I started to paint another one of my drawings but it started to pour buckets and the natural light wasn't strong enough. I will finish it tomorrow hopefully if the weather is nicer.

Art Area as I waited for the sun

 As I waited for the weather to clear I did a really random drawing of a green penguin like bird. I love the quote too.

My Weird Penguin

After many problems with my computer freezing and crashing I have finally finished condensing the four illustrations I have so far. I have a pretty solid method of getting the videos on my computer without it freaking out. It takes a lot more effort but I will not give up! I am more than halfway done this video project and I feel very proud of it so far! I have to finish the rest of my painting and then I can move on to final editing, music and narration. Yay for progress!

The two drawings I forgot to show you guys

     Today I did something that I think I will remember for the rest of my life along with the person who was impacted by this action. I was with my friend Griffin and we decided to go downtown. We were trying to figure out different ways to make friends. We were worried that once college ended we wouldn't know how to make friends without the college setting. After tossing around a few ideas on how to make friends, one of us came up with the idea of writing a note and giving it to a random stranger. I took out the notepad I keep in my purse and started writing a message to a stranger. Griffin wrote something like "the wind rustling in the trees is calling your name". She wanted to give the note to someone and completely confuse them. She liked the idea that the message was spontaneous and random and would leave the person asking "why?" . I wanted to have a connection with the person I handed the message to. I wrote something like this:

Hello,
I thought you had a friendly face so I decided to give you this note. I always thought it was fascinating that you could pass by someone and look at their face and share a sliver of a moment and then go on with your life without thinking of that person again. This note is a method of extending that moment and someday you will look at this note again and remember that tiny sliver of a moment and smile. I think that is beautiful. I hope you have a beautiful day
-Camille

     Griffin and I walked around the magnificent mile trying to find the right people to hand the notes to. After a few blocks griffin bravely thrust her note filled hand towards a tall man with curly gray hair and held it there until he saw it and took the note. She then shoved me towards the crosswalk and walked in the opposite direction of the man. She asked me to look back at the man to see his reaction. I saw that he was reading the note very intensely. He looked incredibly confused because he just kept reading the note over and over again. He never looked back to see where the secret note giver went.
     It took much more time for me. I wasn't nearly as brave as Griffin. Griffin made me walk in the middle of the sidewalk and I looked at every single person that walked past me but I couldn't find the right person. I was looking for someone who seemed to be open minded enough to understand the value of the note and someone who I shared a moment of eye contact with so that the "sliver of a moment" in the note would make sense. Griffin and I walked block after block as I tried to find the right person to give it to. As I passed people I would think, "Oh I should give it to them" but then I would chicken out and keep walking, hoping to find someone who suited my purpose better.
     Finally, after doing what I decided would be my last loop around the block I saw a boy and I decided that HE would be the person I gave the note to. I looked at him really intensely and he looked at me really intensely and then I handed him the note. He took the note as though it was the most fragile thing in the world, as though it was a newborn child. He looked strangely honored, as though he understood its value and how long it took me to find the right person to give it to. I looked at him one last time and quickly walked across the street he just finished crossing. I didn't look back. Griffin grabbed my shoulder telling me not to look back as she peeked over her shoulder to see how he reacted. We turned a corner and griffin peaked peeked over corner of the building to see what he was doing. She said that he stopped walking and he was reading the note, looking over towards where I disappeared. We then walked towards the train and went home.
     This was an incredibly interesting experience. It's fun to imagine what the boy was thinking after I gave him the note. When I told my dad what I did he kept saying "boy! He must be going crazy with curiosity". I just keep wondering if it would cause him to change the way he looked at the world and if anything as simple as a note could change his world. The note wasn't a call to action or anything it was just something to make someone aware of their existence and the fact that every moment in life can mean something. He is probably wondering why I gave him the note and I can't really say I have much of an answer except that he was the first person I walked past that was really aware of me.
      I am still sort of amazed at how he received the note. Griffin and I both noticed how accepting of the notes these two strangers were. As I walked block after block I was always worried that if I handed the note to someone they would automatically reject it because they would assume it was some kind of advertisement. Both people we gave it to accepted the note without question. They didn't even talk. They just took the note. We thought maybe it had to do with the fact that it was a folded piece of notebook paper. Folded notebook paper has something special about it. I don't know. I wonder how I would react if a stranger gave me a random note. This experience really opened my mind to a whole bunch of new ideas. I don't know if I will be brave enough to do it again but I'm glad I was brave enough to do it once.

Today I spent a lot of time (maybe too much) trying to find the perfect font for my video. After many hours and looking at hundreds of different fonts I finally found one called Cute Tattoo. It looks really nice and it fits the style of my video I think. It was too rainy and cloudy to film more water colors but I will soon. I won't have a chance to work on my art until next monday sadly but I can't wait to come back to my window seat table and work! With the rest of the day I am going to tweak my story. I haven't looked at it much since I started writing it in my incredibly dull Environmental Resources class so it probably has to be improved a lot. See you on monday!

My long list of possible fonts

The font I chose! Cute Tattoo. As for the wording? I can't figure out a good title for my story so I don't know if the "once upon a time" will stay. Its hard to think of a title when I don't want to spoil the story for my friends and family.

Update! I am excited to say that my idea is working so far! I have reduced 40 minutes of painting to 2 minutes thanks to the glorious iMovie. People might think it is primitive compared to other editing programs but it does what I need it to do. We are on our way to making this video! Yay!

Editing!

Today I painted two of my illustrations. We are finally on our way! This whole projects is very interesting and the water color stage is the most interesting. I feel a bit rushed when I paint because I'm worried that the clips will be too long to clip down when I finally edit. I hope that my master plan will work. After I finish this update I am going to begin editing those two paintings and I will experiment with the timing. I'm excited and nervous! I hope it works.

The Finished illustrations

My workspace is getting messier!

Another Project! Gardening. Today my dad and I fixed one of the broken planks for my planting bed and I am now ready to go to start planting the Vegetable seeds.

My planting bed

The seeds

I took a break from illustrating today but hopefully tomorrow I will finally start recording the watercoloring of the drawings. Yay projects!

I took a break from working yesterday and went downtown with my sister but today I came back to my table and worked full force. Today I finished transferring all the drawings to tracing paper and I started the final transfer onto water color paper. It took a looong time but I am almost done. I only have two and a half to go before I can FINALLY start recording the water color. It will start soon.

The tracings

the water color pages ready to be painted

my work space is getting messy

what it looks like when I trace my drawings onto water color paper

Have you ever had a memory rush back to you? You stand around thinking about nothing in particular. One of those little nothings floats through your mind and you catch a whiff of a smell that is connected to that idea. Maybe the way the sunlight is hitting the fence in the corner of your eye makes you remember, then you're frozen. The place, the smell, the people the temperature, how tired your body was, the conversation, the emotion. All of a sudden you are back in that very place where that special thing happened or maybe it wasn't even that special. It doesn't matter, you're there. Then you snap back to the real world, still in shock. The only thing you can get yourself to say is "Oh my god, it smells like bug spray".

I have 4 more drawing designs. I only have one left but I am going to keep it a secret because it is the last frame of the video. Soon I will start tracing and transferring the drawings to water color paper so I can start filming finally.

Just a moment ago I was playing the piano and I remembered something. Piano has been an instrument that has followed me throughout my life. When my mother first held me after I was born she looked at my fingers and said, "Camille has the long fingers of a pianist". My mother was an opera singer when we lived in Montreal and sometimes I would sit in the room during one of her rehearsals and watch. I remember seeing the piano keys being pressed down and being fascinated by it. I didn't understand where the bottom half of the key would go whenever the key would be pressed. I would then go up to the piano and press the notes down myself causing a cacophonous sound to erupt from the piano. My next memory of the piano was when I was a little bit older I noticed that there were letters at very top of the keys under the velvet lining that prevented the keys from banging the wood. Once again I was fascinated by the prospect that I couldn't always see them since they were always covered by the velvet. I would spend hours pressing keys playing peekaboo with myself. I don't know why it was so fascinating to me. Those secret letters were a treasure to me. I was reminded of them today when played piano because after all these years they still appear and disappear when my figures dance along the keys. It still feels like a little secret that my piano and I share.

The Letters at the end of the keys. They are all in the wrong place if they were meant to show what the notes are but that doesn't make me love them less.

The pressing down of the keys that fascinated my toddler self.

I have begun designing the illustrations. It's interesting drawing things that I only imagined in my head. The house was especially difficult to draw and to bring to life. In my imagination I only saw parts of the house. I had vague ideas of what it looked like. I knew it was large, I knew there was a clock tower, and I knew it had many floors but putting them all together and still being true to the feeling I get when I think of it was quite difficult. These drawing are very simple and don't have very much detail. They aren't very realistic all the time too, this it because when I do the actual illustrations on video it won't take as much time so the speeding up process will work better. Also, the illustrations won't distract from the story. When I am done with all of the illustrations, I am going to transfer the drawings using tracing paper to water color paper and then I will begin recording. There are a lot more drawings to do before then though. Wish me luck!

First drawing introducing the character

character development

No I won't spoil the story!

house attempt #1

House attempt #2

clock tower

Another one of my projects is illustrating Auto-correct poetry for my friend Julia's blog, Sequined absinthe (sequinedabsinthe.blogspot.com). You should check it out. It's quite interesting to read.

Illustration work space:

The finished illustration:

Today I started my first project of the summer. I am planning on working on it throughout the summer and maybe next year as well. I wrote a simple little children's story and I am going to film myself illustrating it. I am then going to speed up the recording and line it up with my dialogue so that as I am narrating the story, the story is being illustrated before your eyes. Today I built the rig for my camera and I will begin planning the illustrations as well. I am really excited to share the process with you!

My home-made Camera Rig

Hello! My Name is Camille (pronounced Cami) and this is my new blog. I decided to finally start a blog because I thought that it would help encourage me to do the things that I have been planning on doing over the summer. If I have project ideas that I am thinking about, which I always have floating in my head, then having a blog would encourage me to start or continue working on those projects. Summer Vacation is about to start so I am ready to start creating and taking full advantage of my free time. I am hoping to create several videos, fabricate dolls, and maybe write stories. These things might even be combined! I hope you are as excited as I am about this journey. Have a lovely day!

-Camille