A Silverware Concerto

by Joel Guthrie

The wild creativity of Brian Wilson at his peak in 1966 never ceases to inspire (and amuse) me, because his creativity expanded far beyond just the Beach Boys' music. It infiltrated every aspect of his life. It's easy to dismiss his behavior as the eccentrics of a man on the brink of mental collapse, but to me it paints a sort of idyllic (maybe naive) picture of the ultimate creative life. A life of no artistic boundaries, just a willingness to try out wild ideas on the spur of the moment and see what happens. A truly playful way of being. 

As an example, this is an excerpt from my upcoming video essay on his unfinished album SMiLE, told through motion graphics and storyboards, as well as a silverware concerto that I recreated myself with various plates, glasses, forks, and knives. The roommates were very perplexed by the clanking and banging going on in the other room. Enjoy, and may it spark your creativity!

 

COW

 By Aedan Peterson

I painted this cow in Christ Church meadow.

I drew this cow in the labyrinthine catacombs below the meadow.

My Daughter Likes My Comics

 By Jon Densk

    Recently I showed my daughter the latest 8 pages I have inked for the second chapter of axolodyssey's comicbook. She laughed with Jojo, cried with Jojo and was surprised with Jojo. It was really cute to see, and she started putting her own lore together of who might be ' peaking out ' in the darkness, looking at Jojo. She thinks its a ghost, maybe it is! Her little imagination firing off in real time was really cute and exciting to see. It reminded me why I decided to not get a real job in the first place and stay a grown kid! 

    I started making this comic, one, because I thought it would be a great way to tell the larger story of Axolodyssey, but two, because I really look forward to reading it with her. When she was one, she was very interested in my Bone comics, so we read the entire story together. She clearly has good taste. But doing that made me really want to read something together that I made. I figured it would be Flea ( maybe it still will be someday down the line ) but this story seemed like the right call for now. 

Only have a bagillion more hours of drawing and inking to go! 

A Day with Porch Kitty

So a bit of backstory... About 2 years ago, by husband's family found that their porch was chosen to be the new found home for a neighborhood stray cat. It was very skiddish and aloof towards most, only really getting near one or two people. Since no one could get near enough to figure out if it was a boy or girl, we deemed it 'Porch Kitty' and from thenceforth was known as such.

As far as we knew, Porch kitty would wake up. Wait for food. Eat. And then be gone exploring all day. Another, probably a more plausible, reason that Porch Kitty wouldn't stay near the house all day is because of the other stray cat, Chachi -- a orange tomboy cat who had the personalitly of a mean landlord who always treated you like you were late on your rent. But I digress--- I continued to wonder where PK would travel off to? What did it discover or play with? Did it get into any trouble or did it have pretty peaceful, long summer days in the Tennessee heat. Which is what inspired this storyboard/color script!

My color inspo was from a single image from Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the heart. The colors and depth, lights and darks, is so rich and warm. I wanted to learn from their use of color is this shot to unify my pallete for this script.

It all started off as a quick sketch and my love for this cat, and now two years later I've been able to complete it. I'm really happy with how it has come together, though I know it still needs some fine-tuning. I think if I keep working on it, by the end of another two years I'd like to turn this into an animated short and possibly a picture book. But we will see. Porch Kitty sadly passed away last year. We were all so heartbroken, and so was the neighborhood. My mother-in-law was able to connect with some neighbors to see if anyone else had their own photos and memories with PK. Turns out PK was actually owned by a couple two streets over. They moved several blocks away, but continued to let PK be an indoor/outdoor cat. After sometime they noticed PK didn't come home one day. Turns out it trekked all the way back to it's orginal neighborhood that they moved away from - my in-laws neighborhood. I guess it missed it's home. The owners saw that people were taking really good care of PK, and kept in touch with neighbors to see how it was doing from time to time. We also were told... Porch kitty was a boy! A very cute southern gentlemen who liked to sit on his porch.

New Kitty!

 by Chloe Arvin

I recently welcomed a new cat into my heart! I adopted Pippin (formerly named “Cheesepuff”) from the Nashville Humane Association a month and a half ago. (If you are considering getting a pet in the future, I implore you to adopt!) Don’t let the sleepy sketches fool you, he is an energetic and dense boy that plows through anything in his way! He is also, appropriately, a glutton. 

He was a real cuddle-bug at the start, but once he realized I wasn’t going anywhere, he toned it down. Now he wakes me up at the crack of dawn and threatens to topple over my monitor so he can get me out of bed and lead me to his food bowl. They call this settling in. I’m settling in too! I’m learning his habits as he learns mine, countering his early-morning routine, and thoroughly enjoying caring for a cat again. The companionship of a cat is worth all the early mornings, plant-casualties, extra expenses, and even the inevitable heartbreak at the end. 

I had to draw him in the fellowship cloak. And yes, he does ask for second breakfast. 

Fool of a Took!

Let me Tell you about Lasers

Ahoy there! Ellie here. 

Alrighty, so you may be a typical artist who loves pencil and paper but have you ever used a paper cutting machine like a Cricut or a Brother?

You load a mat with paper or vinyl or whatever and the machine, attached with a tiny little knife, cuts out little shapes. Some machines can even do lettering with markers. Pretty neat right?! There’s loads of possibilities with something like this, especially if you want to make art that is layered or maybe using different materials. This is the primary tool I used in high school. With this, in consort with my mom’s iPad, I was off to the races making a bajillion cards. Every year I cranked out something for my grandfather. As much as I love hand cutting horrifically tiny details for hours on end, this tool definitely saved me a lot of strife. And as far as traditions go, making a Christmas card every year is a sweet one.

Obviously I'm blacksmithing.
What did you do as a kid?

Actual Real Life image
taken through safety glass

Now, what if I told you I found something even cooler, using the exact same idea? It’s a freaking laser! I know it sounds dangerous and these machines can be pretty pricy, but don’t be scared. I am a proud member of the Nashville Maker Space. If you haven’t watched a lot of Adam Savages Tested like me, you may not know what this is. Essentially it’s a gym membership. You go to the gym and use the stair-master, clean up, and get fit. Except in this instance you don’t get to use workout equipment, you get to use power tools and printers and in this specific example, a freaking laser. All tools come with training classes so you never do anything dangerous and the price of the membership is way less than buying a laser. Plus, it operates just like a Cricut! You just upload your file to cut and place the material under. Now, you are probably wondering why I even need to use a laser. Well, I’m achieving my engineering dreams my fellow adventurer. 

I went to animation school because I loved crafting and after learning a lot of the little clubs in the digital arts, I so strongly want to make things with my hands again. Plus, I have so many projects that are becoming more multi-media.  For example I participated in the Nashville Animation Conference called “Animation Y’all”. 99% of you dear readers have heard of it and for that 1%, you get a cookie. You can contact my totally real assistant for the mailing details. 🍪📫

Animation y’all was so rewarding for me. It gave me the motivation to prepare the little crafts I couldn’t justify making on my own. I don’t know if anyone else struggles with this but I really have a hard time making art for myself. It’s so much easier to have people relying on me. (However, if you read my last blog post - you know I’m working on it.) My goals for the conference were to laser cut little magnets, resin print some models, and the biggest goal - to cut a whole sign! Since we are talking lasers here, I'm going to skip talking about those models for another day.

In order to make little magnets I needed to first make a design. I grabbed my favorite gouache and very quickly mocked out what kind of shapes and designs I wanted. I always find it easier to plan colors with real paint. (Physical media) Then I traced silhouettes on my Ipad and converted those into a vector that the laser could cut out of some plywood I had. These got painted in the very same gouache and sealed with UV resin. The last step was just to attach magnets or pins to the back!

My very legit and messy plans

So many...

Now, I'm fairly comfortable with little laser projects, but the sign was so challenging. This is a big piece and I had limited materials to use. I knew I wanted to do something stain-glass-like but I couldn't just cut acrylic and glue the edges together. I even briefly considered soldering cut pieces together like you do for real glass but the heat would melt the pieces and probably leach some horrible fumes into my apartment. So, I settled on using a piece of wood as the backing and gluing the acrylic on top of it. Just like how people glue cardboard to the back of a finished puzzle to keep it together. I needed to find my largest size of plywood which was around 4x2in. This would become the base measurement for how I would design the sign. My design went through so many iterations. I knew I wanted the text to look like real glass so I found an internet archive of stained-glass lettings and traced the letters for my own front. Extra. I know. Once I got the type I just put my name into it and create the base "Ellie A Lenz" for the logo. I drew connecting lines and details before struggling on the color choice. I only had so many sheets to choose from and one sheet would not be enough material to fill the background. I settled on combining two purples together to get the look.

Referencing color swatches
from other items on my booth

Final Design (Almost)

The assembly portion of this thing was crazy. I designed all the bits just like stained glass but I wanted there to be lines in-between the colors just like the soldering in real stained glass. Ordering 10 yrds of crafting chord would be too expensive but I remembered they make an 1/8th in black foam chord, perfect for my needs. It’s window sealer. Yeah, the little chord they use in-between a window and wall would be my cheap solution.

The last problem I had was attaching all these pieces to wood. It was here I had another clever idea. I didn't want to hand place every pieces by memory and glue them because they might not be lined up perfectly. I was also hesitant about what kind of glue to use. So, I ordered big sheets of acrylic sticky. It's like big sheets of double sided tape and they happen to be a little transparent. I printed off my design to scale and placed the sticky sheets on top. I peeled the top layer and used that guide underneath to place all my cut pieces. Once I was done, I stuck the entire thing to my board. The gaps between the sticky was perfect for putting in my chord -- which was very satisfying to do.

The puzzle

Assembly

Final Sign!

After this adventure I feel like I can tackle anything Laser related. I've made some cool presents including a Catan boarder, a Hollow Knight display for my BF, and even a Wingfeather Keychain. Now I'm working on some boardgame inserts and even a DM screen for a friend! Maybe I'll keep you posted.

Catan Boarder

Hollow Knight Display

Wingfeather Keychain

Thanks for reading my adventures! I hope this inspires you to have some of your own!

-Ellie

Impressions

 Hi Everyone! 

A shorter post today. I wanted to share this painting I did (keeping in the spirit of working on things for shorter amounts of time), It took me just a little over an hour. I was very inspired but the Impressionist exhibit going on at the Frist right now (Unitl May 29th, you still have time!) 

I did this as a break from studying for my Private Pilots license checkride, which consumed my whole life leading up to May 8th. So my hands were ready to paint - anything other than write out my acronyms or VFR minimums or regulations. After all that work, I passed!  And a private pilots license is for life! So I never have to take that checkride again. I'll include a video from one of my solo cross countries, where I am alone as the Pilot in Command of the Plane trying to go 100+ Nautical Miles. It's so beautiful up there I wish I could look out the window more, but alas they want me to "fly the plane" and "make calls."