i am not an elephant.

in all the holiday splendor, i forgot that i never wrapped up my fall thesis. here is the last track, the delightful "in an aeroplane over the sea" by neutral milk hotel. i think this one is my favorite palette. also, the wraparound cover follows, with lots of tiny mixtapes for everyone.

the final book is finished and constructed and all that, but is in baltimore, and i am not. i will properly document it with my shiny new christmas camera as soon as i get home to the city to share with you.

as far as the spring goes, things are still a little up in the air. and by "a little," i really mean I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING NEXT. stay tuned for updates. i hope.

I JUST CAN'T STOP.

continuing on the "upload everything ever super-fast and super-after-the-fact" trend, here are two more pages for my thesis, the weepies' "take it from me" and andrew bird's "tables & chairs." i have a lot of work still to do, but i'm feeling pretty okay about the whole thing. we'll see how the final-final-finished-product turns out. there's only one more page! which is done, but i am going to leave you in suspense.

paint-ink-scan-print-cover-trim-construct-go!

more things more things more things.

i've been doing things i swear! i'm actually much farther along than my blog indicates, i've finished all twelve tracks and fleshed them out as spreads with track and artist information on the left hand side. all i have to do is print them out, paint the cover, and construct the actual book, at what i imagine to be about 7", like vinyl ep size. which, i realize makes little to no sense since it's supposed to be a mixtape (emphasis on the tape) but the book is square to act like an insert booklet so whatever.

anyway, these are tracks eight and nine, the new pornographers playing "the bleeding heart show" and owen playing "a bird in hand." hooray! below that also is the hand-lettering for the track list, although it won't ever appear in the book this way, it will only appear opposite each page on a single-color background, so that your eye can rest at least a little somewhere in this book.

keep an eye out for the rest as i race toward the finish line, aka, christmas.

I CAN'T KNIT.

so as to be not so much a slacker, here's the next track, to the tune of stars' "look up." i should be finishing up the actual playlist-imagery by thanksgiving, and then onto the cover and printing and binding and such wonder.


however, the real purpose of this post is that though i am not a youtube-savvy human, i was alerted of this lovely knit animation via yuko shimizu at lost at e minor, and i kind of love it, her, and them. so watch it! the end.

big fat halfway point.

here are tracks 5 and 6 from my thesis, marking the start of the downhill slide to the finish line, hopefully the good kind of downhill, like "the worst is behind us", not the bad, "it won't get any better than it is now" kind. i'm rounding out the 9th track right now, so you're getting this story time-release style, for savoring? or something.

anyway, the 5th track (below) is pj harvey's "you said something" and the 6th (below below) is "gold in the air of summer" by kings of convenience. tada!

thesis part deux.

here are a couple more pieces from my thesis, tracks three and four. in the real world, i'm a shocking two-thirds of the way done, but here in fake-blog-land, i'm a little behind with the updating. the first image accompanies "postcards from italy" by beirut.
track four (below) is "if she wants me" by belle & sebastian. also in the works is a companion page with the track info to be placed opposite each illustration. so the final book will be 24 pages (or twelve spreads). less chat, more other things! there's a bunch of work to come, i swear. i feel like the boy who cried wolf, but i'm the girl who cried "new work coming soon." sigh.

in which alissandra finally makes good on her eons of empty promises.

try not to have some sort of aneurysm or anything, but look! wow! cool! actual updates of substance. here are the first two pages of my thesis, which is, in short, an illustrated mixtape. each of the twelve tracks has an accompanying full-page illustration, with lyrics illuminated from each song to tell a simple love story through the course of the tape. here is the track list:

1. cath... - death cab for cutie (below)
2. pictures of success - rilo kiley (below below)
3. if she wants me - belle & sebastian
4. postcards from italy - beirut
5. you said something - pj harvey
6. gold in the air of summer - kings of convenience
7. look up - stars
8. the bleeding heart show - the new pornographers
9. a bird in hand - owen
10. take it from me- the weepies
11. tables & chairs - andrew bird
12. in an aeroplane over the sea - neutral milk hotel

as was mentioned and linked before, i had originally uploaded the entire playlist as a handy muxtape, an amazing (and therefore highly dangerous and destined to fail) mixtape service that the riaa killed a few months ago. check out the link to read about their story, and if you really want to hear the tracks, check out the hype machine or skreemr, two fairly reliable web aggregators that should give you a taste for what the accompanying music sounds like. or, you know, youtube that business. ideally the illustrations would be formatted as a lyrics booklet to accompany the mix, so in theory, the reader would have the track and the images together.

anyway, feedback would be greatly appreciated, especially in terms of readability as the book progresses. i just finished up the 5th track today, so there should be more work in the pipeline. and, two more sequential pieces on the way as well. this weekend is spx, the small press expo (and indie comics nerd holy grail) in the middle of nowhere, maryland with the likes of jillian tamaki, james kochalka, and jeff lemire, among others.

in other news, two bits of non-thesis-related splendor: i started my internship with squidfire yesterday and oh man, it is great. they are a little local t-shirt company that designs, prints, and sells their own shirts, bags, etc., and they just opened a retail store in hampden. i'm helping them out with the launch of the store, festival and craft show prep, and internet orders/inventory! yay. and lastly, i recently found out that i will be having a solo exhibition this coming february here at mica in one of the student space galleries, showing a full year of my dailies all together en masse. cool! okay. the end. sorry for the all trigger-happy hotlinking on this bad boy.

final final project! starring: my hands.

the semester is done. summer is here. and making its big debut: the last of my final projects, officially titled "A KID'S GUIDE (or for anyone who's curious) TO THE REALLY cool, not-taught-in-schools but totally super-mega IMPORTANT skills, strategies, and other THINGS IN LIFE." complicated, to say the least.

first up is a (shoddily compiled) image of several views of the actual book itself. then the nice spreads from inside. then the book all open and crazy looking. it's bound in a modified squash style, for any of you book-making nerds out there, and closes with a jazzy purple slip band (seen below). the actual illustrations and text were all hand-done in ink and gouache, then scanned and cleaned up a little and printed (so i could arguably make millions! or not) to make the final specimen you see before you.




the end! i start my screenprinting class on thursday, so there should be something fruitful from that, AND i am using the summer as a testing ground for my "oh god i have so many things to do, can i slash will i choose to, and actually follow-through with, making some semblance of art too?!" fear that my unavoidably official senior-status has forced to the surface. so i'm working on some things to that end as well. i'm also holding down about twelve different jobs this summer, sticking around in baltimore, and hopefully taking some semblance of a vacation to nyc at some point. and trying to iron out my thesis. and i have about 5 months' worth of daily illustrations scanned into my computer, waiting to be... something more exciting. so, the moral of the story is hopefully my blog will remain active with proof of these lofty goals taking place throughout the summer. so stay tuned!

unnecessary drumroll.

after an emotionally traumatizing day of lessons in nothing-prints-out-as-nice-as-it-looks-on-screen-or-in-real-life-ology, i played angry frisbee for twenty minutes, then decided it was time-wasting time. so here we are. because i also happen to be fast approaching the end of finals time (supporting evidence of the severity of the above learning curve), this is also the time for the big reveals of all the things i've been promising and hinting at for weeks on end. and because the print-outs look like balls, here are the nicer, but not quite as nice as in person, spreads and such for my illustrated version of 'freak the mighty', a young-adult-ish book.





the book is written from max's perspective (the big kid, purple sweatshirt), about his unlikely friendship with kevin, aka freak (the little kid). the two of them play to one another's strengths to conquer the world! or, you know, go on adventures and things. a surprisingly depressing book, i found out as i reread it, like bridge to terebithia's lesser counterpart. it was also made into a (pretty awful) movie with kieran culkin. i illustrated the book as max's journal (featured in the book, as the book itself) and fleshed it out to accompany the text. there are all sorts of "knights of the round table" references throughout the book as well, hence the horses and "fair guineveres" abound. the end! ooh, except the book would arguably have a full page illustration like this for each of the twenty-five chapters in the book, i just don't have them all because, um, yikes.