Baby Maggie!

I can't say that I have been producing too much art lately. That is mostly due to the fact I have been busy making, delivering, and growing a sweet little baby girl.

 I was able to make an announcement of her birth soon after she was born, a "Maggie-Zine"

Here it is unfolded.
I sent them out with my thank you cards for all the great gifts people gave to help us welcome Maggie into the world.

As with everything I find fascinating and beautiful I take lots of pictures. Needless to say I have a selected few of the thousands (yes, already) of pictures of Maggie on my Flickr page.

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.

Show Poster

As a follow up or cap to the Digital Art class I was given the opportunity to make a show poster for The Bellmont. I haven't done any show stuff in awhile and was happy to get back to it. I only wish we could attend the show. I have heard the CD several times and really like it, very tight and clean recording with some great tunes and lyrics.

This one is a tiny bit different from the final printed one but I prefer it with the ommited detail.

One a different note we had a great Christmas with family and friends and got to some crafting in between starting off with the messiest cookie making session ever, i.e. more dough on my clothes and walls of kitchen then actually got baked. There was a step we took beforehand that we will have to omit next time ;)

Other crafting that I am excited about that I will post about soon are garlands and Suminagashi.

Digital Art Class

It's been awhile but I have actually been blogging in between just over here for the semester. I am posting some highlights from the class here but hop on over there for more... because I know you are dying for it.

Home is Where you Park It

14 Images 14 Days- Mid-Century Modern Adorned

Final Project- Holiday Cards

To be honest I went into this class having little idea of what we were going to be doing. Certainly not art, that's not school. School=boring, right. Well obviously I need to wrap my mind around what art classes are because I had a blast. In part due to the professor, Phillip Faulkner (check out his art) and some of the classmates.
I also had a bias in my head about digital art, one that that I think that most people have, that it is missing an aura. I am still coming to terms with the fact that it can have an aura and trying to figure out how any digital art I create is special or unique to me but I think I am hooked on this medium.

Risque?

I completed these collages about a month ago and immediately put them in my archives without documenting them. I was a little concerned about the content and message, how people may react... specifically to Head in the Sand. I am not interested in making this my platform for issues I may or may not have with my country and the world in general but I am interested in creating things that provoke thinking, even if it is just my own thoughts that are provoked. Aside from that, I like the elements of the collage, I like that it is a little edgy... so there it is.

This next one, not so much message-bearing as it is just a little risque, more skin than usual and a straight up appropriation of someone else's full work of art. I got this out of an awesome book about the history of mass art that is full of beauties like this and a whole bunch of huge-eyed children and creatures. Pretty amusing and very disturbing.

Also, M helped me make a lot of the executive desicions in the content of this collage. Co-creating is fun!

Montreal

Ok, I went to Montreal this week... it was awesome. I will go so far as to say it was fucking awesome.
I am not sure why I went all the way to Montreal and these are the images I came back with that in my mind summarizes the city. I know, it makes no sense.
More pics on my flickr page... some that more appropriately represent the city.

Spiro Collage

I got myself a Spirograph set and made this.

Upcycled: Altered T

I love shopping for t-shirts at the thrift store but never found them girly enough to wear outside the gym... and usually the neck is too tight, the arms are too wide, etc. *sigh*
Solution: I borrowed this book from the library (thumbs up to Denver Public Libraries... a breath of fresh air!) and unpacked the old sewing machine.
I actually remembered how to thread it... yeah it's been that long.

Excuse the cut off head, the hubs took the picture!

The shirt turned out well but I realize I can really only wear it to the beach or Vegas! So... time to go book my flight.

Thrift Store Love- From House to Home

We purchased our first house in November of last year and then promptly dove into the holiday season with plenty of travelling and entertaining. There was little time to make the transformation of a new house to our home. As soon as the holiday rush slowed down we ended up with some room-mates. The in-laws needed some help. Well seven months later they have moved out.

For reasons having to do with respecting each other's space and lack of vision we did not do much with our house since moving. Now that we have an "empty nest" suddenly the desire to pimp it out has surfaced.

The majority of the elements in this collage are found from thrift stores over the months (I bet you're suprised). The flowers grew on their own in our backyard and are absolutely beautiful. I feel lucky that that they decided to return this year.

The bedroom is turning into a real girlie-girl room with nail polish and bangels on display but the other half doesn't seem to mind so let the gold leaf prevail.

Upcoming plans for the abode? Paint our super long & tall wall in the living room/kitchen. I am thinking of a dirty turquoise, the kind that goes well with lots of wood. Hopefully more news on that soon!

Thrift Store Love- Old School

I more addicted than ever to thrift store hunting. I realize that I can't take everything home with me so I snap a photo and then pine after crazy bobble head tigers for days... Hey, if nothing else at least they provide inspiration!

Swap-Bot Zine

Here is the full page layout of the Zine I made for a swap on www.swap-bot.com. It is very much nature inspired with mostly flora and fauna in the pictures. It is just as significant to me though that it is made from about 95% recycled materials with nearly everything acquired from thrift store purchases. I found several old Highlights magazines from the 1970's, at first pass through them I didn't think much was there for creating but once I started pulling things apart I realized I love the colors & texture of the paper and the illustrations are pretty cool on their own.

Details of each page here.

2-D Design Class Chronicle- Final Project

The theme for the final project was faces/heads. My source is a picture of mannequins with wigs for sale that I took at an antique shop here in Denver. I used Prismacolor pencils and Turpenoid with some collage as the medium.
I can't say I am totally happy with the way it turned out, perspective and proportions mainly. With that said that are parts that I do like quite a bit so I am displaying some of those snippets.




and the full piece... the funky face of the lady in the middle and the one on the right that looks dead have a mannequin-ish feeling that I think it worked for the project but I am still a little embarrassed by them.