Yeti Lives!

After our Thanksgiving Portland trip I passed along a few pictures of my Dad to him and he captioned them Yeti lives! I think this response was partly fueled by my sister's boyfriend's somewhat sincere belief in Bigfoot, and how we all like to give him a hard time about it. So I got an idea for their Christmas presents.

I made several digital designs combining Yeti & Mt. Hood silhouettes and adding a few design/composition elements. I would have loved to hand pull these prints on t-shirts but had time constraints so went for iron-on transfers. They turned out so much better than I anticipated.

Needless to say I will be making more apparel with t-shirt transfer material.

2011 Holiday Cards

About this time of year I am unable to do anything but think about holiday projects and what I would like to do as gifts for my lucky friends and family. The last several years despite high ambitions of wanting to make  calendars, ornaments, cards, tags, etc I seem to fixate on cards and tags.  The first three cards are ones that I made last year for my digital art class.

The rest of the these cards were created this year with a mix of paper collage, print, and digital collage. I made a whole slew of them for a craft fair and now have them listed on my Etsy shop to see how they do out there in the DIY/craft world.  I am selling the cards for $3 each and hope to list smaller tags of the same designs for $1-$2 each. I hope this is a good kick off for me to start actually using Etsy again.

Hero! Martin O'Neill

Flipping through my Google Reader today and came upon some interesting prints by graphic designer Martin O'Neill. It is a style that I would love to achieve myself so I had to investigate further and I think it is safe to say I have a new hero. This guy's prints are just lovely and incorporate all that I appreciate about art. Taken from his page about his process:

Martin’s work evolves from a subtle alchemy of collage, silkscreen, photography, paint, and digital techniques. Fifteen years of experimental image making has resulted in his unique and instantly recognisable brand of illustration. Martin works from a vast archive of found and self generated material and also works with stock and supplied imagery.

Catalog: Rollotexture

Signed and numbered Giclée print
in a limited edition of 50.
Paper size A1
594 × 841mm / 23.39 x 33.1 inches
308g Hannemulle paper
Printed by Andrew Turnbull at Professional Fine Art Printing Solutions in central London using archive quality inks.

And this one caught my eye because it provides inspiration for a project once I am done making holiday fun. I have a plethora of handcut images that I hoped to use for some collage at some point but it just didn't make the cut at the time. I want to pull together all of these pieces into an explosion. It will help me clear out my stashes and start new without feeling like I have wasted anything, a purging of sorts. 

Dogs and Dice Poster

Litho print in edition of 100
Signed and numbered
613 x 490mm
170gsm Recycled paper

Fall Love

I learned two cool things today, I think I bore my little bun in the oven with my day to day routines and copy machine art rocks. Somehow I learned both of these by taking a walk at lunch in a park with some beautiful trees turning for fall.

I keep meaning to make it to the mountains (now foothills) to collect some leaves or just collect some pictures of leaves but one thing after another and it just hasn't happened within the season as it is late fall if not early winter in the higher elevations and there are just a whole lot of brown crusty leaves to be found.

On my way to work yesterday I was trying to plan my ideal weekend in my head which included going on a hike to take pics and I looked over to my left to see a whole park with a plethora of leaves of every color. So I made a lunch time plan... walk 10 feet inspect the lower branches of a tree pick the best leaves, move on.

My first discovery, about boring the baby. I am a little more than 20 weeks pregnant with a baby girl (I know it has been awhile, I haven't even said anything over here!) and according to the literature I should be feeling the baby move and while I have, here and there, nothing significant. About 20 minutes into walking she started moving all over non-stop for the rest of the walk for about another 25 minutes. It was strong and bizarre and cool and almost left me off balance a couple of times. As soon as I got back to the office, nothing, not even a hint of movement, I started to think it was just digestion or my imagination.

At about five o'clock when the office vacated (god forbid my office peeps see my eccentric side) I pulled out my stash of leaves and spread them all over my desk and started rearranging. Then with the best array of colors and shapes in hand I visited our awesome copier. I achieved these variations through playing with the color settings (color inversion & erasing settings), I was really on the verge of going crazy with different scans. Lo and behold about 15 minutes into playing the same attention catching baby flips returned and stayed with me throughout until I got a call from the other half wondering what in the world would motivate me to still be at work so late on a Friday.

Whew... that's a lot of talking. Now the results. (By the way, M still thought I was maybe a little too enthusiastic about it when I came home and showed him what I was up to. So I may be on my own in believing I discovered something awesome with the copier)

What I started out with more or less.

Really love the ghostly nearly translucent effect of the cooler colors.
...and the pops of pink. Does this tree exist somewhere because I wanna see it!Now off to wall paper the nursery with these ;-)

As usual, more variations to be found on my flickr page.

Western

Eeps! I am supposed to be working, bad me! This one will be quick....

On an awesome fun trip to Pagosa Springs, CO this past weekend I got me a little of every thing I love... family, friends, antiques, art, and nature. Oh yeah, and booze!

We found an antique store with gobs of old books and magazines and I really had to limit myself. Here's a collage I made from the ones I came home with.

Screen Print Workshop- Who Gives A Hoot!

I am posting my first attempt at printing from the screen I made this past Tuesday in my screen printing workshop at Art Students League of Denver. I couldn't wait until next Tuesday to print so I attempted at home with the gear I have. Heck I could hardly wait until last night but life gets in the way ;)

I didn't really take the time to register the prints quite right so in the next run I will take more care in that respect. I was just too impatient to see the end product, that is probably always my downfall in these types of projects. Also, I went backwards in the order of color this would have worked better if I printed black last.

I will revisit with properly registered prints and probably some other colors. While it may seem I was meant to live in the 60's and 70's with all the throwback design I think this project will benefit from some softer more modern colors.

Denver Art Museum

Today was Library Book Due Date for us so we took a trip downtown and found ourselves there before opening time. Not feet away it was Free Day at Denver Art Museum so we decided to partake... good stuff! Some highlights offered to you via a crappy ipod lens.

Went on to find lots of good, inspiring art books at the library. And to round it out we visited Il Vicino on S. Broadway. First beer or pizza in 30+ days, glad I had Il Vicino for the re-introductory.

La La Love You

La La Love You
Originally uploaded by a.m. design

More valentine's love. For some reason this holiday provides me with the most inspiration to create. I think it is the fact a valentine can be sweet, silly, sassy, or bitter. Really all you have to do is slap a heart on it.
Check out more on my flickr page.

Sweet Love

sweet love
Originally uploaded by a.m. design

Nothing like little sweet window treatments. Valentine's is the only time I feel like it is acceptable to indulge in the super cute... and I take that job seriously; hearts, glitter, lace and all.