Tag Archives: australia

Day 88:Tim Burton OR If at first you don’t succeed try again 2 more times

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It was July 2010 and I thought I might freeze to death. I was in Melbourne, wearing a white winter coat I had borrowed from my Australian friend and thinking how backwards it was to be utterly frozen in July.

The changes in seasons from the northern hemisphere (in which I had lived 20 years of my life) to the southern hemisphere(in which I lived 5 months) kept throwing me off.

What do you mean you wear boardies and a tank top during Christmas? What do you mean you feel like an icicle in July?

So. Strange!

Because of this, the whole time I was in Melbourne with my friend Rose we sought to do museum and other indoor activities to keep out of the cold. One the exhibits I went to and loved was the Tim Burton art exhibit.

I have always liked Tim Burton movies (with the exception of Beetlejuice which haunted me as a child and still haunts me today) and so it was cool to explore many works of his I had never seen before.

I saw drawing and stories from the time he was the child and saw various props and costumes from his movies. What I remember the most from the exhibit was seeing some costumes from “Alice in Wonderland” which I had watched in the movie  theater while I lived in Australia.

2010 Melbourne, Australia

Now let’s Flashforward 2 1/2 years. I am living in South Korea and I discover that the Tim Burton Art Exhibit is on display at the Seoul Art Museum. I decide I absolutely must go up to Seoul and reconnect with my memories from the time I was in Australia.

Attempt #1:  A Monday

I go to the museum on a Monday feeling very excited to compare the differences between the exhibit I saw in Australia and the one in Korea.

Problem: The Museum is closed on Mondays! Gahhh!

 

I  have to leave early on Tuesday which means I can’t see it this time on my trip to Seoul. Bummer.  :/

Next time  I am in Seoul I vow to  make this happen for sure!

Attempt #2: A Sunday
This time I want to go early on a Sunday with my two friends. But it ends up being a lazy Sunday per usual and we get to the museum at 4pm.

Problem: The waiting period for the museum is 2 hours but I have to catch a bus back to the city I live in at 7pm! I don’t have time to make it.

Damn. This is annoying me. Seoul is about a 4 hour bus ride from Seoul with roundtrip bus fare about 52,000 won (about $50 USD). This trip ain’t cheap, so I don’t know when I will next get a chance to be in Seoul and see the exhibit.

Why!?!?!

Attempt #3: A Saturday
I am up in Seoul for a K-Pop concert and by hell or high water I WILL GO to this museum exhibit!!

I drag my friends out of our hostel and race to the museum where I discover, yet again, there is a 2 hour waiting time.

But this time I had planned for it, so my  friends and I wander around Deoksugung Palace until we can get into the museum. The entrance for the Palace was only a paltry 1,000 won = less than $1 USD. It’s a cool place to kill some time and also to see some of Korea’s history.

Finally, at last, the time comes in which we can enter the museum.  Yes!! Nothing can stop me now, muhahahaa.

I love taking my photos with Tim Burton monsters. Also, it appears as if I only have one outfit I wear in Korea. Ha.

Slight snag: There are hordes and hordes of people at the museum because it is a weekend and also because it is one of the last few weekends the exhibit is open.

I decide to skip over the long lines and wander around the parts of the exhibit that isn’t super crowded. The exhibit has many of the same things I saw while in Australia but a few different things, notably materials from his new movie “Frakenweenie” and from the short “Stain Boy.” If there are any “Alice in Wonderland” artifacts around, I don’t see them through the crowd.

Furthermore, my experience here accompanied by 5 friends is also vastly different than the time I saw it in Australia by myself. When I saw it in Australia my friend Rose decided to go to an Abba exhibit so I ended up exploring Tim Burton on my own.

This time there is a lot more laughing (laughing in a group over silly things is fine; laughing by yourself just causes you to receive strange looks) and a lot more posing for photos. Overall I think the highlight of my epic odyssey to see this exhibit was taking funny photos with my friends next to Tim Burton’s art work.

I just love Batman's itty bitty feet compared to the rest of his body!

 

Day 20: A E I O UUUUU UUU E I O AA

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Day 20’s assignment: “Buy or make some clay (see instructions on page 238) and then use it like you never have before.”

I decided that it would be easier to buy clay in an assortment of colors rather than make it on my own. After work I made a trip out to Michael’s and bought a rainbow pack.

Now what to sculpt?

I was inspired by my friend Kayla who has a penchant for mushrooms and various other plant life. From there it developed into “I’m gonna make this into something out of Alice in Wonderland from the scene where the caterpillar is talking with Alice.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbntWU7pG8

I only made a few pieces since it was getting late: 3 mushrooms plus the mushroom with the caterpillar (constructed with the help of Sibling1). Then to take photos of my creations I used an 2011 Australian calendar as the background in the attempt to make it look a little trippy.** The top scene is a picture of the Great Barrier Reef and the bottom scene is one of the Australian coast.

Lost one of his arms in an accident 🙁

 

I think for a future project I am going to make a trippy diorama to display everything I made today.

*Speaking of Australia, I just imported my blogs from my UMW blog Barrier Reef Brief to here. Check, Check, Check it out!

Graduation & life after!

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After  eight semesters of hard work, plus a couple of summer classes here and there, I’ve graduated from the University of Mary Washington!

I’ve graduated with departmental honors and a BA in English: Creative Writing, summa cum laude.

Me & Meghan E --> Both of us received honors in English 😉

So now that I’ve graduated I’ve faced an exponential increase of family and/or random people asking me:

“So what are you going to do with your life now that you’ve graduated? Are you going into journalism? Are you going to teach?…”

Then they stare at me, unblinking, until I say something.

Like many of my fellow peers, I don’t really have a plan for my career yet (most of them fell through for various reasons), and thus, these questions get really old, really fast.

If I was smart I would say something random, like “I’m going to become a scuba diving instructor in Hawaii.” (I’m an actual Scuba diver but no-where near experienced enough to be an instructor! Although I would love to move to Hawaii for a few years!)

 

But really this is what I tell people I have planned for the next few months:

1) Figure out how to fit everything I brought back from my apartment into my room at home. My room here is the size of a cardboard box, no joke,  so this is going to be tricky!

 

2) In 11 days I am flying to California to meet up with my Australian friend Rose who I met in New Zealand last year.

postcard I bought last year. love it!!

 

Then we are going to travel together around  California, Arizona and Nevada for a little over two weeks. After that we are headed over to the East coast to do more traveling until she leaves in mid-July.

I am super excited because Rose is one of my closest friends and I haven’t seen her in almost a year. Also, while I’m from California, I’ve never been to Arizona or Nevada, so I am looking forward to traveling there.

Viva las vegas!

Vegas, anyone?

I’m also looking forward to showing off the best of America to Rose because she has never been to the U.S. before.

So definitely be on the lookout for more blog posts about her and our trip in the upcoming future!

3) Once Rose leaves its all going to be about applying for jobs or internships or seeing if I have any money left over to do more traveling. I got the travelin’ bug and I want to see as much of the world as possible before I’m 25.

Goal in life: Visit all the countries in the world plus Antartica. This can happen I just need to invent/write something that I can make bank on!

 

I am so there!

 

Week 1 postcard project

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Okay so I actually started this project 5 weeks ago, but due to certain circumstances it took me a while to get good copies of my Australia photos to make into postcards.

So here is week 1 of my Australia and US postcards. This starts with my first full week in Australia and I plan on continuing this project until beginning July when I left Australia. I am doing this as a way to compare my life in OZ to my life here.

I wanted to exactly match my postcards for this project and the week in which I took them, but the devil has my soul this semester and I have a billion things to do for my other classes. D: (this emoticon doesn’t begin to convey my stress!)

I’ve decided to make the postcards more of a secondary final project (less pressure on me to get it done) and focus my most attention on the daily shoots/ all the other homework I have for my other classes. I like making the postcards but they take sometime to make, hence why they are on the back burner for now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creation Process:

So I started by finding the photo that I wanted to use for each postcard and then editing it in Picnik by intensifying the colors, adding words and also a border around the card. Once that was done, I created the content of the photo using Photoshop.

All of these postcards are addressed to friends who if these postcards were “real” I would send it to them. The stamps are real  stamps from each country which I took a photo of and  then photoshopped these stamps into a new document.

The handwriting is  actually my own handwriting which I created using this really awesome program called Pilot Handwriting.

Through Pilot Handwriting I write out each letter of the alphabet and upload to the website which then processes the letters so that I can I can type out a message.

Now this isn’t exactly my handwriting which is more a cursive-y print, but it’s a very close approximation of it, which is cool.

There are a few drawbacks to the program, such as I can’t download my handwriting as a font for my computer. This means that I have to always go to the website, type out my message then do a screen shot of my message and paste that into the photoshop document I’m working on. Thus, I’m stuck with the black text color for all my postcards. This also takes a lot more time to put on my postcard that it would if I used a normal handwriting font.

Also, when I first wrote out all the letters to upload to Pilot handwriting, it was hard to make sure that each letter was the correct size. Take a look at the postcard from the 909 Saloon. If you look closely the letter E is HUGE is comparison to the other letters. This is because I wrote it to0 big and didn’t really want to fix it at the time. It’s passable for what I’m doing, but it kinds of irritates me.

I have 4 other postcards 100% done which I made using pilot handwriting and I have several others half done. For my future postcards I’m thinking about handwriting the messages I want to use because that would be a lot faster. It might also encourage me to do more in the small chunks of free time I have.
Will hopefully post more of them soon!

My Final Project(s)

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So for my final project, I’ve actually decided to do two projects! Before every student in the class starts hating on me for doing two projects let me explain why I am doing this.

My first project is continuing on with the Daily Shoot assignments. As I have mentioned before, I am a photography nut and really enjoy the challenge of the Daily Shoot assignments. Sometimes I think I come up with really great stuff, like “The Masks” set, and other time I capture just an okay photo. But I’ve decided that it’s a personal challenge of mine to make this my #365 day project and take a Daily Shoot photo everyday for a year.

I feel like this might be a little tough for me to keep up with since I tend to get distracted easily, although so far I’ve lasted 32 days!

I keep meaning to post about this experience of taking the photos, but have been swamped so far by other  class assignments. However, I promise that this week I will def have some reflection posts up!

Now for project #2: Postcards.

Last Spring Semester I studied abroad in Townsville, Australia and experienced some of the most  crazy/awesome/intense/amazing experiences of my life. It was really hard for me to leave Australia and last fall semester I was really sad to be back at UMW for various reasons. Now that I’ve been back over a year from Australia, I think it would be an interesting study to parallel my life week by week over in Ozland versus my life week by week here.

I decided the best way to do this would be by creating my own postcards, because in real life I am a postcard/letter writing fan and each week I send numerous postcards and letters to my besties. I was also inspired by the awesome postcards from LOTR created last semester.

I’ve made a couple of postcards for my US life the past few weeks and have just started working on the ones from Ozland. I plan on posting them sometime this week, so look forward to that!