Art-Craft Challenge: Week 3 Final

Finished Flying Cupcake - Unfinished Winged Lady

SMALL WINGS: I... love cupcakes. And I want to put wings on them. Unfortunately, I could only make two winged cupcakes, since I only had two sets of small wings. They now hang over the mirror by our entranceway, so I'll post a picture of that soon so you can laugh at me. And my plaster/papier mache angelic bakery goods.

LARGE WINGS: It's hard to find things to put large wings on. They're about six inches across (per wing). I started out by gold leafing a pair, and attaching them to the model of a dressmaker's model, which has been sitting around for a couple of years. BUT I still have 2-3 pairs of the large wings. Hmmm... For the moment, "The Lady" is unfinished, I'm trying to decide what else to do with her.!

Art-Craft Challenge: Week 2 Final

Finished Piece: Choke on Smoke! (6"x12")

This is modeled on the Legend of Zelda sprite for the bomb (with graffiti around it further insulting the smoke-intolerant Dodongo, Level 2 Boss). I've been following with interest in recent years the stories of people appropriating videogame images into their public art, such as the Space Invader graffiti, and the Question Mark Blocks.

Working with that as inspiration, I thought I'd give this more of a graffiti feel to it (especially because the bright colors from old videogames feel attention-grabbing to me, like spray-paint). And that lets me get away with being less meticulous! Yay!


Keyboard Keys in Pickle Jar - getting clean

I am terrible at three-dimensional work, so I thought about ways to de-construct the keyboard in order to make it work for my two-dimensional planning. I decided to go with a mosaic so I got out my screwdriver to take this thing apart. Taking apart keyboards is a gross project - this is a pic of the inside of the keyboard. Needless to say, I did a very careful job of cleaning the keys.

Since I'm a big videogame nerd, I thought going with some sprites would be a good idea. With help from sites like Sprite Stitch I discovered that holy crap, most character sprites (like Ness or Luigi) take a LOT of "pixels" and I only had about 150 of the same sized pieces. I decided to stick with one of my favorites (Zelda) and one of my favorite items (bomb). I made my own mosaic pattern in Illustrator since I couldn't get the stupid Pixelate filter to deliver in Photoshop.


Painted Keys

Once the keys were dry, I laid them out in the correct bomb configuration, and found a canvas that they would fit on. I found some collage paper that looks like an old painted wall. I painted the keys (made sure I re-counted how many of each color I need) and while they were drying, I attached the paper to the canvas.

I started sketching some other "graffiti" ideas to put on the piece, I didn't just want to put "Dodongo Dislike Smoke", I thought that was too easy. I was thinking more along the lines of an angry anti-Dodongo Hyrulian, graffiti-ing their town. So I came up with the phrase "Choke on smoke" and an insulting sketch of Dodongo. Now every time I look at it, I think of Hyrulian political graffiti.



Well, I better find old stuff to make things, quick! This week's already started!

Also, for those who asked previously, I did put last week's "There's a Girl in the Garden" in my Etsy shop.

Art-Craft Challenge: Week 1 Final

There's a Girl in the Garden

Here's the final piece I created using the materials. I liked the phrase "There's a girl in the garden" so I went with that as a theme (it's from "Shawn of the Dead", but this isn't a zombie).

I had to work around covering up too much of the background paper, because I like it too much. Once I had the girl in the corner, I realized that she needed to be looking at something, so I made her some bird friends, who she is helping reunite.


I checked out this great book from the library about collage art that mentioned the technique of transferring inkjet images (The Art of Personal Imagery by Corey Moortgat).

The left two images are using the transfer technique (which is just essentially printing out the image, spraying it with water, and then pressing it to rag paper). They both have some highlighting done with watercolor pencils. (The robot is just drawn with watercolor pencils and watercolors).


Placement: At some point during the process, I started thinking of the phrase "There's a girl in the garden" (which is a line from "Shawn of the Dead").

I didn't really want to make it a zombie girl, so I just went with the phrase and did some different interpretations. Here are four versions of the piece that I did by creating different images and layering them. Almost all of them are inkjet image transfers, except for the bottom left, which is colored pencils and watercolor.

I ended up going with the bottom left one, since the others all blocked a lot of the cool background.