pant pant pant...

Wow! What a crazybusy few weeks!  I took today off just to get my head back to normal speed.  Woohoo!  So what have we been doing?  Weeeellllllllllllll......

We went up to Montreal to the bookfair up there, which was hectic & fun & energizing & exhausting all in one swoop.  I was so busy within the bookfair itself that I forgot to take pictures.  My favorite part of the experience was learning how to talk about our newest graphics campaign that focuses on the MesoAmerica Project of globalized industrial expansion and the grassroots resistance to that.  It's an overwhelmingly big topic and I have a lot to learn still.  But I was able to get the basics down while I was there and have some great conversations about it with folks who came through our "booth".

this is an abandoned train station that we stopped by on the way up to Montreal. Explored it just from the outside.

this is the group house that we stayed in.  Thats Matt sweeping.  He's an long-time Bee that I live with here in Machias. 16 people live in this house in Montreal and 10 of us crashed there for 4 nights.  The hospitality was lovely.

I went across the border between the US & Canada 4 times in one weekend.   This pic was taken after about 2 hours of  sitting in line, switching off and on the car to save gas.  Oof.

When we got back to Machias (after a meandering 12-hour car ride back from Montreal), we ran full speed ahead working on our next Kickstarter campaign.  The Beehive needs to fundraise bigtime in order to get $ to print the next run of posters for this MesoAmerica campaign.  The kickstarter is going to hopefully do that, as well as feed into a bigger film about the Beehive and its history & where we are going.

My role with the kickstarter this week was to create an animation that is, this very moment, being photographed for a stop-motion animation!  I hand drew a seed cracking open and growing into a flower.  Never have I ever done an animation before.  Now's a great time to start!  

This is the very beginning of the animation.  See the seed at the top left? Each line develops it's growth more and more.  In the end, I think I drew about 550 frames, which ends up being between 30 & 50 seconds, depending on how the editing takes place.

Light tables are a wonder.

This project of creating the drawings ended at 2am this morning so that it could be photographed today.  I'm crossing my fingers that it looks good.  I'll send out the link to the final once I have it.  That should be in less than a month.

So, that's about it for now.  I have lots to do, but I'm trying to chill out so that I don't burn out.  A slow burn is more useful that a spark if you're trying to boil a stew.  ....haha

Similar but Different... May 22nd

This is the print we were working on at the printer.
I'll send a link to a better photo of the poster once we have it up on the website.

Being amongst activists and artists 24/7 is awesome.  This is very similar to how I wish Cambria house had turned out, but with different people and different motivations.  I'm super glad to be here. For example, yesterday about 4 of us got sucked into a conversation about color theory, what websites to go to for ideas about colors, how to build our own fonts, and then passing around graphics that we had made in years past for inspiration.  Then later, after work was done, we dove into news sites, informing each other on the different activist movements in Mexico, Colombia, and the states.  Yup. I can exist well here.

Tomorrow we leave for Montreal. We're going to the Anarchist Book Fair up there and showing this first run of the poster that we got from being at the printer last week.

We already lost one member.  Well, really, 3 members. There was a couple who decided before May 10th that they weren't able to join us because of complications with their 3 year old. Then this morning, another guy who just got up here a few days ago had to leave because he's hyper allergic to mold. Bummer. I think all of them would have been great additions to the group, but we've got a solid crew still here- still about 10 people.

 Below are a couple of patched I made by cropping & coloring parts of the poster. They'll be for sale  this week (hopefully) and in the future.

The bee is making out with the flower.  As they do.

Well, I thought my adventures were over... May 18

I moved to Machias, Maine last week! Woohoo! I moved into this grand old house at the same time as 10 other folks joined 3 other folks who were already here. I might be off in my numbers, but whatever. It's a LOT of people.  And we're all getting to know each other and we've all dedicated to spend the next 6 months to a year together and wow. It's gonna be awesome.

So my blog from here on out is going to be sparse because my life is way different now from a WAM-WAM-WAM adventure.  It's more of a slow burn and I want to let that glow and live without commenting on the world wide web about all the gritty details.

The great thing about this last week (besides the lovely people I just moved in with) is the amount of work we're doing together. I spent a lot of time at an off-set printer outside Boston for most of this week working on the print of the Beehive's newest poster. It was really intense and overwhelming.  We had some serious late nights and some all-nighters, but I think it was worth it, or will be very soon! 

Last night was our welcome party into the neighborhood. We had a potluck, a couple bands played, and had an epic fire the burned for so long. It was lovely to meet a bunch of neighbors and to lay low and defuse after a wild first week here.

And then today we cleaned up after the party, then took a gorgeous walk through the magestic Maine forest.  Um... I think it was Destiny Bay area.  Pictures here are only glimpses of why it is so great here.

this is a little ecosystem tucked into the huge rocks on the shore. I believe that is a clam in there, but I was pretending it was an oyster and it made me happier.  Ha.

Tonight there is a fiddle festival.  I have to go to that now.  Cuz after the fiddle fest is a cantra dance.  And yes, KJ, I'm gonna do that!