November...?

Happy belated Halloween everyone! So after a rather packed Halloween weekend - two costumes, three parties, many cool peeps - today's major activity was ruling a November calendar into my journal. I took a look at the date when I sat down to write and nearly fell off my chair.

It's November.

It's November?

When did that happen?!

As many of you are aware, I look forward to the autumn months and everything that they bring with them... crisp crackly air, red and gold leaves, scarves and hats, apples, hot cups of tea/cider/chai to warm your hands, Halloween, and pumpkin EVERYTHING... However, without fail, September and October always whoosh by buried under a pile of pencil shavings and crumpled paper. And that inevitable morning arrives... you wake up to find wet leaves stuck to the bottom of your shoes, your bedroom floor covered in peacock feathers, and the metal mixing bowl in the kitchen filled with almond joys (because really, what six year old ever picks an almond joy over a reeses peanut butter cup?). You know which morning I'm talking about. It's that one - when after you pull the peacock feather off the bottom of your foot, you hobble to the kitchen for a cup of something highly caffeinated, glance at the calendar page on the refrigerator, and suddenly realize that it's November 1st. Then your stomach drops into your feet.

As soon as November 1st hits, Santa shows up everywhere from Macy's and the shelves at Duane Reade to the street corners all along 5th avenue. Sigh... I do hate how the year gets rushed by. But alas, I digress...

November 1st is the harbinger of autumn's end, and every year I find myself desperately clinging to all vestiges of autumn-ness. This year, in particular, I've barely registered that it's autumn. During the week, the only time I really spend outside enjoying the lovely crisp fall air is dancing down 4th avenue between 14th street and Prospect avenue when I leave Brooklyn and then between 23rd and 21st when I arrive in Chelsea. On the way home, it is nearly always fairly close to midnight, and I stumble blindly to the subway without taking much notice of what borough I'm in, let alone the weather. That being said, these past few weeks, lot of what I've been working on lately has been feeling fairly autumnal.

The autumnally themed project I'm sharing with you here was for my digital class. We've been doing a lot of work with photoshop - learning about coloring, separating the line-work, masking, and loads of other shmancy things I've never done before. (I figured I'd throw in the coloring project as a bonus. The theme of the assignment was breakfast and was my first attempt at coloring an image in photoshop.)

But back to autumn. This particular assignment's "lesson" was about incorporating textures into an image, so I used a whole bunch of scanned leaves and some other random whatnot in the background bits. This is just one version of it... jury's still out on which version is best. I've been playing a bunch with working colored line on a dark background, and I love the way the colors work here. Though should hell freeze over and I find myself with a spare moment again, I would like to come back to this and play with it further just to see how it would look fully colored.


And on that particulr note - my copious amount of free time - I'm off to bed... there's a full day of work at the studio ahead of me, not to mention a lovely six minute skip down 4th avenue to the subway.