Kat Johnston

Tag: tree

  • Body Art: Hearts and gears and bunnies, oh my!

    Kat Johnston Body Art: This is what happens when I get given a body to work on, and a packet of prettily coloured sharpies.

    Finally! Finally I get to play around properly with prettily coloured sharpies… all over someone’s back. Started with the heart and went out from there. It grew!

    I’m actually really loving playing around with sharpies on people doing these ‘sorta not really permanent marker tattoo’ thingies. It took a little bit to get used to the way the coloured sharpies work and blend, but I think I’m starting to get the gist of it. When given the chance, I think I have a far better idea of how I’m going to draw a phoenix on a certain someone – though they’ll have to give me a bigger area to work with this time! Please?

    In celebration of working with pretty pretty markers, I’ve created a new category for such things, entitled ‘Body Art’. That way they don’t just get thrown straight into the ‘Sketches’ category and that’s it. I figure that my friends will lend me forbearance for a while longer to draw all over them, so there is a fairly decent likelihood that I might post more pictures of them here. Yay for friends who tolerate my eccentricities!

    I think that’s about it for today… enjoy the picture, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Phew!

  • Sketch: Proof that ice-cream does grow on trees.

    Kat Johnston – Look! Ice-cream does grow on trees. Or at least grows on tendrilly plant thingies, anyway.

    Another day, another little something for the site! Today a sketch – I’ve been a little lazy with Second Life today. That said, if you’re in a creative mood today, I suggest you head over to my Sanu flickr account and name the ice-cream. Go onnnnn… they’re full of ice-creamery goodness!

    In honor of thinking about ice-cream all day, I would like to posit that ice-cream does really grow on trees. At the very least, it does when I says it does. Money does too, so long as the boundaries between reality and my imagination are well and truly blurred, and there is no need for me to actually spend said money from said money trees. After all, lets face it – nobody wants rotting leaves in their cash register. Its just messy.

    Actually, when you think about it, if money did grow on trees and the money grown on said trees behaved as leaves do, I think it would be a rather interesting situation indeed. Would the seeds of a money tree be coinage? Would there be different types of trees for each of the denominations, or would it simply be a case of seed and flower or leaf development?

    Eg, does a money tree start off planted with a 1c coin (or 5c here in Australia, since we don’t go down at low as a cent), and as it matures it works it way up until its sprouting notes, which increase in denomination as the money-blooms mature, or do you need a whole separate plant to sprout the five dollar notes and the ten? Is the money it sprouts the leaves or the ‘flowers’, and if it comes in the form of the flowers, what are the leaves? Deposit slips? Cheque books?

    I, for one, think that it is a thought entirely worthy of pondering. I think I might come up with a whole philosophy regarding it given enough time to ponder. Pondering is fun.

  • Drip, drip, drop.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: drip, drop, drip, drop, a steady constant stream of dripping and dropping….

    Its been a frantic few days with the final reopening of my Sanu store on the Scribble sim – but how perfect is that name? A sim called Scribble! There is just something deliciously right about a name that fits in with me. Not to mention the fact that it compliments my store so well: most of the sim is in glorious shades of monotone, which tends to lend an incredible amount of vibrancy to my corner of it. What is even better, is that the owner and the other residents of the sim are just fantastic and as quirky as I. I think it is a glorious match. Within the next few days I’ll dig out some piccies from the opening party and get them up for you to see.

    Today’s picture is just a simple one – something I was scribbling as I was sitting in front of the media machine, watching some show or another – I think it was Life, to be honest, but it could well have been something else… I watched quite a range of tv today, alongside playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village on my DS Lite.

    I don’t mind Professor Layton, but I do so wish that they would integrate the puzzles into the story-line a touch more to make them ‘relevant’ rather than simply a string of non-related pieces loosely tied together to form a narrative. I adore a well done puzzle game, but this one… well… I can’t help but get the feeling that it could have been done better, you know? As if it just had so much potential, and it just keeps on falling just short of the mark. That said, it is still fairly entertaining, and I’m still playing despite its flaws. Oh, but give me a Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney any day: best DS game ever.

    That’s all for tonight!

  • The Unwise Owl: Escaped once more to grace my page.

    Kat Johnston Art - A book unwritten remains unread. It takes a pen to paper and a risk of failure to make those words take wing. How's that for a bit of philosophical mumbo-jumbo for you? The unwise owl gets a little sense, perhaps?

    Some may remember a previous post I did a little while back: The Unwise Owl, complete with a little story to tell his tale. A friend of mine liked the image rather much and I needed to draw something more substantial than a two minute sketch last night, so I took pen to paper in one of my sketchbooks; an ‘actual’ sketchbook, mind you, not a spiral-bound cheapie. It comes after this page in the same book, in case you were curious. I decided to give the unwise owl a second chance to redeem himself.

    If you click on the picture for today, it should link to a rather larger picture (800px wide rather than 500) because I just wasn’t happy leaving it so small. Generally it links to a 600px wide picture, so slightly larger, but I love the detailing in this one just so much that I had to share it properly. Lins and I have been talking about Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia (a fear or phobia of messing up a perfectly nice piece of paper) a fair amount recently, as you can probably tell from my posting, since it has been mentioning it so often. So this seemed appropriate.

    A book unwritten remains unread. An artwork which stays in the imagination is only ever partially realized. It takes writing it down or roughing it out for things to truly take form. I can start drawing what is in my mind, but it isn’t until it gets to paper, canvas or whatever other medium I am using for it to really come to life. We all have a vision of perfection in our minds when it comes to what we do, but when it gets to the point of actually being realized, I think it is possible to stun even ourselves.

    I am with this image: I was a little concerned that I couldn’t do something to accentuate the owl properly whilst merging into another level of delicacy with the branches there, but to me, it works. The little books are flapping and floating, they’ve taken flight around him; perhaps he sits in awe of them. I don’t know why he isn’t flying with them… perhaps he is scared? Perhaps if he leaps from his branch he won’t float, but will fall? Who is to know. Perhaps I will write another ‘Unwise Owl’ story to accompany this picture later.

    I did slip up majorly once, although it probably doesn’t seem major to anyone else but me. As I drew my pen away from the page, I slipped and accidentally drew a line in the bottom right of the page. I turned it into the pen of the artist – what better way to transform those mistakes than to make them a part of the image? That’s all for today, hope you like it!

  • Alfred.

    This is Alfred. Alfred is a tree.