(S)Ketch Up and The Landscraper

The long awaited hive photos have made their way into the Inter-tubes! You don't have to say it - I already know. You are BURSTING with excitement. Click here for the photoset. I don't have a shot of the final final product but I assure you, it is very huggable. I was having trouble with how to display it, but after seeing Art in the Garden yesterday, climbing a tree and hanging it up doesn't seem so ridiculous. 

Aaand here's a little preview of my Sketch Up 3-D text thing. I spend HOURS on this because the program goes slower than a snail on sedatives, and it's still not done. I will eventually color it and stuff. My name was going to be too long (though I probably spent the same amount of time trying to move that dumb sphere around) and I couldn't think of any other words but this one.

Those hexagons are so cool but so annoying to make. I used the polygon tool but I had to wait for both that one and the push/pull one to work.  No fun.

Anyways, digiscapes? I wanted to make a landscape with an unconventional view, so I decided on an underground landscape. I was thinking about worms and stuff buried under the surface, and a few people mentioned ant colonies/ant farms. So great, more bugs. For at least one of the prints, I'm going to orient the paper vertically with the

 "horizon line" on the very top so you can see how deep the colony goes beneath the grass. Other ones might be looking down a tunnel or a horizontal

 cross section of the grass and dirt underneath. 

At Florida State, some researchers did casts of ant colonies (they got the ants out first) and they are really neat! There are more pictures if you follow the link and scroll down to the bottom. The paper mentions "ant hotels," which would be a fun concept to play with. I guess they made artificial chambers to test the depth preference of younger and older ants. Also, Dominick coined the term "Landscraper," which is so awesome that I've made it the working title for this project.

As for the execution, this is the first thing I thought of when Jennifer first described the project. The video is a teaser/demo of an awesome video game with a rotating landscape made of what looks like cut paper pieces. I love all the textures and would like to incorporate something similar into my digiscape, using scanned textures of found objects and craft items like yarn and fabric.

And Yet It Moves Teaser from mml on Vimeo.

Also, speaking of depth, here is xkcd's take on it. I seem to remember one with stuff buried, including dinosaur bones. Does anyone remember that one or know which one it is? I can't find it. 

Hive Mind?

I began my reference photo resource with this kind of image in mind - the kind of beehive found in a Winnie the Pooh cartoon. Surprisingly, I couldn't find very many actual Pooh images (this one is a mural someone painted for a child's room) or photos of hives like the one I had envisioned. 

I found a few images that looked like this one, but they were all illustrations and no photos. 

So I did some beehive research and found out that a "beehive" proper is almost always manmade. The one pictured here is called a "skep" and is actually a basket-type structure used by beekeepers. There's a little opening for the bees to fly into but no structure inside, so they have to create their own honeycombs. The troubles with skeps are 1) the keeper cannot check up on the colony throughout the season and 2) honey can't be harvested without destroying the whole structure (that's why the big box-type hives are used more often).

Here are some dudes making traditional skeps.

So what about this type of nest? It's the shape I was thinking of, but a very different texture. this is actually a wasp nest made out of a paper-like substance that they produce. Bees, on the other hand, make wax and tend to nest inside preexisting structures instead of making their own. 

An exposed bee nest looks like this. Crazy!

So many things I did not know before! I don't even know who I am anymore.

Now, I don't want to go all Winnie the Pooh for a serious art project, but I decided I still wanted to draw inspiration from my original thought. Even though that kind of beehive is an amalgamation of a wasp nest and a skep, it's the first thing I pictured and I think it's pretty iconic and recognizable. It's also a simpler shape to reproduce in fleece. 

Photos of hive creation forthcoming.

The Buzz

I really wanted my infinite print to be a component of the unique object, not just something related or a variation on a theme. And in thinking about things that are infinite, I somehow came up with a swarm of bees. I don't know how it happened, but it works. For my object, I'm going to make a plush beehive and hang the printed and cut out bees around it. I'll be able to combine my love of (obsession with?) insects and my desire to make a plush. My thinking keeps going back to making scary things more appealing. First, the creepy crawly pattern, now an adorable swarm of bees and their huggable hive. On an unrelated note, it might be fun to do a whole series of common fears made cuddly. Or at least un-scary.Anyway, I'm thinking it's going to be some sort of installation. Preferably in a tree, but I also want to make it work indoors because the weather has been so strange lately. 

Here are some beemakin' pictures. 

Tried drawing right into Illustrator with a Wacom. The first one is a serious attempt, the next two are sleepy/angry doodles. I was hoping for something between accurate and cutesy. Not much luck. You may remember the fourth bee from my damask pattern. It's just there for reference. After much gritting of teeth, I went back to old-fashioned pencil and paper drawing. and came up with this:

Here's a cuter, fuzzier version.

Live trace on that image didn't work as well as I wanted it to, so I inked it and scanned again.

Isn't he precious? Sorta went for the creepy-cute look of the rat creatures from Bone.

And here it is in LIVING COLOR:

Stay tuned for more on the hive. I learned a ton of really interesting information as a result of looking up photo references.

The Infinite Print. INFINITELY FRUSTRATING.

This project has been plaguing me... which is why I haven't posted anything until now, I could only think of each part of the assignment separately - if I had a good idea for the infinite, I didn't know how to make it unique, and vice versa. My first thought was to make an image of  something, then make a 3D version of it. What's more unique than the third dimension? 

I am particularly interested in soft sculpture (fancy name for not-for-kids plush toys). 

Sorta like that, but a little more refined (hopefully!). Lizette and Roberto Greco create plush toys based on their children's drawings. Click here for more of their work (really nice stuff, but most don't show the reference drawing). Anne Karsten did a similar project with a class of 4th and 5th graders, asking them to do a bit of product design and creating plush versions of their "concept drawings."

Disclaimer: I'm not an art major, so I'm not looking at 

master artists all the time or thinking serious art major thoughts. I've always been interested in crafting and most of my inspiration comes from the Craftzine.com blog (which I read daily). 

(Unrelated, but see also Yeondoo Jung's magical "Wonderland" project that turns kids' drawings into photographs)

Anyway, so 2D to 3D. Want some more distractions? I got 'em. Like this 3D printer used for rapid prototyping. This thing is SO cool, but sort of the opposite of what I want to do. It's able to create 3D objects over and over again in precise

 detail from a CAD file. Dang. Good thing I don't have access to one of those puppies.

I also considered making a crochet version of my image, but that kind of thing can be very frustrating. I kept thinking about how patterns make pretty much anything reproducible, but I could avoid that by doing more of a free-form crochet without using or making a pattern. Entertained the idea of making the object first and writing my own pattern for the infinite edition, maybe doing crazy typographical things with the pattern. Scrapped that idea. Still very little thought about the subject of my project.  

Considered monoprinting, particularly with an image that's been in my head for a long time. It's based on a lyric from "I Can Barely Breathe" by Manchester Orchestra. You can watch the video on YouTube - embedding is disabled so you'll have to click. Anyway it's just the first two verses and they go like this:

When the dark flood came, 

we wrapped ourselves inside a dirty blanket,

citing different opinions

on whether we should move.

When the houses came,

they ate up everyone like they were fishes

saying, "come on, come on. 

it's the end of the world."

Here's a crappy photo of the only time I ever sketched out my idea. I think the thing on the right side is a dude in flippers? I dunno.

Aaaand this is what it sorta looks like with a little live trace. I love the way the lines look but I couldn't get the trace to pick everything up. I remembered that I wouldn't have access to the studio and materials anyway, so monoprinting was out. I thought maybe I could create a 3D set-up with wood blocks for the houses and printed out versions of the water (pasted on cardboard or something).  Buuuut I think this image wants a lot more attention than I could give it right now. And I think it wants to be a block print or a screen print, not some crappy diorama.

So I am back to soft sculpture. I want to make something as awesome as this gigantic mosquito by Weird Bug Lady, aka Brigitte, who is a zoology student by day and a plush invertebrate crafter by night. Just so happens that I like bugs too...

More content soon!