Not really portable

Challenge: Make something portable (or that seems portable) that normally isn't.

I have to say, I really struggled with this challenge.  Almost everything I thought of to make portable already exists in some portable form.  It reminds me of when I travel, and there are all those travel-sized containers and other gear to help you pack light.  I really enjoy looking at all that tiny stuff, and get so impressed by the new things designers cook up.

So instead of working with the challenge and brainstorming more, I decided to take some pictures of a few old drawings I found while cleaning my apartment the other day.

I sketched this out when I was thinking of designs for a sculpture in my Metals Fabrication class in the summer of 2005:

I think I was more than a little inspired by Metroid graphics in this design.  Fun fact: I found a bunch of old mix cds while cleaning too, many from 2005.  I guess it was a good year?  In hindsight, it really was.  Here's a skelley:

I used to draw skeletons all the time and still really enjoy drawing them and finding quality skeleton imagery in art and design.  I also drew this guy in 2005, and man, I'm totally glad I put the dates on stuff as often as I do/did or I'd totally forget when I made things.  Here's something else:

A bunch of stylized balloons?  Who knows.  I really like it though, but sadly, I left this one undated.  And lastly:

I call this dude "Funky Shuffle Dancer" and I think I drew him sometime in the early-mid 2000s as well, judging from the way I had my name written on the piece of paper (cropped out).  I went through an intense few years where signing my name in a "cool" way was really important, oh me.  But I love how free this guy is in the picture!

I feel like I kind of gave up on today's challenge.  I guess these old drawings are portable although I don't usually think of them having that function, but I've been carrying them from place to place for several years now, so they work for today's challenge in a technical way.

Day 25

Challenge: Work with nature.  Go to your yard or nearby park and collect materials to work with.

Today's challenge is right up my alley!  I looked around my place for inspiration and found a small green bowl.  Aha, I could make a little terrarium!  I've seen some really cute ones in a shop made by a local artist and on a few other blogs and really wanted to try my hand at one.

So I gathered some grass and a few clippings of old growth from a pine tree outside my apartment.  I put a small chunk of cotton batting in the bottom of the bowl to make a higher surface to work with, glued in some of the grass and pine chunks, a Lego wookie, and here's the result:

Some of the cotton batting is still visible, but I wasn't super concerned about craftsmanship and presentation for my first terrarium.  And you know what?  I don't think it's a true terrarium since it doesn't have a glass enclosure, but I still wanted to share my inspiration and line of thought.  Here's a closer view:

Can you find the wookie in this picture?

Hey, guess what?  There's a wiki out there called Wookieepedia!  I discovered it a few years ago when I was trying to find a specific Star Wars quote.  I love how totally whiny Luke Skywalker is when he delivers the line.

Also, my sister/roommate found some Legos, so I am totally gonna try to work them into a project this week.  Huzzah!  

It IS easy being green

Happy Memorial Day weekend!

I was having such a fun time yesterday cleaning my apartment that I completely forgot to post.  This girl knows how to have fun!  But honestly, my weekends have been pretty over-planned lately so the cleaning has totally escaped me.  Now that it's done, I feel so much better in my space and can enjoy my long weekend a bit.

Yesterday's challenge: It's not easy being green.  Work only with green-colored materials today.  Try working on a green surface for a real challenge.

Well, I don't really have many green surfaces, but I was super excited about this challenge.  I've mentioned before how I enjoy making things out of felt, and I decided to make a small boutonniere using green felt, embroidery floss, a pipe cleaner, and a button.  It was so much fun and I'm really happy with the result:

I've been seeing and reading about a lot of people who are using handcrafted flowers for weddings, and I completely love that idea.  Handmade flowers aren't tacky like fake flowers can be, and I think they'd be great favors for guests to take home - and excellent way to save a little cash when planning a wedding and add a personal (not to mention sustainable) touch.

Off to go to a baseball game!  I haven't been to a game in years and am really excited.  Go, Tigers!!!

Fortunate recycling

Challenge: Waste not.  Dig in a recycling bin for all of today's materials.

I checked the recycling bin at work and found a lot of paper products.  I decided to make something out of an old event calendar.  The first idea I had was to make a cootie catcher, so I made one!  For privacy and to add some limits to the amount of visual information, I blacked out a lot of the words with a black marker, Austin Kleon style, and came up with this not-too-pretty-but-still-interesting work:

(that's right, I'm wearing my "I Read Banned  Books" bracelet)

 

The 4 categories to start from: Library, Favorite Books, Policies, and Thursday.  After that, you can choose from Library (again), Discover, Monday, or just a picture showing a book on one side and a person reading a book on the other.  From there, the participant chooses his/her final fortune: Music Celebration, Learn to Play Chess, Rainbows in the Garden, or Save the Date for the Summer Reading Program.  All great fortunes!

It’s a wild and crazy adventure with this cootie catcher!  I made one a few years ago for a school project about Francesca Lia Block.  The imagery in her books is so great!  Read this excerpt from Weetzie Bat, the first book in the Dangerous Angels series, and try to tell me it’s not beautiful.  I’m gonna try to remember to scope out some old folders around my apartment this weekend and see if I can find that old cootie catcher and post a few pics.

Happy weekending!

Color bridge

I completely forgot to complete my challenge yesterday.  It slipped my mind until I was laying in bed, and I decided not to get up.

So today, I completed yesterday's challenge: Create a bridge.  Connect two thing in a creative way.  It could be small enough for an amoeba or big enough for an elephant to cross it.

I made a bridge, but not really a connective bridge.  I decided to make a line of crayons across a small table I have, and color coordinate them in ROYGBIV order:

I feel like I haven't done anything strictly design-y in a while.  This was fun.  The last crayon on the purple/violet side was only halfway on the table, but I wanted to finish the sequence.  Here's another view:

It smells so waxy in my living room right now!  I really wanted to make a bridge out of Legos, but I don't have access to any right now.  Maybe next time.

Celebration!

Hi friends!  Today I'm celebrating 200 views to my blog!  Cool!  Fun fact: some of those views came from Germany, Singapore, and Australia.  Thanks, internationals!  I've set my blog to not count when I've looked at my blog, so these are all legitimate views.  Wicked.  :-)

On to the challenge: Write a ten-word love story.  Bonus: Illustrate it.

Whoa.  I frickin' love this challenge.  (There's a story right there, and only 6 words!).

So I got into my head a lot to come up with good stories.  I really wanted to come up with some cute or really cool and meaningful stuff.  Here are a few of my 10-word creations, not really sure if they're "stories", however:

1. My heart is loyal to myself, and you with me.
2. I loved my green shoes that took me everywhere.
3. "Find an old-fashioned love, like Andy Williams," said Jae. 

That last one is actually a true story.  I work with this woman named Jae, and I'm not sure how old she is but it's definitely in the senior citizen category.  She has tons of kids and grandkids and is always talking about them and sharing life advice.  Now, I recently put a fairly attractive picture of Andy Williams on my tack-able wall space at work because I totally dig him, and she happened to see this picture and went on and on about how she saw him back in the day, how the song "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is great year-round (I agreed), and how I needed to hang on to a good old-fashioned guy like him.  I know, the explanation of this "story" is longer than 10 words, but I felt compelled to share.

Then I came up with one last story: True love is when your heart and brain agree.

Always up for an extra bonus, I drew a little picture of this sentiment:

I love love.  I love it so much that I have a tattoo of it!  Love is the best.

Day 20

Challenge: Buy or make some clay and then use it like you never have before.

Noah gives a recipe for homemade clay in his book, but I didn't have enough of the ingredients.  I reeeeeally like clay, too, but I didn't want to go out to buy any from the store.  Instead, I decided to take a few past projects and assemble them together to make a sort of collage.  It's not a super assemblage, but I like seeing so many of my projects together all at once:

Tomorrow's challenge is totally sweet, I'm cooking up something good.  And really, it involves zero cooking, I just like using the expression because I don't really know how to cook.  :-)

Twofer

I had a busy weekend, and I completed my challenges for today and yesterday on time but didn't have time to post yesterday, so this will be a two-challenge post.  Are you ready?!?!

Challenge for Day 18: Work with the things you find in your car (or a friend's car if you don't have one).

I was in my car a lot yesterday, but the things in my car aren't very exciting or inspiring.  Instead, I took a picture of something I have in my car, dangling from the rearview mirror:

A time turner keychain I bought as a souvenir from The Wizarding World of Harry Potter last fall.  And it was such a beautiful day, I snapped a few photos and a short video of the outdoors.  I think my little camera does a good job taking pictures while in a moving vehicle.  Look at this blue sky!

Visited some family nearby.  This is what the drive looks like from where I live back to my hometown:

I realize I didn't really make anything yesterday, but I felt like it was more important to honor the beauty I saw than to try to cook something up just to stick to the rules of the day's challenge.

Day 19 Challenge: Create something that floats on water (it doesn't have to be a boat).

But what if I want to make a boat?  A quick assessment of my materials, and that's where my mind went:

I wove together some regular curling ribbon and taped along the edges, made a tiny sail out of a snipped piece of paper taped to a toothpick, and I had a little floating raft.  I think it's pretty cute.

I saw a cool advertisement for a book today called Drawing Nature: A Journal by Jill Bliss.  I think that her illustrations are really beautiful.

Eye spy

The challenge today was to make something inspired by and/or that goes over an eye (yours or someone else's).

I spent my day today hanging around the high school where my boyfriend teaches, so it's a natural progression  for me to privately sketch an eye in my little notebook.  That was THE THING that people were always sketching back in my school days, so I figured that I would give in to the elements around me and enjoy the throwback to those early days of doodling:

It was tough to get a detailed shot without blurriness, but I kind of like the the effect of this close-up:

The end!  I have to turn in early because, frankly, I forgot how early high schoolers have to get up to get to school on time.  

Stampy

Challenge, Day 16: Make a unique print by cutting up a potato or sponge, and use it to stamp on a material of your choice.

All outta potatoes, on to the sponge!  I don't know about you, readers, but I'm not made of money.  I decided to cut a small chunk of sponge off a bigger piece so I could still use the bigger part for cleaning.  As a result, I only had a small piece of sponge to work with.  I know that I don't work well as a subtractive artist, so I decided to just create a piece using my small chunk of sponge as it was cut instead of trying to cut it down into a smaller and more interesting shape, or variety of shapes.  I loosely mixed some red, purple, and green paint together in a tray, dipped my sponge in, and lightly covered a piece of paper with back-to-back stampings, not random stamp marks like I did before in my apple painting.  Here is the result:

I love pattern and texture, especially when there's something a little "wrong" with it - the print doesn't line up, the saturation varies, etc.  That organic, imperfect quality is attractive to me.  However, I think it's important that craftsmanship is considered.  I can't stand seeing horribly cut mattes on framed pictures!

Here's a close-up of part of the picture I made:

Feeling much more energized today, and loving these longer days with more sunlight exposure.  

Skipping

Again, life has left me a little tired and without the resources for today's challenge, mostly those valuable resources of time and energy.  So today, I will post a funny project I did a few years ago for some contemporary art class that was a totally ridiculous but kind of awesome experience.  I didn't love my teacher, but she was open minded and I learned about a lot of cool artists of the modern and post-modern movements (most of my favorite artists, actually), so it was still pretty cool.

I don't really remember the assignment or even what I set out to achieve with the proposed work.  I just remember taking pictures of tiny plastic dolls and putting them in other settings.  I knew that my photo editing wasn't great, but it wasn't meant to be, I was only illustrating a visual concept.  Here's the prototype:

Then I inserted this image into other settings.  I remember finding this all to be super hilarious, and still think it is quite funny:

And that's all for me today, time to hit the hay.  Goodnight!

Dollah!

Day 15: What can you do with just a dollar?  Use a dollar bill as your medium or inspiration today.

When I read about this challenge last night, I was thinking it sounded pretty cool.  Today, however, I spent about a half hour folding a dollar bill different ways and coming up with really uninteresting stuff.  I ended up just making a basic accordion fold repeatedly and taping the bottom to make a fan.  At least the shadows are interesting, and I forgot how much I liked to think about shadows in my work:

An acquaintance sent me a message recently with a few links I might be interested in, and I wanted to share one that's particularly interesting to me.  I agree with a lot of what Austin says, mostly about how nothing is original, you shouldn't wait until you know yourself to make things, and you should put your work out there to invite others to talk about it.  Writing this blog is going out on a limb for me, it's putting myself out there for criticism, but most of my feedback has been positive (mind you, I understand that I'm not widely well-known).  I just really identified with Austin's reality of being an artist.  Furthermore, I totally love his blackout idea!  I find this one to be particularly great:

Tiny

Challenge for Day 14: Make something microscopic.  How small can you work?  Can you make something that requires a magnifying glass or a microscope to see?

So I think it would be way cool to make tiny things, but I think my eyes would hate me forever.  I've done some rather detailed drawings before because I like the quality of the Pilot G-2 pens and getting into precise line work, but I can only do a little at a time since my eyes get so wiggy from it.  Kind of like watching tv or being on a computer too long.  Here's one drawing I did a while back:

For today, I obtained a magnifying glass and played around with working on tiny pen drawings with it.  Here's the result, with a dime for size:

A tiny little tree!  It was super hard to get close-up detail, since my camera is not superb, my camera skills are far from great, and my photo editing software is, well, the standard kind that came with my computer.  Here's a couple blurry shots that look more like faded old tattoos to me:

I kind of really like the quality of that last close-up.  

In other things, I rediscovered the awesome illustrations of Trina Schart Hyman this weekend.  Beautiful stuff.

Tea art

I don't have the 365 book with me right now, so I don't remember the exact wording of today's challenge,  but it involves working with tea somehow - either using tea itself, the bag, the grounds, etc.  I've painted with water that was heavily steeped with tea, so I decided to try something new.  After drinking a couple cups of tea, I opened up my teabag to make something with the grounds.  Here's my project:

And a close up of the project:

In addition to sketching trees a lot, I sketch a lot of faces in profile.  This project didn't take long at all.  I like the gritty quality of the used up tea leaves and think they are a pretty cool medium.  I ran out of room to finish the head and make hair, but that would be super cool!  To move around the grounds on the plate, I just used my fingers and a butter knife. 

A new day

Day 12 Challenge: Camouflage.  Create or alter something so that it disappears into its background.

I got the mail on my way home from work tonight and saw that my bank sent me a new debit card since my old one was about to expire.  Cool.  I get a lot of satisfaction from cutting up old credit/debit cards, so I then began to cut up my old card into tiny pieces.  It dawned on me that maybe I could use the tiny pieces in my project for today.  I looked around my apartment - ah!  Lola's food bowl is almost the same shade of blue as my old card.  So, that will totally camouflage, right?

Well, no, not really.  I could've flipped over all the little pieces so they were blue-side up, but then I thought, hey, the sound of pouring those little pieces of plastic into the food bowl sounded almost exactly like the way it sounds to pour cat food into the bowl.  That's, like, auditory camouflage (stay with me here).  To test this half-baked theory, I put the food bowl on the floor to see what the kitties would do.  This project turned into a regular animal behavior experiment.

Lola's response was complete disinterest.  Interesting for me, however.  Her complete love of food cannot be tarnished by some blue plastic and pokey-edged competitor!  But honestly, a part of me thought she'd be really into it since almost anything in her food bowl means she's gonna try to ingest it.

Stimpy, on the other hand, we super interested.  Maybe it was just pretty to her, who knows, but I pulled the bowl away before she had a chance to pull a fast one and end up hurting herself. 

So there you have it.  I could probably make up some artsy fartsy b.s. about how this piece is all about society and convenience and companionship and blah blah blah, but I'm really not that complicated about my creativity.

Checking out

I am postponing the challenge for Day 12 because I am tired and there are other things to take care of in life right now, on this day, that are more important that this challenge.  Maybe sometime, I will feel ultra-creative and complete 2 challenges in 1 day!  But for now, I'm taking a day off.  I don't want to feel obligated to complete every single challenge on time, or this will stop feeling fun and creative for me and just turn into something that I feel bad about.

So, to not shove off with nothing, here's a picture of the sculpture installation piece I made for my thesis in May 2007:

It's form is much changed now, but that was always the point.  I have to reflect sometimes on the cool things I've done and remember to never limit my own ability.  I built a pretty sweet piece.

Handy

Blogger (or blooger as I mistakenly typed before that) was down last night when I intended to post, so here is yesterday's challenge.

Day 11: Work on the other hand.  Pick a medium you're comfortable with, then work with your nondominant hand.

I'm a righty, and I doodle trees and flowers all the time, mostly when I'm on the phone, so I decided to check out my left handed drawing skills.  Here's a typical righty drawing:

I was short on time yesterday and wanted to keep my drawing pretty basic anyway, anticipating that my left hand would be totally shaky and do things I didn't want it to, so here's my lefty tree drawing:

I actually love the gestural and free quality of this drawing!  I will have to keep my left hand in mind when I'm working on drawings or paintings in the future and I want to take a different approach.  

Day 10

Yeah, I'm in the double digits!

Challenge:  Use only water as your medium/inspiration today.

I enjoy water a lot.  I'm not a strong swimmer, but I love being in/near water, the sound of it moving, the beauty and power of it, the way the sun makes it shimmer, the creatures that live in it, and so on.  So my thought was to practice some photography skills in outdoor bodies of water or maybe do something with the reflections in a drop or small puddle of water.

Then, something else happened, and a new idea was born:

My sister/roommate is a 3rd shifter and gets home from work around 8 a.m.  I slept like hell last night and texted her to get me a yummy iced coffee drink on her way home.  After I drank it, I dumped the ice into the garbage disposal and realized that it kind of made a cool shape as it sat on the little rubbery parts above the drain.  After snapping a couple pics, I dug the ice out, put it on a plate, and took a few more pictures:

The initial formation.  I think it kind of looks like Australia.  I played around with a close-up, which looks like a cool beginning to some textured wallpaper or linoleum tile:

And also an ultra close-up, out of focus but still cool-looking enough that I played with the brightness, contrast, and color saturation to make an abstract image that could kind of be anything:

Not your average picture of a lake, eh?  Let this be a lesson: sometimes, inspiration comes in the form of the stuff you really just wanted to put in the garbage.

Day 9

Challenge: Make something with your breakfast before you eat it.

Aww man.  Today was a regular ol' milk-and-cereal day.  I had to get to an appointment before work, so I was up a little bit early today and didn't make any great effort to come up with a more interesting brekkie.  Here's what I made:

I'm kind of wondering, if I make a happy face with my cereal every morning, will it make an impact on my level of happiness?  I don't know, I mean, it's happy - but it took some effort and discipline to make when I was hungry and in a bit of a time crunch.  I think it's probably 50/50.

I'm going to divulge in a secret now: I've secretly been checking out the next day's challenge on the day before.  I wait until I've completed the challenge for that day, but then I check out what I might be in for the next day.  I like to think about ideas, see if there's anything I might be able to use from work in a project, or if I need to look around to get a little inspiration or check on supplies.  My big secret is out, oh no!