A few weeks ago, my awesome friend Tinah Lai introduced me to the world of the NASA Datanauts. It's an amazing program that NASA is doing right now, to encourage girls to explore the data science frontier through classes, fellowships and apps. Tinah got a group of friends together to show us how to put together a keyboard using some foam core, circuit boards and a mobile app. When you connect it to your smart phone via Bluetooth, you can push the keys and sound FX will play on your phone. I'm talking sound FX...from space!! Everyone assured me that the sound FX were from NASA's vast archives, but I'm pretty sure that we made contact with extraterrestrial beings and now they're super excited to come to Earth and hang out with us.
We also got to decorate our keyboards, and mine of course ended up featuring one of my Post Modern Muses. And who better to communicate with space via keyboard than Lady Gaga?? I'm calling the device Gaga's Hell Piano
It's directly inspired by her extraordinary performance of "Paparazzi" on Saturday Night Live way back in 2009. With its fierce scarlet lighting, flames in the foreground, and Gaga and her backup dancers' red leather ensembles...I'm pretty sure this performance metaphorically takes place in hell. I have my theories about what this all means symbolically, but I'll spare you all from a 400+ paged dissertation.
In April, I took an amazing gesture drawing class taught by the incomparable Glenn Harmon at DreamWorks. Glenn covered a ton of ground each week, giving us specific tips and tricks...and then immediately had us put those lessons into action with quick gestures drawings of a live model. Below are a couple of my lightning round sketches.
We were also given a sketchbook, which we were supposed to fill up each week with as many gesture drawings as possible. The first week, I was on a big Melissa McCarthy kick (when am I not?) because she was on a massive press tour for her movie The Boss. I basically DVR-ed every single talk show appearance that she made that week, then paused them a bunch to do quick gestures of her. It also doubled as research for my character Lilinoe...which Melissa McCarthy is a blatant inspiration for.
A lot of the sketchbook pages are of Melissa making her entrances, walking over to greet James Corden, Ellen DeGeneres, etc. BUT THEN she did the most epic Lip Sync Battle with Jimmy Fallon of all time! That was the most fun to gesture for sure! She killed it doing DMX...and then slayed "Colors of the Wind" with an industrial fan that nearly blew her backwards. Awe-inspiring!
Do yourself a favor and watch the Lip Sync Battle below...if you haven't already! Pocahontas would be proud!
