High Contrast Grey.

The bar I have come to find as being my favorite in this town I was told has a 60s night every last Friday of the month.  I put on my black skinny tie. I look at my outfit in my reflection on the metro but still feel more 30s than 60s. The last Friday fell into the time frame of spring break and so the bar was dead in comparison to how I usually see it. Turn tables in the basement turning little obscure 45s. Pretty people in vintage clothing. Dancing in the basement, I keep trying to get out of the way for others meeting their friends and end up dancing next to the turn tables. Front row, center. A question in French about my bondage belt. I have no idea what the specifics of the question are and mutter some things. Agree. And start dancing again. The metro ends at 00.30. I look at my watch and decide 'fuck it.' The bar starts closing at 00.40. We hang out in the street. A huge crowd. Slowly dispersing. "After party chez moi!" We walk up a wooden staircase. P...

Since the castle was closed on Monday and Fougères was such a neat little town a return spur of the moment trip was planned. It still had that eerie feeling with no one about except a few old ladies who gave us odd looks as we walked through their neighborhood taking quick snapshots of their quaint little cottages. The doors had a je ne sais quoi beauty about them that I couldn't help but photograph. The weather was beautiful this time. Overcast. Tiny droplets hovering in the air to be caught by the lenses on my glasses. The castle was shrouded in a thin layer of fog. Old. Covered in moss. We were given a little electronic thing we held up to our ears to hear the history of the castle. Voices with unknown accents. Each voice served a role; dull history, military history, high pitched feminine. We would laugh unsyncronized at word choice. About halfway through the different things to listen to we gave up. The knowledge of the thickness of each of the towers was not exact...

 We left Rennes in the morning with the plan of hopping a few buses to go to Saint Malo, but as we rode the bus through Dinan we decided that we should just hop out and check out this town. Medieval. Steep hills with narrow cobbled winding streets. An antique store or artist gallery on almost every street (or so it felt). This was definitely an interesting little town. Sadly because of it being a vacation for most of the country a lot of the interesting little shops were closed. Peering into darkened store fronts. When we arrived it was right at lunch time so I thought it would be nice to find a little 'hole in the wall' restaurant to get some food. We wandered all over, tracing back over our steps until we came to Crêperie des Artisans just past the opening of the city wall constructed in the 14th century. When we walked in we were greeted with a collection of antiques and everything in a shade of brown, plus the unmistakable aroma of burning wood. They had a pot...

The other day I was told about how to use the bus system here in France. I kept thinking that it was something like the train system where one needed to find a ticket somehow beforehand, but I found that it is much simpler than that. A person goes to the station pays about €3 and then waits fof the bus, or else it is possible to pay for the bus on the bus. Anyways, I went by the station early Monday morning to figure out times and prices and found that for only €3,40 I could get a ticket for Fougères. So I get the ticket and wait at the bus stop for the next few minutes for the bus to arrive. A dull drive through the country side that has started showing the brown of winter. I kind of wish I had brought my mp3 player to have a sound track to the drive, but I hadn't planned on leaving town and sitting in a bus. The bus comes in to the town from the side that has all the medieval buildings. I wander off the bus at some random stop before the bus station to look at all the m...

A tradition I developed back in Seattle was that I would go for a long walk and admire the beauty of the city. October 2007 I go for a walk on Capitol Hill. Its raining hard. I put Hang Me Out to Dry by the Cold Wars Kids on repeat. Or rather I just pushed the back button each time it came to an end. A faulty download that ended a few seconds short. Mid breath. Last word lost. Thankfully the nights have started warming up again and allowing me to walk and see them once again. Cloud cover trapping the heat. The stars become lost and replaced by the street lights above. I have loved wandering Rennes at night. The inspiration it provides. The way the light dances off the buildings. The way the cobbled streets shine irregulary when wet from the latest rain. The mixture of colors of lights. The complex beauty that is a city at night. Where people are either illuminated by the lights around them or shrouded in darkness. The idea that one can become lost. One thing I have n...

One of my professors has been wearing an old fishbone suit jacket. Only 1.5 of the buttons remain on the cuff of his left sleeve. I found the patern to be interesting though and wanted to see how it would look applied as a texture. It seems to have worked for the most part (even if the detail is too small for the camera to capture properly), although initially my idea was to ink in the detail, paint a thin layer of color and then ink in the detail again but I kind of like how this is working at the moment. Mustache or no mustache. It is times like these that I miss having my tripod. It could make things so much easier if in the middle of the night I could take reference photos of myself.

One of the problems that I constantly run into when I have two art classes is that I don't always know how to divvy up my time so that I work on all projects at the same pace and intensity. I feel like my comic has been neglected as I have tried to figure out my painting. I over heard the prof last week say that there is a two page maximum so, my initial idea for three pages has been cut and repeating frames have dropped down a lot. The last four frames are still being repeated (with slight alteration of the last), which will hopefully make this go faster and help me finish by the deadline of tomorrow.