Playdate

Rose, Reuben, and I visited with Liv after school today. What had been a very chilly morning turned into a fairly nice day, so I walked down to Newtowne with Reuben in the double stroller. We met up with Liv, her mother, and her little sister. With our stroller seats facing forward and theirs facing back, the two girls started talking on the way to their house, and the conversation never ended until we left much later in the afternoon. They had a great time with pretend play, music making, and many craft projects. Great thanks to Laura for hosting us and providing a stream of activities for the girls.

Amazingly Reuben, who has had difficulty sleeping with his teeth hurting, zonked out and slept through some pretty raucous play.

Yay to growing friendships, play, and just being in another space.

Glass Tile Effect

As I sit at my sister's table, the glass pitcher is refracting light and the spoked chair behind creates a striking image reminding of one the work on one of my now-defunct favorite art blogs, Fractal Beanstalk.

blast from the past-scanned

When I was in the height of my Magic playing days, I saw a piece of art someone had made from cutting multiple copies of cards and gluing them together to make a mini-shadow box diorama. I did the same with some magic cards and some cards from the Milestone series of comics.

I took one of the Magic ones to the Comic convention in Philly when I saw that the artist was going to be there. He enjoyed it and signed it for me.

Barcode

An article in a magazine pointed out the obvious, one that I had already dabbled in but forgotten, that the scanner can be a fun toy to make art.

The decorative grasses that emerge at the corner of the house near the garbage cans create a small island of emerald and cream contrast. While I must do battle with this probably invasive and aggressive species, I do admire the plant's beauty. When lined up on the scanner, I could almost read the leaves at a grocery store checkout.

What would my work be without the requisite spiral. I lightly dampened this shell before putting an old, faded piece of construction paper over it.
I tried some still life compositions with materials found in the yard. I like them, but I will certainly have to spend some time with the medium before I achieve the look and feel I want. I do love ferns, and this is their season!
Lastly, I created a high-resolution close-up of one of the purple flowers. I cropped to what seemed to me to create an other-worldly image. Imagine a yellow rocket launching from a purple landscape.

Probably my scanner is unhappy with plant residues, but I like this promising start of a new hobby.

Burgeoning Artist

Rose seems to be a Pointillist.

late night doodles

I finally installed a very unstable version of the program that Tim (mentioned before) uses to create some of his work. Mine, on Windows, crashes when I try to save the image. I can copy and paste into Photoshop, so I keep the work that I do. Took a while to figure that out.

I love the patterns that the block wave filter in Showphoto creates and have enjoyed Tim's work for a while now. Now I get to play with this tool. I think I'll download the mac version which should be much more stable.

In honor of Tim

Tim has one of the nicest blogs of digital art and writing. Art from Pushing Buttons and Turning Dials is an exploration into the minimalist approach to digital art. I tend to make the overly slick fractals he rails against, but I was playing with a new plugin for Photoshop (Harry's Filters) and found this reminded me of some of Tim's work.
Further fun with filters.
And a last one. All of these from the picture of the corn flower.

Shiney!

While I work away at my various school projects and Reena is at school, Rose spends time in her old co-sleeper that she never slept in as a co-sleeper. Just one of those plans that did not come to fruition. However, it is a good playpen, but she doesn't like being in there for too long.

In art class, we did egg tempera painting. We had the option of doing some gold leaf as well, so I chose to paint a rose surrounded by gold leaf. I am not a painter by any stretch of the imagination, and I experienced that aspect of this art class that was one of the reasons I took it. I like to put myself in positions where I am a novice to really feel what it is like to be a student. I believe teachers can become very separated from the anxiety and feelings of incompetence that students feel every day in the classroom. Well, today I got that in boatloads! The paintings around me were really amazing. There are a few petals on the rose that look like petals, but on the whole it was a novice effort next to people who have trained. I still enjoyed the medium, and I lived the experience though I ducked out a bit early as my students are not allowed to do. hmm.

Tuesday is Art Day

Tuesday night is art class night, so I am back from art class. The group presenting today was mixed media. There were three stations featuring wax painting, paper mache, and batique. All three projects were very classroom friendly, and I hope to get at least one of them in the room this year. All three definitely next year.

This is a picture of the wax melting apparatus for the wax painting. Paraffin wax was melted in the foil container, and crayons were melted on the hot plate surface. We used mini canvases to play with the technique. Lots of fun and bright colors. The paraffin in the tray slowly got colored and repeated dipping of the canvas gave the work a translucent coating on top.
Here are my three wax paintings and my batique. The resist for the batique was school glue gel which washes out with soapy water. It was very easy, and the results were quite nice.
Our final project of the evening was a construction with any or all of the techniques presented. This is a structure created from cutting and folding a piece of stiff cardstock. I then encased it in plaster of paris bandages, covered that with tissue paper, and attached some string. The base of the board is covered with paper pulp.

Inspired by Tim

As always, I was inspired when reading Art from Pushing Buttons and Turning Dials. Of the many things I could spend a lot more time playing with, fractals and other digital art call to me. This is a five minute exploration of the piece he wrote.

Boxes and Critters

This was art class night. We had some demos and then worked on a found object critter.
This is a box made from pieces of chip board. Not carefully constructed, but done quickly to get the idea.
This foam and string sculpture was also quick and to get the idea of possibilities with this medium. I like the curvy nature of the bound foam.
We also got to play with clay. This box was made from slabs which I rolled with two different textures.
My creature is constructed from dryer vent hose, boards from a hard drive and from some other electronic component, pieces of a broken kid's toy, and cut off corks. It is very centipede-like.

Auction around the corner

The Atrium Auction is next weekend. My class created the four glass plates, and I donated this fractal print. It is always neat to see how they look when printed and framed. This one is called Venus Flytrap.

Pottery

Evelyn Ortiz, a potter from the Southwest, visited Atrium on Sunday and will be in school Monday and Tuesday for the students. Rose and I stopped by to see those folks who wanted to experience more on a Sunday afternoon.

Art imitates life

I am working away on my current art project for class. We were given an old text book and have to create a modified book that focuses on teachable moments in our lives. I have been going through old photos to use in my modification project, and I came across this one of me. I scanned my parents' boxes of slides (medium format) a few years ago in order to make the images available to all of us in the family. So here I am, an infant, with a bear I still remember and a smile on my face.

Water, water everywhere

The roof above my room at school has a pesky leak. It has been worked on multiple times, but it continues to drip on our heads. As a result, there is much water to deal with which can be annoying at times, but it also leaves some interesting results. This is the underside of a chair. The paper acted as a dye separation as the water crept up with capillary action. I thought the resulting image was eye-catching.

Sunday's Walk

Today was as warm or warmer than yesterday. I took Rose on a walk to Harvard Square to pick up comics and just be out in the sun. I think others had similar ideas because the place was swarming with people just sitting around and soaking in the rays. On the way back, I stopped by the Cambridge Artists' Cooperative. This is where I first saw the leaf print plates that Reena and I registered for our wedding. I just window shopped today as the baby carriage was a bit much to bring into the store.
Here is Rose enjoying the warm day. I was in tee shirt and jeans and quite warm.

The Nature of Glass

I know that many of my posts in recent months reveal my love/hate relationship with the long winters in New England. I do not like the duration and darkness, but I love the ice and snow (until I have to shovel too much of it). Ice, especially, is an amazing substance that appears in a vast array of forms. I think its changeable and impermanent nature makes it even more attractive, because a striking image will be gone tomorrow if not in a few minutes' time.

Glass captures a few of the qualities of ice in a more permanent way. This year's fundraising auction item that my class worked on was a set of four serving plates that they designed the pattern to be etched. I gave some parameters to make the groups create images that would end up looking like a set but still gave them enough freedom to make their own piece. This is the result.

Paper Cut

I was looking at our ketubah today, and I wondered if Melanie Dankowicz had used the images we sent them of our wedding ceremony. Melanie did the paper cutting and her husband, Harry, does the lettering. Sure enough, on the ketubot page, there we were. Later in the cycle of images, there was a close-up of our ketubah as well.

warp and weft

This is a weaving I made in class last night. It combines a photo of a desolate road in Alaska with a carnival image. Another good class.

The long walk home

Last art class, we made plaster casts of a hand, foot, or in one case an ear. I did a cast of my hand, and then I did this cast that wrapped around my hand and one finger. We were assigned to "finish" our piece for homework. The variety of pieces in class tonight were amazing. I particularly enjoyed a set of three elephants that were made from wrapping the tips of three fingers in plaster. My spiral hand has positive messages on the outside and negative conditions of the world on the inside.


On of the oddities I walk by often is the new crosswalk at Porter Square. I pass it at night on my way home from art class. The light for cars lasts only long enough for three cars to make the left turn from the parking lot, and even then the last one is running a red light. The rest of the cycle for a very odd intersection is red for this left turn lane, and the corresponding walk signal for pedestrians is very long. The counter for the walk signal starts at 73 seconds, but my shot of that was too blurry. Here is one at 70 seconds.