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 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 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 16: Potato stamp

I'm not eating that.

I actually can't remember if I've ever done potato stamps, although I must have because I already knew what they were. I feel kind of bad cutting up a nice redskin potato for this, but that's what we have, and this one was starting to grow out of the eyes a little bit...
It's a kid's craft, and that got me thinking of kid's books, so this project is based off one of the Lyle the Crocodile books. Specifically 'Lyle and the Birthday Party'. I no longer own a copy of this book, which is kind of a shame, because this and 'Hop on Pop' were the first books I ever learned to read. I never felt the latter counted for much, because the words were too small. I also recall not being believed when I said I could read the book; my parents felt I'd simply had it read to me enough times that I had it memorized. They were wrong, though, because what excited me enough to tell them was the realization that I didn't just know what it said, but that most of the words on the page actually made sense.

Just the stamps...

It was like I'd unlocked some magical door, and I was ecstatic.
Why the story was one of my favorites, I'm really not sure. This was actually the only Lyle the crocodile book I remember, although we must have read the others, and I'm not quite sure if I owned it or just checked it out from the library repeatedly. My father working there gave me ready access, so I know there were books I had him bring me from work more than once.
This particular book is, in essence, about dealing with jealousy. Specifically Lyle the crocodile is jealous of the little boy of the family because it's his birthday. I imagine that's the kind of thing that happens a lot with siblings, but I was an only child so I'm not sure how that spoke to me.

Is it just me or does this look like children's wallpaper?

I did love birthday parties, though, and thought the most exciting thing about my own birthday was that it's just a week before Halloween. I'm not so big on birthdays, anymore, but I still think Halloween is the best holiday there is.
Maybe some year I should dress up as a crocodile.

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 13: Tea

There are probably different ways to work with tea, artistically, but I've heard of people painting with tea, and I was curious to try it. I'm not all that thrilled with the method, honestly. I made a pretty strong black tea, but it's still a very subtle effect that took a lot of washes. Maybe I'm just not patient enough for the process, but as you can see I gave in and inked the outlines just to make the picture read clearly. It was an interesting experiment, and I might still try painting with coffee, but I'm also not sure what the tannins will do to the paper over time...

For anyone interested, the tea used was Twinings Irish Breakfast. I welcome tips if anybody else has had more success with this technique.

This eccentric illustration is brought to you by the children's book, 'Alexander and the Magic Mouse'. Alexander is the alligator, and the magic mouse really doesn't come into the story much, but my favorite of the characters was always the yak. She doesn't have much of a role, either, but she's described as a lady yak, who gives yak milk every day, which can be made into yak butter, such as the Tibetans use in their tea.

I guess I have this book to thank for that eccentric piece of knowledge, thanks. I have no desire to try yak butter in my tea. It sounds horrible, although that might be partly because I can't divorce in my mind how hairy yaks are, so I picture that in the tea, too.
The remaining animal in the picture is a brindle tom cat, and all these animals live with an elderly lady who's done a lot of traveling and has a weird idea of what constitutes a souvenir, but apparently lives somewhere there's no laws against exotic pets. They all live together in an absolutely gorgeous house full of lush plants and antique furniture, and they spend a lot of time all having tea together.

© Philippe Fix reproduced w/out permission.

The illustrations are gorgeous, especially a two-page spread picture of their house in the rain. At least half of them are in color, but the ones that aren't are done in a kind of sepiatone, which I thought painting with tea might imitate. No such luck, so I'll just go back to wishing I could step into the illustrations in the book.

Day 10: Water

Day ten's assignment is to use water as your medium or inspiration, but why not both? The idea of pure water as a medium sounded interesting, and initially I thought why not draw directly with water on some hard, resistant surface? I have a black sketchbook with plastic still on one cover, so I got a glass of water and a brush, and started pooling the water and trying to draw it into shapes... but I really don't recommend this method.
One pool of water in the lap later, I decided to paint with water on actual paper. Much better results, as you can see. What's even more interesting to me is the way the first-drawn shapes fade and vanish as the water dries.

Water, whales, it all goes together with this book, 'Deep Wizardry', which I first read in my Freshman year of High School, I think. This is actually the second book in a series, and I read them in order, but at the time my school library only had the first three, or possibly that's all that were written then. The series follows two kids (pre-teens?) who discover manuals to becoming wizards, and tumble into a whole hidden network of wizards that way. These people live like anybody else, for the most part, but also use their powers to maintain the balance of the world against the forces of destruction and entropy. The concepts in the book are nicely more complicated than good or evil, and are the kind of shades of grey that still resonate with me as an adult. I'll admit it though, this book struck me just about the time I was also obsessed with whales. The wizards of the world are not, as it turns out, all human. In this story the main characters temporarily take the shapes of whales to join whale wizards in the performing of an important ritual to keep the balance of the forces in their world, and there's some subtle hints at how interconnected the ocean is to everything else on earth. If the balance falters there, it's just the start of a chain reaction that would affect everything and everyone else.
It's a book well worth reading at any age.

Day 7: Stencils

I wussed out on yesterday, mostly due to the kind of sinus headache that makes it painful just to look at anything, but this is a Tuesday post, I swear. I finished this about midnight, even if it has taken me until 1 AM to get the pictures sorted out and post.

Today's (okay, Monday's) prompt was to make stencils and use them. I've never been good with stencils, no matter the size. I always end up with nothing but a big blotch when I pull them away. So of course I decided to be really insane and make teeny tiny stencils, which were probably doomed to failure.

On the other hand, what I made was supposed to look like an old carnival poster, probably screen-printed and mass produced. Flaws are acceptable. I have plans to color and weather/distress/age this, but not tonight. In fact, I have ideas for a whole big mixed-media painting of which this would only be a piece, so there may be a redux of all this at some future date.
For anyone curious, the stencils themselves were actually made by pasting some fancy decorative font characters, wingdings, and clipart into a document, printing it out on card stock, and cutting them out with an exacto blade. Some designs I had printed turned out to just be impossible to cut out at such small size, others I fudged on to make them work as stencils. I ended up doing the drawing all freehand, without much in the way of any sketch underneath, and it was done with a dip pen and india ink. I actually went through a phase in High School where I drew a whole lot that way, for a year or so, but I'm out of practice and my hand now hurts from the stippling. It took me pretty much all day, and obviously well into the night.

Tiny stencils doomed to failure.

Stencils had me thinking of simple iconic images, and somehow that led me to thinking of this book, 'The Manual of Detection'. There are a number of visual icons, and some of them are hidden in the poster here. It's a fantastically weird and kind of surreal novel, and I'm having trouble describing it at one in the morning. If there were a film made of it, then it would need to be directed by Terry Gilliam.
The setting is very film noir, kind of a bleak-sounding city, and the main character is a clerk who lives a life of dull repetition, although he actually seems very content with that. It's a detective novel, like the title would make you think, but it involves traveling in dreams and a lot of fantastic imagery, and the main threat to the city comes from a once-traveling carnival and its employees.
The character descriptions in the book are actually pretty loose, when it comes to practicals. It's one of those books where you've got no idea what most people's hair or eye color is, and even the central villain of the books is described as, I swear I'm not giving anything away here, 'squarish, dull, bored-looking'. Okay. That's not a lot to go on, for an artist. On the other hand I guess it gives you the freedom to imagine the characters however you want. The character descriptions might be vague, but there's a lot of other detailed imagery that sticks in my head, which is why I really do want to do a full painting. In the meantime, this first draft of the circus poster will have to do.

So. Much. Stippling. My hand hurts.

I owe this post to my friend Mel, who loaned me her copy of the book over a year ago. It took me a while to pick it up, but once I did I was sucked right in from the first few pages. When I asked her if she'd be willing to part with it, she made sad-eyes over the phone at me (don't ask how that works), so I had to return hers and buy my own copy. I'm glad I did. It's going on the shelf in a place of honor among my absolute favorites.
As soon as I'm finished reading it again, anyway...

Day 3: Pure paper

The prompt for day 3 in my 365 book is to make something out of paper, but no drawing, cutting, or gluing. I can't really explain how that led me to Animal Farm, beyond some vague train of thought about government, bureaucracy, and paperwork.
This method of paper sculpture was certainly a lot faster and more freeing than yesterday's. I did make some tears to separate out legs and head and tail, a method I used to use for making animals out of aluminum foil (maybe that will come in again somewhere down the road in this project). Beyond that it was a lot of crumpling and twisting. The snout was the hardest, and the head only looks good from certain angles. I probably could have taken more time on it, but there's also a point where you can overwork that kind of thing. He looks like a pig, he's got the right authoritative character, and it works for me.

Comrades, I see the light of a new future! Or just the window.

I stumbled across 'Animal Farm' at the very beginning of 6th grade, on the shelf in my Home Room. I can remember this because when I was about halfway through, or more, the teacher noticed what I was reading. He kindly asked me after class if I liked it because it was about animals, and I politely informed him that it wasn't really, it was about the corruption of power and politics and social behavior. He gave me a funny look, and told me I was right, and never questioned my choice in books again. He was a cool teacher, actually, his name was Mr. Horner and he got me into the Bald Eagle Watch project, and I remember him as one of the better teachers I've had.
This is not the same copy, because I bought it later, but I think it's the same cover illustration.

Day 2: Animal inspiration

Yes, I was once one of those little girls who was horse crazy. I drew horses more than I drew anything else, I begged my parents until they broke down for riding lessons, and I read all the classic horse books and a lot of the more syrupy girl-meets-horse paperbacks besides. My absolute favorite though, was always 'The Black Stallion'.
My copy is an old, tan book with no dust jacket, showing a little wear. There's an 'Fa' in white on the spine, which would hint it was once a library copy, but there's nothing else on or in it to hint where from. I've had it ever since I can remember. I don't know where my parents got it, or when. I used to read and reread it, or just stare at the fantastic, bold, drawings, which look like they're done in black ink and brush. I used to admire it inside and out, carry it with me outside and leave it laying in the grass on a sunny afternoon, or run my smaller toy horses across the cover, pretending it was a sandy desert floor like where the Black Stallion came from. I dragged that book all over, and I took it with me when I moved.

Then a couple years ago, I was looking at details like copyright date and all forLibraryThing (which is a great site, if you have the ambition to catalog your own books), and realized that it seems to be a First Edition.
Yikes.
When I think of how careless I was with this thing, growing up. Except I guess I wasn't too bad, because the spine is just a little loose, but it's still in pretty good shape. You can read it without worrying that any pages are going to come loose or anything. More importantly, I loved the book. Loved it inside and out, for the story, the illustrations, and the way it was bound. I still love it.

Along with drawing horses like crazy, when I was a kid, I also made a lot of three-dimensional stand up ones. I couldn't tell you how I hit on the idea, but my mother says she can recall one day when I was drawing she saw it looked like the shape I was going for was roadkill, legs splayed out and all. She asked what I was drawing and I just said 'you'll see' and cut it out of the paper, and folded it, so that it stood up on its own. She asked me where I'd seen that trick and I told her I'd just figured it out.
I made lots of stand-up animals that way, but mostly horses. They were usually simple, and I refined the technique, cutting them on a folded edge of the paper and taping on a separate neck and head. I still have some of them, barely held together with yellowed tape, paper faded. I never really thought of them as art, more like simple toys. When I got old enough that I stopped making them, my parents and friends of my parents kept asking about them, or asking me to make them one. These late creations were more complex, lots of folding and separate leg pieces, true paper sculptures like this one. I haven't made one in years and years, but the prompt was your favorite animal, that led me to the book, which led me without even thinking about it to this.
I never used to worry about the simple, on-the-fold horses much, sometimes I didn't even draw my shape first, just started cutting. This one I spent a couple hours last night making a pattern for, out of printer paper. Granted, I actually didn't change the main pieces much from my very first try. The head, legs, and body sides are just what I first drew. It's the little extra pieces like the one along the back, and the top of the head that needed refining. I cut them out, taped it together with masking tape, pulled it apart again and made adjustments. I didn't get it traced onto black card stock and put together until today, and I was out of the house and without a camera or I would have taken a picture of the pattern pieces. Still, it's all put together with scotch tape. Some things never change, I guess. I used a little glue and some spare cheap doll hair, but in retrospect I probably could have made just as good or better with mane and tail out of paper, too. I was thinking of the Black Stallion, which is an Arabian horse, and I know my horse breeds so I was going for the classic tapering head shape. It wasn't until I photographed it with the book that I noticed the artist didn't make the Black look much like the breed he's supposed to be...
Anyway, it's a neat little paper sculpture, but like all of my paper horses it's fragile. Scotch tape isn't the greatest structural material. I know it won't last except in photos, and I have enough art cluttering the house. I guess I still think of them as more like cheap toys than high art.

The Black Stallion and an old friend.