Tag Archives: art

September Creative Experiments Recap

Posted by melydia on September 30, 2010 3 comments

As I posted at the beginning of the month, I decided to take part in the Creative Experiments for September over at Daisy Yellow. Let’s see how I did, shall we?

â™¥ Carry a notebook with you for a month, adding notes, scribblings, to-do’s, sketches, doodles, coffee stains and whatever you wish.

I always drag a beat-up old spiral around with me, but I was only a few pages away from the end so I decided to finish up that one and start a whole new kind of notebook: a National Brand hardcover, quad-ruled Lab Book. It was certainly a new experience, but I felt more free to doodle and otherwise not just write one big, unbroken paragraph of rambling prose. (But I still did that too.) I also felt more compelled to fill the entire page, perhaps due to the lack of defined margins.

â™¥ One day this month, write a thoughtful description of 5 sounds that you encounter.

I love this prompt. I’ve never encountered anything like it. Unfortunately, I kept forgetting to do it, even during the most perfect time for it (the Celtic Classic), so I just took a few minutes here and there during an ordinary Monday.

My coworker talking on the phone in Persian. It’s so beautiful, and yet I’m so used to hearing him speak in English that it always takes me a second to realize I can’t understand what he’s saying. It reminds me of when I’d listen to another coworker at another job speak Polish on the phone. I swear it sounded like English backwards.
The printer hums and ticks like a vacuum that just sucked up a pebble. It’s a happy noise – printing something out generally signifies completion of a task.
The racket of the locker room at the gym: a child squealing, over and over again. There comes a point in every child’s life when they discover they can produce a high-pitched shriek that makes adult ears bleed and dogs take note. I guess the mother has learned the quickest route to quiet is to ignore the noise. Anything else will just encourage more. I’m not sure I can hear that sound without shutting my eyes and taking a deep breath.
A cell phone ringing (jangling?) from inside a locked locker. Surprisingly clear, not muffled at all. Reminds me of a sound from an old video game, like a laser pistol on an old Atari or Nintendo. I’m positive I’ve heard this specific noise before in some game I used to play as a child, but I can’t place it.
My cat’s strange, creaky greeting. Sort of a “meh-eh?” – like a question. Often she opens her mouth before speaking as if she has to force out the noise. It doesn’t sound especially friendly, but it’s one of her “I love you/pet me” meows. Over the years I’ve come to find it cute, even endearing.

â™¥ Create an itunes playlist or mix CD with 15 songs that make you feel just right.

This was by far the most difficult. I almost never listen to music anymore: in the car it’s audiobooks, and it’s rare for me to spend enough time in my study for listening to music to even occur to me.

“Time to Start” by Blue Man Group
“Sin” by Pet Shop Boys
“Send Me an Angel” by Real Life
“It’s Good to be Alive” by DJ Rap
“Running in the Family” by Level 42
“Mess” by Ben Folds Five
“Magic” by Ben Folds Five
“Blue” by Eiffel 65
“Asshole” by Jim’s Big Ego
“Lifeline” by Copper Sails
“Ana Ng” by They Might Be Giants
“Never There” by Cake
“Anna Begins” by Counting Crows
“Always” by Erasure
“Puttin’ on the Ritz” by Taco

â™¥ Read four (4) books this month, fiction or non-fiction.

The books I read (and reviewed) during the month of September:

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The Immortals by John F. Ferrer
Time of the Twins by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That’s fewer than usual because Crime and Punishment took roughly half the normal human lifespan to get through. Holy crap that’s a long book!

This was lots of fun, but I wish I’d put more concentrated effort into it instead of just signing up and then promptly forgetting all about it. Maybe next month, eh?

Intervention Sketching

Posted by melydia on September 14, 2010 1 comments

Me, as sketched by Alex Heberling of alexsguide.net. I'm a poor judge of how much it really looks like me in particular, but my cowlick is spot on!

This past weekend I attended Intervention. We were in the Artist Alley, which always means a lot of time behind a table with people occasionally coming up to talk to you (and/or buy stuff). From time to time I’d wander around and chat with folks, but mostly I just sat and amused myself with my sketchbook.

A couple of random skulls

On Friday evening I participated in a special session of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School. Our model was dressed as Kali, complete with skull necklace and blue skin. Most of my drawings pretty much suck (30-second poses are not my forte), but I got a couple halfway decent ones I inked and colored the next morning.

Not the best, but certainly the most complete drawing I did that evening.

During the breaks they introduced Stupid Artist Tricks contests. The first was of Kali destroying the world, and mine was chosen as one of the top three by the staff, which would then be voted on through applause. I got by far the least applause, but I was so psyched to have been chosen at all that I didn’t mind. Besides, the girl who won totally deserved it. Her Kali-meets-Katamari was brilliant.

My last-place masterpiece.

By Sunday morning I was starting to get bored and uninspired, so I colored some old line-art drawings I did at another convention, possibly Otakon 2008.

After I ran out of things to color, I drew a vampire chicken.

Look, I don't know.

Anyway, I loved Intervention and we will definitely be there next year. And I’ll probably continue to draw inexplicable things.

Creative Experiments at Daisy Yellow

Posted by melydia on September 1, 2010 1 comments

Daisy Yellow is an excellent blog about art and creativity, especially in terms of your daily life. I’m a fairly new follower but I have found it an invaluable resource for inspiration.

Every month she posts new creative experiments meant to challenge you in new ways. I’ve decided to participate in these for September. I will not be doing all of the challenges, but I think I can commit to these:

â™¥ Carry a notebook with you for a month, adding notes, scribblings, to-do’s, sketches, doodles, coffee stains and whatever you wish. — This isn’t too different from what I normally do, but I’ll try to be more mindful of actually taking the notebook with me when I go out.

â™¥ One day this month, write a thoughtful description of 5 sounds that you encounter. — I am fascinated by this idea.

â™¥ Create an itunes playlist or mix CD with 15 songs that make you feel just right. — This will be the most difficult, as I don’t listen to much music these days.

â™¥ Read four (4) books this month, fiction or non-fiction. — Not a problem.

I think it’ll be fun. Now to go find a notebook…

Life Drawing

Posted by melydia on August 3, 2010 None comments

I recently participated in Sketching in the Atrium, one of the Free Summer Saturdays program at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, so I grabbed a bunch of pencils and hopped on the Metro.

Basically it was just free life drawing. A (clothed) model posed on a box for ten minutes at a time, and we all drew. Unfortunately, we were sitting in those awful folding chairs where the seat and back are just strips of canvas, and by the break at the halfway point my butt was pretty sore. After about two and a half hours of sketching (with only a half hour to go) I decided I was too tired to continue, snapped a quick photo of the model, and headed out.

Our beautiful model

My drawings didn’t turn out spectacularly, but considering they were each done in ten minutes or less, that’s not so bad. (Of course, I probably would have been happier with mine were I not sitting next to Edgar Friggin’ Degas, who was making masterpieces with – I kid you not – RoseArt colored pencils.) Here are a couple of my favorites:

This was my first time drawing from a real live model. All my previous “from life” drawings have been inanimate objects (and a few sleeping cats), mostly because people tend not to sit still long enough. Yes, I know that’s the idea behind gesture drawing, but I have yet to master that. And ten minutes was just enough time to get down a good solid sketch without having time to obsess over perfecting it.

Free life drawing sessions are extremely rare, and I’m glad I took advantage of this opportunity. There’s another session in September I’ll probably sign up for.

Sketch Crawls in DC

Posted by melydia on July 15, 2010 None comments

Local artist Elizabeth Graeber has organized a sketch crawl for this Saturday, July 17th, in Washington, DC. The itinerary is extensive, starting at the Washington Monument and ending at the National Zoo (via Dupont Circle). Registration is free; they just want to know how many people to expect.

I’m still waffling on whether or not to go. Ordinarily I’d be there in a heartbeat, but downtown Washington in mid-July isn’t the most comfortable of locales. That, and there’s a BC in DC meet in Silver Spring, MD, near a Moog Guitar Clinic in Wheaton that my husband is thinking of attending. So we’ll see.

However, I will definitely be attending another drawing event this month: Sketching in the Atrium at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washingon, DC. Registration is, again, free. It’s being held on July 31st, the same day as the next international SketchCrawl. (There’s another Corcoran event on September 4, which I may also attend.) Hope to see you there!

Repainting Burger King Toys with Office Supplies

Posted by melydia on July 7, 2010 None comments

Burger King has the best toys in their kids’ meals. Or maybe it’s just that they happen to partner with things that amuse me, such as Neopets or the Twilight franchise. However, sometimes I get toys that are repeats or simply ones I don’t want, and then I’m not sure what to do with them.

So I decided to paint them.

But the thing is, these toys tend to find their way into my office, as I have much more room on my desk for dust-catchers than at home. The first one was a few years ago, during the Neopets promotion. I was buying the kids’ meals strictly for the prize codes for use on the site – the toys didn’t interest me so much since there wasn’t a Xweetok toy. One day, after hitting up BK for lunch, I brought a Poogle back to my office. It sat there on top of my PC for weeks until one day, during a slow afternoon, my officemate and I were discussing The Dark Knight. (Comic book movies were one of our most common topics of conversation, actually.) My officemate was cleaning out his desk, as his last day was coming up (he left to go to graduate school full time), and I decided I wanted to give him something. So I painted the Poogle like Heath Ledger as The Joker. Needless to say, my coworker loved it.

Fast forward to a few days ago. BK was out of Twilight: Eclipse toys, so they stuck in a Marmaduke toy instead. (I guess they figured something random was better than nothing at all.) Before you chastise me, the Eclipse toys are hilarious. My Bella Bracelet looks like it was made by Duplo, and my coworkers really want me to get the Edward hologram ring. Anyway, back to Marmaduke. Or Giuseppe, rather. While the other toys had action-packed names like “Pouncin’ Marmaduke” and “Darting Lightning,” I got Loungin’ Giuseppe, whose special talent was described in the pamphlet thusly: “Giuseppe can sit on his pillow.” Whee.

In the film, Giuseppe is a hairless Chinese Crested dog. When cast in plastic, this means he has Ears of Doom. We decided he looked a big like Gizmo from Gremlins. And thus a new project began.

I thought about making this a tutorial, but there isn’t much to say. Take a plastic toy and recolor it using stuff around the office. And….that’s about it. So instead I’m just going to share the results with you.

Poogle as The Joker

Materials used: Liquid Paper (or generic equivalent), red and black Sharpies, green dry-erase marker

Giuseppe as Gizmo

Materials used: Liquid Paper, brown dry-erase marker

Yes, I only colored their heads. There’s only so much Liquid Paper I’m willing to waste on these things, after all.

My coworker, having seen my handiwork, was sad that I’d given away my first Joker Poogle. Luckily, I had another one (a green one, this time), so I brought it in and repainted it. Now he has it on his desk, and he loves it. He also suggested I start a blog dedicated to kids’ meal toys repainted with office supplies. Which I would totally do, except I have no more toys, and I don’t really like kids’ meals enough to go purchase them on my own.

ATCs en masse – an experiment

Posted by melydia on June 10, 2010 None comments

Artist Trading Cards, usually abbreviated ATCs, are 3.5″ x 2.5″ pieces of art, more often traded than sold (hence the name). I first discovered ATCs through my interest in mail art, but didn’t start trading them until I joined Swap-bot, an online, mostly arts’n’crafts trading site. I usually create them as small individual drawings. Then I decided to try something different: ATCs en masse, or creating a bunch of small pieces of art from one larger one. This isn’t a new idea, just one I’ve never tried before.

I started by drawing one big zentangle on a normal 9.75×12″ piece of sketchbook paper. I used a black Koh-I-Noor pen because that’s what I had on hand. That took an extremely long time. Like, many hours. Zentangles are, by their very nature, extremely detailed. But, as their name implies, it can also be somewhat relaxing. This was my first one, and perhaps I was a little overambitious. They say that one cannot fail to make a zentangle, and that it is what it is, but I’ve never been much of a repetitive pattern doodler – I’m not really that type of person. So this was an interesting experience for me, concentrating on pattern and abstraction rather than copying something from life or a photograph. I’m not sure if zentangles are supposed to look quite so…psychadelic, but mine sure does.

Monster zentangle

As this is a trading card, it has to be reasonably stiff: no drawing on a cut-up index card and claiming it’s an ATC. Mine tend to be extra thick because I usually start with a plastic Neopets trading card, put something pretty on the back, put white paper on the front, and then put my art on top of the white paper. The white paper is the ATC’s undershirt: if I leave it off, the original card image shows through the drawing.

To some people, the back of the ATC is half the art, but I don’t see it that way. I like the backing to be somewhat nice, but if it’s just white (or white paper with colored pencil shading), that’s fine too. Recently I acquired a NASA planner from 2009 as a freebie somewhere, so I used a few of the nifty galaxy and nebula photos for my ATC backs. The back also generally includes all the information about the card. I haven’t found any official rules about what to include (indeed, the only “official” rule is the size), but generally I write “Artist Trading Card” at the top, then my name (well, melydia, anyway) and the date and usually my URL. If the art has a title, I’ll put that. If it’s for a swap, I’ll put the swap name. That’s about it. I haven’t quite figured out what an “artist’s signature” is, as I always sign the image on the front of the card.

The card backs attached to the zentangle. I didn't worry too much about "right side up".

The cards' placement on the zentangle.

I decided to add just a little bit of color to the fronts, if only to differentiate them a little bit more. Since the design was already very busy, I used the palest colored pencils I own – Earth Colors Memory Pencils – and used two colors per card. I restricted myself like that because I have a tendency to want to use every single color available to me. I didn’t want these cards to be nauseating.

Anyway, after a bit of coloring they’re ready to go:

The final ATCs

I have mixed feelings about this experiment. I think if I were more comfortable with abstract art I could make some really great ATCs this way. I found making the huge zentangle to be frankly tedious. Maybe I’d enjoy it more with a smaller canvas, like a postcard. Another possibility is to make a big collage and then cut it into cards, but that doesn’t really interest me. As much as I enjoy gluebooking, outright collage is unpleasantly difficult for me.

I’m thinking of bringing these as party favors to an upcoming Swap-bot meet’n’greet. I hope ten people show, or I’ll have no idea what to do with the others.

End note: my husband was very disappointed that I cut up the zentangle without scanning it properly. I hadn’t realized he was such a fan of that sort of art. Huh.

Hey Postcard Lovers

Posted by melydia on June 4, 2010 None comments

To my postcard-loving readers:

From time to time I will be doing more art experiments, and many of them will be on postcard-sized paper because I seem to enjoy the smaller canvas. I have absolutely nothing to do with most of these cards beyond stuffing them in an accordion file and forgetting about them. So I figure I might as well mail them. Yesterday’s experiment has already been mailed out, but if you could like to receive any of my future experiments, please let me know. I can’t promise it’ll be beautiful but it will be original. And if my mailing list is short enough, you’ll receive cards multiple times. (Though if you’re outside the USA, it’ll depend heavily on the current status of my wallet.)

And it won’t just be the experiments. Sometimes I just get a wild hair and decide to start making postcards. Mailart calls and swaps are all well and good but sometimes I feel like being more random than that.

Before you ask, yes, I am already a member of sendsomething and PostCrossing. I do use them from time to time, but I figured maybe somebody out there might be interested in receiving random mail from yours truly and felt safer about giving their address to me than posting it online.

I guess I should mention the obvious: I won’t share/sell/forward your information to anybody. And you don’t have to send anything in return. Just one request: if you throw it in the trash, please don’t tell me about it. :)

Eyeshadow Art – An Experiment

Posted by melydia on June 3, 2010 1 comments

I’m going to be in a wedding this summer and I realized as I was going through my makeup that none of it had been worn since my own wedding some four and a half years ago, which meant that the very newest stuff dated from then and quite a bit of it was much, much older. I hate throwing things away, especially when they’ve barely been used, but it was time. So I decided to experiment with the makeup as art supplies.

I used watercolor paper (more specifically, watercolor postcards).Â I figured the more texture on the paper, the more likely it was for the makeup to stick at all, and I think I was right. Since I was working only with the makeup I already owned, and I never wear makeup, my selection was pretty limited: Lancome Colour Focus 4Dreaming, Mary Kay Signature Pink Pout lip gloss (apparently a much sought-after discontinued color), N.Y.C. black eyeliner pencil (given my complexion I have absolutely no idea what I was doing even owning this thing), Clinique black/brown gentle waterproof mascara, and assorted Mary Kay eyeshadow, blush, mascara (unlabeled and five years old, so I have no hope of finding them; suffice it to say they were various shades of brown).

It didn’t work out so well.

The makeup was all more or less destroyed in the process of doing this, and I made a mess. (The latter is hardly surprising; I can manage to make a mess with a gluestick. It’s a talent.) The trouble with using makeup on paper is that you need a lot of it for it to really show up, and if you use anything non-powder like lipstick or mascara or eyeliner, the contrast is too sharp. If I were to do this again, I would start with a much broader palette of colors. Then I would choose to draw something that is in no way associated with makeup. And skip the mascara.

But at least now I don’t feel so bad about throwing it all in the trash.

WG 2010-19: Getting Graphic

Posted by melydia on June 2, 2010 None comments

This week’s WG is about graphic novels. Now, despite the fact that I’m married to a webcomic artist, my experience with comics is extremely limited. I am slowly (oh, so slowly) working my way through the Death Note manga series and have read the first few collections of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I’ve only read three self-contained graphic novels: Malice, which was kind of meh;Â In Odd We Trust, which was pretty decent; and Cancer Vixen, which was absolutely excellent.

My to-be-read pile has quite a few goodies, however, including The Crow, Watchmen, Preludes and Nocturnes, and Maus. I look forward to those. I have to get into a special mode to read graphic novels, though, or else I just zip from word balloon to word balloon and miss the illustrations all together. Â I suspect that comes from reading comic strips (which I love), since often the dialogue is all that really matters. Â Not so in graphic novels.

I am also, ostensibly, writing my own graphic novel. As of this writing the story, dialogue, and storyboarding is all finished. All that’s left is the actual drawing. You know, just a minor step.

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