This weekend was filled to the brim with activity, most of it with the scoobs up in Boston. So much activity, in fact, that I am dragging and tired on this sunny Monday morning, and feeling slightly congested like I might get a cold at any moment. But it was worth it, because I had so much fun! It almost makes up for having to attend nine solid hours of classes while everyone else enjoys their Columbus Day.

First, I received two very important packages in the mail on Friday: both my Spoonflower order and my Ponoko order! Great excitement. I haven't photographed the fabric, but I went a little nutso over my fancy yellow stars:

On Friday I headed up to Boston and, among other things, had lunch with the ladies of the scooby clan:

Then on Saturday Matt, Lizzi, and Julie came into town to see Waterfire and get a taste of the RISD atmosphere. I was running around a little crazed for a portion of it, but eventually got all my to-do items checked off, and we enjoyed a delicious dinner at the Red Fez before walking over to Waterfire. I even managed to get us all onto the roof of the Design Center so that we could see the whole thing! Very cool, and we only had to climb out of one window to do it!

And then on Sunday I drove back up to Boston to attend Charlotte's first birthday party. She started taking her first steps just this week, so of course there had to be repeat performances for all the grandparents. And a huge pink piggie cake to be smushed and consumed. Lottie didn't really know what to make of all of it, but she was pretty cute anyways! I drove home and went immediately to bed, I was so exhausted. Birthday parties take a lot out of you!

This week I tried out two cool services: Ponoko and Spoonflower. Both are new entries in a little niche called desktop manufacturing, where you can design something at your home computer and have it fabricated in small quantities without sacrificing quality or paying heavy setup fees.

Ponoko is basically an online laser cutter. You send them outlines created in Illustrator or Sketchup, and then choose from a menu of materials to have your shapes cut from. A few weeks later, you get a package in the mail! I tested it out with some Morroco-inspired stars that I had lying around my hard drive, and cut them out of yellow acrylic. So if you see me wearing yellow acrylic star earrings, you'll know where they came from. :)

Spoonflower is the same idea, but for textiles. You create a square design that can repeat or tile in any direction and then upload it to the site. Choose the size of fabric you want to print (anywhere from a fat quarter up to three yards) and in a few weeks you have your own fabric to work with! This has been my desktop background for a couple months now, but as fabric its destined to be a pair of pillows in a certain New York lady's new apartment.

You know you're in grad school when your professors start saying things like, "Let's hold class an hour later. Class at 8am is uncivilized." Or, "Next week, we will meet at the beach. But first I would like to take you all out to breakfast." Its a strange transition from being a student to being a peer, and we're in the early stages of finding out how to relate to our faculty in this new way.

Luckily for me, the professors leading our thesis studio are fans of beachy locales, and so this past Wednesday we did, in fact, meet at the beach. But first we piled into a caravan of cars and headed to breakfast in Little Compton, RI. We sampled native Rhody fare of Johnny Cakes at the The Commons Lunch, and then proceeded on to Tiverton, RI, to the Goosewing Beach and Nature Preserve.

I brought a trunk full of stuff to play with, but ultimately ended up wandering around tidal pools and tall brush in my new rainboots, taking pictures and exploring the area.

Since my thesis is about reconciling old and new image-making methods, I decided to only use analog methods during this beach trip. Which means I am waiting for several rolls of 35mm and 120mm film to come back from the processor. Score one point for new technology.

I did break down towards the end and snap a few pics with my digital camera after I ran out of fim.. I also toyed around with some letterforms that I cast in concrete last semester, tossing them into the surf at various spots and seeing what happened. At one point I overdid it a bit:

I also misjudged just how strong this stream was when I threw the "ow" brick into the current. I had to dash into the surf to rescue it before it got washed out to sea!

So even with the ridiculously easy goal of posting once a day for the rest of May, I didn't actually post every day. For shame. But its the summer now, and I (theoretically) have time to do stuff like put up some of my favorite stuff from this last semester.

The first thing I will show is related to my earlier How to Make Rubber Molds post, and is quite possibly one of my all-time favorite final reviews ever. These are pictures from the final review of the second in a series of two graduate studios I took last year. We spent the last three weeks building physical objects, and at the end it was decided that we needed an installation to truly showcase all of this tactile work. So a few people commandeered (sp?) the small conference room at the end of our studio and got to work.

The room was anchored by this scene, which is a complete re-creation of my friend Hannah's bedroom to showcase her final project: two pillows placed side-by-side on the bed, with the phrases "When I don't sleep I can't work," and "When I don't work I can't sleep" cross stitched on either one:

It was such an appropriate message for the often compulsively creative and driven nature of the students here, and placing it in the manufactured serenity of a bedroom with these two vibrating messages on top was very effective. The room actually became a makeshift bedroom as thesis presentations loomed closer, and it wasn't uncommon for me to get to studio in the mornings and find someone napping on the bed!

Also in the installation room was a corner dedicated to a collaborative group calling itself Sustain Me, which was dedicated to producing gentle acts of public intervention that educated people about environmental issues. They produced a stop-motion animation about coral reefs using all of these hand-sewn "creatures" and then re-created the installation for the final review.

Mary's awesome "cross-stitched" tape lettering on the fence on the empty lot next to our studio. The building that used to be here burned down the year before I came to school here, and it supposedly housed a very cool diner.

Huy's huge cardboard letters and luscious photographs of them in abandoned buildings.

Melissa's "us" made out of garbage collected from a local lake.

There are zillions more I could show because it was a really cool set of projects! Many thanks to Mary, who put a bunch of the pics from the final review on flickr.

Our soon-to-be president has been busy these last few weeks, touring the campus and producing a series of ad-hoc podcasts of various final crits across campus. Its a neat way to experience the unique atmosphere of this place, and perhaps explore what motivates so many people here to become relentless creators:

My First Podcast
Crit Week, Part 1
Crit Week, Part II

Since I finished my Intro to B&W Photography class this past Wintersession, I have been slowly but surely scanning in all of the negatives that I didn't have a chance to print for the class (the ones I did print for class are here). I can see a real difference in the quality of both my exposures and my film developing as I get into some of the later stuff, but its still very helpful to have Photoshop on my side to fix small issues.

Despite a wealth of things to do and see in this region of the country, I haven't really tired of taking pictures of Providence itself, and I wanted to share a few of my favorites. Its such an interesting place, with elements of the old colony butted up against today's modern city. The state itself has a long history of lawlessness — this hasn't changed much mdash; and so there are all sorts of alternative narratives running beneath the surface of the pristinely preserved historic buildings and squares.

Walking along S Main St:

Walking along Canal St:

(coincidentally, that building in the upper left is where I'm staying this week while I take care of Eve.)

One of my last projects of the semester involved creating typographic narratives that lived somewhere out in the real world. As often happens to me with projects like this, I was way more interested in the system of producing my pieces than I was in my ultimate message. I spent weeks developing a method to make rubber molds so that I could make castings of the negative space around letterforms, and finally came up with a process that I really liked:

1. Cut forms out..
   I used sheets of pink insulation foam (around $12 for a six foot sheet at Home Depot) because it was inexpensive, easy to cut, and water resistant. I made a template in Illustrator, traced it out on the foam with marker, and then used a small jewelers saw to cut it out. I was going for a rough-hewn look, so the imperfections of this process were exactly what I wanted. Note that this is a positive of the ultimate shape I want to cast.

   

   
   

2. Mount forms to a base.
   I built a shadowbox-style frame around the form, using "planks" cut from the same sheet of foam, and held together with masking tape.
   
3. Pour the mold!
   I used a mold-making rubber called OOMOO 30. I picked it because the supply store here on campus stocks it, and because of this video. If Martha can do it, I sure as hell can!
   

   

4. Make a cast!
   Now that you have a mold, you can pretty much pour whatever you want in there. Plaster, concrete, wax, soap, water (make ice molds in the freezer!), jell-o, cupcake batter — you name it. Be super careful pulling out the hardened cast from the mold, especially if your original has as many curves and undercuts as mine did.
5. Play.
   Take your new mold outside and play with it!
   

   

Today was my final review for Digital Type Design, where we all brought 17 copies of a specimen of our type face and then collated them into a book that each of us could take home. Then we went through each person's typeface and got feedback from an outside critic on what went right (and wrong). Here's the type face that I developed in the class. Its called Shoestring:

All in all it was a pretty mellow end of the semester, and it means that I only have three more to go! Oh, except for that silly little thing called proposing your thesis. Right. Tonight my class hung a show in the Graphic Design Gallery of posters presenting each of our thesis proposals. On Wednesday night we'll have an opening reception thats open to just the 14 of us and all of the graphic design faculty, where we'll answer questions, get feedback, and shop for advisors for the coming year. Here's a sneak peek at my poster:

I spent most of my Sunday desperately trying to get some work done, but kept myself entertained by finding excellent podcasts and YouTube videos to stream in a little window on the corner of my monitor. The best one by far was from a BBC Series called The Machine that Made Us, hosted by British television Stephen Fry. In the show Mr. Fry sheds light on the invention of movable type by following the construction of a working replica of Gutenberg's press, as well as travelling across Europe to learn how to cast type and make paper. The series lasts about an hour, and I enjoyed seeing the process in action.

Having spent a lot of my first semester here at RISD studying Mr. Gutenberg's series of innovations (G developed not only a printing press, but a new lead alloy, a formula for ink, as well as an entirely new casting process), I particularly enjoyed watching Fry actually carve his own punch of a blackletter 'e', strike it into a copper matrix, and then cast several pieces of lead type that would eventually be used on the replica press. I spent a lot of time trying to find images of this process for a research book, so I was amazed to have such a detailed video fall in my lap!

The real shock came, however, as I started up the first video... lo and behold! Mr. Fry's is a face I knew well — for uttering the very line quoted in my last blog entry, no less! — as the endearingly clueless Mr. Mybug in BBCs miniseries of Cold Comfort Farm.

It was funny to reconcile the bumbling, hopelessly egocentric Mybug, whose life's amibition is to prove that Branwell Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights, with the charismatic TV host geeking out over movable type.

I finally managed to locate a window of time when the photography department offices were actually open (a tougher challenge than one might hope) and retrieve my final portfolio from Wintersession. And THEN I managed to find a window of time to actually sit down and scan them in! Miracles do happen.

Enjoy:

These were being given away in the Graphic Design building this past Friday.

(posters by Experimental Jetset and others available here)

The design blogosphere is falling all over itself for this movie. It debuted to a packed house at South by Southwest in Austin last month, and screenings are selling out across the country.

But not the one tonight, here in Providence, at 6:30pm. One of the many reasons I heart RISD. :)

I'm taking advantage of a rare lull in the activity here to give my blog some much-needed attention. I finished up my classes at around 6 this afternoon, and I have spent the entire evening doing everything non-school related. All right, I did cheat and do some reading for my seminar class (an essay called Think/Classify by Georges Perec - I am supposed to be reading another book by Perec for a book club this weekend, but thats doubtful), but for the most part its been an evening of homemade fajitas, tv, laundry, and a cold Killians Irish Red.

I've been working on lots of interesting stuff lately. Mixing neutral primary, secondary, and tertiary colors with gouache and then matching them on my inkjet printer - I am a co-owner of a fancy new wide format Canon printer that uses a cool eight-ink system. Designing a book cover for a fictional Department of Labor document. Creating a photographic tour of my studio (which is up on flickr, in rough form). 10 1x2 inch slides with compositions inspired from the movie Il Conformista.

Just this morning I finished a project known across campus as The 500 - 500 one-inch thumbnail sketches in a week, all based on a small wooden cube and an s-hook, rendered in black ink. Once my camera is charged back up, I definitely want to document that one - its truly an exercise in process and pushing past creative block, especially when you get to your 200th drawing and think you have no more ideas left.

I'm very rarely away from my work these days. I'm in studio or class by 8:30, and I mostly get home after midnight, even on weekends. I have dreams of typography, of the 500, and of concept sketches for Form+Communication assignments. In addition to my studio at RISD, I have a tabletop photography setup in my basement, and anything in between is fair game when it comes to photography projects. (Just the other night I had Adam working as my assistant as I tried to photograph water beading up on my car's windshield.) My main academic building has an art supply store, a commissary (like Entropy @ CMU), and a coffee shop all on the main floor, which means I don't really ever have to leave it!

This morning I went to a lecture on freelance writing and the design media. I was interested in it primarily because Grace Bonney - she's the force behind design*sponge, in addition to doing freelance design writing for magazines - was on the panel. I sat in the back finishing my 500, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Well, I officially survived my first week of grad school!

This morning I am in the studio, setting up my workspace and starting on a project for my Color class. We drew numbers for our desks during the first day of orientation, and I chose a location that, while farther away from the windows (natural light=bonus!), puts me in a row of other three-year students. I seem to be the earliest early bird to the studio in the few days I've been here - arriving at 9am this morning nabbed me a great free parking spot out in front of the building!

I've been to two of the four classes I'll have this semester, and I already have tons of projects to work on. All of my fellow classmates are amazing, thankfully, and we've already formed a cohesive little unit (there are eight of us in the three year track).

We met up at the RISD Museum last night to attend the opening of Wunderground, which included, among other things, a collection of several thousand art, music, and event posters made during the last ten years in Providence. The show was mind boggling simply for the sheer volume of posters you could look at, not to mention the artistry and craft that went into each one. They were plastered on every available vertical surface, much like you'd have found them in their original form. We did get a good introduction to the bizarre antics that are common at this school: We'd been up in the gallery for about an hour when the sounds of drums started echoing in. Then an entire marching band - dressed up in costumes as devils, monkeys, and various forms of the undead - came dancing through, followed by a throng of dancing art patrons. They stopped in each room and played various songs, and the whole gallery erupted in singing, dancing, and shouting. I tried to get a picture of it for you all, but sadly my camera phone wasn't up to the task. I did find some photos of the opening on flickr, though:

Many thanks to everyone for all the emails and comments and phone calls - its awesome to be able to share my excitement with so many people! :) Its finally beginning to feel real for me, even though I haven't received my "official" letter from the admissions office yet. I've told everyone at the office, and this weekend I started a massive financial projection spreadsheet that would make my Dad proud. I don't know if it rivals the infamous Apartment Matrix, but I have three years to perfect it.

Since I really haven't written much about it (jinxes, you know), this all started back in November, when I flew up to RISD for an info session and made the decision that this would be the year I applied. From that point until the end of January, my only goal in life was to prepare my portfolio. The portfolio is both the best and worst part of applying for a design program: on the one hand, there is no studying, no prep courses, and no test to take; on the other hand, you have absolutely no frame of reference for how you stack up against your peers. Its completely subjective, and working for months and months towards a nebulous goal without any boundary or reference point completely wears you down, physically and creatively.

But ultimately I finished, and raced it off to the post office at the absolute last minute (typical Katy style). Fast forward to two weeks ago, when I got an email from the department head. RISD narrows the initial applicant field down to a smaller group (30 if I remember correctly from the info session) and then asks them all to come up for an interview on campus. So Adam and I hopped on a flight up to Providence!

There were some stressful moments - losing my luggage and racing frantically to purchase new clothes, practicing tough interview questions with Adam, last-minute internet research in the hotel Starbucks - but ultimately I had a great interview and left feeling more confident that it was a place I could thrive in. I've never to date had a leisurely, planned-in-advance trip to Providence, but I do hope I'll get one eventually!

Last week I got another email, with the excellent news that I was accepted into the program - a three-year MFA program in Graphic Design. I'll spend my first year taking core design classes like typography and color theory, and then spend two years in graduate studios working towards a thesis.

So if you've ever wanted to travel to New England, now's your chance - I hope to have lots of visitors. :)

I got in.

Maybe its the impending snowfall we're expecting tomorrow, or the Christmas music I've been selecting for this year's mix, or my latest silkscreening project, but this weekend I have been in an extra Christmas-y frame of mind. Here are a few spots to indulge your cravings for all-you-can-stand holiday imagery:

Allsorts
My mom is posting oodles of pictures of the decorations at the Homestead. Its making me nostalgic!

Vintage Christmas pool on Flickr
These people make me look like Scrooge.

Wee Wonderfuls (more on Flickr)

This morning I'm intrigued by the recent show by collaborators Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz. They capture exquisitely detailed scenes created within the surreal confines of a single snowglobe, and the results range from the quietly beautiful to the imminently violent. Often both occur at the same time, lending a very surreal quality to the photographs. (Via ArtMoco)

I just got home from my second class of the week at my local community college. Monday nights are now reserved for Intro to Multimedia I (otherwise known as How to Use Flash), and Tuesday and Thursday nights are now reserved for Introduction to Design II (otherwise known as Color Theory). I have supply lists to fill and books to read and even homework assignments to turn in already! Both classes are looking really interesting so far, although I have higher expectations for the design class.

In Multimedia I think we will have to spend some time bringing everyone up to speed on various software programs. Plus the class is taught in a Mac computer lab, which a lot of people haven't used before. So I expect a few really basic lessons before we jump into fun stuff. Hopefully I'll learn a lot!

Design II has gotten off to an excellent start so far. Our instructor has taught art and painting at various levels for 35 years, although I have to say she doesn't look old enough to have had 35 years in any career. She teaches art at a local high school, as well as adult watercolor classes through her studio, so I'm looking forward to her insight into color theory. And she's taught art for so long I think she'll be able to tie all sorts of other tidbits of information into her teaching. On the first class alone she gave a mini art history lesson on Fauvism - so it should be really fun!

On my way out of class I was able to stop into the college's art gallery to see current exhibition of faculty artwork. My former professor and my current one both had paintings in the show and, thankfully, I really liked both of their styles. Its always interesting to see the work of someone who is teaching you, although sometimes I prefer to see their work after taking a class so that their style doesn't influence my projects in any way.

Last spring I had two of my own pieces accepted into a student show at the same gallery. I'm looking forward to having more to submit for this year's show!

Over the last few weeks I've been participating in an online cd swap organized by Jen, a fellow blogger. It worked like this: I make five mix cds of whatever style, genre, or theme I want, and am given five different people to mail a copy to. In return I received five new mix cds to explore, the last of which arrived this weekend! I was so impressed with the variety and creativity in each one that I decided to take pictures..

Fragments, from Amy:

Songs to Hold Hands To, from Rachel:

Meatheads, Gangstas, and Hipplies Oh My!, from Chris:

iloveyousockcat, from Nathaniel:

State to State, from Tricia:

And, last but not least - Rainy Morning Music, from Me:

Hide and Seek - Imogen Heap
Tropicalia - Beck
Let Go - Frou Frou
About Fun - Psapp
Clocks - Coldplay
The Black Keys Work - Erlend Oye
In the Waiting Line - Zero 7
Between The Bars - Elliott Smith
Starry Eyed Surprise - Paul Oakenfold
Tiger, My Friend - Psapp
Holding Out for a Hero - Frou Frou
Take My Hand - Dido

If I weren't starting another class in a week, I'd sign up for the next swap - the Dual Disc Debacle!

I've been following the work of Friends of the High Line for several years now. Its such an intriguing project - take an abandoned, overgrown elevated railway track in the middle of Manhattan and turn it into a public meeting space, transportation corridor, and sustainable urban green space. They've managed to get funding, support from the mayor and city officials, and enough public awareness to garner an exhibition at the MoMa that opened yesterday. The show displays for the first time the projected designs for the 1.5-mile structure, but the designs are also nicely showcased in this online presentation.

You can also wander through some interesting photo galleries of the High Line in its current state.

What a gem! View is an online architectural photography archive, aggregating the works of more than 30 leading photographers. You can search on a whole slew of criteria, and the images are mouth-watering!

I'm spending this Easter weekend at home in Dallas with my family. Its so nice to be home! The weather is rainy and cold, but its still going to be a day full of food and family. We're heading out to have the big lunch with the family later..

Yesterday we had a very typical day for my family - an early breakfast at La Madeleine, followed by the weekly trip to Central Market to pick up ingredients for dinner. Then we hopped in the car for the short hop over to Fort Worth to see the National Cowgirl Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum.

The Cowgirl Museum was filled with paraphernalia and stories of the women who survived in the American west - including Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who grew up on a ranch in Arizona, and who served as ribbon-cutter at the museum's opening ceremonies. I liked that the museum focused on the archetype of the cowgirl as well as the stories of individual women.

I've been to the Kimbell before, but it is always inspiring to see their fantastic collection. Sometimes much larger museums can be overwhelming, with whole wings of paintings from the various eras. I get a sense that they are competing with each other to have the largest collections, the most famous paintings, etc, but the quality and impact of the museum suffers. The Kimbell is smaller, but their collection feels edited and refined, and each item hanging on the wall is really interesting and valuable in its own way. There are long descriptions on the wall for each piece, which tell you a lot about where the painting fits within the artists body of work, but also the political context of the painting's subject. Its not often that you stop, look, and spend 5-10 minutes per painting in a place like the National Gallery in DC, but the Kimbell offers that kind of experience.

Our secondary reason for visiting the Kimbell is that we had a copy of "My Architect" sitting at home waiting to be watched. "My Architect" is a documentary following Nathanial Khan, son of Louis I. Khan, as he attempts to understand his elusive father by visiting all of his great buildings throughout the world. One of these just happens to be the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. I have always believed that place, and the structures that surround us, can have great impact on our lives, and this movie was really built on that premise. Not only did the people who now use his buildings speak of this, but the cinematography allowed the buildings to speak for themselves.

You know who you are. :)

Essential Fonts for Designers | 300 Free Truetype Fonts You Should Have

I just picked up these for myself:

Despite my exhaustion from the day prior, I hopped back on a train on Sunday afternoon. This time it was the Metro Orange Line, and my destination was the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian for special tour sponsored by the local DC Alumni Association.

I arrived a little early, though, in the hopes of ducking into the National Gallery's East Building to see the new Andy Goldsworthy installation in its final days of construction. I've been a fan of his work ever since I stumbled across a copy of Stone in my local bookstore in high school, but I've never seen any of his work close-up. (Few people have, for that matter, since a lot of what he does is solitary and short-lived.) I liked what I saw - the domes built out of Virginia slate were almost complete, and only the occasional bucket or work boot was still lying around. Its a shame we won't be allowed to walk around them.

Afterwards I met up with Julie, Matt, Lizzi, Jason and Cris to tour the Museum of the American Indian. First we watched an introductory video, and then spent a few hours wandering through exhibits called Our Universes and Our Histories.

With the seemingly impossible task of representing every native tribe in the western hemisphere, the museum packs a lot of stuff from wildly diverse cultures into a very small space. Sometimes I wished they had gone into more depth about just a few tribes instead of trying to cover just the surface of all of them.

Caution: Winding walkways, dim lighting, tropical temperatures, and plenty of glowing, animated multimedia content makes the exhibits hypnotically overwhelming. Enjoy it in small doses.

In a bit of Friday afternoon impulsiveness, I decided that I absolutely *had* to take a day trip up to New York and see The Gates. Especially after all the lively discussion! So I bought an Amtrak ticket for Saturday morning, and arranged to spend the day touring the city with Laura and Scott!

I arrived in the city around noon, and, following a little subway adventure, I met up with them at the Museum of Natural History. We grabbed some food in the cafe and raced upstairs to catch an IMAX movie about the Vikings. Now I want to visit Iceland. I am such a sucker for educational movies like that.

We left the museum and headed into Central Park. And, of course, the gates were everywhere! They really do look stunning with the sun shining on and through them. If you look at Christo's early sketches of the project, you can really tell that he had planned for this effect. When the sun went behind the clouds, the gates suddenly became very dull and lifeless.

Another detail that struck me as we walked was the size and placement of each gate. Each one was slightly different in width depending on the pathway it was situated on. One moment we might be walking through a densely-packed tunnel of orange, and then a few minutes later they'd spread out again. It made me very aware of the conscious planning that went into this: they hadn't just ordered a few thousand gates and haphazardly plonked them down the week before. Each piece was individually tailored to suit the spot it was in, and placed with great care to achieve an overall design.

After taking the requisite pictures and admiring all the cute dogs wandering around with their owners, we ducked into a nearby Krispy Kreme to warm our hands and fill our stomachs. Its very funny that my memory of the delicious hot glazed donut I had is as powerful as the once-in-a-lifetime public art display I had just come from. :) A few more hours of wandering around with Laura and Scott, and I hopped on my train for the (very) long trek back home.

If you can't make it up to New York to see The Gates, at least there is Flickr around to show us all cool pictures of it.

Earlier this week, without much ado, I started taking a class at our local community college. Its called Fundamentals of Design, and meets twice a week for 2.5 hours until the middle of May. I signed up for the class in the hopes that I would a) learn new things, b) have a productive environment in which to produce quality work, and c) be motivated to do work outside of class that will move me in a more creative direction career-wise.

It was a little strange to be back in a college setting again. I felt old, even though it really hasn't been that long. And I felt like a freshman again, trying to find my way around a maze of new buildings and hallways, and not really knowing anyone yet. Of course , the massive power outage that had the entire campus - save the building where my class was - bathed in darkness didn't help me much! Hopefully tonight I'll be able to explore some more.

Our first class session started out pretty well. My instructor was very very nervous, and kept losing her train of thought and jumping from topic to topic without ever getting a full sentence out. But she calmed down towards the end, and I started to like the ideas she was expressing about design and the creative process.

Our class is studio-based - meaning that we'll be creating a lot of artwork in a variety of mediums over the next few months. We'll be working only in black and white (color gets its own semester), but we get to work with everything from charcoal, acrylics, gouache, india ink, plaster and clay. I spent today's lunch break geeking out at my local Plaza Art Supply shop, stocking up on Bristol board and paint brushes (all brushes 50% off - wahoo!). I even splurged on a second art tackle box to keep everything organized.

I can't wait to start playing (uh, I mean working. yeah.) with all of it!

Veer pointed me to a really interesting ad campaign this morning. Its for Honda, who already has a history of ground-breaking advertising (Cog, anyone?). There's a lip-smackingly gorgeous tv spot narrated by Garrison Keillor. There's also a quirky website.

Its apparently become so popular in Britain that they are trying to release a pop single. And groups are starting to take the song and use it outside of its original purpose (to sell quiet diesel engines) for things like motivating people in therapy and rehab. How cool is that?

Meet Maxwell, my mom's entry for the Loobylu's Month of Softies!

The theme for November was The Accessorized Elephant, and December's will be Holiday Hang-Ups. I've had such fun looking at all the entries people made - seeing such amazing creativity in other people is always very inspiring to me.

there's this very cool online Flash widget that lets you cut your own snowflakes.

The much-anticipated winners of the Speak Up Poster Design Competition have been announced! They'll ultimately go on sale from the community's website for all design geeks to add to their collection. I am already picturing the emoticon poster and the hell-in-a-bobsled poster on the wall in my new studio.

I'm emptying out my RSS news bins again.. Enjoy! :)

Saul Bell Winners Announced
The Saul Bell Design Award Competition is an annual jewelry design competition. The stuff people come up with is amazing! The winners for 2004 were recently announced.

Movin' on up
Firefox aims at 10% market share among browsers by the end of 2005. This Firefox user certainly hopes they make it. I also hope that it propels certain large ecommerce websites (ahem, Art.com) away from making their core functionality IE-only.

Netflix for handbags
Pay a monthly fee and borrow as many designer handbags as your little heart desires. Interesting concept..

This weekend, in addition to painting and hanging out with Adam's family, was all about the quilting. I am woefully behind in my homework for the Beginners Quilting class that Cris and I are taking. I spent Sunday and Monday nights attempting to catch myself back up. I even sewed while eating lunch with my coworkers this afternoon!

The end result is pretty good - I have my 9-patch done, my 4-patch 75% completed, and the inner portion of my 8-pointed star looks pretty decent. Tonight's class will hopefully provide some insight on how to finish it up.

Three down, thirteen to go. Heh.

I am so in love this idea:

Acquire delapidated cigarette vending machines. Refurbish into heightened state of hip, retro, chrome-plated glory. Stock machines with original artwork. Place machines in museums, libraries, and galleries all over the country. Pursue global domination. (ok, maybe not)

The fact that all of this started right in the backyard of Big Tobacco just makes it a little more interesting. I just wish I had known about these when I was visiting Jeff in Winston-Salem!

If you're looking for a little Monday morning inspiration, you can't do much better than this.

Speak Up is an active, talented community of professional and aspiring designers that often pulls together showcases and competitions to teach, challenge, and just generally play off one another. One day when I have the time I will enter something, but in the meantime I'm having a ball deciding which poster to vote for.

While reading Apartment Therapy this morning, I stumbled across a mention of Front Studio, an architecture studio founded by two CMU graduates.

I was especially excited to see that one of the principals is also actively involved in the Friends of the High Line project, which I've been following in the news for a while.

... with this letter:

Its among a roundup of fonts over at Typographi.com (formerly Typographi.ca until an uncharacteristically stingy Canadian registrar yanked it). It is, quite appropriately, named Geetype.

with basically everything in this store..

Man it would be nice to have something like this near me. Supposedly they are offering free letterpress classes during the summer. Sigh.

Man it would be nice to have something like this near me. Supposedly they are offering free letterpress classes during the summer. Sigh.

I spent the majority of my President's Day off wandering through the National Gallery. I started off on the bottom floor of the main building, since I have typically only walked through the main floor. Small, intimate exhibitions were the theme of the day. I wandered through a series of examples of early French printmaking, including one incredible example of a life-sized print of the human circulatory system created for an early medical textbook. I found a secluded room filled with small wax and bronze sculptures, of which my favorites were (surprise!) the small replicas of Degas' young ballet dancer.

But I think my most prized find was even farther back in the depths of the National Gallery basement - a one-room collection of drawings and sketches by master painters. It was a unique window into the process and struggle that even the greats like Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Mary Cassat, Matisse, etc, all went through. You typically don't remember of these artists for their drawings (with the notable exception of Da Vinci, perhaps), which is why I really enjoyed seeing them. It sort of pulled the curtain back a bit, and showed that effort, struggle, and real work went into producing those final flawless paintings.

I stopped off for lunch at the Cascade Cafe that sits on the walkway between the main building and the East gallery. For a museum they had pretty good food, too! Then I continued walking underground to the east gallery, where I soaked up a very contemporary exhibit that had some Rothko murals, a couple of fun Warhol prints, and a wonderful, three-story, light-filled room showing off mobiles by Matisse and Alexander Calder.

It’s fairly safe to say I'm in a Rothko phase at the moment. I ended up getting a small print of one of his earlier works, as well as a postcard book with prints of 20 of his other paintings. I'm definitely seeing his influence in some of the painting I'm doing lately. I use the phrase painting lightly, however, because sometimes it feels like I'm doing nothing more than glorified doodles that happen to be in color and on canvas. But I'm having fun, and I have a few more things to hang on my walls now, so I'm happy. And hopefully so is Rothko, wherever he is. :)

The best thing to do after stuffing yourself silly with a delicious Valentine's Dinner is to have a Craft Day with the girls. And this is exactly what I did this afternoon! I met up with Julie, Cris, and Lizzi at Mosaic Makers in Clarendon. I picked out a clay flower pot to decorate. I have a problem of picking out huge projects and then not giving myself enough time to finish them, so this time I tried to exercise caution by picking out a small pot. My planning paid off! I was able to obsess over the tiles as much as I wanted and cut them into teeny tiny pieces before gluing them to the pot. I picked out a pewter colored grout to finish off the project, but I still have to wait for all the glue to dry fully. With the slight exception of the shrill, obnoxious chatter of several kids birthday parties, we really enojoyed ourselves! :) Pictures to follow.

Craft stores are dangerous, dangerous places. Especially if you enter such a place with crafty mind and an empty credit card.

This afternoon I wandered over to our local Michael's on my lunch break with the vague goal of finding supplies for candlemaking this weekend. I walked away with supplies for candlemaking AND more painting, and about a hundred new ideas. I shouldn't be allowed in that store! Its like a disease that can't be stopped. :)

The sad thing is that Michael's isn't even that cool of a craft store. After about the first ten minutes you start to get a dizzy headache from the overwhelming stench of dried flowers and potpourri, and your eyes start to hurt from looking at the wall of flourescent Easter basket supplies that you have to pass to get to the supplies you want. Even if I wanted to linger in the art supply aisle, I physically can't take that store for more than 30 minutes.

Imagine how much more dangerous it would be if I actually had access to a classy and tasteful craft supply store! Look out, Kate's Paperie! ;)

I am so used to waking up at 7am that I am now incapable of sleeping late on weekends, and this Saturday was no exception. I woke up, worked out, ate breakfast, and took my shower - all before 8:30am. After fruitlessly attempting to relax and be lazy, I hopped in my car and headed into Old Town Alexandria.

My goal was to poke through the galleries of the Torpedo Factory Art Center, but I arrived a bit too early. So I wandered across King Street to Starbucks and procured myself one Tall Caffe Mocha, which I took with me on a walk along the Alexandria Waterfront.

I spent some time watching the ducks on the ice in the marina, and I observed a funny phenomenon - ducks slip on the ice just like we do! They did it in sort of a pattern. Waddle, waddle, sliiiiide. Waddle, waddle, sliiiiiide. Rest, then repeat. This entertained me for a few minutes while I finished my coffee.

Once inside the Torpedo Factory, I started on the first floor and worked my way up to the top galleries. For the most part I wasn't very excited about what I saw, I'm sad to say. There were a few amazing shops along the way, but for the most part it was a lot of amateurish watercolors and oil paintings featuring such tried and true subjects as the national monuments, pets, and lots and lots of hearts in preparation for Valentine's Day.

My secondary motive for visiting that morning was that I still had a bit of money left on my Art League gift certificate (from the ever-handsome and always charming Mr. Baldwin for Christmas last year), and the Art League supply store just happened to be open on Saturday. :) So I wandered through the tiny room like a kid in a candy store, picking out paints and pre-stretched canvas.

I spent the rest of Saturday blissfully painting away in my living room in front of a roaring fire. ;)

The Church of Craft

On a recent trip into Dupont Circle for dinner, I happened to pass by a painting that caught my eye. It was 5 degrees outside and I was freezing, but something about it was engaging enough to have me risking frostbite for a few extra seconds to take a look. I don't know which gallery I walked past, or the name of the artist, but I did find a website that offers maps, descriptions, and links to all of the art galleries and museums of note in the Dupont area.

Dupont Art Galleries

Every month the galleries hold a joint gallery opening event, where visitors can walk around the neighborhood and pop in to see all of the new exhibitions at the same time while enjoying food and music. I am putting in on my calender for when it is NOT 5 degrees outside. ;)

After a discussion with a few co-workers, I've decided I'd like to learn how to make candles.. I know, I know, I collect and discard hobbies faster than a three year old gets tired of their toys. But I'm excited! Ive found a cool supplier - CandleWic - that's a family-owned operation out of Pennsylvania. I have been impressed with their website and selection! We'll see what the Pillar-Making Kit looks like when I get it next week. ;)

Its quite cold outside, and some forecasts are calling for 1-2 inches of snow to fall. I'm warmly settled in on the couch at Adam's apartment, with a fire going and the laptop in front of me. Up until a few minutes ago there was a very entertaining episode of the West Wing on the telly. Before that I managed to finally write Thank You letters for most of my Christmas presents. (All of my grandparents breathe a collective sigh of relief - our grandaughter is not completely without social graces! whew!) Of course I don't really know the window of time after receiving a gift that one should send a note, but with my generation's waning interest in any form of written communication, I am just glad I wrote them. ;)

Having never been to this particular New York institution, I was excited to discover that you can view the Guggenheim's entire collection online. Its a collection of past and present shows, and its indexed and searchable. God bless technology.

Guggenheim Collection Online

Tonight I start my latest art class at the Torpedo Factory. I feel into an old familiar routine this morning - gathering all my art supplies, locating the supply list that I still need to buy, packing dinner and a change of clothes so I don't get charcoal all over my work stuff. I'm very excited! I hope I haven't regressed since my last class. It was, after all, almost a year ago. I guess we'll have to see!

This weekend was