the broach

this is a hat pin. if you don’t know what a hat pin is, then that makes the two of us. I guess it’s something you put on your hat. Maybe it’s something to keep your hat in place.

I grew up with this thing as the price of my mothers jewelry collection. I can’t remember her ever using it, but I was deeply fascinated by it. I thing this fascination stemmed from the fact that it kind of looked like a fancy wand.

I was never allowed to play with it, for good reason, but it still fascinates me to this day.

The daily practice paradox

There is a paradox that occurs when you decide that you are going to upload a drawing to your blog on a daily basis. This paradox is, that as much as you might want to make every post amazing, some days you are just bound to drop the ball.
This leaves you with the question, should you just not upload on the day that your work is subpar, leaving you to go back on your original resolution? Or should you upload knowing full well that your work is terrible?
I think my choice is quite clear…

Winter, when will you leave

I am starting to get tired of winter.

I know that many of you out there feel my pain, but I still feel like it’s a point of view that needs to be expressed.

I live in denmark, which is in scandinavia, which is in the northern part of europe… that may be too specific. Anyway, it’s often cold up here. it is not unusual for us to have wet and rainy summers and cold and long winters.

still, by the end of march, we usually start seeing the small signs that the seasons are changing. It can be as small as a flower popping up, or that certain smell in the air, which tells you that the trees are waking up. Whatever the way, march is usually the time it happens.

However, not this year. As we are approaching April there is no sense f winter letting up. The snow still falls daily and honestly I am sick of it.

a light

I am one of those weird people who love to work. As it is probably very obvious by this blog; if I don’t have a project for more than a week I become restless.

that is why there are two times a year that I despise, summer vacation and January.

Summer vacation (which in Denmark spans from July to September) is the worst. Usually I am coming directly from some kind of exam situation and therefore super tired when it starts, but as those two months progresses I become increasingly restless. I end up pulling my own hear out and wishing school would just start back up and when it does I am grateful like you wouldn’t believe.

However, January is the suckiest month of all. Not only is it cold and grey in Denmark, but the months is usually spend preparing for exam. even if I have allot of work to do before christmas I usually just find myself twiddling my thumbs til school starts back up.

I know this isn’t the best quality in my and that I really should be better at motivating myself, which I guess is what this blog is all about. So let’s see how it goes

 

the tale of the three sisters part 4

When the young mother returned to the kitchen of the castle with the big fat boar the pretty woman squealed with delight.

“how did you manage to get a boar from the forest” asked the pretty woman

“I made the leader of the Bandits laugh” said the young mother

“you truly are brave, if you dared confront a man as dangerous as the leader of the bandits” the pretty woman gushed. “If you help me prepare this boar, I will show you to the king and the queen.”

And so the young mother and the pretty woman set about preparing a dish of wild boar and before long they had a leg of pork glazed and ready for the royal mouths.

“We should go serve this to the king and the queen” said the pretty woman and started leading the young mother through the castle. They walked down stairs and through large empty halls decked in the finest silks. The young mother had never seen splendour like this. Finally they came to a gate so large and beautiful that it took the young mothers breath away. In front of the door stood an old man wearing the armour of a guard and snoring slightly

“this is as far as I can take you” whispered the pretty woman “if you want to see the king and the queen you will have to get past the guard and through the door”

with that the pretty woman left.

The young mother stood a for long time and looked at the old guard, who was obviously sleeping. She started to walk past him, but quickly realized that that would be harder than she had thought. Every time she walked close to the door he would stop her. The old guard didn’t wake up, he just appeared in front of here every time she tried approaching the door. After a while of this, the young mother gave a sigh of frustration. Obviously she would not be able to get anywhere close to the door.

Just then, the young mother had a thought. She lowered the two potato sack from her back and let the two infants onto the floor. If she couldn’t get to the door maybe they could. Maybe the old, sleeping guard wouldn’t notice the infants walking past his ankles as he had their mother walking past his face.

The young mother looked expectantly at the two infants at her feet, but they just stared up at her perplexed. “go, walk crawl, get to that door” the young mother urged.

For a long time neither of her daughters did anything, but in time the ugly child got on all fours and started crawling towards the large gate. The young mother was horrified, what if that ugly face was the first thing that the king and queen would see when the door opened. The thought repulsed the young mother so, that she wanted to call after her child, but if she did so she would wake the sleeping guard, and he had a big sword.

Instead the young mother bend down and started to urge her plain child forward, but for whatever reason the plain child would not move. She had rooted to the spot and looked up at her desperate mother with no expression at all.

It didn’t take long for the ugly child to make her way to the door and as the infant touched the fine gold of the door it sprang open and a hundred voices started cheering at once.

The king and the queen came walking towards the ugly child with bread smiles on their faces.

“this is our child” exclaimed the queen

“she surely is” said the king “she is the daughter of a woman who was clever enough to trick the bandits, brave enough to bargain with them and smart enough to figure out how to get to the throne room. This child has deserved to be raised as a princess.”

The young mother was invited inside, and though she offered her plain daughter to beceome a princess in the ugly ones stead, the king and queen would not hear of it. Instead they gave the young mother fine clothes and invited her to a fantastical feast. They had found their princess and that should be celebrated.

The celebrations lasted 5 days and 5 nights, and when they were done no one could ever remembers feasts as grand.

The young mother had finally gotten what she wanted, she hadgiven away a child to the king and queen, but she knew that she could never return to her husband. She had given away two of his children and never said a word to him. So instead of walking back into the first to her husband, she walked to the sea and became a seamstress and they lived happily ever after

I finally finished this damn story. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.

the tale of the 3 sisters part 2

after several days of travel the young mother finally reached the edge of the forest and for the first time was able to look out over the planes.

To her left she could see oceans and ships setting sails for unexplored land and on her right she could see a castle so shiny and magnificent that its like could not be seen anywhere else in the entire world. The young mother veered right and walked towards the castle.

It wasn’t long before the young mother came across another woman walking with her infant son. The woman was dressed in garments so pretty that it made the young mother feel faint.

“Where are you going?” asked the pretty woman.

“I am going to the castle to offer the king and the queen one of my two daughters” said the young mother holding up the potato sacks.

“in that” the fancy woman laughed and pointed at her raggedy clothing.

“yes” said the young mother, but the pretty woman just laughed and walked away towards the castle.

“I will show her” said the young mother top herself as she too made her way up to the castle gates.

When she finally got there, the young mother was astounded by how many people had met up at the steps of the castle. There were women of al ages, sizes and colours all holding infants to their chests. Out of all the women, the young mother was by far the shabbiest. All around her people were pointing and jeering at her, but the young mother payed them no mind, she had come to give a daughter away and she would not be stopped.

After a while, a handsome young man stepped out from the castle and a hush fell over the mothers gathered by the gate of the castle.

“The king and queen will see your children now” he said.

There was such an excited uproar at this that the handsome young man had to shout to be heard as he said, “if you can get to them”

With that the handsome young man walked back into the castle and locked the large iron gate behind him. The excitement died down, what were they supposed to do now?

Some of the mothers went up to the gates and started pounding on it, more of the mothers started crying, which in turn made their children cry and even more of the mothers looked up at the castle in disgust and turned on their heels and left holding their children. The young mother was not so easily fooled though.

She had heard that the handsome young man had said “if you can get to them”

That meant that there had to be a way to get to the king and queen and that was obviously not through the iron gate.

Slipping out through the crowd the mother walked in the direction of the forest from which she had come.

“there must be another way in” she thought to herself.

Just then, the young mother came across a tiny little path set with flowers that led around the side of the castle. The young mother followed the path which led to a beautiful clearing filled with flowers of all sizes and shapes. In the middle of the meadow sat a young boy with curly blond hair and a white tunic on. The boy was playing a flute, but as the young mother approached he stopped his gay tune and looked at her.

“what are you doing here beggar woman?” He asked “don’t you know that this land belongs to the king and the queen”

“I do, pretty boy” said the young mother “I have come to seek an audience with them, I hope to give away a daughter”

“Why would the king and queen want the child of a lowly beggar woman” said the pretty boy with a scowl.

“I am not a beggar woman” said the young mother” I am the wife of the hunter in the forest and the mother of the daughter of the leader of the bandits. I have put on these clothes to deceive my enemy and entice my friends”

the pretty boy looked at her in awe and said “that was very clever of you. A woman as clever as you is bound to have clever children. I will take you to see the king and queen immediately”

OK, so this was the second instalment of my fairytale.

Sadly I won’t be able to upload any of it in the morning as I am heading out to a party right now and will probably be hung over in the morning. However I plan to finish this thing before Christmas, so stay tuned.

winter solstice

I kind of love Christmas. I know it’s corny and I should be much to old for it, but honestly I just love the whole pageantry of it.

But I kind of have a weird relationship to the motives behind Christmas.

I personally don’t celebrate Christmas, that is, I don’t celebrate the birth of Christ. Firstly, because he was born in April (I believe this is a fact) and secondly because I am not really religious in any way.

Not to say say anything despairing about religion, I am just not a fan of any set of rules that seek to restrict my life. Of cause it doesn’t help that I am gay and that is frown upon by most major religions.

So why do I celebrate with my family at the end of December if I don’t celebrate Christmas?

Well, believe it or not, in Denmark people have been celebrating Christmas, or as we call it “jul”, long before we were converted to Christianity. Actually one of the reasons for putting Christmas near the end of December was to have it coincide with the pagan winter solstice celebration.

Denmark in the winter is so sad, grey and cold that there isn’t much to look forward to. This is actually one of the reasons that I hate the annual death march that is January and February. These are months when it is just cold and not fun to be a Dane.

The reason that I can get through November and December is the fact that I have Christmas to look forward to.

So on December 24 when I eat myself silly, sing Christmas carols and receive gifts from people I care about, I will not be celebrating the birth of a deity, but rather the turning of the seasons. That for me is something to get excited for… damn, I miss summer

a skill I didn’t know I had

I don’t consider myself a weird person, at least not overly so, I always enjoy it when someone really goes “there”.

That is why, when one of my friend asked I would help him cover the local graffiti hot spot in print paper, I immediately said yes. Not only was this an amazingly bizarre thing to do, but he promised that he would give beer and pizza to anyone who helped, so I was all in.

now, before I start, I just want to say a few words about this graffiti hot spot.

I live in a small town, where the only real cultural life that exists is crated by the students at the design-school. Because the town in so relatively quite and the school is the only escape, it becomes sort of cultural hob. Sadly once in a while that culture spill over and manifests itself in terms of graffiti, which the local government sees as an act vandalism.

Because they were seemingly powerless to stop it, and it was becoming kind of expensive to keep removing, they decided to designate a tunnel leading under the railway as a graffiti hot spot. Basically, you can paint as much as you want there without any repercussions, which was nice because the place was basically covered wall-to-wall anyway.

The place itself is however not particularly enticing. It is a somewhat broad but dank and “rapy” place that you kind of can’t avoid if you live in kolding.

Because of it’s central location and probably because it is one of the few places in kolding that you can do this kind of project, my friend Markus, decided that this would be the perfect place to be arty-farty.

He talked allot of his friends into joining him in this bizarre assignment, which really isn’t that hard for him because he is both hot and charismatic. I, of cause, was one of the friends who showed up at 4 pm on a cold windy November afternoon to paste up copy-paper to the wall.

It was a pretty straight forward job and it should have been boring as hell, but strangely I found an aptutute for that particular task. Yes I know it sounds weird, but I was the fastest person in my group to paste up pieces of copy paper to a concrete wall in a dank tunnel.

I guess I can add that to the list of incredibly dumb tasks at which I excel.

It was really quite exhilarating to get compliments all the time and show off this skill I didn’t know I had and I stayed much longer than I had planned, but in the end, the cold did get to me and I ended up leaving before the job was done.

I know that is not very gentlemanly of me, but if you have ever been outside on a windy, rainy November day in Denmark, you would understand.

the Christmas bazaar

Every years at the design-school that I attend (Kolding school of design in Denmark) we have a Christmas Bazaar. The arrangement it quite simple, for a small fee you are able to put up a stand in the middle of the cantina and sell your goods to unsuspecting civilians. For most of my fellow students this is an opportunity to hone their skills and maybe make some money, for me it is a desperate attempt to keep my apartment.I am quite broke. Actually broke might be putting it lightly, as I am completely out of money and have no new prospects on my horizon. So the Christmas bazaar is kind of a big deal for me.

The attendees at this event rarely vary; it is a mix of 50+ grandmothers and 30+ mothers who have dragged their families along.

Needless to say, the audience for this thing is prominently female.

I had this in mind last year when I made handbags, teddy-bears and postcards. I thought I had cracked the code to easy money.

Well, It turned out that I was not the only person who had come up with these ideas. As a mater of fact the Christmas bazaar last year was filled with people who had had roughly the same idea as me and were much more skilled than I am. So, needless to say, my booth did not all that well last year.

That is why I have decided to go in another direction this year.

I am going macho… or well as macho as I am able to go.

I have decided to create a number of Christmas tree ornaments designed like guns (why? Just because) and a batman paper doll. I figure if nothing else, plus I plan to give these things away practically for free, so I might have a shot this year.