Color

RABARI. Doshi Levien for Nanimarquina from Maite Felices on Vimeo.
Dresses with mirrors Deepak Perwani bridal spendlor

Purple explosion

WoodSwimmer

A music video made entirely from wood for a song by bedtimes.xxx/music, WoodSwimmer is based on a concept I developed while designing a new stop-motion universe where wood is the primary element. The sequences are cross-sectional photographic scans of pieces of hardwood, burls and branches. It is a straightforward technique but one which is brutally tedious to complete.

You can see photos here.

WoodSwimmer from bfophoto on Vimeo.

Tamae Mizukami

I am struck by the beautiful simplicity of Tamae Mizukami's illustration of trees. I can't turn away, I want to see more and more. 

More of her art on Flickr

Oliver Jeffries

I know it is hard to be an artist full time, but Oliver Jeffries seems to be a master and having a great time creating the most fabulous kids books! 

Instagram

Requiem For A Soldier

With or without lyrics the Band of Brothers theme song, Requiem For a Soldier is one of the most beautiful songs ... always makes me feel like I am hearing a heavenly chorus of angels. I echo what what was said on the video, stay safe out there wherever you may be. For my uncles, grandfathers, cousins who served in war. Strangers who sacrificed all to make us safe. Thank you! 

"You never lived to see 
What you gave to me 
One shining dream of hope and love 
Life and liberty 
With a host of brave unknown soldiers 
For your company, you will live forever 
Here in our memory In fields of sacrifice 
Heroes paid the price 
Young men who died for old men's wars 
Gone to paradise 
We are all one great band of brothers 
And one day you'll see we can live together 
When all the world is free 
I wish you'd lived to see 
All you gave to me 
Your shining dream of hope and love 
Life and liberty 
We are all one great band of brothers 
And one day you'll see - we can live together 
When all the world is free" 

Envelope Poems

I want this book: "The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems" 

Browse the Emily Dickinson Collection, Amhearst College, online.

Listening room

I really need to get back to listening to Audible (I even have two credits) ... instead of the news and screaming obscenities at the radio. 


I might try this as well, LibriVox, Free Audiobook Collection. They have a nice blog for monthly picks. Sanity, is important and there is nothing better than to escapte into a book story on the drive to work in traffic.

“Seeing Nature” typeface

Celebrate natural shapes and flowery letterforms with this fanciful nature alphabet called “Seeing Nature.” This font is a bit different from other OpenType fonts we usually feature at Chank.com because it is provided to you today in the form of a great big image file, where you need to select each letter, then copy and paste the full-color letter images to create new colorful words. It is an image file you can open and use in Photoshop. These letters word create at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as part of a fontmaking workshop at the museum’s Third Thursday event recently, in conjunction with AIGA-MN and the MN Landscape Arboretum. Seeing Nature typeface here.

More fun fonty things here on my pinterest board.

Owen Davey - dots, lines, patterns

Dungeness Crab Timelapse from Owen Davey. Isn't that fantastic? 

Dungeness Crab Timelapse from Owen Davey on Vimeo.

Marie-laure Cruschi

I want to come back as this illustrator ;) - Marie-laure Cruschi.


Live Illustration with Marie-Laure Cruschi (Cruschiform) 3/3 - hosted by Michael Chaize

Sticky situation

My obsession with cactus art continues. I really, really need to make or buy some of these. I have a couple of birthdays coming up ... I am thinking a sticky present. 

 These very graphic wooden cactus from Urbanmasquerade ... are just too adorable. 

Ready-to-make, precut poplar wood Cactus. Do not expect it to grow, but count on it to make a very good impression by PAPIER TIGRE. 

DIY: Wooden Succulents over at think.make.share.

Wooden sculpture made of pine wood from Aminadav forest near Jerusalem.

And yes, I just bought two of these, wooden cactus building toy set.

Cactus Christmas tree! YES!

West Elm : Wooden Cactus.

 

Cactus Sanya Opuntia coat rack ...

DIY Christmas Cactus
 

Wired cactus

More cactus on Pinterest.

Sand and stone

For 20 minutes I was whisked away to Acacus, Libya; Petra, Chad and was grateful. To remember the beauty that has been left for us to discover. Thankful to the internet that I can visit and see these remarkable places without leaving my living room.

I don't really want to be ranting about politics every day. I don't like politics. Like most artists, I just want to get lost in my studio to play and create. The last year+ my anger and frustration has taken over my creativity, except what I create for work, all else has taken a back seat. A better description would be "playfulness". I feel guilty if I am feeling happy and distracted from the appalling corruption going on in our government. I even get mad at the morning news shows for daring to have something trivial on, like the best, newest lipstick. They are all laughing and cajoling, while our country to going to hell. I feel frustrated that we, "we the people" can not fix it. 

I join the local "resist" movement, read everything I can about the state of our nation, tweet, post, repost, comment, rant. Read the NYT, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Time, Rolling Stone, PBS Newshour, Bill Moyers, exhausted just thinking about it. I watched Bill Maher last night when I realized he was about to lose it while begging the GOP "to do something". I saw in his face and heard in his voice, that  "I want to explode".  I feel it, just as many of us are feeling the frustration of having to sit back and watch this debacle unfold. Honestly, I keep expecting Trump to have a news conference admitting we have been "Punk'd", we all laugh and get on with a normal state of affairs.

So today when a friend of Robin's emailed that she was at Petra, it gave me a minute to think about something else. Something bigger than Trump, Bannon, Conway. 

Places in the world that have been there forever. Built out of sandstone, worn down through time and wind. "Petra is a famous archaeological site in Jordan's southwestern desert. Dating to around 300 B.C., it was the capital of the Nabatean Kingdom. Accessed via a narrow canyon called Al Siq, it contains tombs and temples carved into pink sandstone cliffs, earning its nickname, the "Rose City." Perhaps its most famous structure is 45m-high Al Khazneh, a temple with an ornate, Greek-style facade, and known as The Treasury." Can you imagine seeing this in person!

Rock-Art of Tadrart Acacus - Prehistoric rock paintings. The Acacus Mountains form a mountain range in the desert of the Ghat District in western Libya, part of the Sahara. Where there were once palm trees and giraffes.

Rock art of Botswana. Most of Botswana is located in the central part of southern Africa and is bordered by Namibia to the west, South Africa to the south and east and the Caprivi Strip to the north. Most of the country is covered by the Kalahari Desert/Sands. The only mountains or rocky hills are either on the eastern side of the country near the border with South Africa or in the extreme north east of the country near the borders with Namibia and the Caprivi Strip, west of the Okavango Delta. This is where the Tsodilo Hills are located, now a World Heritage rock art site where some 4,500 paintings have so far been recorded. Although some of the paintings were made by San/Bushmen most are believed to have been made by Khoi (Khoe) people and also by Bantu immigrants like the Hambakush who arrived there about 1,800 years ago. It is possible that most of this art was made during the last 2,000 years. In eastern Botswana a lot of the art is San art but there is also some Khoe art in the east.

 

"Rock Carvings and paintings in Northern Chad are prolific and relatively little known. They range across a vast and mostly uninhabited region. During this trip we covered just a few of the important sites in a small part of the east of the Ennedi Massif in the southern Sahara. A vast area remains unexplored and unmapped and there has been almost no archaeology in the region Dating the sites is complicated and in need of serious study." From Factum Foundation. Images from TARA | Trust for African Rock Art.

This is a beautiful account of the search for rock art in Chad by Ferdinand Saumarez Smith for The Economist’s 1843 magazine.

"It’s dusk and I’m walking through one of the world’s most surreal landscapes. Towering above me are slender 50ft - high stacks of rock that stretch into the distant desert like some kind of ancient Manhattan. The pillars are the remains of mountains whittled away by wind over millions of years, but this landscape has more recently been subject to change that is, on a geological timescale, swift. Only a few thousand years ago, the desert was a green home to past oral people. One of the ways we know this is through the beautiful, graphic artworks they made of their lives and their herds – the sole remaining evidence of a lost civilisation."

FORMS IN NATURE: Understanding Our Universe

Sometimes I see something that makes me tear up because it is so beautiful, and that happened today when I watched FORMS IN NATURE: Understanding Our Universe: Through scientific study and understanding, we deepen our connection to the natural world. An audiovisual collaboration by Kevin Dart // Stéphane Coëdel // David Kamp // Nelson Boles. More about his process here.

 

FORMS IN NATURE: Understanding Our Universe from Chromosphere on Vimeo.

Make Beer Great Again

Yes, we have a large gathering once a month, hosted by different departments to "come together" and chat. Some really timely and great ideas for posters just don't make it the cut. SHAME! I though this was one of my greatest ideas all year. ;) My first version has less appropriate tweets.

I love my job

And my coworkers. 

Yellowstone National Park headed home

I am so lucky to have a best friend who invites me along on her adventures of a lifetime. We kept saying, as we were driving through Mammoth at 6am with our horrible-free-hospitality-hotel-coffee sloshing around in the styrofoam cups ... with snow falling silently over Mammoth ... "Let's not forget this wonder of being in Yellowstone in the winter". They snowplow the Northern entrance at Gardiner to Cooke City everyday. Only the hardiest of photographers are out there photographing the beautiful winter life of Yellowstone: bison, foxes, elk, wolves, birds, snow ... lots of snow. I always get so wrapped up in Robin photographing something that I forget to pull out my iPhone. But this time I got a couple of shots and 2 hand-fulls of sand. :) It was an amazing drive home. We left Yellowstone at 6:30 am, on I90 and arrived in Seattle around 7 pm. A breathtaking snow-filled drive. We live in the most beautiful place! Robin and I feel extremely lucky!

Then there were those white-out conditions ;)