leaf-y friends

growing up is strange. evolution of relationships is just as strange. i’ll never not be my mother’s daughter, but at the same time, i am no longer a child. unable to decide on how personal to get, i leave my words as broad thoughts to ponder.

made a fun little art project today. the colors of the leaves grabbed me and they were soft and just begging to be drawn on. i remembered gavin braman’s project tagging leaves with monsters and decided i, too, must make my own leaf-y friends (owls, of course!)

then i took photos and now i’m sitting her blogging about it, making me feel like a real crafty blogger. ha. it would be nice if i did this kind of thing more than once a year…

sketchbooks

so one reason i’m looking forward to going back to school is spending time with my moleskine–taking notes in a graphically creative manner. decided to look to flickr for some inspirations. here are a few of my favorites (images click-through to the corresponding flickrs).

andrea joseph – has some amazing sketches–her ability to produce such depth with simply a ball point pen almost blows my mind.

i particularly like her use of different forms of text around the drawing in this one (and it appears as though it actually served a practical purpose as a calendar and grocery list):

the negative space!

…and her writing

other favorites
jennifer kraska – (use of textures & spot color)

4ojos

i love watercolors like this (and again, the negative space but it still looks finished). that’s one thing i wish i were better at…watercolors.

susan rudat – love the lines/textures created with just pen & ink

elfelix – little monsters in an organized fashion (click through to page–i can’t grab the image)

isabel ginsberg – love the use of her watercolor under the ink drawings. this particular image is of stamps she’s drawn–another great idea.

superhan* – i love doodles.

featherbed – the details!

more amazing watercolours:
wil_freeborn

luis_ruiz

bob aubuchon

and not sure how i feel about photos in moleskines–i think when integrated, they can be cool… but i thought it was worth addressing.

the3robbers uses a technique i’ve seen becoming popular lately. i particularly like the play on positive/negative space and how the top seems to weight the pages down.

erika kuhn

amoa

yesterday, having a bit of free time in austin, i decided to visit the austin museum of modern art (AMOA)-downtown. they had two featured exhibits:

running the numbers looks at contemporary american culture through the austere lens of statistics. each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. my hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

this project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, i hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008

chris jordan’s visual presentations were thought provoking and i definitely got lost staring into all the details, trying to figure out how these were compiled. it was difficult to find any kind of pattern. this was visually one of my favorites–barbie dolls, 2008. 60″ x 80″. it depicts 32,000 barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006.

i could relate to sunyong chung’s works on a different level. she had filmed dancers with light and overlaid these trails to be the basis for her sculpture the dance. i wish i’d taken my camera in, but i forgot to grab it and wanted to just experience rather than document my experience.