I didn't really mean for this to turn into a general art blog.

Delwin has a glow beetle!

I guess I'm just rolling with it, though, and I will try to resume the 365 projects but it's kind of nice to have somewhere else to share my general art, too. I have been busy. On the drawing front, I joined an online RP that's very art-centric, reusing an old character of mine, a little centaur boy named Delwin.
He's kind of challenging to draw, because I struggle with drawing children, but he's fun to play because the psychology of kids is fascinating. I guess I'll be drawing him a lot, and I'm pushing myself to do more digital painting experimentation with him.

In other not-so-fun news, all of my artistic output has been severely dampened for weeks and weeks now by an outbreak of hives. We think it's an allergic reaction to a new medication, which I have since stopped taking, but there's apparently no good timetable for how long it takes to work its way out of your system.
If it's not a reaction to the medication, then it means I've spontaneously developed an allergy to something that's consistently in my environment, and that will be utter hell to work out. I'm currently on my second dose of Prednisone to try to shake this off. A lot of the hives are on my arms and hands, which has made it almost impossible to so much as hold a pencil, some days. Using scissors is hard. I can't practice the guitar. It's obnoxious and frustrating and makes me want to be creative all the more just because I'm having so much trouble physically doing anything.

And yet, I've still been managing to get stuff done, sometimes painfully. Inspired by the cubed bird, I've been making these guys we've dubbed 'SquareCrows' to sell for Halloween, both at the local Farmer's Market and on our Etsy shop. The largest there is a cube three inches to a side, the medium-size one is a two-inch cube, and the tiny one is one-and-a-half inches to a side because I cut out a one-inch square and took one look at it and decided I'm not quite that insane. They're all felt, all hand sewn with embroidery floss because we were out of orange thread, and I've been scrounging for button eyes. We did find these packs of teeny tiny buttons that work for the littlest one, and may have to break down and buy a pack of buttons for the others because I've pretty much run our miscellaneous bags/jars of buttons out of orange. I've gotten lots of squealing comments and had a commission for a full trio plus one extra of the largest ones. Anybody who sees them here and wants some, drop me a line, because I'm still at work on more.
Mostly I'm grateful my hives today are mostly on the backs of my hands and I can still work...

In betweener art

I know I need to make time for daily 365 projects again, but life is keeping me busy. Two days a week get pretty much eaten up with the local Farmer's Market. In addition to running the table for a local tea shop, on Saturdays we also have a table to sell my girl's dolls and my art.
The other vendors are so friendly and it's a cool social atmosphere, so I'm not complaining. Anyways, there's a woman there who sells what she calls 'bird cubes' which are these cubical birdhouses. I asked if they were for cubical birds and the idea struck me and wouldn't let go. I just had to make this guy. He only took two days, and he's all hand-stitched with some stiff interfacing to hold the cube shape. There's an European robin on her business card, so that's what he's supposed to be, although I had to paint on the red.

The cube bird in natural habitat.

He's gotten a lot of good comments already when I gave him to her on Wednesday, and I'm hoping tomorrow she'll help direct business our way. Saturday promises to be busy for me anyway because we'll be out of here at 6:30 for the market, and then I'm working at the tea shop after the market until who knows what time of night. It's going to be a long day, and I probably won't get a real meal until dinner. Ah well. If we can sell some dolls or art, it's all good.

Day 36 (Really?): Make the old look new

I hope somebody's still reading this blog, but if you are I bet you thought I'd given up.
I really apologize for the big gap. Life just kind of got away from me, partly because working a lot of odd jobs under the table can devour your time the way no normal job could. Part of that is they are multiple, and that means dashing from one place to another. Also a major portion of my time got eaten up painting a giant signboard menu. It's awesome to get a job like that everyone will see, it feels professional, but it took a lot more time than I'd anticipated. Anyway, I hope this one was worth waiting for, because I did put a lot of work into it.

With the assignment to make something old look new, I scrambled around looking for ideas until my brain fell on the metaphor of Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods'. The plot is a convoluted one, but at its core is the idea that the old gods of ancient mythologies do not die when we stop looking for them, but they are forced to either adapt or fade away. Some gods find it harder than others to make a place for themselves in the modern world, but the author makes some very plausible transitions. Some deities, in a very essential way, are still up to their old tricks even if they've learned to put a new face on them.
There are several gods portrayed in the story from various diverse cultures (including one whose legacy is the subject of another Neil Gaiman novel), but one I noticed missing was Ganesha.

I'm not a Hindu, I'm not really anything that's easy to define by the terms of organized religion (although I was attending a Unitarian Universalist church for a while, and have only stopped due to a hectic schedule), but Ganesha holds a special place in my mind. Back when I was in High School, or maybe college, I had an incredible and apocalyptic dream that involved the repercussions loss of religious faith the world over, and in it the only deity I actually came close to was Ganesha. It was in the form of a white stone statue, and at the time I couldn't even name what deity it was beyond 'that elephant-headed one from India', but the image was one brief pause in the chaos of the dream. It was a moment of resounding calm while the world was crumbling, and I stood before the statue and touched it, and it started to cry.
I don't see the dream itself as prophetic in any literal way, although there was some important symbolism in it, but an image like that really sticks with you. 

I have since learned a lot more about Ganesha, and collected a few little figures and a pendant. Of all the deities of the Hindu culture, Ganesha is without dispute the most widely revered. The myths around him and his status vary from one sect to another, but he crosses boundaries other deities apparently don't.
What it is about him that makes him so popular, I'm not sure, but even to other cultures he's probably the most easily recognizable. It's not just his cuddly, elephant-headed appearance that makes him endearing, but he's also usually represented as being fairly humble and easy-going.

He is known chiefly as the Remover of Obstacles, the guy that helps deal with roadblocks in your path. Depictions vary, but some of the more common things he's shown carrying are an axe and a rope, both useful for differing approaches to practical obstacles. I guess the ability to chop things down aggressively or work more subtly pulling something aside or someone through makes him a pretty versatile problem-solver. This version is also giving a sign of blessing, which can't hurt along the way, and carrying a lotus blossom to remind us to pause sometimes in all that work and enjoy where we are. He's also dancing... because it has to do with balance and moving through the world, or maybe just because he's that kind of a guy.
If you look at my previous progress posts, you might get an inkling of what kinds of old materials I used to make him. Nothing was purchased for this project, and most of it was old stuff that we had around and really didn't know what to do with.

His body itself is made from an old plush shirt that fit me in Middle School. I hung onto it because the material itself was so awesome. I want to add that my girlfriend gave me a lot of help on sewing the body, because our sewing machine has been busted and yes this thing is every single stitch sewn by hand. Only one material in the house struck my mind as right for his pants, and apparently it struck hers too, because the yellow fabric was actually a mostly-finished skirt my girlfriend had made for a doll. It was long since abandoned for reasons I can't fathom, and she let me cut it up. What he's wearing is actually called dhoti and it's one very long rectangle. I wrapped and tucked it just like the real ones, although I had to tack it down with stitches.

Beads are something we seem to have no end of, and yes I used lots. His rope is just some neat yarn, and his axe is actually a plastic one stolen from my pirate collection (remember those?), prettied up with some paint and beads and glue.
Lastly came the lotus flower, which is made with a technique a close friend of mine invented. It's colored tissue paper, a couple layers cut into circles with petals coming off them and strung onto the end of a piece of wire. Then you paint and shape them into place with clear nail polish and it magically makes it all translucent yet flexible and durable.
I leave you with that reminder to stop and enjoy life's moments, and I'll try to do more of that in the future by resuming this blog.

Almost there...

This has taken longer than I wanted, but if I can just get the time tomorrow to finish him off, I'll be making a real post and get things back on track... I guess that was my spring break? Except that I spent most of it working odd jobs.

Slow Progress...

I haven't done so well on the daily updates, but I have been working! This is going to be a long one... still have the limbs to go, then embellishment. If you didn't guess what I was making before, there's a not-so-subtle clue.

Day 35: Instructions to make something

I really did mean to get this put up yesterday, and despite having a long day that included my car stalling out twice, a tow truck, being out of the house from first thing in the morning until about eight at night, I still got this project more or less done.I was tired but feeling accomplished when I hooked up the camera to upload my instructional video by eleven at night.
Then it took two hours, a lot of alt+ctrl+del and at least one restart of the computer just to upload what was on the camera. I also couldn't do anything else during this process, like post to the blog that this post would be delayed. Attempting to do other things like, say, move the mouse, resulted in complete computer lock-up.
Putting it all together this morning has been a slow process, too, but only slow instead of disastrous. As with the disguise project, this entry is pretty much about the video. I made a flaying monkey pop-up card, and with the video you can make one too! The first thing you need to do is download the PDF and print it out on your home computer. I've included two versions, the color one you'll see in the video and a black and white version in case you want to color it yourself.
PDF is a pretty standard file format, but just in case you don't have a PDF reading program (they're free), I recomment CutePDF.com which ironically works way better than the original PDF reading program Acrobat (which is by Adobe who originally created the file format in the first place!).
Got your PDF reading program? Acrobat or CutePDF either should work fine. Click the link below for whichever version you want, or both. Make a whole army of flying monkey cards!
Black and white flying monkey card
Color flying monkey card
Once this is printed out, preferably on card stock, just watch the video below! The joy of a video tutorial is that you can pause it if you need to gather supplies or something.



About the book: This massive Wizard of Oz pop-up book is by Robert Sabuda, who describes himself as a paper engineer. You should visit his website for lots of pop-up tutorials and stuff, which is not what I did, because I was away from the computer when I created this project, and because my brain hasn't been working very well this week.
A friend who's a kind of surrogate uncle gave me this book, and along with it he sent some print-outs about Robert Sabuda and his work, so that was my introduction to him as an artist. I'm not sure how hard the book is to come by, but I highly recommend it. A lot of the papers in it are metallic and some of the pop-ups are incredibly, beautifully complex. Paper engineer is a very accurate title for this guy.
I'm not sure this project really does justice to his work, and I apologize for it being both late and a little ramblingly incoherent. The video was made late last night, and I'm still feeling a little rough today because yesterday was such a mess. My car and my computer are both old, and cranky, but at least for the moment they're still hanging in there.

Day 32: Make something ephemeral

Maybe I'm being overly philosophical about this, but it seems to me that capturing and documenting something ephemeral does in essence negate it being ephemeral. If you can look at it any time you want for the foreseeable future, it's relatively permanent, at least as much as anything on the internet is. I apologize for the grainy photos and video, though, we were having severe thunderstorms while I did this project so the lighting wasn't good.
The story 'Brothers of the Wind' is by Jane Yolen, and it's a picture book, probably not one of her better known works. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous, rich blue skies over golden deserts textured so you can practically feel the sand. It's a story about a boy, and a horse with wings, but there's nothing patronizing about his tale. There's a grimness underlying the story, despite the dreamlike imagery. I don't want to give away the ending, but mortality and the fleeting quality of life are a major part of the message.
This book is one of those much-loved volumes my parents brought home from the yearly book fair in Seattle, where they'd go for my dad's work and stay overnight. The torn dust jacket shows it's been around and read often, and it's one of those few treasured picture books I kept when I moved across the country. The image in the left background of this blog is actually the back cover of this book.

I struggled with what to actually make for this project, and what I really wanted was to do something with smoke, but I couldn't quite figure out how. Ultimately I just made a little winged horse for the purpose of burning it, which creates smoke, but not enough to set off our smoke alarm. The slow, ashy collapse was strangely interesting to watch, as was the remnant that refused to burn...

Day 27: Dreams

I guess I should have known that making something based on a dream would turn out to be a longer project. I keep a dream journal, and I tend to have long, semi-coherent story-like dreams full of strong symbolism and mythology. Needless to say, I had a lot of material to choose from, and I even had multiple dreams that connect to books. I narrowed it down to two choices and in the end I'm not sure either one could have been done in a day.
The book shown here isn't a work of fiction, it's more a study of certain mythological symbols and what they stand for psychologically. The story of the Fisher King goes way back, and has been adapted into Arthurian legend. The king, as a young man, suffers a serious injury. Some versions say in the thigh, while others versions don't mess around and say it's in the genitals, the point being it's in the 'generative' region. He lives, but the injury will not heal, and he's left forever cold, or unable to feel, no longer able to enjoy life. The author links this to the psychological impairment of being wounded in the ability to access the passionate, warm, creative and feeling side of one's self. It's not strictly a masculine problem, but in Western culture men are encouraged to focus on the logical, practical side of things, to live more by 'cold' reason.

Don't ask how he drinks his coffee...

There's a lot more to the myth, which you'll have to read the book for, but ultimately it takes someone else to go questing and bring some symbolic thing (such as the holy grail) to heal the fisher king. It's an interesting analogy, and an interesting book. For another interpretation of the Fisher King story, I highly recommend you look up 'The Lazarus Heart' by Sting, even if just for the lyrics. He's said the song was inspired by a dream he had, which he later learned from a friend was the typical dream of the Fisher King myth. Apparently it's not an uncommon symbolism in dreams, and that probably means something.

Here then, is my own dream journal entry, dated 12/21/08 6AM-ish:

 

The initial setup of the dream reminded me of the movie Matilda, with my viewpoint character a very young girl with two inadequate parents.

Intelligent beyond her years and very self sufficient, the girl noted the absence of parenting in her life and was constantly dismayed by it. She was always sweet-tempered towards her parents but spent much of her time being left to entertain and care for herself. Sometimes there was a vague suggestion of a disinterested brother, which I think was my brain leaning on the movie, but half the time I had the impression she was an only child.

The mother was a genuinely loving but vapid and useless figure. She seemed mostly distracted with her own interests but truly affectionate when she remembered to show it. Affection came in brief bouts, clumsy and ineffectual, then she’d grow distracted and distant again without meaning to, until she realized her own absence and overcompensated to try to make up for it. The cycle was repeated so many times the girl just accepted it and was grateful for the periods when her mother was overindulging her to try to make amends, even though she knew that was a passing thing. The mother was very pretty, and vain, mostly concerned with her appearance and clothes and make-up. I remember an impression of blonde curls and frilly clothing, a vague kind of Marilyn Monroe-esque appearance.

The father was distant, cold, sometimes caustic. He regarded wife and daughter both with a proprietary air, but didn’t really want any close contact with either. He thought mostly of his work, kept apart from his family, and spent most of his time out of the house in his business. The only time they really saw much of him was in the mornings at breakfast, and late in the evenings when he finally came home from work tired and uninterested in talking to anyone. The mother accepted his manners with a kind of mild and quiet wifely fretting, bringing him whatever he needed in the evenings unasked and unthanked.

That's a working hinge made of metal tape on his side.

The dad’s appearance is where things get surreal. One of the reasons his cold manner was so accepted by others was that he’d suffered some kind of serious wounding in the past. His heart was gone, as were his lungs, and I think the right side of his face was just dark and cratered. The front of his torso unhinged and swung open like a panel, and whatever prosthetics inside that kept him going needed daily maintenance that required it. The man looked like some kind of Dave McKean creation. Early in the mornings he’d get breakfast for himself, moving around the kitchen with the front of his torso hanging open and fiddling with the interior while he drank his coffee. He was red and lumpy inside, but fairly dry. The man was a Fisher King if ever I saw one.

I had the impression everyone in the family moved on their own schedule without much contact with anyone else’s, although the little girl fairly often ate breakfast while her father was still getting his, and she watched him quietly because he didn’t want to be bothered. One morning in a fit of mothering, maybe on a weekend, the mother decided to make pancakes. I don’t think she was much of a cook because the process left the kitchen a horrible mess, and there was supposed to be big dark pieces of something in it, some kind of fruit. The father came in halfway through this, getting his own breakfast and coffee. As some kind of practical joke, he put cockroaches in the pancake batter (Don’t ask me where he got them from). The mother didn’t notice, and cooked them and served them up. The little girl just sat there looking at her pancakes, some of the big dark pieces fruit and some cockroaches. The mother was glowing, pleased with herself, and chatting gaily, and sat down and ate some herself. The father, standing by the counter with his coffee and his interior maintenance, silently laughed at the scene. Some of the cockroaches in the pancakes were somehow still alive, and moved, trying to escape the cooked dough there were now baked into, and that’s the only reason the mother noticed at all. There was no big horror reaction, but she was very surprised and bewildered how they’d got in there.

The next scene I remember was the little girl gathering up some of her most important belongings in a nice sturdy ornate box, maybe a jewelry box, and running away. The setting was vaguely my parent’s house with her running towards the hillside and up into the more large-scale woodsy scene it sometimes became in childhood dreams. Then it was on to a more park-like setting, again familiar as a dream setting; light woods with trails leading off to meadows mostly on the left, deeper woods ahead. She was headed off on one of the trails toward a meadow when she ran into what seemed almost like some version of myself with my parents, or some prosaic version of us. The older girl was someone she knew, and she was privately a little jealous at her nice stable parents and the whole cohesive family they made. They invited her to join them for a picnic, and she was a little afraid of joining them because she was worried they’d realize what she was out there for was to run away. She was nervous they’d return her home. She accepted their invitation only because she was worried not to would look suspicious, and they were very nice and polite to her but it was pretty obvious she was upset about something. Trying to make excuses I think she opened up her box and was talking about the things in it, and I think that’s how she found the little wrinkled, dried-up lump slightly smaller than her fist, dark dusty red and looking for all the world like a big prune. As soon as she saw it she recognized it and so did my brain, even though I got the impression she’d never seen it before. How it got into her box I don’t know and neither did she, but this was her father’s heart.

This is a poor substitute for a heart.

She had the idea that if she could somehow mend this heart and put it back in him, he’d be a changed man and might feel some affection towards her, which she longed for. At this point the dream swept along in vague narrative impressions, whisking frustratingly along like my brain was bored with the story now that it had worked out the resolution. Somehow the heart got outfitted with some small mechanical workings to enable it to go again, and these were basically the way a winding pocket watch works. He’d still have to maintain it. They carefully wound it up with the top stopper pulled up, and when put into place in his chest that was going to depress the stopper and it would begin ticking away. But it wouldn’t work with this alone, it needed the organic component it was missing, that was essential to the magic of making it work properly. A heart needs blood. With the help of some expert (I think the me-girl was helping her get all this accomplished, taking her to the watch/heart experts and all), the girl was going to donate some of her own blood to put into her father’s heart to make it work. I remember it being magically drawn from her chest, leaving her dizzy and drained.

At that point my subconscious decided it knew how the story would end so it was time to wake up, even though it was ridiculously early on a Sunday morning. I’m annoyed that happened. It was such a wonderfully symbolic story and I guess I was waiting for some kind of fun and interesting twist or something, but mostly I just wanted to see the ending.

Doot doot

As it turns out, paper clay over fabric is an incredibly time-consuming and obnoxious process. I'm in love with the idea of air-drying clay, but I don't think I'll be buying any more of this stuff once I use it up.

Slow progress

Not a real blog post tonight, but I'm working on it! I'm torn between pushing myself to post every day, and pushing myself to make interesting stuff that I get to work on to a point where I'm satisfied it's finished.
Not sure why I'm so big on the 3D stuff lately, instead of just drawing or painting something... texture just seemed like an important part of this one.

Day 26: Create something portable

The prompt for today was to make something portable that normally isn't, and that's a tricky idea that I struggled with up through this morning. I had an appointment today that got me up earlier than usual, and in my groggy pre-coffee state I had this weird idea of a forest in a cart. What this concept had to do with anything I wasn't really sure, but once the image was in my brain it wouldn't let go.
Later when I suggested the thought to my girlfriend, she pointed out that it's a very fairytale idea, which made everything slip into place. I've read at least half a dozen fairy tales where some heroine or hero is given an item that, when opened or thrown causes a forest to spring up and bar the way of whoever is chasing them. Sometimes it's a comb, or sometimes a nut or acorn, both of which make some kind of sense.

The book behind the forest here is a copy of Grimm's fairy tales from 1925, which I have no real idea how I came into possession of but which has some nice little odd stories or strange versions of stories that are a little more obscure. There's 'The Man Who Learned to Shiver' which was retold in the Jim Henson Storyteller series as 'Fearnot', some weird stuff such as one titled simply 'The Nose', along with more familiar stories like 'Snow White'. Even when I was younger I preferred the more obscure stories, and the idea of opening an acorn to produce an entire forest is just an enchanting idea.
It kind of reminds me of the puppet show I'm helping design shadow puppets for right now, which is a more realistic telling that includes the idea of planting an acorn to sow the future of a forest.

Peter Pan approves!

I guess my brain was still on materials from the back yard. The wagon is one of several kits my girlfriend bought to make up and put with dolls. It went together fast, but I was in a hurry to paint it with some very watered-down acrylics to get a kind of stained look, and the wood warped some because it was so saturated. I should have given the glue more time to set, at least, I think. It's not very sturdy.
There's real dirt packed in, and some moss from the back yard over that. The pond is a blue flat marble I found on my walk earlier today, and the horse (just pretend it's a deer?) is a little plastic thing I for some reason remembered I had in my old childhood jewelry box. The trees themselves are the very tips of branches, where the leaves come out in bunches. I cleared out our tiny garden in the process of looking for these. I still had more of the moss I used for Peter Pan yesterday, for the treetops. I noticed as I was taking photos that he's just the right height to stand next to the forest and be camouflaged, so I just had to include him in the photo session.
If anyone has a magic acorn that will instantly create a full-size forest, let me know, but in the meantime this one on wheels will do.

Day 25: Work with Nature

I've been saving certain absolute favorite books for the really good projects, and I guess I've given in to the realization that some of what I come up with is just too big to create in one day. This only took two, at least, and part of that may have been the material itself.
This slightly ambitious creation is none other than Peter Pan.
He's made from sticks and leaves collected at the back of our apartment, and, I admit it, some old moss that was actually from our millipede cage. We no longer have millipedes, and it's pretty clean. The catch that made this so tricky was that the sticks were fallen branches from the wonderful tree that sits just outside our fence, which happens to be an oak.

I went through a few years were I did a lot of wood carving, and later moved on to soapstone (which I prefer, but is expensive), but I don't think I've ever carved oak before. My hands hurt. The smaller pieces, like his feet, were the worst. Each foot is about as long as the last segment of my pinky finger, and while I didn't snap a photo of the bottoms of them, they doe have the curved arch of the instep and a general toe shape. That may have been excessive of me.
The limbs are all separately carved of sticks, and obviously I had to choose some Y-shaped branches for the arms and trim away a lot. Arms and legs all fit into sockets carved into the body, and while I did glue them into place, the arms at least actually fitted in tight and stayed without it. The feet needed the glue, but the end result actually stands on its own and is very stable.
His face isn't quite what I'd like it to be, but the direction of the grain made it very fragile and difficult to carve, and his nose actually broke at one point, leaving it crooked. I would have liked to do more detail and get a better shape to the whole thing, but it was pretty clear it just wasn't going to work with this.

Peter Pan is a captivating story in its own right, but what really captured my imagination right from the start is the illustrations in the copy I grew up with. I still have the same copy, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, and you should go google her work.
There are who knows how many versions of Peter Pan out there on screen and stage and picture book, elfin and delightful. The way she draws him isn't delightful or cute. He's scrawny and all limbs, wild and rough and almost primal. He wears barely enough leaves to cover what needs covering, and she draws him with expressions that can be carelessly cruel as well as sweet. I don't think I've ever seen an illustration of him by anyone else that so perfectly captures him as the wild animal of a boy that's described in the story.

I don't think I've gotten close to the illustrations at all. The face isn't much like the pictures at all, and his pose isn't as fluid as I'd like. On the other hand he's a slightly awkward, long-limbed wild little thing, so maybe I did all right, after all.

Day 23: Recycling bin materials

The project that ate 3 days.

What is this thing?

So this project shouldn't have taken me three days, by which I mean I should have simplified it. A lot, obviously. It was also complicated by the fact that we don't have a recycle bin. Our apartment complex actually won't allow the recycling trucks in, so we're on our own for recycling and I admit we're not as gung-ho about it as we could be. This sent me back to the paper bags we've collected, which are easier to find a place to recycle at than some other things.
Also distracting me from the project, my cat, who already has some kind of issue in one side of her muzzle, abruptly developed a serious limp.

Construction material, or cat toy?

My cat is about thirteen years old, so these weird and random health issues worry me a little. She'd already been to the vet about the first problem, was given an antibiotic shot and diagnosis of 'probably not an abscessed tooth but keep an eye on it'. I looked her over for injury, felt her from paw pads all the way up to her shoulders without even finding anything that made her flinch. She limped through the evening and into the next day. Apart from these symptoms she seemed just fine, and took a few trips through my 'construction materials', which I clearly had out for her to play in.
Another trip to the vet got her diagnosed as having some kind of allergy as the initial cause of the face issue, and arthritis exacerbated by a bad jump or something for the limp. A bunch of money, a couple shots, and a day later she's no longer limping and back to begging to go outside and kill small animals.
For the other Squeaks I used paper bags, some really crappy thread that's almost gone, and I tried tea-dye for the Siamese markings but that didn't show up well and curled up the paper so in the end I broke out some old acrylic paint. This probably destroyed the spirit of using recycled materials, but it's still all older stuff we had around, at least. The finished model is a little gimpy, but I guess that's appropriate.

Two out of two cats can't read.

The book I had in mind is called 'The Christmas Junk Box' and our copy is itself recycled. It's a library discard, and as you can see they stuck the barcode sticker over the cover so the title only reads 'The'. It's full of woodcut illustrations, and is a simple little story about a father giving his family a box of useful junk collected from around the house as a Christmas present. The idea is they're materials for making all kinds of toys and things, and everyone in the family builds stuff out of the contents.

Why are you wearing my collar?

Their projects sounded simple, but apparently sewing paper into a life-sized three-dimensional cat takes a long time. I'm not sure the end product is quite as long as she is, but I put it down for the cats to inspect and even tried her collar on it with no adjustment necessary.
For anyone concerned it might replace the real cat, the paper model is currently on the floor now, while the real thing is sitting in my lap purring like crazy. Possibly she knows I'm writing about her.
I'm also trying to make up for the delay here with lots of pictures. Both our cats seemed really interested in it, although that may have something to do with my putting it by the scratch pad.

Squeaks has won the 3-way standoff, and the scratchpad.

Since I just now realized most of these pictures only show the front end of my cat (I should've included the one with just her butt sticking out of the paper bag), she is a Siamese/Manx mix, with long rabbity back legs and about four inches of slightly kinked tail. She's got a short, square Manx build, but the Siamese markings and definitely a Siamese voice. Yes, her name is Squeakers. When I first got her I tried valiantly to name her something more elegant, but in the end she outvoted me. Vocally.
The other cat in these pictures is my girlfriend's 3(?) year old cat, Froggy.

You smell like paint.

 Froggy was possibly even more interested in the paper cat than Squeakers was. Of course, this means if I leave it on the floor, I can probably only expect it to last a few days before she chews it to pieces or something.
Realizing it might not last, I did attempt to take a nice picture of the whole thing against a blank background (the back of the desk chair), but it was not to be. I'm not really sure what to do with a paper cat anyway. The real ones are more fun.

Be careful when introducing a new cat into the home.

Day 20: Work in a new way with clay

Well this project didn't go off quite how I hoped. I have some paperclay, which I'm really not very familiar with using at all. Initially I wanted to do a kind of flat clay picture, and by flat I mean it would have some dimension and depth, layers of clay for foreground and background, and I found out that paperclay just doesn't do that very well at all.
In fact, I can't get it to do much that looks really good, although the big buttons for the 'Coraline' project came out well. So instead of a 3D picture of the golem from this book on a bridge (with Vimes nearby), I made an actual golem, which is supposed to look patchy and cracked. They're ancient, and have repaired themselves with patches of clay so many times the original shape is blurred into a big humanoid mass without much features.
This golem is named Dorfl, and he's on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. I should have made him a badge. The top of his head is a separate piece and his head is hollow, ostensibly for a place to put the scroll with the holy words that keep him alive, but Dorfl is unique in that he no longer needs those. Instead, the top of his head comes off so I can shine a LED flashlight in and make his eyes glow like they're supposed to.

Glowing eyes!

'Feet of Clay' is another book in the Discworld series, and the entire book revolves around golems, which are made of clay. Not paperclay, but that's largely wood pulp, which is even closer to something organic and living than dirt, maybe. Either way, the prompt of clay made me think of Dorfl, who is living clay, and who would point out that it actually makes him a lot more like us than we might want to admit.
At the end of the book, the priests band together, outraged that he is alive without holy words to control him and give him life. They tell him that he is not even really alive, to which Dorfl says:

"This Is Fundamentally True, I suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life- However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process."

Needless to say, there are no volunteers.

Day 19: Something that floats

I almost made a pirate ship, because who could resist the excuse to make a pirate ship? I have lots of books on pirates, after all. Making a boat for something that floats seemed just a little too obvious, though. This, instead, is Louis from E.B. White's 'the Trumpet of the Swan', in his bathtub at the Ritz.
It's an entertaining book, but there's something about the absurdity of the swan's night in a hotel room that's always stuck with me. He orders a dozen watercress sandwiches and sleeps in the bathtub.
If you haven't read it, Louis is a trumpeter swan who is born mute, and to compensate and hopefully win the lady swan of his dreams, he learns to play a trumpet which his father steals for him. His other aim in life is to acquire just enough money to pay back the store his trumpet was stolen from.

I didn't have a trumpet the right size, but I did have a little plastic saxophone, which is an instrument I've always wanted to learn to play. If he can play the trumpet, maybe someday he could move on to other brass. Louis himself is carved from styrofoam, and I ended up pulling out the pumpkin carving kit for the details. His neck/head and body are two separate pieces, with a little indentation carved into the body for it to fit into and a little Grrrip glue. I dabbed on some acrylic paint over his bill and glued on beads for eyes (kind of squished them into his head while the glue set). His bathtub is a stroke of random luck. We think it's a soap dish, and it came out of my girlfriend's old stuff from her parent's house recently, and we kept it thinking she'll make a doll that goes into it. I put down my chess board (which i made in High School) for a floor and a nice piece of scrapbooking paper for the wallpaper. Just so you can see him in real floating action, I made a doofy little video:

Day 18: What's in your car

Okay, so the book wasn't in my car. The rest was.

It took me some thinking to come up with a book to go with this prompt, which was to work with materials found in your car. I already covered another book from the 'So you want to be a Wizard' series, but this is the very first (and I just gave the full title). In it, the two main characters are young teens who discover wizardy through a manual, and go through a dangerous trial in an alternate dimension New York. This other city is inhabited by all kinds of monsters, including living, predatory cars. One of these actually befriends them, after they help it, and ends up giving them a lot of help.
There is something strangely anthropomorphic about cars. Maybe it's just that the arrangement of headlights and grill-work can trigger that face recognition thing in our brains, or maybe it's that they've taken the role that once belonged to a living animal, the horse. Maybe we're just set up in a way that we anthropomorphisize anything we work so closely with and rely so much on.

Yeah, he's showing his age a little.

I love my car. It's a 1984 Chevy Cavalier, and my registration insists it is two colors; blue and blue (the sides are a shade darker blue, a subtle fashion statement?). My girlfriend's father got the car for us, from a terminally ill relative who had it from new and kept meticulous records. We owe him so much, it's run longer and better than anyone expected and it's worth a lot more to us than the kelly blue book value. We were told the car's name was Baby Blue, which was a little too cutesy, but we got it around the time B.B. King and Eric Clapton came out with the 'Riding with the King' music video and that clicked in my head, so we just call it by the initials B.B.

Along with the car, we inherited the contents of his trunk. This includes a heavy tool chest. The chest contains, of course, tools. It also contains a lot of old screws, nuts and bolts, dozens of those little hex wrenches you get with 'some assembly required' stuff, paperclips, and other odds and ends.
It's the other odds and ends that are really interesting.
I made the model car above with paper bags (I have a bunch I need to take to recycling), a scrap of plastic, and some chopped up water bottles for the tires. The headlights are automotive fuses, but in the picture up above you'll see the car being menaced by monsters, which also came out of the tool box. Yes, that's a plastic dinosaur, and a plastic spider ring like you see around Halloween, and a... well I'm not really sure. The silver thing looks to me like some kind of baking soda capsule submarine. I really don't know. I didn't include the wooden whistle, the bookmark of laminated Swiss coins, broken Tonka truck, or the old 1 cent stamps because they didn't seem very menacing.
There used to be a wooden paddle in the trunk that said 'heat for the seat' and showed somebody with their trousers down about to be spanked, but I gave it away.
The man we inherited this car from, and his wife (who is also now sadly passed on) never had any children. Why their car trunk holds so many things that would lead one to believe otherwise, I don't know, and it's a mystery that will probably never be solved.
Anyway, using junk from the car to make a model of it seemed an appropriate tribute, and I'd like to think if it ever came to life and we were stuck in a nightmare city, he would come to my aid. Also, the fact that the paper car's bumper and my real car's bumper are crooked on the same side is sheer accident. Er, that is, my one and only fender-bender from a skid on the car itself, and lucky chance on the paper model.

Day 17: Eyes

This project has defied all attempts to photograph it in action. I've spent literally hours trying to get a good shot, with the aid of my girlfriend, until I can only conclude that either there's something wrong with both our camera-operating skills, or I'm experiencing some kind of malign interference from the Other world.
'Coraline' has probably gained notice mostly from the stop-motion film that came out a while back, but there are a number of differences in the book and I highly recommend reading it even if you've seen the movie. I liked the movie, but I don't think either the book or the movie is better, they're just a little different.

If only Coraline had button glasses like these, perhaps she could have tricked the Other Mother into thinking she'd accepted button eyes? Probably not, but if you want to try it yourself, just let me know and you can borrow these.
If you're not familiar with the story, it's kind of a modern twist on the old myths of faeries abducting children. Coraline takes a door in her new home through to an alternate world, where she has an Other mother and father, and strange duplicates of the other local residents, all of whom try to entice her to stay. Her Other mother is in charge, and makes her favorite foods and gives her pretty things, but all the people in this world have button eyes. The only catch to staying with them is that the Other mother wants Coraline to let them give her button eyes, too.
I couldn't find buttons big enough for this on short notice, so these ones are made of paper clay with a little black paint and clear nail polish over them. The frames are an old pair of not-very-useful sunglasses (the lenses are red and make everything look weird). I popped the lenses out, glued and then masking-taped the 'buttons' on. I had to make the buttons ahead of time to let the clay dry, but it was a pretty simple project, overall.
Now if I could just get a decent photo.

Day 15: One Dollar Bill

Today's challenge was to work with one dollar bill, and for some reason my mind went to dollar bill origami. How or why I already knew that existed, I'm not sure, but I found an excellent resource site with instructions for making lots of different things. It helps a lot to have a solid background in regular origami... which I really don't anymore. I used to be better at it, but I ended up B.S.ing this one a little. It still turned out looking all right, and I like how the pyramid with the eye ended up dead center.
The book choice to go along with this prompt was almost inevitable, Terry Pratchett's 'Making Money'. No, it's not a how-to guide, but part of the amazing and endless Discworld series. I was slow to catch on to these books, and I have favorite characters that I tend to pick my books around. This is one of his newer books, and I'm not as big on the main character, but some of the concepts were interesting and made it an excellent read anyway.

One of the nice things about the Discworld books is that it's not too hard to pick up with any of them for a starting point (because once you do pick one up, you will want to read the rest).
In this one the main character, a former crook, is pushed into managing a bank. That might sound like a disaster waiting to happen, but when a crook is in charge of the bank funds, what need does he have to go commit crimes anymore?
The details of how banking and money really works are handled with Pratchett's usual cleverly accurate perspective, but this book isn't just about a bank. Golems come into the plot (if I could have found origami instructions for a humanoid figure...). If you're not familiar with what a golem is, they're usually made of clay, living statues in a way, who follow commands and make the perfect slaves. They're not technically alive, so this makes them property rather than people. Of course, it also makes them valuable.
This book isn't really about money, so much as what we place value on and why. I think what I love about Terry Pratchett's writing most is that he gets you laughing, but he also makes you think.

I'm in a tight spot these days, keeping the bills and utilities paid is rough when you're unemployed... but I still can't seem to give up any of my books. I value the books I have more for their contents than for whatever they'd be worth if I sold them.

Day 14: As Tiny as possible

If you squint, you can see Eurasia and Africa?

I did this while looking through the lens of a magnifier, with a very fine-tip paintbrush. Unfortunately my camera just isn't up to photographing it very well. If you squint, you may be able to see Eurasia and Africa, and part of Australia. The Americas and Greenland are on the other side, but I did it all without looking at a real globe so the landmasses are all a little iffy. Considering the lack of detail at this size, I didn't see the point. I can't duplicate the coastline of Japan, for instance, when it's just a couple of dots. Still, I got some color in there, greens in the more appropriate areas and icecaps. This started as a blue bead, so maybe I'll make some jewelry out of it.

The tiniest thing I know of in a book is in 'A Wind in the Door', where the core of the plot involves mitochondria. I don't think much was known about them at the time the book was written, as the scientific explanation given isn't quite right. Mitochondria are real, though, and they're so tiny they live inside of our cells.
The story in this book hinges on the mitochondria within our cells, and a fictional organism even smaller than that called farandolae living inside the mitochondria. The point is to each of these living organisms, the organism it lives inside of is as big as the world is to us. Worlds within worlds, like nesting dolls, and possibly infinite. Who's to say there aren't so many levels of things bigger than us that we may be microscopic to something, somewhere out there.
Size, like everything else in reality, is relative. It's also important to remember that something so tiny, and organism within an organism within cells, is still vitally important.

Day 12: Camouflage

There is a leopard on this shelf.

Another way late post, not because this took me all day (took about three hours), but because I got such a late start. If there are typos or anything strange, that's because I'm typing this at 2 AM. Anyway, the prompt to camouflage something to blend in its environment got me thinking about Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories', for both the story of how the leopard got his spots, and the beginning of the armadillos.
I read this book over and over as a child (although I read 'the Jungle Books' even more), but the pictures in it are a little hard to make out. The pictures in how the leopard got his spots are even harder, because in one of them the leopard is supposed to be camouflaged, and when you add this to a smudgy black and white drawing cheaply printed... well, I really had to hunt for him.

See him now?

This isn't actually a leopard, I think it's supposed to be a cheetah, but I decided it was close enough. I started with a solid black base coat, and his natural environment is of course on the bookshelf. We have too many nick-nacks, which means we frequently have to shift them around to get at the book we want. I cleared some space for him, though, and got out the full set of acrylic paints, and went to work disguising him. I spent a lot of time squinting with one eye to narrow down my perspective, and of course he's best camouflaged at a certain angle. Some of the writing got kind of wonky, but it did get late and I have to admit that where I'm sitting now, from across the room, he's really pretty hard to see against the books.
Just for the lulz, I took some in-progress photos and made a craptastic little video of the painting from tailtip to nose. The photos would be a lot better if I had a tripod, sorry.