rflxns 2

must increase positive rewards and become a more balanced person.
must.
vacation this weekend brought back a much needed equilibrium. it's nice to be around friends i haven't seen in years and be able to pick up just where we left off. everyone is spread around the country in different places, though, and making new friends locally is a sad situation. baltimore is small. and everyone forms an opinion of one another before even meeting for the first time.
i could probably live somewhere else in the not-so-distant future. anywhere, i think...

"snuggies" have been unofficially re-named by me. the new unofficial name is "lazy wizards." be honest, when you see a photo of someone is a snuggie don't you see a wizard with his robe on backwards? like maybe "i care just enough to cover my full frontal nudity but oh the back will peek out ever so gloriously." you might want to admire the lazy wizard.



he is practicing the magic of saying "fuck it" and laying delicately on a fine leather couch. he is the the awesome lazy wizard.

rflxns

i've been thinking about how life used to be so easy. decisions were nothing consequential or concrete. when i lived on ash street the drama and craziness happened all around me but here i stand today 100% unaffected by the majority of it. we'd drink every day, bike around in the dark with no helmets, drive recklessly, work as little as we could manage, and have affairs of the heart that could only be considered scandalous by today's standards. that wasn't all too long ago but i guess i've gotten to the point in life where 5 years ago means it may as well have been a different person entirely. maybe i'm remembering it differently than it actually was. i know there was a lot of heartbreak and headache involved but that's not the stuff that sticks in my memory. i remember coming home from school at lunch, drinking a beer and watching a few minutes of trash tv with ben. then i biked back to mica and probably had a great day. i got to live every artsy nerd kid's dream. sometimes i feel like i squandered it. maybe not. i hope not.
real talk. more to come.

lineup

I recently acquired some more fleece for stuffed animals and I'm excited to make things again. The new apartment is awesome; we both have space to work and play which is a new thing. I've been making curtains and pillows, so I'm feeling up to making cute things again.

Last Christmas I made Noel a bat pillow to bring on tour with him. It has wings that wrap around to cover his little bat face and disguise him as a normal non-special fleece pillow.



Currently I'm exploring my options for expanding this collection of shy animal pillows. So far I've done sketches for shy owls, and may even dabble in the realm of flying squirrels. I like the flying animals for this because of the wraparound wing effect, but I'm curious also about fish (mudskippers and catfish to be specific)...

So anyway that's on the horizon.

Also my friends over at NoveltyButtons.com have asked me to make a freakshow character for their next promotional flyer. Specifically a strongman, wolfman, or siamese twins. Here are my reference pictures:



MissionCreep.com has more siamese twin photos!

I have a lot to look at and I'm stoked to work on art again. It's been a while. Last night I found some old sketchbooks of mine out at my parents' house; it's like looking at someone else's artwork. That seems like so long ago. Art used to be a priority in my life, and maybe it should be.

On the agenda for this week: Starting the wedding bouquet, sketches for Novelty Buttons, and producing a shy owl pillow.
I start school next Monday. Ceramics class. So excited!

paper wedding bouquet

In the next few months, I'll be making a paper wedding bouquet for my dear friend Nikki Porter. This is really exciting to me for a number of reasons, but mainly because Nikki is really awesome and deserves a super amazing bouquet of her dreams.

The wedding is in November so it's only right to include warm harvest colors in her bouquet, sure--but we're going to be careful not to let it get cliche. No straw, or wheat or what have you. No gourds of any kind (I suggested she simply carry a jack-o-lantern down the aisle, making the "tossing of the bouquet" a bit more interesting. She didn't want to do that, strangely enough.)
So here's the palette I'm thinking about:


(This cute guy can be found on paper-source.com) Nikki loves and has always loved orange. The damn diamond in her ring is orange. I think she chose November because it's a month that's appropriate for an orange wedding (Can't blame her there, it also means pink is entirely inappropriate. Phew!)


I can't find a good solid dark green, but that will be thrown in there as the darkest base color for the bouquet as well.
For the handle/"stem" of the bouquet Nikki and I agreed on wood: small branches with character, with some white and dark shades throughout, and some curly twigs thrown in there. I think some tiny twigs can be sprinkled around in the flowers as well. Also we were thinking about incorporating amber-colored glass beads just to dress up the sticks. Nikki may be a flower child but I'm not, so I think we're trying to steer this away from looking too much like some kind of prop in a hippie production. Glass beads may not work or they may do just the trick, so there's something to think about...



Now to the meat of the bouquet, I found this great looking one on MarthaStewart.com of all places. It's made from tissue paper with a skeleton of wire and styrofoam (sounds much like a middle school art project but it sure doesn't look like one.)



I'll make it easier for you than it was for me, here's the direct link: http://www.marthastewart.com/article/crafted-bouquet?xsc=stf_MSLO-ARTICLE

So I guess my next step is to go on a hunt for tissue paper and floral wire that I can play with. Martha Stewart says it takes only an afternoon, but she and her team are also an exception to basically every rule of average motor skills and coordination so I should probably start now.