Challenge 42

Today's challenge: Turn today's junk mail into something much more appealing.

My initial thought was something papier-mache with ads that come in the mail, but I didn't have time for that!  So I decided to try my hand at a blackout poem, in the style of Austin Kleon.  Here's the result:

It's a letter to time!  It says (with some added punctuation):

Dear time, you're terrific.  You love to get e-mail and photos, time.  Also, space.  Take advantage of the benefits of waiting.  Sincerely,

This task was more challenging than I thought it would be.  I bet this kind of thing takes a bit of practice and is more fun with newspaper/magazine articles and book pages than some crummy letter announcing terrific internet and cable deals.  It would be fun to get friends together to make these sometime and see what happens.

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!

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: