Altered Calendar: July

Now that it is the last day of July, I figure it is about time for me to post July's altered calendar piece. I basically filled this mountain with flamingo silhouettes. It's flamingo mountain! That's all I have for you today.

New Yorker Spots

The second assignment for my illustration class at the Museum School was really, really fun-- we drew series of spots, which are the little images in the middle of magazine articles such as The New Yorker. The illustrations are in black and white and don't have anything to do with anything so we could draw whatever we wanted as long as it was tiny (3" x 3" max). Most people in my class did a few illustrations on one theme but I thought the assignment was awesome so I made it my personal goal to do as many as I could in a week.

Aaaaand here they are!

I did this candle and the small person with a giant coat and house plant in class:

Then I thought, "I should do illustrations on a theme. How about fluffy animals?"

In following the theme of fluffy animals, I drew the fluffiest animal I have ever met-- one of the dogs that belonged to my host family when I spent a semester in Mexico. Her name was Tonka:

Then I thought, "Woah-- ALL of my host family's dogs had so much character. I'll draw all of them!" so here they are. The wrinkly one is Jani (pronounced like honey), then there's Tonka again, and on the bottom row the black one is Pintocha, and the one looking away is Georgie.

(These dogs were not drawn to scale. See below.)

So then one day I was sitting in Copley Square with my sketchbook and I drew a series of spots of Copley. I did the dome of Old South Church:

The door to the Boston Public Library:

A house sparrow:

And a tree:

Also here is a shopping cart that is completely random:

... and a girl hugging a star. If she were hugging a real star, she would probably burn to death, but she seems ok.

And finally, I did a series where I messed with a bunch of famous art.

This guy with no clothes has stepped in yet another icky clock puddle while walking around in Dalí's masterpiece.

Someone is invading Mona's personal bubble here:

This is my take on the beautiful tradition of nautical painting:

And finally, I gave this guy something to REALLY scream about.

The assignment for next week is cookbook illustration, so get psyched for some food I'm about to draw! 

Also, I was enrolled in a second class this semester called Introduction to Adobe Illustrator but I have decided to drop the class for many reasons, the main ones being I didn't realize that I would find Adobe Illustrator so boring and I can't think of any way to apply it to any of my artistic goals. I think Photoshop would be more up my alley. Don't get me wrong-- Illustrator seems super useful and I'm glad we have artists and designers out there who can use it and enjoy using it. However, I am not one of them. Also, there was a wait-list for people who really wanted to get into the class and I figured they would make better use of it than I would. AND the class was on Zumba night and the thought of giving up Zumba for 14 weeks so that I could sit at a computer was very sad to me. 

The Last of the Cornell Studio Ceramics

Well, it is official: The Cornell Ceramics Studio is being shut down after 54 years of use by the Ithaca and Cornell communities, artists, students, and anyone else who was interested so that they may transform the space into a "multi purpose room." Read: a room that will probably end up with some grungy couches and a broken pool table in about 6 years. There are no other public ceramics studios in Ithaca. I think this will be a huge loss to Ithaca as a whole.

Yes, even after a petition with OVER 1,000 SIGNATURES, many letters on behalf of the studio to the president of Cornell and the Dean of Student Life, and a spirited protest in the rain which featured me on a bullhorn chanting things like, "Make a bowl! Make a pot! Close the studio? I think not!" the higher ups at Cornell still decided to shut the studio down for good.

I am super bummed out.

I went to the studio today to collect what I think (?) is the last of the stuff I made and I am pleased with how everything came out! I have all these new ideas about more things I could make but oh wait... I can't because they're closing the studio to make way for a multi purpose room.

Anyway, here they are!

My mom chose the glazes for this mug with its little bird alighting the handle. I think she has been even more excited than I was for it to get fired! My mom is adorable.

This is the first bowl I have ever made that is is actually big enough to fit a meal's worth of soup.

I added patterns to this little mug using some stampy things I found at Ten Thousand Villages (I threw that picture of me holding them for reference). I am new at stamping wet clay and so I ended up with a very asymmetrical mug but you know what they say; if you want perfect ceramics, go to Walmart.

And below is what I have been referring to as my Wonky Pitcher. It's one of the weirdest things I have ever thrown. It is super lopsided, doesn't pour very easily, and the glaze came out... well, not quite how I expected it would, but the little guy has grown on me. Three cheers for Wonky Pitcher.

The following are my latest MAGICAL CERAMICS!!!

Yes, that is a unicorn mug!

It reads, "Just say NEIGH to people who don't believe in MAGIC."

Look at that glaze! How cool is that?

Ok, and I know you have been on the edge of your seats waiting for these bad boys to come out of the kiln and here they are-- HARRY POTTER POTION BOTTLES!!!!!!

Felix Felicis and Polyjuice Potion!! I also made Veritaserum but it is hard to read and the lid hasn't been fired yet, but when I get it, I'll post it up.

Anyway, to take my mind off of how bummed I am that I will never take another class at the Cornell Ceramics Studio, I started taking a watercolor class at CSMA. Soon to come: a post about watercolors!

The Error part of Trial and Error.

Hey friends, I just got two new pieces home from the ceramics studio that didn't go the way I had planned. I had an awesome ceramics professor in college who used to say that clay is a good metaphor for life. I think that's true-- not everything works out the way you want them to all the time. I'm posting photos of these pieces anyway because even if they aren't perfect, they're still kind of cool.

First of all, I made this bird with five smaller birds stacked on its back. Now that I am doing so much throwing, I started missing hand building, so sculpted these little guys and stuck them together.

The glaze did not come out quite like I had hoped, but it started growing on me. I think it sort of looks like the sky, which fits in nicely the bird motif.

Then I took it home, showed my mom, and she promptly dropped it and the tail broke. Oops.

It is a pretty clean break, so maybe there is a way to glue it back together?

I have learned that if you lament about a broken piece of ceramics to an experienced ceramic artist, they will shrug and say, "Make a new one." This is totally different from all the painters I have worked with, who tend to want everything to be just right. I interned with an artist who didn't want me to breathe on her wet paintings. Another artist for whom I interned monitored my every brush stroke on my first day. 

I am not exaggerating. 

I'm sure there are many fussy artists who work with clay out there, and painters who are not so particular, but based on the ones I have met, I think painters could learn a lot from potters. 

....... And speaking of potters, my Harry Potter bowl came out of the kiln as well!

I decorated it based on the test tiles featured in this post.

Ron came out awesome... but unfortunately Harry's and Hermione's faces melted.

It is a sad day in the wizarding world when the boy who lived and the cleverest witch of her age were defeated by a mere kiln and one-layer-of-clear-glaze-too-many (even after Gary warned me not to use too much!). I was thinking that maybe I could just say that it is portraying a moment from their second year, when Ron's wand was broken. Maybe his spell backfired and melted his friends' faces, then Madam Pomfrey would re-solidify them in a jiffy. 

I will draw a little cartoon of whoever can come up with the best story as to why Harry and Hermione's faces melted. Extra points for the cleverest references to the books and uses of additional characters.

Arts for All Marathon, No Running Required

Hey all! For today’s post I want to talk about a project I did this past Fall as a fundraiser for the Community School of Music and Art in Ithaca's Arts for All Marathon. It took place mostly in October and the idea was that local artists would volunteer to create a piece of art in whatever medium they chose (painting, collage, poems, music, plays…!) that had something to do with the number 26, because the fundraiser was to last 26 days and a marathon is just over 26 miles. Those artists then got people to sponsor them and donate money to CSMA. Cool, eh?

So I chose to make one small painting every day for each of those 26 days and exchange them for donations to CSMA. Each painting is on a 6” x 6” piece of watercolor paper and incorporates birds, trees, and houses. Why birds, trees, and houses? Well, psychoanalyze me, but for whatever reason, those are three subjects towards which I frequently gravitate in my artwork. I thought it would be a cool creative challenge to see how many ways I could re-configure them and make them interact. It really pushed me to think about the images in new ways and generate more ideas than I initially thought I could. I found that I could never have started with painting #18 for example. I had to do all the paintings before it to arrive at that idea. 

In fact, this would be a cool project for other artists to do as well, I think. SO if you are an artist, whatever your medium, I challenge you to pick three favorite images and combine them in as many ways as you can! GO!

I am posting many of the CSMA bird/tree/house paintings. I didn't put all of them up because some of them were better than others... which is bound to happen when you make many paintings in rapid succession. In fact, I think some of the best advice for people who aren't sure of themselves as artists is to not be afraid of making bad art. Bad art helps you make good art. The worst thing you can do is nothing.

Sooooo here they are!

This one is my homage to Magritte. He is awesome.

This is the longest-legged duck in the WORLD!

OH! And COMING SOON: Absurdist collaborative comics. YES!