously, choosing what we present to the others. Even the simple act of taking a photograph is a level of separation; the type of camera, lens and settings will have an effect on the how the light is captured in your box.

So editing each photo here has not just prettied things up a little, but helped hone and focus my intentions, getting to the heart of the matter.