Day 29: “I swear to God I am going to have a heart attack”

Day 29’s assignment: “Make a disguise for yourself, a friend, a pet, or an object. See if you can fool anyone with it.”

I was going to do a whole video montage of scaring people, but I will have to save that for another project.

Basically I put on a John McCain mask, lay in wait in my friend’s little sister’s bed, and when she came home from school I popped up suddenly.

httpv://youtu.be/1qRho5-5EJY

Full quote by Army; “I swear to God I am going to have a heart attack one of these days because of you people!”

 

Day 40: Ojo de Dios

Day 40: “What can you do with yarn? You don’t have to know how to knit or crochet; you can try yarn painting or just experiment.”

What can I do with yarn? Nothing! Ahh!!  

These were my thought yesterday as I lay in a creative slump. I was behind on a few of my Creativity Journal projects which was not good. Luckily Megan Mc is a totally awesome person! She suggested I make a “God’s eye” or “Ojo de Dios” out of yarn. I had no idea what that was so I googled it.

Turns out “Ojo de Dios” is made out of  brightly colored yarn on a frame of crossed sticks. They are made by the Huichol Indians of Mexico and the Aymara Indians of Bolivia. These are placed on an altar so that the gods can watch over their people and protect them.

It seemed like it would be easy and fun to make, so using the directions from the website above I got to work.

Luckily my family is a craft family so I had all the necessary materials at hand.

The result:

I definitely want to make more of these when I have the time. Also, the instructions suggest adding little bells on to each end, so that it something I will add to this one next time I make it to a craft store.

Day 27: The Inferno

Day 27’s assignment was: “Dreamland. Use a recent dream as inspiration for what you do today.”

The night before, I went to bed wondering what crazy dreams I was going to have this night. The past few weeks I’d been having ridiculously vivid dreams and thus assumed that this night would be no different.

I was wrong. I woke up in the morning and couldn’t remember having a single dream. :/

So for today I decided that I would paint a recurring nightmare I’ve been having lately where I am trapped forever in the hell that is retail work. To me, there is nothing worse that dreaming about work because generally when I dream about work I sleep very fitfully and wake up more tired than I was before I went to bed.

In this recurring nightmare I am trapped at working at Macy’s for the rest of my life in endless servitude to all the ungrateful customers. I never able to leave the store and the pile of clothes that the customers try on and throw on the floor always grows larger and larger and larger.

For this I used acrylic paint on a canvas and also an image of Macy’s that I got from online.

I was tempted to throw it in the fire and let it burn, but decided it probably wouldn't be that good for the enviroment

Actually since I made this painting I haven’t had a nightmare about Macy’s…

 

Day 12: Creative Differences

Now Day 12 of 366 Creativity Journal has come and passed a looooong time ago, but I wanted to take a moment and highlight the art of Marieke. Marieke is one of my friends who is doing this project with me and she happens to live in Germany. This means that for the most part I only hear about what she’s creating after she makes it.

Day 12 assignment was: ” Camouflage. Create or alter something so that it disappears into its background.”

For this assignment I ended up taking the easy way out and photoshopping an image of pedobear lurking in the forest waiting to snatch unsuspecting children.

 

In contrast, Marieke took a much more creative approach to the assignment. Using photos she took with her Diana Mini film camera on our #ChasingSummer trip she painted in the background of the photo.  I love the contrast between the print and the paint and yet how they blend in really well together. Definitely more amazing than my take on this assignment! : )

Miami SoBe

New York Subway

Times Square

Day 22: Building a bridge across the continents!

Day 22’s assignment was: “Create a bridge. Connect two things in a creative way. It could be small enough for an amoeba or big enough for an elephant to cross.”

Thinking of what to do for this assignment was really tricky for me. It wasn’t until late at night when I was talking with my friend Aitak that inspiration struck.

I wish that  there was such a thing as bridges across all the continents (actually rather have instant teleportation, but that doesn’t help with today assignment).Since this isn’t going to happen, I thought I might as well represent my friendships with people across the globe by using a giant world map and then building bridges out of yarn between where I live and where they live.

I used three colors to signify how long I’ve been friends with them

White- Many years

Blue- 2 years

Light Purple- one year or less

This is one of those assignments you’d be better off seeing in person since the scale isn’t quite captured in a photo.

If I had more time I would have made  the bridges/connections between my friends, i.e. which friends know my other friends, but I will save that for another project.

365 Days Worth of Photos

Last Monday I finished my yearlong Dailyshoot challenge! For my final dailyshoot I took Sibling1 along and headed out west. I took photos in two different locations (abandoned house & empty field) before deciding how I want my final shoot to end. The result:

Victory!

Let me tell you, it was really hard taking a (good) photo everyday! Some days, especially when I was traveling, I would take so many good photos it was hard to decide which photo to choose as my dailyshoot. Other days, I had to scramble around just to find something to photograph.

It also was a lot easier to take photos when Dailyshoot.com was running. Once it became defunct in the beginning of October 2011, it took a lot more motivation to go out there and photograph something each day. It also was a lot harder to keep track of which dailyshoot assignment number I was on since I generally didn’t post the photos the day I took them. This lead to double posting assignments for one day and also not having my dailyshoot assignment #’s in the correct sequence.

Still, I had an absolute blast with the project!

Out of all the photos I posted for my dailyshoots, about 2/3 of them are pictures of inanimate objects, landscapes, & plants. The remaining 1/3 is mostly pictures of friends/family, animals and random strangers.

My thanks go out to all my lovely amigos who helped me with my project including: Megan Mc, Elena, Laura, Gina, Karen, Colleen, Marieke, KKY, Rose,  Kayla, Army, Aitak, James, Dan G, Quacclynn, Raven, Sabine, Mario Lopez, Tito, Steph, Ashley, Natalie, Aliyah, Jess C, Z. Efron, Clare, Isaac, Charlotte, Meghan, Jackson & Nikki, George, & last but not least, Jim Groom. (If I forgot anyone, let me know!)

Also, I am extremely indebted to DS106 as whole because it inspired me to start this project and to continue on with it for an entire year.

I used over 10 cameras to take these photos. During the course of the year I managed to kill two cameras  (my 1st camera died of old age (4 years old) :/ and its replacement later fell victim to accidental drowning >.< )

My favorite photos from the year are as follows:

Favorite Photo Shoot: The final Rainbow Brite Shoot  where I managed to get 7 friends plus Jim Groom to dress up in  crazy outfits and take silly pictures.

Favorite Model(s): All my models were truly fabulous! But definitely big kudos to Megan Mc, Elena, & Karen because they were the ones who volunteered to model in a lot of my photos.

Megan, Elena, Karen

 Favorite Photo of a person: I like how this photo is really focused on the dandelion and yet, it’s also all about the person in the background (Elena).

 

Favorite inanimate object photo: Love the image of the flame leaping into the balloon.

 

Favorite altered photo:  I like the extreme color contrast here.

Favorite Animal Photo: Bentley jumping into the lake. Great frozen motion shot.

 

Favorite photo of me: I ended up using a few photos of me for my dailyshoots and this by far is my favorite because it captured such a unique experience.

I was going to start year 2 of 365 photo a day project, but decided that with all the effort I am putting into “366 Creativity Journal project” I don’t really have time to do both properly. So year 2 of photos is going to have to wait a little while, but I definitely plan on coming back to it one day.

Meme Version of the Hacking Incident

My reactions after finding out my websites were hacked last week:

 

Is this a joke?

Not a #ds106 joke? Why me? Why my blog?

I will hunt this person down and destroy him!

After getting everything up and running again:

I missed my blog so much! I promise I will blog 3 times a day!

Two Weeks from now (reality)

I should start blogging again... But first, one more page of 9gag....

 

Day 21: I might be going to hell for this

Day 21’s assignment:  “Write a ten-word love story. Bonus: illustrate it!”

After consultation with various people, I realized that I couldn’t do a sincere love story in 10 words. So instead I wrote this:

“On the big screen: Will you marry me?

HELL NO!”

By this I mean that if someone asked me to marry them while watching some kind of sports game among a crowd of hundreds of thousands, my response would be an emphatic NO!  I would hate that kind of attention.

Thinking that my drawing skills are lacking and that there must be other girls who have rejected these kinds of proposals, I headed to youtube. The following are comics illustrating my story. Made it in Paint which took entirely too long. I miss you photoshop.

From the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtPkxzHKLpk

Taken from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH9K74IFX80

I kinda feel bad making a comic out of other people’s rejections, especially the last one. That being said though, it is a terrible proposal  idea. I also almost changed the words “Hell No” to “As If!” to make it funnier, but was limited to changing the words since I used paint.

Day 20: A E I O UUUUU UUU E I O AA

Day 20’s assignment: “Buy or make some clay (see instructions on page 238) and then use it like you never have before.”

I decided that it would be easier to buy clay in an assortment of colors rather than make it on my own. After work I made a trip out to Michael’s and bought a rainbow pack.

Now what to sculpt?

I was inspired by my friend Kayla who has a penchant for mushrooms and various other plant life. From there it developed into “I’m gonna make this into something out of Alice in Wonderland from the scene where the caterpillar is talking with Alice.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbntWU7pG8

I only made a few pieces since it was getting late: 3 mushrooms plus the mushroom with the caterpillar (constructed with the help of Sibling1). Then to take photos of my creations I used an 2011 Australian calendar as the background in the attempt to make it look a little trippy.** The top scene is a picture of the Great Barrier Reef and the bottom scene is one of the Australian coast.

Lost one of his arms in an accident 🙁

 

I think for a future project I am going to make a trippy diorama to display everything I made today.

*Speaking of Australia, I just imported my blogs from my UMW blog Barrier Reef Brief to here. Check, Check, Check it out!

Day 19: Row Row Row Your Boat

Day 19’s assignment: “Create something that float on water (It doesn’t have to be a boat.)”

After deciding I couldn’t think of anything that floated on water beside a boat, I decided to once again brush up on my origami skills.

Too bad I could only remember the kid version of the song where Barney is thrown overboard, rather than the actual lyrics…

After teasing my dog Bentley about it (he really wanted to play with it), we headed off to the creek by my house.

Poor B will never have the boat to play with.

Ready for takeoff

The boat trip lasted about 5 seconds. 2 seconds after the launch, the boat hit a branch and filled with water. It managed to float a little bit more downstream before completely filling with water and sinking.

Bye Bye Boat

Next time I will try to construct my boat out of something more sturdy than paper.