Not April Fool's, sorry.

So I'm thinking that not being able to finish by midnight probably means I'm making my projects too complex...

Day 22: Create a bridge

I was saving this book for a special project, because it's one of my absolute favorites. I came across 'Winter's Tale' in my High School library, but fell in love with it immediately and spent years tracking down a copy.
It's a complicated book, and I'll admit it's not the kind that will be a favorite with everyone who reads it. The plot twists and turns through time and place, and pinning down what it's actually about can be tricky. It's about people, and New York from its aristocratic heights to the terrifying depths of slums, and how dreams shape history and what we do echoes down through time. If you're in love with cities, this is well worth reading.

Bridge of light, cast on the wall.

The main character, Peter Lake, has an influence in the course of the city's history in a dozen different ways, although to his perspective he never does anything all that exceptional. He may be one of the few characters in the book who doesn't have big world-changing dreams. One of the dreamers is a man named Jackson Mead, and his grand dream is building bridges. He sees them as eternal rainbows, a kind of heavenly architecture. It's not just the construction he's in love with, but the very concept of what a bridge is, and how it connects people and places.
It's probably important to note that even though this story takes place in New York, it's a kind of mythical New York that isn't quite historically accurate. In a way this New York is even larger than life, and much of the story takes place around the turn of the century.

Brooklyn Bridge, 1896

It's late, and I'm failing at finding the words to adequately describe this complex and moving story.

The bridge I've created is made of light, which is an entire rainbow in itself. I made a stencil using this photo of the Brooklyn Bridge, so with a good light source it can be projected to bridge just about anything you want to connect.

Day 21: 10-Word Love Story

The bonus for this prompt was to illustrate your 10-word love story, and I guess I was... inspired, this evening. Because I still wanted this prompt to connect to a book, I chose 'The Dream Hunters' by Neil Gaiman. Apparently this story is available in a couple versions, including a graphic novel, but the copy I have is more like a children's storybook, with illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano. If you've never seen his work, you should google him, and while you're at it add 'dreamhunters' so you can see his pictures for this story.

The author wrote the very popular Sandman series of graphic novels, of which I'm also a fan. This is technically a part of that and the Sandman, Morpheus, does play a pivotal role in the tale, but it stands alone beautifully so don't be scared off if you're not familiar with the series.
There's several plots here to give you everything you could want in a classic fairytale: Trickery, love, monsters, a quest, revenge, hard justice and a bittersweet ending. It's not a story for the kids, unless they're the kind of kids who also get to read Grimm's fairy tales the way they were originally written.

At the core, this is a love story, between a fox (possibly a kitsune?) and a Buddhist priest, which takes place in both the waking world and in dreams. The Dream King grants help to them both in turn, while pointing out their love is unlikely to have a happy ending.
It doesn't, I'm warning you now, this is not a cheerful book. At the end it's hinted that they still find love together, in their way.
This is a gorgeous book, both the story and the illustrations, which I tried to mimic the style of in my own work. These paintings are watercolors, a couple of 4x6" pieces on cardstock. This marks the first time I've gotten any success out of using salt with watercolors! I did add some pencil for details on both pictures.

Lives sacrificed for love may yet be joined in dreams.

My own artwork of the lovers reunited against Yoshitaka Amano's illustration of part of their struggle.

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.

This is not a post

Skipping a day due to lingering migraine effects.

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.