musical robots

Lesson 1. when it comes to doing commission work: get paid up front. At least a portion of the price. Like a fool I jumped at the opportunity when a web dealer selling art for kids asked me to design some work for them. I would get paid a certain amount per print sold. Awesome! Except that after I had drawn all the designs, they backed out, saying they were under new direction and now selling work only by artists who have gallery representation. Lame.

But anyway, here are the music-themed robots they requested. I'll make prints of them myself eventually.


I did actually get paid to do this drummerbot, but thought it fit in with the theme and should be included.

more plates

Here are some more plates I made. Tom drew the fox and the cat, I drew the planes. These are small, sandwich size, but I'd like to make bigger ones.

As far as using pots as canvas goes, plates are ideal since they are flat, but then the question of usability comes into play- would you want to eat off a plate with a cat on it? Where do you place the food? How do the colors correlate with most food colors? Should they just be decoration? These are all things I need to experiment with.


And, for the technical details: Cone 10 Stoneware, clear and white glaze, black stain, and orange underglazes.

Sad Clown

Here's one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. It was on my fridge, and I wanted to post it in case it gets lost during my move.

Read in style

If you find your book accessory assortment lacking, head on over to etsy to spice it up with handmade bookmarks, covers, bookends or vintage reading lamps. Typically I use gum wrappers, receipts or plane tickets to mark my page, but I was given an adorable robot bookmark as a gift, which I have been diligent about not losing.

Since I tend to have several books in progress at once, I decided to get another bookmark and found this dino marker for only a buck!

And on my "Favorites" page, I've had these bookends saved for a while. Nonchalant cowboys love holding up books! Also by the same artist: t-rex, "fancy horses," cats and sewing machine bookends.

Minnesota tees

MFM Apparel is a t-shirt company started by some cool peeps I know, Saman and Erica. Saman designed a threadless tee, which instantly gives him all sorts of art cred. On top of that, he makes cool designs related to Minneapolis and Minnesota- so if you want to represent, check out their website or etsy store. I've got the blue one above and would happily be twinsies. Oh yeah, and they'll be at Uptown Market this year, so look for 'em there!

quilt madness

I'm in Paducah, KY, during Quilt Week, where some 35-40,000 quilters invade the town. I'm with my mom, debuting her newest book, Nickel Quilts and Borders. She is also doing a series of benefit lectures for Habitat for Humanity, which is pretty cool. The vendors market is new, and needs help getting publicity, so spread the word about Two Hearts Quilt Market. It's in the old Gore's grocery store, which is a little bit out of the way, but completely worth the stop! We plan on coming back next year.

Here is a pic of the new book. I did the graphics. Tell your quilting relatives about it.
Nickel Quilts & Borders by Pat Speth

And! The Best In Show award went to a quilt based on Lord of the Rings.
Tribute to Tolkien by Sue McCarty

plates and drawings

I've been working with surface textures treatments lately, specifically with various methods of applying stain. Typically stain is applied after a piece has been fired once, bisqued, but with these plates I added stain while they were still greenware. First coating them in wax, then carving away the wax where I wanted the stain to be, I was able to use the clay as a canvas. I was a little nervous about messing up the drawings, so I had Tom draw some as well.



Glazing the plates I also used a completely new-to-me method: coating areas in liquid latex. Layering glazes can be tricky, especially if you want a crisp line, around a drawn image for example, and liquid latex can be applied with a brush and peeled off after you dip the piece in glaze. It was messy, smelly, and I ruined a couple of brushes, but I like the way the plates turned out and will probably use the latex some more.

nerdy embroidery and cross stitch

These pieces by Joanna are embroidered versions of Kurt Vonnegut's sketches. His self-portrait, the cover of Look at the Birdie, and what you might initially think is an asterisk, is in fact Vonnegut's drawing of an asshole. Awesome.
(via the Magers & Quinn blog)

And then! Cross stitched robots by Krupp. The argyle shirt is made out of recycled material (for curious nerds, binary can be decoded here), and I love the concept of the photobooth bots. Patterns available on etsy.

viewer participation photocomics

Comics with pictures instead of drawings are called fumetti; the wiki article references A Softer World as well as a series about zombies in a post-apocalyptic world called Night Zero and a self-explanatory spoof comic, Alien Loves Predator.

I've already expressed my love for A Softer World, and word art in general, so I took this one step further and created interactive fumetti to hang in my bathroom. The idea is that anyone can change the words whenever they feel particularly inspired.


I looked through my photos for a series of shots that could easily be edited into three pictures with people interacting, then cropped them as 5x7s and arranged them accordingly. I added white boxes for text, put them in a frame with a glass cover and then taped a dry-erase marker on a string to the frame. I added the initial text to give people ideas, but am happy to say they seem to change fairly frequently. I'm working on my next photo selection (probably something with cats) and plan to change them every few months.

lines, cubes & blues

Blue is a well-loved color, potters often joke (lamely) about blue glazes being called "cash money blue." The fondness is translated into paintings and drawings as well, for myself at least. I am attracted to two qualities in these artists' work: their color choices and their use of lines. The thick, sketchy linearity alludes to cubism, and they have a solidity to them not easy to create in two-dimensions. Makes me want to grab a sharpie.

Kevan Murray:

Beka Goedde:

Erik Otto:

Foot in the Door @ the MIA

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) is having their fourth Foot in the Door Exhibition, which happens only once a decade, featuring any Minnesota resident that enters a piece. It runs Friday, February 19, 2010 - Sunday, June 13, 2010, with an opening reception on February18th.

The only requirements for the art is that it be smaller than one cubed foot, under 80 seconds if it's a video, and it mustn't contain any liquids, live animals or infestations (dang). So, if you fancy yourself an artist, enter something! I'm submitting the mustache mug shown below and Tom is entering his short film, Call of the Wildman. Pretty rad to say you've got artwork at the MIA!

string dance, human skateboard and opposite art wall

In honor of Conan I think we should all make flip books. Or just watch this one that someone else already made:

And, sort of like a flip book, but otherwise unrelated, check out this awesome stop-motion video by PES. (Thanks, Tom.)

Finally, here is a minimalist, opposite version of an art wall, which I rather enjoy.

art wall

Jess and I had piles of art sitting around the apartment with seemingly not enough wall space to properly display it all. Then we realized this was not true. Instead of one or two pieces of art per room, we decided to cover one wall floor-to-ceiling in a collage of art.

The Walker currently has an exhibit, Benches and Binoculars, displayed in a similar fashion, referencing 19th and early-20th century salon-style installations.

The first step to creating an art wall is simply deciding which pieces to include. With the help of friends and cats, the floor was sectioned off in the same dimensions as the wall. We then played a gravity-free version of tetris with the various prints, making sure to have a even spread of size and color.Next, we painted the wall a deep gray, a color that would compliment the art. Possibly the hardest task was finding inexpensive frames for all the non-standard prints.

Finally, an art wall! Most of the pieces are done by local artists, a lot of gig posters as well as purchases from the annual MCAD Art Sale. Some of the prints are by pal Paul Gardner, and some are from other friends' rock shows.

To create a variety of depth and texture we included a few non-traditional art pieces, including a spray painted Minnesota-shaped basket (thrift store find) and Jess's Where the Wild Things Are toilet-paper-roll craft project.

I also filled an IKEA spice rack with gradients of paint and a Lego Indiana Jones. Just because. And to round things off, I used a shadowbox frame for an unfinished sweater from my childhood, which is topped by little robots.

Art walls: attractive, practical and meaningful!

Mikey Burton

I've been on a gig poster kick lately. Maybe because I finally got around to framing and hanging all of the prints I had lying around. Anyway, Mikey Burton has some sweet designs. Bands I enjoy, books, beer and plaid: what's not to love??

watch out for hop-ons...

...there's gonna be some hop-ons.

Camper bike by Kevin Cyr.