First Post of the year.

Hey guys! Happy new Year! I know I'm late but I got lots of info to share with you guys:
I started to learn to drive, here in France it's stick shift all the way so I've been dealing with that. Driving in town is so stressful and that's all I've been doing till now. Just last Monday I started to drive a bit faster on the normal roads, far from towns of any kind and today I took the highway for the first time! It's crazy fast! So I've done 21 hours so far and I think I'll need at least 10 or 15 more hours before I can even think about trying to get my licence but I'm more than halfway done so that's exciting!
I've also been hard at work on my portfolio for art school. I''ve got to send it by snail mail soon so I've been hard at work.

I've been working on this for my portfolio so I'll share with you guys, it's a series of photos for the theme "Self Portrait":

More supermarket fun!

The other thing I've noticed in the Swedish supermarkets is the American products you can find, or other things that you would probably find in an American supermarket but not in a French one. 

-Bags of ice! Ok here is the thing about bags of ice in France: IT DOESN'T EXIST!

I know it's so stupid, nothing in the world could be simpler, there is bottled water in France, why not bagged ice?!!

When I worked at the supermarket in France two summers ago there was this gypsy camp not far away, they would always come and ask for bags of ice at the fish station because we had an ice machine to keep the fish fresh on display. But I can't really blame them, even if they had wanted to buy ice you couldn't so i always obliged even though I was pretty sure I was not allowed to give them any...oops

Ok, you can buy Dr Pepper in France but It's hard to find and they bring it from the UK or something, Dr Pepper in sweden is bottled there so it's way less expensive.

Frozen Corn on the cob, always hard to find in France, here they have bags full in the frozen food section!

Supermarket Fun

Everytime I'm in a foreign country I like to go to the local supermarket and take pictures in weird products that you can only get there or who are different then what you can get in France. I know that I did this last time I was in Sweden but there are plenty of weird things to go around so here are some more products that I found interesting:

Some sort of lemonade with apple juice from what I understood:

This is the special Christmas soft drink they have here, I went to my trusty friend Wikipedea to help me understand exactly what it was. 

"Julmust (Swedish jul "Christmas" and must "Sap") is a Soft drink that is mainly consumed in Sweden around Christmas. It was invented 1910 as a non-alcoholic alternative to beer. The original recipe is said to be locked up in a safe with only two persons knowing the full recipe." 

Well I can only imagine that it is locked up somewhere in a secret cave in the north of Sweden where two hermits protect the entrance from the fools who would want to steal the secret recipe...Yeah seems legit. "Must is made of carbonated water, sugar, hop extract, malt extract, spices, caramel coloring, citric acid, and preservatives. The hops and malt extracts give the must a somewhat root beer-like taste, but much sweeter"

 I can totally agree with that even though Mat says it doesn't. I would say it tastes lie a mix between Coke and Root Beer. I liked it well enough.

I finally found it, the thing that is fasinating but that I will never eat: frozen reindeer meat, along with moose meat and wild game meat. I guess we know where Santa's reindeer go after the holiday season: to your nearest swedish supermarket!

This is Cheese in a tube, it looks gross and Mat says it tastes as bad as it looks.

I've already talked about the flat cracker type bread they have here shaped into disks:

 Here is their cute Christmas edition packaging:

This is tea, nothing special but I tought the package was very cute and Swedish:

I've got more supermarket fun that I will share with you tomorrow!

End of the year in Sweden!

Yesterday I took the plane alone for the first time in my life to meet up with Mat who was in Sweden. I've taken the plane so many times in my life that it's strange that I've never been alone. Even last time I went to Sweden Mat was with me for the plane ride.
Anyway, I am now safe and sound at Uppsala with Mat and his whole family who have welcomed me with open arms. I'm staying here until the 7th of January so I'll have plenty of time to explore.
No pictures yet but I will keep you posted throughout this whole adventure.

Gouache Portrait

I have never really worked with gouache paint before. I always thought it was kind of a child's paint since it's the one they always made us buy for art class in primary school. But I was wrong, very wrong.
In colour class we've been working with gouache and this time it's the real deal: You can smell the pigments in the paint It smells like dirt after the rain, it's really nice.
First we worked on creating different colours with mixtures because we only had 5 different colours. (That pack already cost us each 20euros; which is like 26 dollars.) Aghhh why are art supplies so expensive?!!! We really did pay for that wet dirt smell because that means it's good quality paint. Lol
Then we had to chose a contrasted photo and recreate it with gouache:

At first I promise you, it did not look promising at all, but after four hours I'm pretty happy with the result...

Allons voir si la Rose

This is an intallation I made quite a while ago (November 2011) and never got around to posting it.

First of all it's inpired by a poem by Ronsard: 

Mignonne, allons voir si la rose

Qui ce matin avait déclose

Sa robe de pourpre au Soleil,

A point perdu cette vêprée

Les plis de sa robe pourprée,

Et son teint au vôtre pareil.

Las ! voyez comme en peu d’espace,

Mignonne, elle a dessus la place,

Las ! las ! ses beautés laissées choir!

Ô vraiment marâtre Nature,

Puisqu’une telle fleur ne dure,

Que du matin jusqu’au soir !

Donc, si vous me croyez mignonne,

Tandis que votre âge fleuronne

En sa plus verte nouveauté,

Cueillez, cueillez votre jeunesse :

Comme à cette fleure la vieillesse

Fera ternir votre beauté.

It basically talks about beauty, and how just like the wilting rose our beauty will fade with time so we must make the most of our youth and beauty while we still can.

Soooo inspired by that depressing message I created this:

The head is made with paster; the plants are plastic and the mirror is one I found in a thift store, it was broken so I replaced the mirror with smashed Christmas balls.

Cardbord Birdcage

I'm taking this rare moment of free time to post some of what I'm doing in art school.

BTW school is going really great: I'm learning so much and creating so much that it's crazy!

This is one of the projects I've been working on: the theme was cardbord but we can only assemble it, no glue or tape. I decided to make a decorative bird cage.

These are my prepratory skeches from my notebook:

I then proceded to make a prototype because I had no idea how everything would hold together, the result?

Yeah...It wasn't that great:

That prototype did really help me figure out how to make everything and after a few more skeches I made the final product which holds together suprisingly well for something that was made with no glue or tape:

I did use some string though to fasen my little decorative birds in my cage and VOILA!

All in all it took about 3 hours to think up the project and create it so I'm happy with what I managed.

I will try to post little things like this with my projects from time to time.