This is about how I've been feeling lately

head cold pattern 2 (above) and head cold pattern 1 (below) by Lauren Nasseff, from her Drawing a Day series. I've been following this series since summer, and I love the very careful handling of stroke in her drawings, and the unfinished quality of a lot of these images (whether intentional or not) make them really interesting.

DANIMAL GRAFFFIXXX

Last summer, I went to a small arts and crafts fair in South Minneapolis. It was neat, but I actually liked the prints displayed around the coffee shop sponsoring the fair way more than anything that was a part of the sale.

Again, this is another person I don't know much about, but I really enjoy his prints. His name is Daniel Luedtke, and prints under the name Danimal Grafffixxx.

His prints are full of bright colors, and he uses a split-fountain technique to get some neat gradient effects and lots of layers.

I saw both of these prints for sale at the Center for the Book Arts, and I was really tempted to get the one with the microphone lady. Maybe someday soon.
DANIMAL GRAFFFIXXX blog
DANIMAL GRAFFFIXXX on mnartists.org

Jeff Millikan

When I was home this past week, I stopped at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts for some supplies and for some quality work time in their nice cafe. As always, I spent a long time looking through the shop and the gallery. The current exhibit, Quantified Aesthetics, was all about work that featured numbers and formulas.

One piece I really liked was a book by Jeff Millikan (unfortunately, I forgot the exact title of the piece). From what I gathered, Jeff takes old books (this one was a math textbook, I think), covers them with beeswax, and places them in custom bee hives. He tries to use the beeswax to encourage the bees to build honeycomb in certain areas, and eat away at the book in others. It was really fascinating to have the beeswax built directly on the book, and other pages seemed chewed through, showing many layers of text and diagrams.

There were also some photographs of other pieces of his, which were all equally interesting. I've been trying to find more information on him, but have not been too successful yet. I think he might be an adjunct professor of photography at the University of Minnesota, but again, I'm not sure if that's the correct Jeff Millikan.

I did, however, find this single image of a book from this series (which he calls the Insect Manuscripts, if I remember correctly).

overdue

Well, I said I was going to get back into this, but that was over a month ago. So, maybe I'll try posting other things besides my work to get back in the habit of updating. (I'm toying with the idea of making some spring mixes)

In other news, here's the full embroidered/sewn storytelling project that those patches were for. It's somewhere around 18"x24" in size. Overall, I think I like how some of the individual patches turned out better than the entire piece, but I absolutely loved that I did an entire project without using my computer at all. It was an extremely refreshing break, something that I should do more often.