make

Letting it rip!

Posted by hil

BookRebound Designs takes old books and turns them into bags. I’m not a handbag user, so in a practical sense they are lost on me, but they are really cool. I took a spin past a couple of the op shops the other day, and came home with a few books to experiment with. Maybe I can make a few Christmas presents this year?

Strange how it feels naughty to rip the pages out, even for books I don’t feel any relationship with. I found four Reader’s Digest condensed book volumes with pretty covers that I don’t feel too bad about remixing. I think they must be in the same series as this one.

I doubt I could have done it to this one. I did get a Dean & Son abridged Pride and Prejudice, with an amusing gaudy cover, but I escape any dilemma because its spine is too thin.

Did you ever do that thing of cutting a secret compartment in the pages of a book? I remember it taking a lot of grunt to cut through all the pages!

Foam Latex Puppetmaking Tutorial

Posted by hil

foam

Boing Boing points to Kathi Zung, a NYC maker of foam latex puppets used in animated videos and films, and in particular to her Do-it-yourself Foam Latex Puppetmaking 101 tutorial on DVD. I’d like to try something like that sometime.

This is the same technique that was used to make the Leunig Animated series that brought Michael Leunig’s cartoons to life on SBS TV a few years ago. An exhibition showing how it had been made followed, and I loved being able to see in detail how it had been done. Strangely, while the animations themselves were really good, I felt some tension to do with the whole production of animating them weighing down the original whimsy of the cartoons.

Updated links  2015.

Poseable manikins

Posted by hil

I’ve been busy making two of those poseable wooden manikins that artists use to draw from into small puppet versions of two actors, a man and a woman. Its been fiddly, since to make the proportions right, I had change the shapes of the bodies, and the length of the limbs, which in turn means undoing the joints and shortening some of the springs that tension them . Really, the manikins are quite odd around the hips. I read that these deluxe guys have a lot more movement than the wooden ones, but they just make me laugh! And the woman is frightening!

Its a strange range of other poseable figures you can get supposedly to draw from. Horses, dinosaurs and giraffes are carried by our local art store. I know people buy them just because they are cool, but I like to imagine instead that there is a thriving subculture of ‘giraffe artists’ for instance.

I’m not participating in the Month of Softies this time. Partly I’ve been short on time, but I also wasn’t inspired. And while I think moving it to Flickr was more than understandable, I find that I feel differently about it over there. I’m not sure why.

Colour-in Canberra

Posted by hil

tcb

Urban services here in Canberra is running a competition for the opportunity to participate in painting designs on 30 traffic controller boxes around the city. Its a good idea; I hope to put in an entry. The competition was launched a few days ago with the unveiling of this first painted box by Franki Sparke. It’s at the corner of Limestone Avenue and Wakefield Avenue in Ainslie. I’ll have to go for a drive and take a look – I wonder what’s on the other side?

Manufacturing a Yellow Hound

Posted by hil

BiffManufacturing a Yellow Hound is a short online film showing the process of making this cool plaster dog sculpture. The armature is bundles of foil squished into shape and joined with masking tape. The shape is then covered with plaster bandage and painted. This elephant and bee are made the same way.

I found the yellow hound at Naive Knitting where the maker, Martha Wasacz, explains how the dog came about and fitted in with her thoughts about an open source policy towards crafting. I think that’s how it works, too.

Update 2015: broken links

Quilts: Alison Horridge

Posted by hil

Kath at red current has been blogging about the Craft & Quilt Fair held last weekend, and mentioned really liking a quilt made by Alison Horridge. Here are pictures of three more of Alison’s quilts.

Night/Baby

Posted by hil

This is beautiful.Thanks so much, Mimi. I also love this new one. What is it with me and insects at the moment?

Artist Trading Cards

Posted by hil

I’ve been making a few artist trading cards: an edition of just three. One of them is in exchange for Mimi‘s night baby.

atcy

Close-ups below.

I find the concept of artist trading cards quite seductive. It must be the idea of miniature art, like stamps and other mailart. But I am also wary of getting into it, on time grounds alone.

For a long time I wanted to make an installation – sometimes I still do! – with the little images I did for The Republic of Pemberley years ago. (Some of them were money and stamps invented for that imaginary world, featuring Colin Firth’s Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, but those particular ones are not online at the moment). The idea was to print and frame the pictures at the scale they were made – 200 x 150 pixels – and then exhibit them in a purpose-built miniature gallery. The way you would view them would be through peep holes, or being able to pop you head up into the individual gallery rooms from underneath. The idea connects into ideas I have long played around with, to do with how cyberspace impacts on our understandings of public and private space.

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