I’ve been meaning to post some photos of this project for a little while now. This one had me busy for quite some time. I think we first started it almost 2 years ago, and we finished up and saw the final books in late April. It’s a 165-page book commemorating Sigma Phi’s 75th year in their current house on the Cornell campus. The book details the rich history of the Epsilon chapter as well as the fraternity as a whole, and includes anecdotes from many Sigs about their memorable experiences as brothers in the fraternity.
I recently collaborated with Carianne Mack Garside, a friend from college, on her wedding invitation. She’s an amazing painter and wanted to add a hand-made element to the invite. Her paintings often incorporate a poured background which she then paints on top of. We experimented with having her pour ink on each card, but it curled and warped the card stock a bit too much for it to then run through a press or printer reliably. So instead we printed a background image similar to the pour effect she does. She then sewed paper flower cutouts onto the card with one line of stitches through all three flowers.
Her wedding was beautiful, with amazing paper flower center pieces and favors, held in a gorgeous 100+ year-old barn. Congratulations, Carianne & Paul! And check out Carianne’s painting and drawing at cariannemack.com
I’ve been meaning to integrate our blog into our site and I’ve recently installed Wordpress and played around a bit, and you’re looking at the result. There will likely be some changes along the way, but the main goal was to integrate the blog and an easy to update portfolio gallery into one simple site, and I definitely think that’s been achieved. The site is based off a great template I found called Oulipo by Andrea Mignolo. Hope you like the new site, now if I can finally set up an etsy store…
Willa made her first painting the other day, and I think it’s just stunning. I’m so excited for her to start painting and drawing, and our magnetic wall should be filled with her masterpieces in no time.
Also, I saw one of my old bosses the other day, and he told me about a business he’s started with his wife, called Artimus Art. They preserve your child’s art in a hardcover book and an online gallery. They send you out a box, you gather all the artwork and send it back to them, and they scan each piece and produce a great looking hardcover book. I think it’s a fantastic idea that could, and should, really take off. We’ll be building our collection of Willa originals for a little bit before we’re ready to order a book, but someday!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any new work, so here’s a little teaser of something I’m working on for this year’s Craftland show. It’s a calendar of loose cards that fit into a jewel case stand. I think I’m coming up on about halfway done, so I’d better get a move on. Here’s the current state of November. Hopefully you can tell it’s supposed to be like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon.
I still really have no art (or many concepts) for March, June, August, & September, so let me know if you’ve got any suggestions.
Okay, so maybe a better idea is to just post cool things as I find them, rather than trying to gather a bunch a week at a time, and then most likely neglect to actually post them. So scratch that weekly column idea, and here a couple of cool things I’ve found recently:
I’ve seen somewhat similar shots before of miniatures, but they’re usually contained within their own, somewhat more constructed environment, where these often use the surrounding environment more or less as is. Very nice.
Well the title says it all. I do intend to post this every week, but we’ll see. I’m going to try to keep this at least relatively design related, but will not hesitate if something is just too cool to ignore. I think I also probably won’t rank the items, so in no particular order, here are the coolest for this (now last) week:
2. That Lovely Glow Effect tutorial on dooce.com I consider myself to be pretty darn proficient at Photoshop, but I feel like there’s always something new to learn. Sometimes it’s something brand new, sometimes it’s just a much more efficient way to do something I already knew how to do, and sometimes it’s just a technique it never really occurred to me to try. Falling under that last category is this trick playing with a duplicate layer, gaussian blur, and transparency. Heather Armstrong describes a really simple technique to get photos to look “fuzzy or warm and mashed potato-y”. I gave the technique a quick try myself with a photo of Willa from our apple picking trip last weekend. I’ll definitely use this technique again in the future. Here’s a before and after:
beforeafter
3. I became a Print Design Affiliate on shineboxprint.com It remains to be seen whether or not this will actually turn out to be one of the coolest things I did this week, but it can’t hurt. I could get a project or two from it, and I think they’ve got some really cool looking products. I first read about shinebox on uncrate. It’s listed as ‘The Buyer’s Guide for Men,’ but I would definitely encourage women to check it out too. There’s some cool stuff on there.
4. The E Ink Esquire Magazine cover I had seen a video of this a few weeks back and was totally intrigued. I hadn’t really looked into how it worked, but this week I saw a video of it all taken apart, which is pretty cool to see. I still want to see it in person. It is cool without a doubt, but it does seem pretty wasteful/unnecessary. What’s going to happen to all that stuff? I can’t really imagine this sort of thing becoming commonplace in these green-conscious times.
