What Is Love

Happy Thanksgiving! There will be no posts on Wednesday or Friday this week because I will be thanking Christopher Columbus for discovering a land ripe for destruction. Also I will be entertaining my little sister who is coming to visit. Happy family time!


I was sitting in the tiniest Chinese restaurant ever listening to Alex tell me about his new girl. Afterward, I had this song stuck in my head for a week.

Helloween 2008

You can see my Wonder Woman costume here, but you'll have to wait for real photos until I can check out a camera.

Moose

I'm glad I scanned this before we all (hopefully) forget about Sarah Palin and let her fade back into the wilderness. As an assignment for my class Work of Comic Art, we were assigned to create a four panel comic. This was my idea, and falls under the category of Ideas That Come To Me And Make Me Laugh Really Hard Cause They're So Stupid. This category of ideas is often mined for comic material.

Home Sweet Home

This hangs on the wall in the entrance to my apartment. I made it in my first semester of freshman year, out of a photograph I found on the street in San Francisco and a sock that was abandoned in the dorm laundry room.


We were assigned to create something sculptural out of found materials, and relating to home or house. So I put this together, stretching it over an abandoned cardboard container I found on the street in Boystown, and was then inspired to construct my final project, a collapsible, portable, six foot tall house also made (mostly) out of found materials. I hung this inside.

Buttons

I have a button maker that makes buttons about 1" in diameter. I use it to make buttons out of materials generally not intended for the machine, like fabric and beads and such. The two above were made of extra linoleum prints I made into cards last year, and are some of the only buttons I've made as intended, with paper and a plastic cover. Here are some examples of the other kinds:



And for fun, below is the first button I ever made, before I even had a button maker. There was a booth at the Oregon Country Fair that let you make buttons. I used a contact print of the first sheet of B&W photos I'd ever taken. That girl in the middle is my best friend Zella.


I'll be making a lot more buttons in the next week in preparation to sell at the Holiday Art Fair. Wish me luck!

Skeleton Puddle

One of my favorite things about these old sketchbook posts is the seemingly directionless lists. They're all over my notes in every book.

Circle Head

I painted this in my friend Crockett's studio the summer before last, in San Francisco. We had just traveled to Scrap, a creative recycling and reuse center in China Basin. I found a bunch of square white plastic lids for square white plastic buckets and gessoed them, and then we sat in the studio with sun through the windows and music on an old boombox. Crockett keeps his acrylics scrambled around and we used the brushes we could find buried underneath wood scraps and cassette tapes. The whole day was an adventure.

Screaming Teeth

From my comics sketchbook, this is a drawing of a nightmare I had in second grade. In the dream, I'm on the schoolbus, in front of my school. The driver is saying from her seat, "come on, get off the bus, we're here" but there is a giant pair of dentures in my way, uttering a bloodcurdling, piercing, unending shriek, and I can't get past it.

Mathematical Dawn

I started drawing this on the one hill in Chicago at sunset last month, sitting in the grass. I finished drawing it at 4:30am the next morning. I don't really remember what happened in the meantime, but I guess I wrote a limerick.

Fiber Portfolio 3

I hope you all had a happy Halloween! Here is the third installment of my Fibers portfolio from freshman year; soon I'll put up pictures of the costume I made myself last week.


Apart from knitting and crocheting we also had to do weaving. The tiny weave above was done on a frame loom, that is, a picture frame turned into a miniature loom. I like to think of it as some kind of tiny moon-and-mountain-scape.


The rest of our required techniques all involved printing or dying of some kind. Above is a detail of one of my Shibori samples. Shibori is a Japanese practice of sewing and wrapping silk (or linen, in my case) tightly with string or thread and then dying it, allowing the string to create patterns where the dye cannot penetrate. This example was done by wrapping peaks of fabric and dying with several different colors.



These two were the stitched Shibori. You can see in the details below how the fabric has been crimped by the thread I pulled through it. (These are poor examples for Shibori - had I done them better the light areas would be free of dye. It's really hard!)




And last but not least, here is my blockprinting sample. You can see the pattern I made for this in this photo. I cut two symmetrical foam 3"x3" squares into stamps and made a two color pattern out of them. I quite like this.