bad teenage 'art'

[rusty_halo]

Random shit, because I am bored. (I'll answer that meme post later.)

The evolution of Laura, visually.

These are some scans of my sketchbook from middle/high school. I've been converting these to digital format because the poor sketchbook is totally falling apart. Warning: large images and bad teenage "art."

These scans kind of suck, because the sketchbook doesn't fit my scanner, so I have to scan these in parts and merge them in photoshop. Also, most of them are scattered with glitter, which scans as ugly black dots. Sorry.

There's no real reason to post these, aside from narcissism, and well, endless recurring dreams about this time of my life which I'm trying to resolve and move on from by focusing on/dealing/processing/understanding etc.

You can click any of these for a larger version, if for some inexplicable reason you are so inclined.

I remember decorating this with these little image-imprinted markers. I think they were Sarah's.


It was an assignment to draw your shoe. I was such a little grunge kid. Kurt Cobain must've done wonders for that shoe company.


I was 12 or 13 when I drew this. It's based on a poster that hung next to my bed, under my window.


Basically just a scribble, based on the X-Files and the Simpsons. Danielle was giving me ideas. I'd guess we were 13.


Similar to the previous. I drew it, but Danielle had most of the ideas. It's our history teacher as a zombie, Darin Morgan as the flukeman, Danielle and her family (including her cats) fleeing her house and escaping on a boat, the lightning kid from X-Files electrocuting the band Rancid, and aliens abducting the Tyrannosaurus from Noah's Ark.


The assignment was to draw something melting. This humpty-dumpty lamp sat in my room, and seemed eminently draw-able.


The assigment was "illustrate a line from your favorite song." God, I was so predictable.


"Take something new and make it look old." It was a brand new Han Solo doll. Always a sci-fi dork, wasn't I?


"Something in motion." Alice in Chains, drawn from a photo. The only time I seriously attempted to draw them; I was afraid to ever draw Layne Staley or Kurt Cobain, because I knew I could never get them right.


This one is horrible. It's only half-finished; I quit part of the way through because I knew it was unsaveable.


"Something exploding." What better than a barbie doll? This was drawn so lightly that I had to fuck with the contrast to make it visible; sorry.


This might be my favorite thing that I've drawn. I was 14. The text at the bottom says "'The best thing I've ever drawn' - Laura 'Dull and lifeless' - Danielle." She was referring to the eyes. I was hurt. Whatever. I was so proud of it, but it's not really that good, and the eyes do suck.


It was a party at Jeff's house, and I was sitting on the couch in his basement staring at this boy and his girlfriend and feeling alone and left out. We might've been watching the NIN closure video at the time. Darkly romantic lines from love songs are scrawled within. I was 15.


This is better than I remembered. This photo used to hang over my bed.


This is shortly before my 16th birthday. It was the first time I'd had a group of friends, and I loved them all. So I drew them. Then I drew myself, inadvertently (perhaps subconsciously) separate. I was contemplating "going goth," but hadn't yet. (I wanted to, I wanted to feel pretty and attractive, but I'd spent years feeling like the most repulsive thing on the planet, in gigantic oversize jeans and tshirts every day.)

You can tell my thoughts from the quotes in the corner:

"I don't need your hate. I'll decide my fate.
You cannot sedate all the things you hate." - Marilyn Manson

"Just decide you want to be a certain way and go on. You end up being a little more free because of it. In doing so, you're expressing yourself as an individual, not necessarily as a group. It may produce rage and happiness, but it will keep you alive inside." - Eddie Vedder.

And six months later I dressed goth, but had no friends.



I was unhappy with this one:


Ugh.


Scrawlings over summer vacation 1998. I remember sitting in my living room and drawing this. The idea being that love is an illusion, or whatever. I had fallen hard for this boy and... yeah. (This was BEFORE the relationship. Christ, no wonder it didn't work out.)

The small text says "Danielle is in Puerto Rico so I can't call her which sucks because I want to talk about Aaron & maybe I should call him but it would be awkward & he's probably not there anyway. Maybe I'll call Sarah except she's supposed to call me back and she doesn't care anyway." Yeah, she really didn't. Wow, I'm still bitter about that.


So literal.


So very, very literal. I drew this on my 16th birthday.


Ugh. Also on my birthday.


Fanart! I'm fond of this, though. I turned red watercolors into bloody splotches. :)


And this was the winter after that summer and I wanted to die.


The last thing I ever drew that I liked. Five minute Trent--I scrawled it out because I was never happy with the other one, and liked the sad look.


It was something to draw. Kind of a pathetic finale to my artistic pretentions.

Comments

[irfikos.livejournal.com]

Some critiques:

You certainly capured Layne's "foot stomping with simultaneous head shaking" and Jerry's "shiny hair head toss."

And if it helps, I totally recognized Courtney Love instantly in that one you hate. If it helps. ::shrug::

I gave up trying to draw celebrities after that ill-fated New Kids On the Block obsession of my pre-pubescence. I created a giant and elaborate picture of Donnnie Wahlberg and was mocked so mercilessly that I had to chase one 7th grad boy down and punch him in the stomach.

If only I had come along a few years later and been introduced to those fresh new hormones during the grunge era. Thankfully, my latter obsessions are much less embarassing. In fact, I'm proud of the bands I loved in high school. Mostly. Er...

In high school, I won some awards for art projects and stuff. We had an all-school art show one night and my English teacher came up to me the next day and told me that my sculptures gave her little girl nightmares after the show.

I consider that a success. :-)

I remember some of my favorites included a sculpture I called "Gingerbread People" that featured a bunch of small screaming caricature-like people laid out on a tray like cookies. They were burnt on the bottom too. Heh.

I also did a vampire head sculpture. He's leaning back and baring his fangs with this long black hair falling behind him. He looks evil, but also kinda like he's in pain. Unfortunately, the art room was for K-12 and the little kids came in and broke off his fangs right after he came out of the kiln. So those are super-glued on.

And I still have the painting we had to do based on an image of a super-model from a fashion magazine. We got to pick the photo, so I snagged a Kate Moss pic of her in a stovepipe hat and gothy black lace collar. I painted her all in black and white with heavier shadowing to make her look even more skeletal. Then I made her lips bright red. I realize now that the proportions were all fucked up. I wish I could re-do it but oh well. I think I achieved my goal of making "super model = corpse" that I (resentful fat girl) was going for.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for the comments!

I like that Alice in Chains one. It was a last-minute homework assignment, so I didn't spend much time on it. Given that, it's better than you'd expect.

Heh. That Courtney Love one is, for some reason, upside down. I can't remember if I was trying to draw it upside down or I just turned my sketchbook upside down because I knew the drawing would suck.

Dude, you LIKED New Kids on the Block!? Seriously, that's it, I can't talk to you anymore. >:|

Well, okay, really, one of the things I'm most proud of about me-as-a-little-kid is that I was six or seven when they were popular, and I despised them. I thought they were totally fake and ridiculous. In fact, I wouldn't allow anyone with NKOTB "gear" (shirts, backpacks, etc.) into my house. I remember making an exception once because my friend Kari was wearing an NKOTB nightshirt for a sleepover, but it was her sister's and she didn't really like them, so I let her stay.

Although, to be fair, I got into "hot actors" when I was nine or ten... I had this huge thing for Christian Slater, and I subscribed to "BOP" magazine. (I still have a mint condition fold out poster of Elijah Wood as a ten-year-old... wonder if I could eBay that...)

But then I discovered Nirvana and Pearl Jam when I was eleven, and I've had good taste ever since. ;)

Hey, if your art can give people nightmares, that's pretty powerful. You've penetrated their subconscious. >:)

Those all sound really cool, particularly the supermodel one. (That's a strange assignment, btw.) I really like the idea of turning it into a critique. There's something so hypnotically repulsive about Kate Moss....

[irfikos.livejournal.com]

Dude, you LIKED New Kids on the Block!? Seriously, that's it, I can't talk to you anymore. >:|

Ok… um… about that: I can explain.

Um…

1. I was dumb, okay? I admit it.

2. Six/seven year old girls are WAAAAY smarter than 11 year old girls. Seriously. Cuz 6-7 year old girls know exactly who they are. 11 year old girls are big spazzes filled with hormones that make them do stupid things even though they don't know what they're doing.

3. At my school, the choices were Mariah Carey/Amy Grant, Garth Brooks, or if you were my brother, Guns n' Roses. Now… at that particular age, I liked Guns n' Roses but was trying VERY hard not to be anything like my brother - who was widely known as the school "bad boy" because he had long hair and listened to heavy metal (ignoring the fact that he got into less trouble and drank way less than the jocks). I was smart enought to hate the first option, resentful enough to loathe the second option. Nobody else liked NKOTB because they were "a bunch of fags."

We didn't have MTV in our town until later. I actually just saw some article in some "teen" magazine about NKOTB and thought Donnie seemed cool. From whence the obsession grew. I frequently got into fights with people who teased me for liking "those faggots" because I thought it was stupid to dislike somebody just because they were gay. And I actually did think that at least Jordan was gay because… jeez.

So if you think about it, liking NKOTB was the most rebellious think I could've done at the time. I mean… I never knew anything better existed until I was actually exposed to it.

4. I actually only liked Donnie. So that's not so bad. I mean, after all, he was the "bad boy." So… I'm forgiven, right?

… Right?

::makes with the puppydog eyes::

As for the Kate Moss painting, I've got it haning on my bedroom wall across from the painting my mom did in high school titled "Eve of Destruction" (since that was the popular song that year) wich features a giant skeleton encircling the earth.

Does that mean my mommy & me are goths?

Hm. :-)

[aimeelicious]

The Marilyn Manson drawing is really good. This was kind of fun, although it must be sort of trippy for you to review your teen years like that. Part of me wishes I'd kept more of a journal and part of me is relieved I didn't.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :)

The Manson one was fun--for some reason I really enjoyed drawing the folds in his clothing.

I'm glad I kept a journal. I think we make sense of our lives through narrative, and it helps to sort of keep track of your life in that continuing way. I also find myself starting to forget things--memory is so unreliable--and it really helps to go back and see how things really were. (Of course the journals are totally biased, but at least I can see from them when certain things happened and how long I knew certain people and stuff like that.)

There was a period for me where journaling was completely essential. I couldn't process anything until I'd written it down. I actually stopped keeping a journal when I was 16, though, and didn't start again until I got this LJ in 2002. (If this even counts as a journal... I guess I sort of use it as one.)

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I love that you are willing to put these out there -- that takes a lot of courage, I think. I would probably never post the stories I wrote when I was a young teenager, before I'd started any writing programs and got my teenage angst beaten out of me.

And may I say, I adore the exploding Barbie dolls? I would put that on a t-shirt if I could!

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks. :)

I don't really think it counts as brave... I'm so distant from it at this point that it doesn't really represent "me." It's this young teenage version of me that I can totally criticize, because I'm so different now--I don't share most of those tendencies/opinions/traits/whatever anymore, so it's not personal. (Which is weird because it's still me, so yeah, I don't know, strange.)

Heh, the exploding Barbie doll was fun to draw. I used to have her hanging (literally hanging) from my ceiling, which caused my parents to take me to several shrinks. I think I tried to explain to them that it was a protest against superficiality, or something.

[aea]

Even if you didn't like them, I recognized all the subjects. I like the one where you had zombies and fluke boy and Rancid; I used to draw stuff like that when I was bored in class. Never drew Layne, just his tat. I drew a lot of skulls and snakes and my idiot classmates getting struck by lightning. I like the dogs with Manson. That first one of Trent does look like him. Angsty McAngstypants. :)

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Hee, thanks. I like that zombie/fluke boy/Rancid one. Danielle was coming up with ideas; I don't even think I knew who Rancid was. She was just like "They're a crappy punk band, let's electrocute them." Um, okay, I guess I can draw a punk band... :)

These are all so ridiculously teenage angsty, it's pretty funny looking back.

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

~~I was so proud of it, but it's not really that good, and the eyes do suck.~~

Actually, I think it's really good; the eyes don't seem lifeless at all. It seems like the best drawing of all of these. And that's sayin' a hell of a lot, because they're all good.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I appreciate it. :)