A few new designs for Bountee tees:

I posted my black sheep t-shirt design on Blogger, just the pic, no text, and it started an interesting discussion about the whole labeling thang, and how being different can be perceived as being "bad", not to mention the whole white sheep good, black sheep ba ba bad  and all it's connotations. My first experience with the black sheep thing, I posted  in a responceon my Blogger post which I am repeating here:

I was labeled a "black sheep" as early as four years old...seriously! I attended a parochial school for Kindergarten, and if that were not traumatizing enough, they had a bulletin board with construction paper sheep with each of our names on them, one side of the sheep was white, the other side black. If you were "bad", your sheep was flipped over to the black side. Daydreaming and doodling was apparently "bad" behavior, and so I often got the black sheep. The connotations were awful- white/good, black/bad and conflicted with the song we frequently sang: "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world...red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight..." If God and Jesus didn't make such distinctions among people...how so sheep?

What I understood however, at that age was that the world views being different in appearance, word, deed, and thought, a dreamer, being nonconformist as "bad", "abnormal", "weird", etc. I seemed to hear those attributes frequently over the years, from family and others. I was never successful at being anything but myself, and if that makes me a black sheep, then I'm a happy, unashamed little black sheep (: Vive la difference (long live the difference)!

The Eartha Kitt song seemed so appropriate (she's absolutely fabulous!), since I've always been a good natured person even as a child, very introverted, wanted to be "good", desiring only the esteem, acceptance and understanding of others (not that I got it), though not at the expense of my own individuality or soul. If I were ever "bad", it has been the "throw mud pies", "hurt flies",  "in the theatre I want to change my seat just so I can step on everybody's feet", doodle and daydream in class kinda bad (:

Now that I think about it, similarly, "Who do you think you are? The Queen of Sheba?" (one of my mother's favourite retorts), would make a great t-shirt design too!

Had to share the Stretch Street video, which has that WOW factor to it,  but for the aspiring yogis and yoginis I also found a really nice vinyasa series of yoga videos from BeYou.tv, and loved the series by Shiva Rea, alternately on YouTube, where I found the Surya Namaskar video, which has a great flow to it. The music was nifty too, very Soma.FM Groove Salad- yay-yah! I cannot afford to take a class, so I appreciate the wealth of free stuff you can get on the internet, and the affordable videos out there.

My favourite by far however, is the White Lotus Foundation's "Total Yoga", with Tracy Rich and Ganga White. I started with this video on VHS years ago until it finally wore out! It seems to cover everything in 60 mins. in a Vinyasa flow, several reps of the Sun Salute with triangle and warrior alternates, forward bends, king pigeon, pigeon, bow, twists, cow, sholder stand (nice reverse of polarity), fish pose and Natarajasana (standing balance), etc., very B.K.S. Iyengar in it's method, counteracting poses, with relaxation at the end, perfect for the beginner, but great for advancing too, with optional, advanced versions of certain poses. Aside from working up a good sweat, rather than feeling all worn out, I feel energized after doing this series, and feel good inside and out. I'm ordering the DVD version to replace my worn out VHS, which is a very reasonable $12.95. Here's a video I found on YouTube of Ganga White and Tracy Rich, an introduction to their practice:


 

My latest SVG. I have this unwritten challenge for myself of posting something every few days on my blogs, but this past week has been one of those times when I have worked on several things, but haven't cared for the overall finished images, enough to post, until this one (being that I am my worst critic). The great thing about SVG is that instead of trashing those images I can reuse elements I do like from each composition, so it is never really a waste of time or effort. Too, I learn something new each time I create.

I used Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968) as a model for my Imagination Fairy, who was a brunette... I cannot help but be partial to auburn haired fairies 'smile'. The background is transparent for my t-shirt design, but shown on a black background here, the wings have some transparency as well. Ruth was a dancer who founded modern dance and one of the first dance departments in an American university at Adelphi University, and saw the spirituality in dance. Nothing is coincidental... Louise Brooks, silent film star and another subject of my SVG designs, studied at the Denishawn School of Dance, a company started by Ruth and her husband Ted Shawn.

The dance of the future will no longer be concerned with meaningless dexterities of the body.... Remembering that man is indeed the microcosm, the universe in miniature, the Divine Dance of the future should be able to convey with its slightest gestures some significance of the universe.... As we rise higher in the understanding of ourselves, the national and racial dissonances will be forgotten in the universal rhythms of Truth and Love. We shall sense our unity with all peoples who are moving to that exalted rhythm. — Wisdom Comes Dancing: Selected Writings of Ruth St. Denis on Dance, Spirituality and the Body (PeaceWorks Publications, 2001)

I came across photos of Ruth on NYPL's Digital Gallery, looking for Javanese Legong dancers, old black and white and sepia tone photos of dancers being perfect subjects for life drawing, and was blown away by the beautiful photos of Ruth in exotic and mystical poses of Radha and Kuan Yin, etc., and her and her husband Ted Shawn in Javanese costume. Nifty eye candy for an artist! She was a fabulous dancer, iconoclast, and a beautiful soul.

There was Harold and his purple crayon, then there was SUPER VECTOR GIRL with her pen tablet of fury! Sexy Benday dots! Roy Lichtenstein would be proud! I had fun with tweaking my icon, which I originally intended to look like this, but was still new at the Inkscape thang. With SVG, I can take a previously created image and create countless transformations, since every line, object, shape, etc., is editable. I created the dot pattern first (it isn't a filter), and as I didn't have a way to turn the dot patterns by degree which is how one gets the composite colours, I had to eye these, and I used CYMK (cyan-yellow-magenta-black), but also red and dark blue, which is also commonly used in Benday dot/ halftone printing, varying the dot size and transparency of the colours, and offset some of the areas to give it that newspaper comic strip quality.