Cartagena, Colombia

Soooo, usually this is just my blog for making stuff and keeping track of my nonsense, but I just got back from Cartagena, which is beautiful...so heres a picture of it because it is awesome! People were friendly, the weather was brilliant, the food is fantastic and the old city is unbelievable.
We met a family from Bogota, who kept bringing us fish and coconut rice and eventually got us all drunk and fed us Christmas dinner.
I go live there now!

Velociraptor VS Falcon

sketch for figures

fimo clay and awesome (I ran out of blue)

Because my friends are awesome this is to top a wedding cake!

Unfortunately they picked two of the most unfriendly and generally pissed off looking creatures ever to have existed, sooo I might have to get creative with the paint to try and friendly them up a bit. or make a tiny veil and bow tie. (technically I think the raptor's big claw things are supposed to go on the feet, but my sculptures have no feet, and my memory of Jurassic Park is somewhat vague, and I like them where they are... I bite my thumb at you paleontology!)

A New List...

So, the last time I made a "To Do" list here it actually did inspire me to get most of those things done. So new list (this time with deadlines!!!):

1. small sketches x3 Oct. 30th
2. finish illustrations for SS - Nov. 15th
3. finish illustration for HM- Nov. 20th
4. cake topper for Hampton and Erin- (yeah I didn't do that one yet) -Dec. 15th
5. alphabet book- A-J -Dec. 15th
6. enter at least one Art show- Jan. 1
7. website illustrations- Jan. 1

and... GO!

"My little Pumpkiny Wumpkiny"....oh how I love BlackAdder

This is where Martha Stewart falls short, while she does understand that everything is made better by the generous application of glue and glitter, lacking in a soul as she is, she has lost that childlike desire to cover everything in googly eyes and stickers... That said, here are some of the awesome pumpkin creations the kids came up with on Sunday...

actually this one was the joint effort of Scoop

and a 7 year old boy...

Rad Event! Awesome Shame!

Yesterday was our first event at the new studio! it was awesome! we painted pumpkins and made halloween decorations and ate too much candy corn... and then... I swore in front of an 11 year old (actually I think the first time I have sworn in front of a child since I was 13 and babysitting for my neighbor's 4 year old, when I dropped a video on my big toe and yelled "shit!" ...said 4 year old told on me and I was not invited back).

So now I am full of shame. hopefully the parents who were stood right next to me and witnessed the incident will not mind the unwelcome additions to their daughters vocabulary and perhaps will forgive me. but probably not. either way... THE SHAME!

Sigh, Despite the charming accent, having a potty mouth is not nearly as cute as one might think, especially around the little people (children not midgets).

Otherwise, I think the whole thing went rather well. The kids made me an awesome pumpkin with pompoms and googly eyes ...and I thanked them by teaching them new words!

:)

YaYStudio!

Fish!

If you look real close ...those little blurry shapes?...see them? those are my new pets! fish! Long-fin Zebra Danios actually...in terms of care and complexity they are about a step above sea monkeys and a couple of steps below a japanese peace lily. I haven't named them yet incase I kill them, or actually, more probably, the larger one (who it turns out is a total asshole) kills and eats the others and then drowns when he finally escapes his tank to try and kill me while I'm sleeping.

These are the first pets I have had in about 10 years. I do not count the cat that stalks through the house at night, hiding behind furniture, clawing up the walls and attacking anyone who comes within 100 paces. firstly the cat is not mine, he (or she, I never bothered to check) belongs to my roommate, and secondly, I hate the cat and frequently fantasize about tying its tail to the vacuum cleaner (I have actually considered buying a roomba for this very purpose).

R+J

YayStudio!

I have a studio!

Robert, Julia and I are moving out of the tiny studio that Robert and Julia have called home for the last year or so and in which I have been more or less squatting, and into a huuuuge new shiny studio space of utter awesomeness! it is so huge and awesome that it deserves to be photographed! oh look at that, Robert is a photographer...

I'm sorry? whats that Robert? oh, you already have photos of our fantastic new studio space?

how convenient!

so yes, envy the studio of awesome!

LAMP!

So, it's been a minute and I suppose I started this thing so I should keep going with it...the idea being that perhaps it will inspire similar feelings toward more of my work...probably not though.

However, I did finally finish my bird lamp! I still need an acceptable lamp base as the black ikea base is not really doing it for me, but it'll do for now. so here it is:

...also I live in a dungeon and this lamp is it's only light source...

Paper and lists

This week at Redwall was Book Arts, but Charlene and I got a little carried away and ended up spending almost the entire week on making recycled paper with the kids from all the left over or discarded artwork and paper scraps that have accumulated over the summer. It was tremendous fun and fantastically messy and actually produced some really amazing little art books. At the end of the week we were left with two huge vats of unused paper pulp. After all the kids had left, instead of wasting the leftover pulp, we decided to make a couple of large sheets of paper with the door screens we'd been using as drying racks. The paper came out an amazing blackberry color and I now want to do some kind of printmaking project with it.

As I was thinking about all the things I could do with my huge sheet of paper, I remembered all the other projects that I have been meaning to start, or in some cases finish and I realized that I had so many I had forgotten most of them. So in the spirit of being productive, I am making a list of all the things I want to do and all the things I need to do and publishing it here in hopes that it will actually help me remember to get some of them done:

1. print making with handmade paper - not sure about this yet
2. finish lamp with guls wing - bought more feathers, lost glue gun...Dammit :(
3. make coconut ice - found a recipe online, had totally forgotten about this stuff and now I want it
4. tiny people for Robert
5. cake topper for Hampton and Erin - weddings not til January, but my powers of procrastination are amazing!
6. small birds - I made birds with left over air dry clay a few months ago, and never did anything with them,
7. knit sackboy for boyfriend
8. quarters - started a couple of projects using quarters - this may never actually go anywhere
9. pink flamingos - I have been wondering lately how complicated it would be to cut up and reassemble these lovely garden beasties - nowhere seems to have them in stock though.
10. finish/repair the pile of heads sitting on my desk.
11. Sam's birthday present - ?
12. make more paper and experiment with natural dyes.
13. stamps - really want to make some stamps, might try this myself and then take them to Redwall for the kids to play with
14. tiny books for Sherah

I know there are many more things I needed/wanted to do, but off the top of my head I cant seem to remember any of them. oh well.

ok... one more cup of coffee, lunch and then I start sketching.

BIRD!

I went to the High Museum the other day. I really don't like the High, it's expensive and the permanent collection is pretty pathetic. The layout is like something out of Escher's sketchbook, there are staircases that seem to go nowhere and bridges that exist only on certain days of the week and you need a degree in advanced cartography just to be able to understand the maps to navigate your way around the bloody place. However, I went with the boyfriend to see the cars exhibit, which was actually pretty cool, I think that watching Scoop's eyes get all big every time we turned a corner was the most fun though. After about an hour I snuck off to go check out the european design exhibit. mostly this was like wandering through Ikea, lots of plastic and patterns, but there were a few things that made me go "ooooo, I want to make that!" like the book shelf that was an enormous pile of furniture and musical instruments glued together and painted black, and the floorlamp that had a gul's wing instead of a shade...my first thought was to run home and start piling and gluing furniture like a mad woman with an industrial sized glue gun, then I realized that my roommate might not be oh so amused by my construction... but the birdlamp... that I can make! I think it was a real wing though, and not having access to sea birds or a desire to learn taxidermy, I decided to make a trip to Michael's to buy up all the feathers and make one myself!

So far I have half a wing (I need more feathers). next I need to actually figure out how I will turn this into a lamp shade as right now it's just a wing... also it looks pretty flammable or at least like it might release some pretty nasty gases when the wide array of glues I used on the already pretty flammable materials heat up and combine when wrapped around a 60 watt light bulb...

COOKIES!

Mostly this has nothing to do with anything but, refusing to be beaten by my lack of kitchen equipment, I made cookies. They were very good cookies. but I think that while I might not be a position to run out and spend a couple of hundred on a stand mixer, I should probably invest in a hand mixer and perhaps a decently sized mixing bowl as Scoop, who did not believe that cookies could be made that were not squeezed out of a tube, doesn't have a mixing bowl. consequently I covered the entire kitchen and myself in flour and made a right bloody awful mess. but like I said...the cookies were good.

a lament for cooking utensils lost

I miss my stand mixer. seriously. I have this feeling that secretly I am an amazing baker...I could make bread and cakes and cookies (and yes, weigh 600lbs but...) and pies and scones and those little chewy things my gran used to make when i was a kid and other things as well...but... I lost my stand mixer in the divorce. technically it was a gift for my ex but I hate him with a passion that could fuel hell now, so I feel like it's time he gave it back. It was a 5 quart, pistachio green, KitchenAid stand mixer and it weighed a half tonne... probably the nicest thing I've ever given as a gift. [this is where I had written something mean about my ex, but I decided to edit it out in the spirit of being a bigger person or something...not that much bigger mind you, as the thought is still there, I just blacked it out so that you can't read it]

...To be entirely honest I had completely forgotten all about my estranged stand mixer until this morning. I was looking on instructables while waiting on a phone call (one that still hasn't come) when I saw it, a pistachio green KitchenAid Stand Mixer, my heart actually jumped up into my mouth as I thought to myself, my stand mixer! how could I have forgotten about you? my head instantly filled with all the gloriously baked possibilities, the breads I could be making and the cookie dough I should be kneading (or whatever it is you do to cookie dough). As I tried to recall the whereabouts of my newly remembered mixer my heart dropped from my mouth into the pit of my stomach where it bobbed up and down for a moment, all the happy thoughts were replaced by that feeling you get right after you wake up on the day after something truly horrible has happened, like the death of the beloved family parakeet, or in my case it was the devastating realization was that it wasn't my stand mixer after all.

...I suppose the truth is that I liked having the mixer more than I liked using it, it was pretty and pale green and it offered the possibility of baked goods whenever I wanted them. now I have to knead dough by hand, and mix with a bloody spatula. A SPATULA! it's like the frickin' dark ages in my kitchen.

little people.

Today I got a box of tiny people in the mail...I am a dork and I am excited!

I finally uploaded images of my animal heads.

Yay heads on plaques!

...

So while all of my reasons for disliking the city are valid, (even the last one) most of my complaints are weather based. Perhaps it bothers me more than most as I grew up in a relatively small town on the coast of South Wales, where, for the most part, people were basically assholes* and it rained 300 days a year. My point is only that despite my complaining there are good things about Atlanta: it's relatively inexpensive; the people are mostly nice; I can go for weeks without needing to go further than 4 miles in any direction from my house, consequently I can walk most places; it's exceptionally green, there are trees everywhere. so yeah, I can bitch about it, but it's my city and I live here so watch what you say about it!

*It is entirely possible that the people of my tiny town in South Wales were actually not assholes, but instead that I was 15, weird, and hateful.

Dear Atlanta...

On Friday, while walking into Little 5 Points to meet a friend for a drink, I began compiling a list in my head of reasons I dislike Atlanta. Bearing in mind that I was walking up hill and it was 96 degrees and while it is only a mile from Redwall to Little 5, it was 96 degree and up hill!

my list went something like this:

1. There are no sidewalks, and the sidewalks that do exist, end. randomly. and frequently on very busy roads. Oh, they do pick up again, on the other side of the 4 lanes of traffic with no cross walk with which to safely journey across. (the same also goes for the bike lanes which will run for 4 blocks and end with no warning, forcing unsuspecting cyclists into the regular stream of psychotic and possibly drunk Atlanta drivers).
2. For about 4 months of the year, from around mid may until mid september, I don't want to leave the house. it's one thousand degrees and there is no wind. (actually that last statement is untrue, there is wind on occasion, but it is actually hotter than the air, therefore it does not count as wind, and shall be referred to more accurately as "fire air").
3. It's humid all the time. If I leave my house on foot, no matter where I am going, I know I will be sweaty when I get there. for this reason I frequently carry a spare t-shirt and sometimes socks in my enormous bag. consequently, should my bag fall open in public I probably look like Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club with my crazy, sweaty hair and my suitcase sized purse full of crap.
4. there is no ocean! if it is going to insist upon being one thousand degrees all of the time, Atlanta could have at least had the common courtesy to position itself on the coast. but no, it is hours from the sea. there are lakes here, but really? A lake in Atlanta is just a large red puddle filled with ugly brown fish and bugs. lots of bugs. those big flat bodied bugs with the really long legs that skate on top the water. and mosquitos!
5. Mosquitos!
6. Should anything halfway decent or interesting begin to establish itself here, after 6 months or so it packs up and moves to New York, not even proper New York, bloody Brooklyn! (this is only slightly legitimate as I was especially annoyed on friday after being sent an email from a former Atlanta resident now in Brooklyn (I do actually like Brooklyn, but! that is not the point)).

I could probably continue with this list, but I have things to do....perhaps I should make a list of reasons why I actually like this city and continue to stay here, before I depress myself terribly and decide to up and move to Brooklyn.

tiny people and big hats

It has occured to me, that for someone who is not really thrilled by the idea of marriage, I do an awful lot of stuff for other peoples weddings. This is by no means a complaint, I actually rather enjoy making tiny people and then covering them in glitter or folding a million paper flowers to piece together bouquets. I have two more cake toppers that I have more or less bullied my way into making. one is actually an anniversary gift and is being bartered (along with a couple of other things) for a totally awesome table built from found/reclaimed objects. and the other is for friends getting married in January who want a velocirapter and a falcon on top of their cake. :) which will either be the most amazing thing ever to happen to the world of cake decoration, or a hideous and colossal fail. either way, i'm excited about it.

besides I do actually like weddings, I just wish people wore bigger hats.

for the ladies!

I made an Orange!
Surprise, surprise it is once again a cog in the wheel of the potential matrimonial bliss of people who i love, but are not me...
one day I will employ all of these people for my own evil schemes and use them to take over the world! or perhaps call on them when I need help moving.
either way, I made an orange, that is also a ring box...



It's made from ceramic, acyrlic paint, metal hingey parts and felt (heart felt emotion ...hahahaha.....aww).

Jennifer and Jason got married! Yay for bunny themed weddings!
I think I shall go into business making wedding cake toppers. I am clearly genius at it.

Today I made a Narwhal! and I am feeling pretty pleased with myself so I felt to should document my genius before the inevitable happens (all genius comes at a cost and mine is clumsiness). I break everything I make. especially anything I am quite proud of. anyway here it is, unfinished and miraculously still in one piece. also some pictures of the giraffe I finished yesterday. (still, amazingly enough, in one piece).
apologies for the crappy phone pictures...