MAKE Molecular!

First CRAFT Mag, and now MAKE too!

Thank you (my lovely ex-dance student and friend) Nikki for bringing it to my attention and Average Jane Crafter for bringing it to MAKE , and Amy@Pikaland for promoting it there yesterday ...

Links:
Original link to the font in Neo2.es Magazine
Original blogpost about being on Neo2.es
Very original idea done about two years ago

Here's the lab set -up I also photographed for the feature page in the paper version of Neo2. It looks slightly out of context, but imagine this at the bottom of the page, with the top half with text explaining the font and where you can down load it , picture here.

What a great and funny Christmas gift!

Merry Happy Holidays!

Continuing on my theme of typographic holiday greetings, here's this year's Gocco printed card :) I made them the day I failed my driving test, so I was desperately trying to cheer myself up...

Hope those of you who actually got a copy, liked them ... and to everyone else (especially all those coming recently from pikaland.com and neo2.es), HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Supertoys!

Continuing on from the GOYA post, I thought I'd put up some photos from something else that Sunshine and I got up to earlier this month. We'd both had a bad day with work and being stood up by potential wedding caterers. I left Sunshine in the Arnolfini Gallery while I popped upstairs (our studios are in the same building, on the 4th floor) for a tutorial.

When I finished, I came down to find Sunshine pulling apart a toy typewriter to get the keys ... He had found the SUPERTOYS exhibition and was busy making a "dancing tape-head baby"! Not be be outdone, I made "Mr Wolfie" (that's your favourite fairytale character's arms and legs sticking in him / out of him ...) ... yes, it was all a bit bizzare, but it was such a load of fun! (especially after a bad day ...)


Here are our creations all lined up on the shelves. "Love Me Bear" was by Sunshine and a reaction against all the mutilation. Apparently the toy stash that was there in the gallery for us to take apart and put back together were donated by school kids who had been asked to bring in toys they no longer wanted! Bear was so soft and cute that we left him be, with a necklace round his neck saying "Love Me", and a tag that said "Representing the Hopes and Fears of Endangered Toys Everywhere..."

The exhibition is on till the 18th of January 2009 and I HIGHLY recommend it. We've been back a couple of times since , just to see how things are going; the shelves are PACKED with mutant creations, and I am proud to say my Mr Wolfie has been moved to the extra special Window Sill, where the curators have displayed the best of the creations ... ;)

GOYA projects ...

Or "Get Of Your Arse" projects - a term coined by Sunshine for projects we get up to when we're bored of doing the usual stuff that's expected of us (job and coursework) ... much better than sitting round the kitchen table post dinner, and complaining about how tired we are and how much work we have to do ;)

mithi on tv, originally uploaded by Drew & Mithi.

365:072 Smoke, originally uploaded by planetmithi.

dripydripy, originally uploaded by Drew & Mithi.

Some tea in your milk sir?, originally uploaded by Drew & Mithi.

There's some ink in your milk, sir..., originally uploaded by Drew & Mithi.

I've always loved photography, having been inspired by my Dad who always seemed to have a camera about when I was a child. Now I'm inspired by Sunshine and his quite 'geeky' interest in photography. I started a 365 project earlier this year and have learnt SO much from it ...

But I've also been partaking in these photography experiments with Sunshine. They're more his ideas (and mostly to do with his adeptness with technology!) , but I do enjoy the collaborative element in them. And they're as much a part of my 'creative journey' as is the art stuff I do for college; and I've been thinking for a while that I want to blog about them here ...

Hope you enjoy them ... hopefully in 2009 there will be MORE of my creative influences on this blog and not just the college work ...

I saw three... erm... TWO ships sailing by ...

Yesterday was the last day of this term (apart from the few people with tutorials today) and as an end of term fun project (because the tutors knew our hearts were not really into doing real work), we got to MAKE Christmas themed stuff.

A couple of weeks ago the tutors went to Scrapstore and picked up lots of bits and pieces for the first years to work on a fab making-3d-ilustrations-with-low-tech-things project with one of last year's graduates, the lovely Hattie Newman. Some of us second years were a bit sad because WE never got to do that kind of project ... so yesterday, we were given free rein to all the random leftover bits; pressure free, to make whatever we wanted in a vague Christmas/winter theme. I started with just wanting to make lots of layers - with eventually became the carol "I saw three ships come sailing by on Christmas eve in the morning ..." But I only managed to make two ships (on sticks so you can move them about). This photo was taken this morning by the window. It looks much better with strong sunlight shining through - but not much of that this time of year!

Photos of more of the random creations here on the illustration facebook group.

The Music of Microorganisms ...

I've been thinking a lot about bacteria (and other microorganisms)...

And I've been thinking a lot about jazz (specifically swing)...

And have tried to bring the two together ...

But very unsuccessfully I feel ...

So I went to the tutors with all the work I had done, and asked them "How do I make sense of this?", and they, with their much well trained eyes said, "Well, what about doing this?". It was there right before my eyes, but I couldn't see. I just needed someone who could step back from it all and tell me how it could all work together.

Have a lot of work to do over the Christmas holidays - 12 pieces of work; the thought of which kept me stressfully awake all of last night! Hope I can make this come together well ...

Character development

Gone back to working on the "Curious Incident" word-and-image module brief again. Have been redeveloping the characters to be a bit more 50s illustration /animation (being inspired a lot by the Cartoon Modern book). Here's what they look like at the moment - not final, but quite happy with how they are progressing.

Those of you with less bright screens will notice that there seems to be a strange shadow round each of the characters... that's because I didn't want to draw with black over my gauche painted stuff. I stuck some acetate over the colour paintings and then Indian inked over the acetate. The black works OK, but I want to try a couple of other treatments to try and give the characters more depth and texture ...

Christmas break from this Saturday - really looking forward to some time off to actually get on with college work!

Indian Prayer - abstract book

Thank you everyone for the messages since my last slightly depressed post ... to make up for it I thought I'd show you all how my abstract book is going. It's not meant to have words but I've photographed the pages with the relevant words so you can see how it relates to the poem.













Its all in place now, just need better paper to print on and then source some book cloth and stuff to make a good cover and bind it. This is actually the one piece that I have thoroughly enjoyed doing this year and am really quite happy about ...

Flexible

Wow, its been over a week since I last posted... Here's something I was working on in that time, but I don't think I'm going to use it for what it was intended for ...

Infact, theres not much of my work I'm really happy with at the moment. Combined with the stress of wedding planning and learning to drive (I failed my test yesterday - you can see now why I'm down), November has been a really tough month. December doesn't look any better, but at least the Christmas vacation is coming up - I need the holiday!

I'll try and update a bit more often, but the work load might mean its still a bit sporadic till the end of this semster (end of January...)

Experimental print

I've been playing round with print processes lately to see if I can get textures that give a sense of bacteria-ness (for the culture project).

At home I've been playing with monoprints and using water based block printing inks, and drops of water, and stencils and other stuff.


And at college I have been using the presses to do embossing and collagraphy to see how I might be able to get different textures. I especially love the effects I can get using bits of wood veneer and rough sandpaper. I think I prefer the embossed stuff to the inked stuff ... hmmm....


Still no clear idea about where I'm going with this - but at least I'm moving and enjoying the process ...

More paper mechanics ...

Week two!

Paper Mechanics

We are exploring two processes in our 'Process and Practise' module - one is print, and the other is paper mechanics. I had been waiting for this set of workshops since I started this course! And now we have FOUR one day sessions with the extraordinary Mr Duncan Birmingham (he's SUCH a nice guy...).


This isn't a very flattering picture of my coursemates I'm afraid, but I just wanted to give you a sense of the explosion of colored paper in the studio earlier this week.

We're making a 'pop-up sketchbook', ie Duncan is going through the basic techniques with us and we're making them as we go along and writing notes on our pop-ups and embellishing them. We have him for 4 sessions (over 4 weeks). This week was fundamentals; next week building on those and more complex mechanisms; the following week we're doing things like pull tabs and such; and in the last week he's going to work with us individually on our projects (we have to make two double page spreads, again on the theme of culture)...

Here's my set of pages from this week - I'm SO happy to be doing this :) ....

Cultural jazz (!?)

I thought I'd better update you on the "Culture" project for the Process and Practice module. Its still very much in development, but its slowly moving along.

You might remember from this where I was drawing bacteria - well the tutors wanted me to get out of my comfort zone and asked me to put the bacteria out-of-context... I've found this very VERY hard but have slowly (after much random sketching) come to the idea of a micro-organism jazz band (because I love jazz music). Above are some very crude initial ideas and sketches ... hopefully I can develop this further into a full blown project ...

(yes, that's E.coli Fitzgerald, Louis Amoebastrong and Helicobacter Pianolory .... I am so geeky)

Don't trust your clock!

Phew! We've just been handed ANOTHER brief for the 'word and image' module (the one with the 'Curious Incident' and abstract book briefs). The new brief is basically to produce two images for this competition. Its all about generating ideas from words. And to start us off we had a one-day workshop today where we were handed an aphorism each. We had to explore it visually and generate as many quick ideas for it as we could; and then take a couple to completion.

My aphorism was "You must have a rough idea of the time, to believe a clock"

I started with clocks with obviously the wrong times on for the time of day (for example a digital clock that says 4:37 am, but its sunny outside the window, etc)... I worked through a few ideas and one thing led to another which made me come to the central idea of a "Is your clock telling the truth?". These are my final two images:



The abstract book, for which I uploaded the patterns earlier this week, is also almost done - I still need to tweak a couple of pages and bind the whole thing nicely; so you'll just have to wait till I'm done. The Curious Incident and Culture projects on the other hand are slightly stuck - but I do have till January (eeep!)

Help Cafe Kino by buying ART!!!

Cafe Kino is a gorgeous little independant co-op cafe in Stoke's Croft, Bristol - conveniently placed within stumbling distance of the ultra fabulous Here Gallery (which also has a show opening tonight) and the uber querky Cube Cinema. Some local artists (including me and Milla and Claire and other exciting peoples) have work on show (and sale) there from today till 13th December. A percentage of the sales go towards supporting the cafe - "cafe kino is a not-for-profit co-operative owned and operated by its' workers and run in part by volunteers. We strive to create a viable business which is open, fair and mutually supportive of all those with whom we are associated" ...how could you not want to support that??!!??

So, if you want to get your hands on any of my stitch'n'bitch inspired hoops - I've got all 6 on sale there ... grab yourself an early Christmas goodie whilst helping keep Kino afloat!

Patterns

Here are some pattern/textures I've been making to use in the abstract book project...