this one needs a title, too...

I really like how this one turned out....



Here's how it was made:

Layer 1 = yellow. I wasted a LOT of yellow ink because I wasn't thinking ahead. There is no reason that I needed to print the entire page in yellow. oh well. live and learn.



Layer 2 = adding copper in for the dandelion. Working smarter this time, I'm only rolling the ink where I know I'll want the color to be.



Layer 3 = aqua. if I could go back and do it again, I'd probably pick orange or some other warm color since the aqua disappears with the addition of the next layer



Here's what my kitchen table looked like this morning:



Layer 4 = violet, blue and white
Here's what my kitchen table looks like right now:

Hello new readers!

Some more color proofs. Turns out this new ink works a little differently than what I'd been using before... and now I have a dozen small pieces of paper that say "Hello". If you have any idea what to do with them, I'm all ears.

...this one still needs a title. arg.

Sushi!

At the request of my relatives, I brought sushi over to my aunt's house on Sunday.... but instead of making it at home, I brought all the *tools* to do it at her house. Here's some that my mom made:

Candied violets!

Last weekend I went to visit Laura. The original plans were to brunch and go biking, but what we did instead was go for a walk with her two dogs, where we found 2 morels along the way (!!!). After that, we decided we wanted to save some of the violets that her dad would be mowing down in the next week, so we picked a kerjillion of them to make candied violets (and pressed some violets, too). Friends, I am not ever planning on doing that again. Laura, the rest of the day was fantastic ---- but what a pain to get candied violets to look nice! They are still drying on top of my microwave. Who wants to try some?





And then I played a little with some digital elph technology. Here are two examples of "color swap".....

Check out these radioactive orange violets:


Run, Laura, Run!

Sweater deconstruction...

Someday, this sweater will be made in to a scarf.... right now, those two balls onthe right are what used to be sweater arms. It's surprisingly tricky to get a sweater un-done. I suppose it would help if I were more familiar with knitting so I wouldn't keep picking the wrong end to start from....

Attempt at "professional" coffee

ha ha..... this is harder to do than it looks!

The arboretum in May

I owe a big thank you to J in CA for sending me an awesome letter with a scavenger hunt in it.... it made me go to places in Madison that I'd not been to in a great long while and take pictures to prove that I solved the puzzle. :)

Here is what one of the clues yielded:

oh man, I am not up-to-speed on this blog. I keep promising people weekly updates and I haven't even updated the sidebar to show May intentions and May is practically over. I have many pictures just waiting to be cropped & FTP'd and posted up here.... it's just a matter of making myself come inside to do it. This kind of makes me want to invest in a laptop so I can sit outside & do this stuff. Think that would work?

Reduction proof

I made a (semi)quick proof for an idea I had.... and I had a really hard time picking what colors to use:



Here are some close-ups of a few selected color combinations:







I'm still not sure what I'm going to do for the actual print but luckily the procrastinating is facilitated by still not having any nice paper in the house :)

OoOoOooooo....

holy cow.... I'm the "Artist of the Month" over at Four Oceans Press in California.

hot dog art?

One entertaining art night we, ah, started playing with food - cutting it in to small pieces, mixing different food together and rearranging it:



the real art, however, is the smile-y face made with the orange bingo stamper that you can see just under one of the plates ;)

the other striped prints....

On black paper:


On white paper (and in a different order. doh!):

Diagonal stripes.... printed!

From this:


Comes this:


and this:

woohoooo - new ink!

look at what came in the mail yesterday:



....now let the printing adventures begin!

stripe-y instant gratification

Stripes are the new "thing" in my house - you will see many stripes in my next few posts. These are really easy to do - I cut two striped images in less time than it took to listen to an entire Apoptygma Beserk album after staying up all night supporting my customer during some server upgrade-y stuff over the weekend:



Why don't you get to see both images right now? Because I want to strech out my posting in case I don't get back to more art projects in the near future :) Also - I'm kind of "cheating" --- this is just the linoleum-composite block to print from - not actually a finished product. I'm out of the ink & paper that I want to use to print these with.

April T-shirt

I designed a T-shirt for some friends this weekend, but I'm not sure if I can post the image until after they've used it for their event.... you might just have to wait until the end of April to see it.

Edited to add:

March marbles

Amazing what a little dramatic lighting can do.... these marbles were going to be called something like "an assortment of some of the ugliest marbles I've ever made"... HOWEVER.... the angle of the flash seems to have caught some of them in a way that makes them very interesting to me.... too bad they're not always this sparkly when holding them in my hand in real life.... you can click on the picture to see a close-up, if you like.



I'm still expecting at least 3 more of them to fall apart at any given moment. I did not do a great job of annealing them and there are a whole lot of stress fractures in these that are just waiting to explode. But it's nice to have now used the little kiln (not the one that needs reqiring - the big kiln is still unusable) twice and not be as afraid of burning down my garage ;)

Next steps: Use fewer colors and pick the ones i *do* use more carefully. Several of these just look "muddy".

Peep art!

OK... so this post might be a little bit cheating.... it's from *last* year, but I've been away from home and largely away from art supplies for the past week.... I made one of these.... can you guess which one? Others were made by 11frogs, Live without regrets, Leigha's mom, and Nick....

Peep Wine!


Peep UFO and alien!


Peeps waterskiing!


Peep fertility/wedding!


Peep-zilla!


Peep-zilla's demise in the microwave...

paint art from the hotel.... take 1