Infinite Scroll : Monsters

I've been trying hard to resist signing up for the seemingly endless stream of fun free projects over at the Art House Co-op ..... but....but....monsters!!!  How could I say no to this one?

This was how they described the project:

This is going to get ugly...

We're calling out to 500 people worldwide to make one segment of what will become a really long, continuous drawing.

The Infinite Scroll series is inspired by the surrealist drawing exercise known as exquisite corpse, in which a group of people work collaboratively on a drawing without seeing the other parts that come before and after. We'll start the drawing off with a monstrous head and end it with some grotesque feet - everything in between is up to you!

Sign up and we'll email you the template and instructions for creating your design, drawing, or illustration of creepy, scary, and cute-in-a-hideous-way monsters.

We'll string all of the submissions together into one really long monster the likes of which has never been seen or imagined!

And this was my monster segment:

I kept him fairly simple, coloured with watercolours, and his spots came from a pencil eraser dipped in black ink

You can see the final whole monster on the project's blog here - but here's a snapshot of the section I'm in:

I think maybe they should have told everyone to keep the background white, as the sections join together better then, but it's still really cool to scroll through

So, there you go, I painted my little bit of monster, scanned it and emailed it in to the project, but then I still had my little bit of monster, and I didn't really know what to do with it .....

So I thought, why not make a not so infinite exquisite corpse monster of my own?

I didn't want to design the head and feet portions myself, as then they wouldn't have looked as disjointed as they needed to, so I asked my other half Jay to draw a head and my 10 year old son to design the legs and feet.

Then I copied their designs in different media, and ta da:

Meet Marvin, isn't he a cutie!

The end result is about A4 size, which luckily I had an IKEA frame lying around to fit.  I think I will hang him in my hallway so that he can greet visitors to my house with that lovely cheery smile :)

The Mystery Project.....let's go public!

So, you probably have gathered by now that I'm a big fan of the Art House Co-op (they of the Sketchbook Project and various other art adventures)....and here is the latest one I have signed up for.....the Mystery Project.

In a nutshell, each of the 2,000 participants worldwide were sent a marker pen courtesy of Prismacolor, and a theme, and were to take inspiration from these to make some public art installation of some sort - it could be anything, a painting, a sculpture, a zine maybe.  As long as it was left in a public space.

I was really looking forward to this one ....until I got my theme.  "If tomorrow came yesterday".....whaaat?  That stumped me completely for a week or two.....

But then I was chatting via email to a fellow blogger - Karen from I am Rushmore who is also taking part in the Mystery Project (her theme is fabulous - "Help! Robots are taking over the local elementary school!" - I was sooooo jealous :) ), and I was explaining my thoughts about my theme....about how if tomorrow happened yesterday you would have already seen a bit of the future....forewarned is forearmed and all that.....   and that sent me off into thinking I could do something with a man with four arms....

It kind of makes some sense to me anyway..... kind of :)

So here's how my submission for the project came to life:

I took four A4 sized white stickers, and randomly sprayed them with yellow and olive green paints to start with, the olive green was chosen because it was close to the colour of the marker pen they sent me

Next I added another green, and tiny spots in bright pink...

...and chevrons in orange....

I cut out the silhouette of a man with four arms and used it as a mask, over spraying with white paint.  And then I also airbrushed around the mask a little with dark purple ink.

The word "forewarned" was but out freehand with a craft knife and sprayed on with blue paint

....and then I used the free marker to write a few words around the image - "if tomorrow came yesterday, the mystery project...."








Here are the finished stickers ready to go:

Only three of them because I kept the fourth, which now lives on my bookcase:














And here are the three of them out in the wild, in various spots around central Swindon (along with my street art accomplice, who thoroughly enjoyed the whole adventure :)  )

Please don't worry, any of you, about us having permanently defaced any public property.  The stickers didn't have much in the way of stick....they peel off incredibly easily, and I very much doubt they will survive the first rainfall....

But it'll be fun while they last....

Rocking Your World Tuesday – week 19

It’s that (variable) time of the week again – time to count my blessings and put a few more ticks on the grateful list

I’m feeling a bit fed up today – nothing major, just a bit run down, big cold sore threatening to erupt any minute, super tired, you know how it is – and so it’s a really good moment to do a round up of what’s been rockin’ my world – to stop me feeling so down in the dumps

And last week had a lot going for it – for a start it kicked off with a three day weekend – can’t beat a free day off work!! :)

On the Saturday we had a nice lazy day, mainly spent at home, the boys played on the Xbox and I worked on my Steve Tyler CJ entry.  Very chilled.  We did have a little walk into town when we dropped Connor off at his dad’s for a bit – and I bought three fab new colours of spray paint at the market – got to say I’m liking this MTN 94 stuff even more than my usual Montana Gold.  

And I was super excited on Saturday evening when I got an email from the Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project tour to say that my travelling sketchbook had been checked out and viewed at the tour’s first stop in Chicago.  I hope you liked it, Angela B. :)

Crossing the Severn Bridge into Wales

Sunday was our day trip day – we try to have at least one big family day out every week, weather permitting.   The Sunday weather had been looking a bit sketchy in the forecasts around our usual haunts, so I tried a bit of sun chasing, and checked the forecasts for various different potential destinations, choosing the one with the biggest chance of sunshine.  And surprisingly the weather man chose Wales – usually renowned for its rain :)  So a trip to Cardiff it was….

The weather man was spot on and we had lovely weather all day.  First we went into central Cardiff to the city’s main museum and art gallery.  Very impressive buildings and lots of interesting things to see inside.  Also we got the chance to see a mother peregrine attend to her chick up on the clock tower (in the black Olympic ring in my photo…) – as the RSPB were helpfully stationed outside the museum with telescopes trained on the nest.

Next we walked what looked like a short distance on Google Maps, but turned out to be quite a trek, to find “Europe’s biggest sticker graffiti combo!!!!” – only to discover that someone had painted over the whole thing with dark green paint – boo.  Never mind, we still added our stickers to the mix.  Better three months late than never :)

Next we took a drive out to the Llandaff area of the city, looking for the Boiler House Graffiti Project gallery.

Which we found, but it was shut.  Pffft.  But never mind, the legal walls around the back of the gallery were all open and well worth a look.  I especially loved the “Silence in the Library” spaceman.

It was a short trip from here to St Fagans where they have a fantastic (and FREE apart from the car park fee) open air museum featuring original and reconstructed buildings from all periods of Welsh history, many of which have been transplanted here brick by brick.  The kids particularly enjoyed the olden days sweet shop (well, they would, wouldn’t they :) ) and having a wrestle in the cock fighting ring.  Connor also had a go at archery.  We were only here a couple of hours and I’m sure we barely scratched the surface of it.  Definitely a place worth re-visiting one day.

And finally, we popped up the road to the coast, and famous Barry Island. I’ve managed to get to the advanced age of 45 without ever visiting the home of Gavin and Stacey, but I couldn’t put it off any longer :)  The place is a bit tatty and a bit run down, to say the least, but it has a certain classic British seaside resort charm to it, and the kids had great fun on the rides.

And we even got ice creams from Marco’s Café, which I think features in the TV show.  (I have to sheepishly admit that I couldn’t get into the programme, only ever watched one episode and didn’t get it at all.  But I know everyone else thinks it’s really funny so it must just be me)

We got home at about 11pm, thoroughly tired but having had a brilliant day – and happy in the knowledge that we could have a nice long lie in the next day thanks to the Bank Holiday.

And we did exactly that – it was nearly midday by the time we struggled out of bed!  I cooked a big roast dinner – which I don’t often get the chance to do given that Connor is always at his dad’s one weekend day, and we tend to go out for day trips on the other day.  And then after we’d had our fill we walked around to the cinema to see the new Avengers movie.

I’d been looking forward to the film, and expected to enjoy it, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it as MUCH as I did – it was awesome!! :) :) :)

And not only for the eye candy ;)

(I have a new Avenger crush, by the way, Thor was still super cute, but oh my, Hawkeye! He had me all a quiver….see what I did there? :D )

Such a fun film – now I totally understand why people have been going to see it two or three times on the trot.  I wouldn’t mind another watch myself.

If you are one of the two or three people left in the world who hasn’t seen it yet, I can heartily recommend that you get yourself to the cinema pronto – even if you don’t think you like super hero films – you’ll enjoy THIS super hero film, promise.

For the rest of the week I was back at work but there were a few more fun spots:

- I made a kite themed bit of mail art for Vicki via Collabor-ART, and a birthday card for my sister – making stuff is a great way to unwind in the evenings

- My theme and free Prismacolor marker arrived from the Art House co-op for the Mystery Project (just need to work out what to actually make now…)

- The Apprentice had a street art episode set in East London and Bristol, which was highly entertaining – blimey this year’s crop of the young business elite are a proper bunch of twonks!

- Our Download tickets came!!  Can't wait!  less than 4 weeks away now :)

- and we booked our accommodation for our trip to Berlin in July - cool little apartment in the artsy part of town on the former East Berlin side - looks ace doesn't it, so excited :)

And that’s about it for this week

As ever I’ll be linking this up at RYWF Central aka Virginia’s blog.  Feel free to join in if you would like to spend a little time thinking about the high spots of your week….it makes a refreshing change from thinking about the downsides of life.  I can definitely attest that having written all this down, I feel a lot less sorry for myself than I did when I started :)

See you again next time!

Art House Co-op Photo Response Project

As you may have noticed, I’m a bit of a fan of Brooklyn’s Art House Co-op – they of The Sketchbook Project and many other community art endeavours.  And I use ‘community’ here in its widest sense as they invite people from all over the world to take part in their projects.  And take part they do, in their thousands!

The 2012 Sketchbook Project tour kicked off this week in New York, and I have been desperately peering at the photos of the shelves and shelves of lovely journals, to see if I can spot mine, but no luck yet.

Let me know if you can spot a fairly thin book with bright pink binding…. 

The tour comes to London in October and I can’t wait to go visit my book :)

I’m not 100% sure yet if I will be taking part in the 2013 Sketchbook Project ( it doesn't look like the tour is coming to Europe next year, so that is a downer :(  )

But in the meantime, I’ve been taking part in a couple of their smaller calls to action.

First I was one of just 200 people lucky enough to grab a space on The Jar Project, which I have already blogged here




And more recently I signed up for the Photo Response Project

This was an interesting one that I couldn’t resist playing along with –

They gave us 5 photos:

 1:

 2:

 3:

 4:

5:













And we had to choose one, and make something prompted or inspired by it in some way – you could use any media – the only proviso being that whatever you produced had to be 6”x4” in size and fairly flat – nothing 3-D

I hummed and harred for ages as none of the photos were screaming out at me.  In the end I decided that I liked photo 2 best, but still had no idea what to actually do with it.  Then my other half started talking about his work colleague going to Liverpool for a few days and ‘where was that beach we went to with all the statues?’ – and cogs started to turn….

So here you go – my postcard sized response to photo #2:

I was thinking along the lines of how, if something bad creeps up on you slowly enough, you either don’t really notice it, or you do but you don’t bother to fix it because you think you have all the time in the world….and then one day you’re engulfed by it, and then it’s too late. I’m depressing you, I know, sorry! :)

Not sure if I like the end result or not but I often feel that way about stuff I make.  Either way it went in the post to America today, so let’s hope it arrives in time for the deadline.  I look forward to seeing what everyone else does prompted by the five photographs.

I’ve also signed up for one other Art House Co-op project, one that involves public art, very much up my street.  Will blog all about it when it’s done….

The Jar Project

Eeeek - it's Saturday and I haven't done my Rockin' Your World Friday post yet, very slack of me

In the meantime, here is my jar that went in the post to Brooklyn today to take part in The Jar Project

I'm not totally over the moon with how it turned out - I actually had a different idea for it in mind originally but had forgotten the instruction to "fill me with stories" - so at the last minute I went for something totally different, using some of my painted paper from the postcard swap with a very personal story on the back

It's kind of designed so that it's impossible to read the whole thing but people can get snippets from different angles

My favourite bit is probably the lid:

I hope it gets there before the deadline....

Sketchbook Project 2012 - "Along The Line"

And so it's finally finished - hooray!

This is my entry for the Sketchbook Project 2012 World Tour

After nine months of slogging away at this little fella, I'm half just glad to see the back of it, and half sad that I have to send it away.

Anyway, it's halfway across the Atlantic now, but I scanned it in before it went - so here are my favourite bits:

I can't wait for the book tour to reach these shores, so I can go to visit my book, and meet some of its little sketchbook pals :)