 "Growing up reading stories about the moon outlining rabbits in the cold winter. The withered trees were not thirsty." I was intrigued by some posts I saw online about altered book art. This style of art uses pages from books and adds art work on top of the text to create the pieces. I saw examples using ink, pastel, acrylic paint and watercolour. Since I have a class coming up that is based on an artist that uses both images, words and weaving I decided to do some experimenting. The first thing I did was pick up a used book that look old. I bought a copy of "Mostly In Clover" by Harry J. Boyle, printing in 1963. I loved the old look of the book and the older way it was written. From the snippets I glanced at the book seems to be about growing up in rural Ontario. The next part was the hardest for me. Being a book lover I would never support destroying books so cutting a page out of a book was hard to do, not psychically but mentally. It took me three days to start the project because of this. I felt like I should at least read the book first but then thought maybe I'd get attached to it and then I wouldn't' be able to use it for this project. Silly I know but that's what ran through my mind. Eventually I sliced a page out and started in on my first experiment. I looked at the page I cut out and started to read though the text circling words that stood out, trying to weave together an sentence or thought with those words. I then decided on the imagery I wanted to reinforce the words I had chosen and the method by which I would create the art around the words. I experimented with different materials including watercolour, acrylic and ink. I even did some simple stitching with embroidery floss to lead the eye from word to word.
0 Comments
 The girls have their first ever play performance of the Little Mermaid Jr., coming up next month. Being the maker that I am I couldn't wait to jump in a help with sets and costumes. Over the course of the month I ended up making some sea and lagoon creatures and a 10 foot long ship (with the help of my brother, father and husband who helped to build the frame. The ship was by far the most time consuming and frustrating. I had a friend of mine how works at Home Depot rescue as much sign board and cardboard as she could and pile it up in my garage. Then I sat there looking at the pile for weeks trying to figure out how on earth I was going to build a ship that would hold five kids and look good form both the side and front angle. I ended up enlisting the help of my brother, father and husband to construct a wooded frame. I popped off to work one day and when I got home there was the frame and ribs of a 10 foot long ship. From there we just got in the groove and while we tweaked the frame and added on a rear level and a mast I also cut the panels out of sign board and painted them too look like wooden planks. I constructed the anchor out of cardboard and paper mache. The wheel was a supplied to us from an art house and was constructed out of foam. Once we had it all assembled we had to take it all apart and rebuild it at the school since it was too large to get in the van or even through the school door. Once on the stage we added casters so the student could roll it on and off stage. On to the costumes. Using an existing fish hat that we already had in the costume trunk I adjusted and made a new hat based on it. I ended up with an orange and white fish and a blue and yellow one. Along with those I made fleece arm sleeves with semi transparent fins hanging from them made out of sheer material. I also constructed a seahorse hat/backpack that sits on your head and stretches down your back, worn both like a hat and a backpack at the same time. I didn't have a pattern for this one or any idea how it would turn out. I think it was a success in the end. And when you're not wearing it, it makes for a great cuddly stuffie. Next up was a frog. The hat was fairly simple and I decided to use the remaining material to make froggie gloves. I think the gloves were my favourite part of the costume. I had a shark costume I had made for my husband one Hallowe'en (He was a Rhett and Link Clown Shark) that I repurposed as a costume for the play. The seagulls all had white shirts and brimmed hats with feathers glued to them. I finished these costumes off by sewing orange fleece leggings with bird toed feet that was elasticized on top of the actors feet. Lastly I whipped up a snail costume made from two pairs of leggings sew into a long tube and rolled up to make the shell, which was then worn like a backpack. The hat I modeled after a balaclava and added a headband inside to attach the garden wire eye stalks to. Add a nice brown or tan pair of shorts and kaboom...you're a snail. It all looked amazing in the end, the kids loved it, and we received many wonderful comments on how awesome the ship looked. On closing night after the show we dismantled the ship again to get it ready for shipping it off to another school who is doing the same performance. Many of the costumes went along too. The performance was amazing. I am so proud of my girls for getting up and performing in their school play and I loved being a part of it all.
 One of my favourite things to make as gifts for people in my family are t-shirts. I have been making t-shirts for fun for 20 years. originally I hand painted them with fabric paints. I made a bunch of t-shirts for myself in high school and often made ones for family members to mark a special occasion. With the acquisition of my graphic design skill set I started using photoshop or illustrator to make my designs and then print them out on transfer paper. I have been ironing on my hand made character alphabet for years but more recently have been intrigued with making t-shirts that play on pop culture or ones that use altered logos in their design. My son's name is Torren (a seldom seen name anywhere let alone on a personalized item) so I have made several t-shirts for him replacing his name in the logo.
 My daughters have a classmate who is a huge Wonder Woman fan. My cousin's daughter, likewise, is a fan of superheroes.
With the new Wonder Woman coming out I thought it would be cool to buy a fleece Wonder Woman hat for all the super fans that I knew. The problem was I couldn't find any for sale online. So I decided to try my hand at making one. I revisited my double sided fleece seal hat and my Fiona hot from Adventure Time and came up with a new template. Voila! The new Wonder Woman fleece Hat was created! My ultimate goal would be to make a version of this hat that is reversible like the seal hat but with Wonder Woman on one side and Supergirl on the reverse. Then maybe a Batman/Superman one, an Autobot/Decpeticon one... Oh the possibilities. For March I decided to post something that is quite different from my usual endeavors. In addition to my love of art, I also love music. (Listening to music, playing music, singing along to music). I can honestly say, when I was younger I never devoted the time to music that I did to art. However, all those piano lessons I took then did allow me to revisit music now that I am an adult and I have since refreshed my piano skills, learned ukulele and guitar and dabbled in a few other instruments for fun. That brings us to this blog post. Yes I have written some tunes. Not on ukulele or guitar (I am still not confident enough for that) but on my ipad, using Garage Band and Auxy. I certainly do not claim to be a song writer, or even a musician, but I do like music and aspire to create my own songs. For now my ipad tunes will have to do. I have never shared these with anyone so be kind when you listen and keep in mind that this is outside my comfort zone. My drive to create though falls even into categories I know less about.
 February was the launch of my first ever youtube channel. I have been using youtube for a long time. I mean, who hasn't. From watching videos on how to fix your dishwasher to tutorials on some new software you've always wanted to learn, to learning a guitar riff to your favourite rock song, to endless silly cat videos. It can be a wealth of information and one of the biggest time burglars of my day. Stikbots were a toy that I found on a list of cool tech toys for 2016, when I was looking up Christmas ideas for kids. Unlike the various $300 robotic toys that made the list, these came in under $10, came in a variety of colours, had lots of moving limbs but no batteries. I went on a hunt to find them. After tracking down a few at Mastermind (the only retailer in Canada that currently sells them) I bought a few and the kids and I discovered our love of such a simple and yet fun toy (for those with a creative mind, a tablet or smart phone and a little know how with video and sound editing - thank you four years of film school) And so burst forth our Stikbot Youtube channel. These little toys are perfect for making stop motion animation. Little known to most, but I was accepted into film school with my own home made VHS tape stop motion made video, that I had hand drawn and recorded page by page. These days animation technology is accessible for most people, which I think is awesome because it really IS fun to make your own stop motion or animated movies. The videos I post on our channel are made from animation snippets done both by me and my children. My children tend to have more random things happen in their videos which I love because the humour is in the absurdity of it all. Our most liked video so far is our Stikbot vs. The Blob but feel free to check our other videos on our channel.  October is Hallowe'en maker month. It was a month of madness that tested my newfound sewing skills to the maximum. First off my twins decided to go as Finn and Fiona (Finn's female equivalent from an opposite reality) from the TV show Adventure Time. I quickly found an online tutorial and pattern for making a Finn hat. Fiona's hat though was move curved and had bigger ears than the Finn hat so I altered the Finn pattern to create a new pattern for Fiona. The trickiest part was figuring out how to wire form the ears so that they remained standing upright. It took two tries for me to get it working right. I was quite happy with the results. For these costumes I also had a make green backpacks for either of them, the sword of their choice (Finn chose the regular sword and Fiona chose the Wish Star Sword) both of which I made using some ideas I found online and then altered to use materials I had on hand. Fiona's skirt I also made using an old T-shirt I cut down to make into a pencil skirt. The kids were thrilled with their costumes and the Adventure Time theme caught on at school with two of their friends wanting to be characters from the show as well. I went back to my sewing machine this time to make a Jake the Dog and Cake the Cat hats for their friends costumes. I started with the same idea as the Finn hats but modified the patterns to create the final look. The four of them looked fantastic in their final costumes and worthy of any Adventure Time cosplay party. Next challenge was for my husband and my son costumes. They both wanted to be Clown Sharks, inspired by the Youtube Rhett and Link Clown Shark video. There was no online patterns available for this. There wasn't even some homemade costumes ideas to help point me in the right direction. Lucky for me I had a small shark costume already that I had picked up used a few years back that was usable for my son. There wasn't a huge selection of shark costumes for my husband though so I decided to make it from scratch...well almost scratch. I found a gray fleece sweater in the local thrift store and using a gray fleece blanket of the same colour created a huge shark head that I could sew onto the sweater. The shoes I made out of an old pair of boots with paper and duct tape. The two of them looked spectacular in their costumes and I was pleased o how they turned out. My own costume was supposed to be something along the lines of a Cheshire cat but my mask ended up looking way scarier than I had intended and I switched up my idea to make myself into The Deadly Black Catshark. I made a cat hat (along the lines of all the other hats I had made) and a scary mask using polymer clay glued to a plastic form. It was hard to see in the mask and super hot but it was fun to create regardless of how little time I was actually able to wear the mask. Since Hallowe'en fell on a Saturday we decided to throw an Hallowe'en party for our neighbors and friends. We turned out basement into a haunted house and decorated the front lawn with ghosts and tombstones. The tombstones were fun to make, using polystyrene sheets, acrylic paint and spray paint. The two ghost we created were made of packing tape modeled on my kids who willingly sat while I wrapped them in parts with tape. With the lights and cheese clothes added, they looked quite amazing. The Hallowe'en costumes and décor are all packed away now with the exception of the jars of human heads. think I will keep them on my shelf as book ends.       Kids move a mile in minute with their interests. They latch on to whatever interests them and focus on it until something else comes along to supersede it. That was the Shopkins craze at school. These popular tiny rubber collectible characters were based on items like food, cosmetics, accessories and all things shopping. That's fine and dandy but I knew it wouldn't last with my kids. It did make for a fun creative exercise for us all by designing our own shopkins and then creating them in polymer clay. The kids gave me sketches and I did my best to make them a reality. They even created names and character traits for them. They did not have the longevity that the real rubber shopkins have and did not stand up to their playing quite as well. Several smaller pieces broke while being played with. Alas, it was a fun exercise, and it got me working again with polymer clay, something I hadn't done since last year during their Avatar : The Last Airbender craze. Other polymer clay items I have made for my kids imagination play have included Harry Potter, the Spice Girls and No Face from Spirited Away. It is a great material to work with and perfect for creating figurines for imaginary play especially when the characters don't have a line of toys. Not every kid likes Star Wars and Barbie.   |
Jennifer MorrisonHere is a catalog of my creative adventures and experiments Categories
All
Archives
November 2022
|
||||||||||
RSS Feed
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by Canadian web hosting from StormWeb