Homage to Cindy of CindysNails
I’m sure you already know and have seen her amazing blog, Cindy’s tutorials are simple and easy to follow and she always answers everyone’s questions!!! Love this girl and her navajo tutorial is one of my favourites, peep it here.
Orly Decades of Dysfunction with a design free-handed by my younger sister. She draws amazingly intricate stuff!
Happy New Year, Or, I Just Want To Be Deluxe!
“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
- Neil Gaiman
BLACK AMERICANA: The Photo-Essay”
Vol. 1 - Island in the Sun
“Black Americana” is a four part photo-essay presenting a commentary on Black American life and patriotism.
When we weren’t marching, dodging fire hoses, and police dogs biting at our brown skin – when we weren’t singing songs of freedom, and training how to peacefully resist in southern sit-ins, we were doing what other Americans did – we went to the beach. “Island in the Sun”, a first installment in the ground-breaking series “Black Americana” re-introduces, and reclaims the image – the representation of free Black women and men living their lives openly and beautifully. The series seeks to offer a broader lens of Black American life not often seen – a restoration of Black bodies on a summer day in 1950’s America. “The beach setting is significant.” says Brandon Littlejohn, Creative Producer of “Black Americana”. “Beaches are visually associated with affluence in urban areas because of Black people’s limited access.” Littlejohn continues, “I wanted to capture Black young women and men in these spaces, because after all, this was a reality for Black people during this time.” This is the other side of the southern Black domestic worker, the other side of the Black male porter. This too was Black American life, in all of its splendor.
- Geneva S. Thomas
Creative Producer - Brandon Littlejohn
Photographer - Rod Gailes OBC
Wardrobe Design - Jamari Walker
Makeup Design - Dominique Jenelle
Women’s Bathing Suits designed by D’ Angelo Scott
Models - (Tope Alabi, Desmond Amofah, Ngozi Assata, Tradell Hawkins, Stephanie Kyereme, Titilayo Mutushi, Robert Vance)
______________________________________________________________________________________Creative Producer, Brandon Littlejohn, and Photographer, Rod Gailes OBC, are collaborating to create a brilliant four-part photography series that showcases classic American settings through an Afro-Elite lens. The “Black Americana” series encourages African Americans to challenge societal messages about Blackness, while aspiring to higher levels of art and education on their own terms. Creating opportunities in the creative industry via a collective effort and artistically challenging the way African Americans have been conditioned to see themselves are two main goals of the “Black Americana” series.
-Taylor N. Lewis
(via fuckyeahblackbeauties)
“I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk or your life on a bus or in a car or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul. People don’t talk about the soul very much any more. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter’s night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve received your test results and they’re not so good. Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and them to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here’s what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger. Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough. It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live. I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived”.
