Hibernation project with corks and pistachio shells

I find deer to be very pleasing to the eye, and so I don't mind decorating my house with them  throughout the year.  However, they obviously retain a seasonal value in wintertime, and with this inexpensive craft, using mostly materials you may already have lying around, you can populate your house at your leisure with overly cutesy forest friends.

This craft is loosely based on an article in a 1970s Christmas Woman's Day magazine, which I have tweaked, and which may easily be tweaked further.  It can be completed leisurely in a day's time and is not challenging for children - as long as there is a responsible person around to assist with the baking of the clay.

You will need...

5 toothpicks (per deer - 4 legs and a neck)
1 cork (per deer)
1 small packet of sculpey clay (yields 3 to 4 deer heads)
2 pistachio shells (per deer)
strong glue of your choosing
Paint
toaster oven

This was the disaster portion, in which I baked them about three hundred degrees too hot in my toaster oven and nearly burned down my house.  Most sculpey, including the Sculpey(tm) brand itself bakes at 275 degrees f for 15 minutes.  The sculpey will still be soft to the touch after the cook time, but hardens once it is cool.

I made squarish forms for the deer heads and pinched them out a bit for the noses.  I rolled out thin snakey pieces for the eyes and secured them with scoring.

Pistachios may be delicious (unless you are allergic to them) but their shells make perfect animal ears. If you press the little ears in prior to baking the sculpey, it creates a groove for them to sit in when the time comes for glueing. Also, a hole on the underside of the head should be poked in the clay while it is soft.  Poke it with the toothpick or whatever you will be using for the neck piece, and be sure the hole is relatively deep, going about halfway into the head.  Bake them without the shells in them and glue the ears on after they are cool, otherwise the ears will obviously catch on fire and disintegrate like Wile E. Coyote.

Here are the deer in process.  Having baked the clay, glued on the ears and painted the heads, the bodies assemble very easily.  You may have to play around with leg placement for best balancing results, as the heads are much heavier than the bodies. I use Japanese toothpicks, which have a flat end and are available at any Asian market or grocery store.  Four toothpicks for four legs and half a toothpick for the neck.  Stab the toothpicks right into the cork where you want them, and make sure the legs are all at an even depth.

Semi-painted deer heads

All that remains is to paint all of the pieces and glue them together.  Paint stores and big chain hardware stores such as Lowes and Home Depot have mistint paint cans in their warehouses.  Latex wall paint dries to a very professional and uniform finish.  Most of the mistints, oddly enough, tend to be permutations of beige, but after digging through the cans one can hope to find something that suits one's aesthetic - which very well may be beige.

Project complete!  To make them into fauns, all they need are dots.  Antlers wouldn't be a stretch either - one could even use smallish twigs. 

Girls on birds 3-color linoleum cut

Here are individuals from editions I did of this block print in green and pink.  I'm not sure how I feel about the way they turned out, although it is the first multi-color block print that I have done so far.  The process was frustrating, but I liked it enough to think I might try it again.

This one I like better because the ink is a lighter brown.  I inked it once and then printed it twice without re-inking it and the dark bits don't seem quite as heavy.  However, this seems to only work with the pink ones, whereas the green on the others is dark enough that it merits a near-black tone.

One of the things I like best about block printing is the lack of need for absolutely perfect inking and printing.  As you can see on this one, the green ink underneath has a good deal of paper coming through, but due to the fairly rugged nature of the process, it adds to it rather than detracts.

Sketchbook 1

The more professional I get, the more I find that my dumpy little digital camera just sucks.  It too me an unseemly long time to start taking decent pictures of my work, and having a scanner available makes things simply heavenly, and even the grungiest images look top-notch....

medecine

I will never, never be employed in the medical field.  That being said, I will always have a strong afinity for medical diagrams, especially if they are misleading or display theories which have since been disproven.  I am enamored with natural history, and I place human civilizations within that category.  Here is just a small selection of medical diagrams, charts, and other related ephemera, false, accurate, or once thought to be.

My favorite part about science class is always the drawing of diagrams.  It is very interesting to me to see human representation of the perceived universe, especially ephemera from the past, which exhibits knowledge of the time that has either since been expounded on or ridiculed.  A most interesting way to observe such an unpredictable organism as humans and humanity is to look at its self-proclaimed knowledge, and how it is illustrated.  A particularly interesting category is that of medical diagrams, which carry on their own a very potent appeal. . . .

cryptid diagram by Walmor Correa,  http://www.walmorcorrea.com.br/php/inicio.php

Tibetan vein chart

i want candykiller

 

     

Candykiller limited edition letterpress print

  I am a great fan of great genre blending, and little seems to go more seamlessly together than artist Candykiller's combo of classic toon characters with gore and dispair.  Perfectly rendered and yet entirely unique, this work ranges from the adorable to the disturbing - my two favorite categories, of anything.  Candykiller employs all types of well-executed print-making techniques, and recently has come out with a line of plush and vinyl toys that no kiddie of adult should be without.  The prints feature delightful characters I can only hope will soon be part of larger narratives, but even if not, I hope that Candykiller keeps the treats coming.

Beautiful sketches

Impressive sketchbook

Adorable dismembered toy bear

Another impressive Candykiller letterpress print

Impressive sketchbook ii

Plenty of drippy-eyed cartoon glory

"Smokin'" poster, yes it is

Grab bag .4

Unfinished bed sketch.  This is unfinished because I was too interested in the bed and couldn't decide on what would go on it, or under it.

Watercolor and india ink, a wintry couple with branches.  This is from my first semester at art school, so it is a bit old.

Peeling, unable-to-be-saved pangolin stencil, for trays. Who knows why I decided to cut all of those tiny scales out of newsprint instead of something sturdier. 

Selections.1

  Every new job I am assigned in Special Collections is new and completely different from the one before it.  However, I have to say that graphic materials are my favorite things to look at.  They are trickier to light and photograph than three-dimensional objects, but paper ephemera from the past never ceases to interest me.  This entry features the best of the correspondence to Walter Jaeger over the years he spent overseas, mostly in France, during World War I.  It is a small part of a much lager collection of artifacts, including uniform items, a set of bloody longjohns, honor pins and several albums of photographs.

 

Many of the postcards were in a similar vein to this one: chauvinistic postcards printed with hopeful and patriotic sayings to be sent to the soldier at war.  As it happens, most of the postcards have no more than a quick and to-the-point sentence written on the other side, with generalized best wishes.

This card I like only because of the landscape in the background, but I don't know what about it appeals to me so. It seems very stylized and of-the-era.

illustration - Byron Eggenschwiler

I just now stumbeled upon this artist
                                          http://www.byronegg.com/#

His name is Byron Eggenschweiler and I dig his vibe.