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Round two:

8tracks is this pretty neat SNS (social networking site) that allows you to create & share music via making your own playlists/mixes and uploading them to the site. You can browse by genre or artist – this is especially helpful for college students during finals week (just search the “study” tag to find the perfect mix for cracking down and studying, or in my case just falling asleep..) Despite 8tracks being bombarded by people who mistakenly think that The Killers and Jason Mraz are “indie”, it’s still one of my favorite channels of finding new music. Last year, at the end of my freshman year of college, I decided to make a playlist titled “Goodbye, EL..” and it was full of songs that reminded me of my first year; each song has a specific memory tied to it, be it walking to class, going to a concert, studying, making new friends, etc. After a year, it has 3100+ plays and 319 “likes”, as well as very flattering comments. To be quite frank, that playlist is probably one of my proudest achievements. Since that was such a success, and also because I like the idea of tying music to memories, I made a new mix for my sophomore year, titled “Round Two”, which is the real reason behind this post! 8tracks allows its users to choose a photo to be displayed with the mix, but I decided to take it a tiny step further (below). The photo is one I took on campus a few weeks ago because I thought the sky was gorgeous. Anyway, 8tracks is a fun site (once you filter out all of the “playlists to have sex to” [???] and mixes falsely advertised as “indie”), and you can check out my personal profile, as well as all of my mixes, here:  http://8tracks.com/madelinegrace.

Film:

Late night fun:

Once again, I can’t fall asleep. But I’ve found that trying to be creative this late is extremely tiring, so I guess that’s what I’ll do now to encourage my body to please, please, go to sleep. Here’s tonight’s product. I don’t really know what to say about it except I think I hate it.

Cat:

Right now I’m very intrigued by collage-inspired art. Also, my family has an obsession with Siamese cats, so they’ll be popping up in a lot of my future work. (All of the cats are old family pets).

Silver Lining//Rilo Kiley:

It’s 3 a.m. and I can’t sleep because I drank too much coffee at IHOP so I made this real quick.

Go forth:

Last semester in my Graphics & Illustration class (taught by Karl Gude, former Director of Information Graphics at Newsweek!) we had to replicate an advertisement using our own photo. I’ve always loved Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign, so I had my boyfriend run around in the soy bean fields behind his house to get a good shot (he was wearing black Levi’s jeans, too!). I’m pretty proud of it, since I had just learned how to use Illustrator.

Trees:

Me & my baby:

I FINALLY splurged for my birthday and bought myself the flash for my Diana mini lomography camera. I must say, she looks quite fetching now. The flash also came with 12 color strips to tint photos different colors. We’re going to go on so many adventures together. If only I had the time for that..

Spring Break 2012:

Not your usual spring break to Cancun or Miami, but I loved it nonetheless. I come from a pretty special place.