Cartastrophe - Emily Week 7

The challenge this week was to make artwork using car parts. Hmmm… The home interpretation was a little bit different. We were allowed to use pictures of car parts as well. My interpretation was even more loose than that. I decided to use the names of car parts and make a word cloud. I used Wordle, which is an awesome site. Just for fun, this is a word cloud using the feed from this blog:


Lovely. For my project I used Wikipedia to look up a million car parts for my word cloud. (Because I can only name about 5...) I mixed up the colors and fonts a few times to get multiple layouts and then I printed them each out. From there I intensely labored to form each of these word clouds into an actual working and functioning car. Here is my final project:



I decided this project would be best suited to hang in a child’s bedroom. Or be made by a child to hang in a father’s office. Either way, incredible. Enjoy!

Emily's Street Art

The challenge this week was a lot of fun. We had to create street art and I LOVE street art. It's basically any art you find in the streets for everyone to see. Everything from yarnbombing to Ellis G. to Paper Monster. I’m a huge fan. For my own project, I enlisted some help. First I’ll show you the final project so you don’t get too bored with all the “making of” details. Voila!

Josh and I spent Thanksgiving week touring the city (DC) and taking pictures of what we saw. We found the brick wall in Baltimore and instantly fell in love with it and chose it as the background. (Since we couldn't exactly paint right on it, we had to take some pictures and go that route.)

These pictures were taken at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum (which is TONS of fun!). Can you name this president? We added one of his quotes to the final piece as well.

We also featured some simple light painting.

Then Josh combined everything together on the computer using whatever he used doing it however he did....

And....once again.....

Salmoney - Emily #5

The challenge this week was to create an art piece based on a newspaper article. The article I chose was from the Manteca Bulletin in Manteca, CA. It was called "Salmon giveaway helps feed people." It was a very interesting piece....I'm sure. I never read it. I felt that would ... damage the creative process... or something... Anyway... I decided to play around with typography. I love fonts, and letters, and handwritten things. I don't really have very many pictures of the project as I was creating it, but here is my final piece:


The background (using the actual article):



Here is the writing with no background:



And here is another (parody) version I did especially for my mother. (She is a diehard Rushdie fan.):


Well, there you have it. ENJOY!!!
-E

Tofurkey Collabo - Emily Week 4

The challenge this week was a lot of fun. We had to draw inspiration from children's artwork and create our own piece with a visible connection to our inspiration piece. When I first heard the challenge, I was reminded of this artist that I discovered a long time ago at the beginning of my StumbleUpon days. He recreates children’s drawings in his photographs. Very neat.

As for my sister and I….Naturally, we enlisted our niece and nephews to help us out. My sister used my niece’s drawing as inspiration. I used my nephew’s picture as inspiration. Here is his awesome turkey art with my finished piece:

Nice job, Little Robbie! I love the texture and all the color. What a fun turkey for Thanksgiving!

Both my sister and I used this piece by our nephew Benjamin as inspiration as well. His and mine:

I love the color. In school, it was obvious what projects were mine because they were always very brightly colored. Benjamin’s piece was great for me!

Back to the beginning... I’ve been wanting to make a cake for a while now, and I thought this challenge would be the perfect opportunity. Especially when I saw my inspiration pieces! I love baking and desserts (even still after I’ve done it for a job!) and it just might be my favorite type of artwork. There is so much room for creativity. AND it tastes great! To make the turkey cake, I threw on an apron and enlisted the help of my mixer. I used chocolate cake, sugar cookies, and ganache. I used sugar cookie and a fun swirly tie-dye technique to connect with my nephew Benjamin’s art piece. Here are some pictures from along the way.

And, yes, it tasted great. Thanks again to Robbie, Lauren, and Benjamin. See you next week!

-E

Challenge 3 - Emily's Political Statement

The challenge this week was all about pop art. Basically, the only parameters were to create an original piece of pop art involving current themes and ideas. Sounds simple enough, right? Pop art plays on things that are popular in culture, from politics to celebrities to entertainment. It involves things people obsess about and see or use on a daily basis. (So if you've seen my sister's post, you'll see that her obsession is with me....) I'm a big fan of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney. One of my favorite pop art pieces is this one by Lichtenstein called "Drowning Girl."

For my own masterpiece, I decided I wanted to use popular topics that are all around us now. I chose Lady Gaga, cupcakes, and the green movement. These are topics I consider very relevant to today. This is my final project:

Back to the beginning... My piece includes pictures of a cupcake and Lady Gaga (in the famous meat dress) giving their opinion on being green all on a background of a collage of plastic bags. My supplies and tools included Paint, scissors, glue, plastic bags, electrical tape, and some old magazines. One of the most time consuming parts was probably cutting out all those itty bitty letters...

Decoupaging plastic bags was fun and played with the whole green/recycling theme.

Again, my final piece.

Some close-up shots:

This was a pretty fun project. I think pop art is really neat. It was interesting to see on the show the types of projects the contestants did. There were some pretty heavy topics... My piece was much more lighthearted (in a deep, philosophical way).

My sister's fave:

I knew you'd all be huge fans of my artwork, so click here to find it on CafePress. Get yourself the shirt version, you deserve it. Note: That color is supposedly "kelly green." I don't know what it would end up looking like...Probably amazing, no doubt.

Overall, it was exciting to give pop art my own spin. After seeing what the Work of Art contestants came up with, my sister and I may need to step it up. It seems our minds aren't quite as twisted as theirs. But we're working on it! Can't wait for another challenge. See you next time! Don't forget to vote!

-E

Crayolava - Emily's Week 2 Challenge

First things first, sorry for the delay in posting. I had my wisdom teeth yanked out and, naturally, I could have died. But all is well. On to the challenge.

This week's challenge was all about motion. We had to create something using motion and parkour as our inspiration. I decided to hit the dollar store to look around and come up with my final plan. After searching through all the Halloween decor and random housewares, I finally decided on some colorful crayons (that's pronounced "crayins" if you're Josh). I returned home and decided what to do. I would use crayons and heat to create my masterpiece. These were my tools:


I wanted to use motion in my actual art piece, so I got to work. This involved removing the wrappers from the crayons and lining them up by color.


Then came the fun part! Using a heat tool, I heated the crayons to create awesome dripping patterns. The motion of the dripping crayons created the art. I love the way it looks!


Now for my final project, called "Crayolava."


This was a fun project. I love color and this was just my thing! I learned a lot along the way, too. For example, some crayon colors don't melt. They just bubble and start smoking. It's very strange. And some melt very quickly (as you can see by the longest drips). I also wanted my final project to have a more unexpected look, and that's why I decided to display it with the drips going up instead of down. Take that, gravity! Well, that's all for this week. What do you think?

Ttylbffs,
-E

Getting Kitschy: Emily is #1!

Our challenge this week was to take a kitschy piece of art we found at the thrift store (for $5 or less) and transform it into something much more interesting that was our style and worthy of hanging in a gallery.

This is what I came up with.

"It's All in Your Head"

Before and after:

But it didn't happen THAT quick. My first step in this process was, of course, to head to good ole' Goodwill.

I was pleased with their selection. They had posters of cars, pictures of animals, paintings of flowers, and interesting and eclectic sculptures. I had a hard time deciding what to pick.

Most of the bigger pieces were too much for my $5 budget, but I found some great kitschy art that made my decision pretty hard. Among them was this interesting fabric covered closet/shelf thing:

I was also a fan of Raggedy Joshua.

Joshua was the front-runner for a while, but I eventually decided that absolutely nothing could be done to improve him, so he ended up back on the shelf. Besides, I already own one Joshua, and two would be too many. Moving on... These dancers made of carpet were also neat:

You find some crazy things. This was an interesting note on the back of one item I found:

My original plan was to find a of picture of a horse and turn it into a unicorn, but I had no luck. (This is especially funny, if you've seen what my sister Kristine ended up doing...) Something I found interesting was the large number of family portraits that people had abandoned at the thrift store. It was kind of sad to see the school portraits and family pictures that Grandma had apparently rejected. I found some I really liked, and was eventually able to pick my final selection. So here it is, this is what I finally decided on... A cheesy Olan Mills-style picture of some lovely abuelos in a tacky gold and floral frame. And for only $1.96? That's a steal if you ask me.

After I got this picture home I started having second thoughts. What on earth was I going to do to transform this picture?! I was almost ready to quit, but I remembered all my millions of dozens of fans and just couldn't let them down. (Or maybe that's one or two fans that might click through this blog a dozen times? Hopefully?) I photocopied the picture a few times and did some tests before finally committing to one idea. I decided to paint the frame, while still letting some of the former glory shine through.

For the actual picture, I pulled out my needle and thread and got to work. I'm a big fan of sugar skulls and decided to turn my unsuspecting models into these colorful creations. I also used some vintage piano music to accent my design. With some careful cutting, gluing, and my trusty Modge Podge, I started to create.

After finishing up all the final details, my masterpiece was ready. My challenge was complete! I created a lovely piece of work I call "It's All in Your Head." Ta da!!!

Some detail shots:

And if you get the lighting behind it just right...

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. This was a fun challenge, although I don't know if my masterpiece will be hanging in a gallery any time soon. Be sure to check out what my sister Kristine came up with, it is pretty good! And don't forget to vote on your favorite! See you next week to find out what crazy project we end up with. I have a feeling it will only get harder from here.

Ttylbffs.

-E