Green walls
The lovely plant wall outside Musee du quai Branly in Paris. Wouldn’t you like growing and green walls at your place? At least some of the plants were growing in little pockets of kapok or something similar attached to the wall:
Archive for the 'design' Category
Spoonflower
I’ve been aware of Spoonflower for quite a while; it’s such a good idea to extend printing on demand to fabric as well as books and paper.
Obamafication
I’ve watched the story of Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster unfold right from the beginning, about a year ago. The design is so good, and it’s wonderfully appropriate in the circumstances that a street art design has become iconic and so appreciated that it has become mainstream. Now you can obamify yourself at Obamicon.Me. It’d be fun if everyone adopted one of these as their avatar at Twitter and other places on inauguration day to celebrate.
King’s Park
On Monday a friend showed us a few sites around Perth. This was a decorative metal plate in the aerial walkway at King’s Park that took my fancy. I wished I had paper and a crayon so that I could have done a rubbing of it! A lot of the paths around the Park were a rusty colour, and apparently it’s because the bore water that is used to water the grass and plants is so rich in iron it stains everything rust. The park has great views of the city of Perth.
Cool cuttlefish and blenny puppets
Raggy Rat has made a couple of beautiful marine-themed puppets for Portland’s Seafest: a cuttlefish and a tompot blenny.
There are some great photos and commentary on the making process here. I love the mixing of different types of fabric, and the wool in particular reminds me of Mimi‘s use of wools. I’m looking forward to seeing photos taken at the festival, too. (And look at this cool jellyfish cake!). Thanks for letting me post your photos, Cat!
Cursters
There are a lot of monsters out there on the web, and I tend to be pretty selective about which I like. Some of Erin Currie’s Cursters I like a lot, particularly the ornate ones, like this or this, or this or this. Erin has an Etsy shop, too.
I hadn’t heard of munnys before seeing the monster above. Interesting to see a cross-over between urban graffiti and stencil art culture and toys.
Butterfly colour palettes
I once had an idea to make colour swatches from Australian landscapes for people to use when designing webpages. My main site Spirits Dancing dates from that time; it’s sorely in need of updating in other ways, but I still like the colours, which were sourced from a eucalyptus tree. So I was interested to come across a thriving community website based on a similar idea, COLORlovers. Check out their colour palettes sourced from butterflies.
(via Laughing Squid)
The Model Family
A 1956 family in model aeroplane kit form, Guy Bottroff’s cool sculpture The Model Family, at the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition in Adelaide this last March. A few more photos here.
FantiSea: Giant sea creatures in Esperance
(Cool festival image by Haylie Michelle)
Over in Western Australia, designer and maker Bryan Woltjen and animateur Karen Hethey have been engaged for the last few months on the huge task of designing and building 8 giant puppet sea creatures for FantiSea, which will be held on 22 March as part of the Esperance Festival of the Wind. The festival was at first an art-themed celebration of the positive energy wind brings to the town, and has now evolved into a celebration of ‘community, art, culture and shared fun’.
The building of the giant marine puppets is one of those great projects in which the participation of number of community groups, schools and individuals is integral. The festival’s Workshop Gallery has photos that were taken during the first phase of the build at the end of last year, when the ‘unskinned‘ puppets were built, and some of them were used in the inaugural Christmas pageant in Esperance. You can see how the frameworks are made from a mixture of bamboo and cane, with wire and gaffa joins. I love this picture of the unskinned eel! I would really like to be involved with making puppets of this sort sometime…
More recently during the second phase, the puppets have been skinned with muslin, dipped in diluted PVA, and dyed. Also, Karen Hethy is now teaching performers how to animate the giant puppets and doing stage rehearsals in conjunction with local scriptwriter, Derek Clarke.
Lurk, the shark:
Lighting up Ziggy, the leafy sea dragon:
The gorgeous Dame Agatha, octopus:
The crab (love this one!):
The workshop shed full of finished puppets:
You can click the photos to see them enlarged, and there are more photos here. I think they are wonderful! Thanks, Bryan, for sending me the photos and telling about it all, and I hope to be adding more photos of the actual event.
Update: Photos from the event have now been added.
