Artwork

I’ve been hard at work.

Basically, I’m not much of an artist.  There was a time in high school when I took a full month of sculpture to make an 8 foot long trophy case

lock (see picture) model out of cardboard that had moving parts and everything and I got an A+ in that class and on that specific project but really since then I haven’t made much of anything in the art department.  Until now.

I guess it started last year when I made a piece of artwork by cutting out a page of a magazine and extra-bluing it to a carboard back and hanging it up in the kitchen, but this year, I’ve been on a tear.

My first major undertaking started when Pepa told me I wasn’t allowed to have a carpet in my room, because I was allergic to it.  I debated that, but not to Pepa, because I didn’t want to get yelled at anymore.  So I took the carpet out of my room, and my room immediately was no fun to live in.  I’ll quote a great man when I say “that rug really tied the room together.”  But there was a silver lining.  Pepa told me that I could do whatever else I wanted to my floor, like paint in the design of the carpet.  Interesting, I thought, but too complicated.  Maybe another design would be better.  Maybe something simpler.  Maybe something more…patriotic.  And so the next 10 days were spent clearing out my room, buying paint and supplies, sleeping in an open closet, and carefully painting 13 stripes and 50 stars onto my floor.  Enjoy.

Then I took a break from my artistic career to focus on other things.  But as with any true artist, my work called me back.  This time it was through the medium of my fledgling business, lobsterjoke.  You see, we needed to refresh the whole thing.  It just wasn’t working for us, from the $15 shirts to the block print to the basic website.  We needed an update, and that needed to start with printing our own stuff.  So I looked into it, and it turns out screenprinting is not that hard, it just takes a while.  Well, I’ve got time, so this was for me.  It also cost some money to get into it, but since I plan to sell millions of shirts, it’d be ok to spend some.  So I bought in and figured it out.  It’s a pretty cool process, a little frustrating, but pretty fun overall.  And the final products are pretty sweet.  I made a couple screens to make 1 shirt and when that worked out, I went ahead and got the rest of the supplies for enough to make 5 shirts and I also bought 40 red shirts to print on.  So I’m now printing shirts and that’s been pretty cool too, and they’re coming out pretty well.  So well, in fact, that I’d put these things up against that cardboard trophy case lock as my best artwork yet.  Here’s a picture of some of the screens I made and the finished products (or at least the backs).

So I know this is a little long and rambling.  And maybe you know that’s my style.  But let me sum this one up for you (for anyone going back to school and trying to write papers about me) in a couple bullet points:

1. I have almost no history with art.

2. I spent 10 days sleeping in a closet on an air mattress so that my floor could be an exact replica of the american flag.

3. The new lobsterjoke shirts are totally awesome, and they’re just $10.  And I need to sell a lot of them now because I spent maybe too much learning how to screenprint.  So go to lobsterjoke.com, pick a shirt, and email me at lobsterjoke@gmail.com.