My pal Patrick came by this week to paint glass with me and he’s kicking my ass. I’m going to make this into a bead tommorrow and then put it up on Ebay. Isn’t it tasteful and elegant? That dragonfly would fit on a thumbnail. I can’t wait to see it.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: failed legends, fruitcake bat, painted beads
The 2007 commerative Failed Legends bead is up for auction. Click on the bead to read all about it. I started my research with a Wikipedia entry on fruit bats where I learned that, due to their hearty size, fruit bats were often used in Dracula or any other bat-oriented films. So that part is as true or as sketchy as any Wikipedia entry. The part about the US being at war in 1942 is also true. And the rest is pure BS. I made it up last night when I was sitting in front of the space heater in the bathroom. I’ve been spending so much time next to the heat that I moved a bunch of my art books in there so I can learn things while I stay warm. If I had a desk and a laptop in there I’d be set.
Today a plumber came to our house and hooked up the bright yellow sink that we bought about a year ago. Now we have two sinks in the kitchen instead of just one sink and a giant, yellow potato chip bag holder. The new sink getting hooked up is a harbinger for something else happening like our ripping out the old sink and getting a dishwasher. So that’s exciting for me and no one else. Kinda like a lot of stuff.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: coen brothers, no country for old men
After gorging ourselves at my parent’s house on Thanksgiving the gang went to see “No Country For Old Men” at the Sundance Cinemas. Right now Sundance is just one theater but eventually it will be a chain. Robert Redford owns them and they are very swanky. They serve beer and wine and you get to pick out your seats. I could have done without the scented air but other than that it was great. Here’s a picture of some fancy chairs that were inside the ladie’s room:
They look like they would be easy to tip over but they were actually very stable. I tried.
But, back to the movie. We’re all huge Coen brothers fans here so we think pretty much everything they do is great. We give it seven thumbs up. Without giving anything away, it reminded me a lot of their first movie “Blood Simple” what with the slow pacing and the slow bleeding of people onto wooden floors. If you enjoyed that movie you’ll love “No Country For Old Men”. It’s got some priceless dialogue in it, too.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: crab, failed legends, fruitcake bat, martini, painted beads, snail
As long as I’m resurrecting things long since dead I figure I may as well make a Failed Legends bead. Actually, the bead part of that is completely new it’s the Failed Legendswriting that I haven’t done in quite a while. Like the ornaments, this collectible bead featuring the fictitious Fruitcake Bat will come with a tiny card on which is printed a real-sounding legend that applies to the creature. I may make the bead into a pendant so you can wear it or hang it on your tree right away. Of course, it will come to you gift-wrapped.
So what will the legend of the Fruitcake Bat be? You will have to wait until it is up for auction to find out. I’ll let you know when that happens.
Speaking of auctions, because I am a dumbass I put some up last week that are going to end on Thanksgiving weekend- Friday to be exact-which is typically a very dead time on Ebay. If you’re lurking the nets on Friday evening, you’ll have a chance to pick these guys up cheap while everyone else is visiting their relatives. The auctions are: Snappy the Crab, Grumpy Snail, and Lovable Martini. Excellent beads all of them.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: Cary Martin, Creating lampwork beads, Karen Leonardo
Hey! Karen Leonardo’s book is out. It’s FULL of stuff too–16 different step by step lampwork projects and 14 jewelry projects. All different levels of difficulty. I wrote a mask bead tutorial that includes instructions for making murrine. The step by step pictures are quite large:
Hopefully the instructions are clear and easy to follow. I hate re- reading stuff I write so I haven’t combed through the whole thing. If you buy the book and you have any questions about my tutorials, feel free to ask.
Designer Cary Martin made an intricate silver necklace using a mask and two companion beads. Instructions for that are in the book as well. The techniques Cary uses for the mask necklace could be applied to many different jewelry designs. Same goes for all the jewelry instructions, really, and a lot of the bead instructions. It’s a diverse book and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. You should ask Santa or whomever for it.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: lost school, painted beads, wall of democracy, watch me create
Back in…I don’t know…maybe ‘89 or 1990 the Memorial Library on campus was undergoing an expansion or repairs or something. A construction company erected a giant wall in front of the building to protect passersby from flying debris and such. The students referred to the temporary structure as the “Wall of Democracy” and began using it for a giant kiosk for band posters and a spray painting surface. Me and Sean and Bob Foster decided to use it for a little Lost School Show. I guess we just wanted to see what people would say or do when they confronted with our nonsense. Also, we were bored.
Before the more portable books came along, we worked with oil pastels on big sheets of newsprint. I don’t think we have any of those drawings left. For all I remember, we may have put them all up on the Wall of Democracy.
We went down to the Library Mall late at night and stapled pictures all the way up and down the wall. My brother came along document the event in photos. That was some foresight, getting Mike to take the pictures. Everyone had so much hair back then.
The next day Me and Sean and Bob sat on a low stone wall across from the W.O.D and watched people look at the pictures. A lot of the pictures were really nice. I expected that people would take them home (you know, free original drawings and all) but mostly they just looked and looked. They didn’t get covered up right away either, which was nice. I clearly remember one guy laughing like hell as he went down the row. That made us laugh like hell. When he got to the end of the pictures he moved on to a band poster and laughed at that…then he looked at an ad and laughed at that. Then we just figured the guy was crazy and that made us laugh even more. You would think we would have been disappointed to find out that the guy was laughing about being awake generally rather than at our stuff but we weren’t. It’s funnier this way.
Say, speaking of Lost School, I’ve got a brief blog up on Watch Me Create about my attempts at incorporating text into bead designs. I’m still experimenting with different ways of doing that. Me, I like the “Mothership” bead. It’s very, very big though. Had to be to get all the words on there.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog
I’ve got some nice beads going up on Ebay this evening. Snappy is my favorite. Don likes the martini one the best. I’m making real progress with the painting thing, I think. Unfortunately it is taking up my whole brain and rendering me unable to form complete thoughts in areas…except one–mouse catching. My helpful hint du jour is bait your mousetraps with ordinary flour. Just sprinkle it on and wait. Mice like flour WAY more than peanut butter and it’s easier to apply to the trap, too. Kills are way, way up at the House of Hilarity. Our blood lust cannot be sated.
If I didn’t have to run home right now I would talk about what a boil on the ass of contemporary art Jeff Koons is. Consider yourselves lucky.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: collective drawing, lost school of madison, painted beads, surreal beads
The books in the above picture are filled with pages of collective drawings I’ve made with my pals in The Lost School of Madison over the years. By “collective drawing” I mean that pictures are created by one person drawing something and then passing it to another person and they add to it etc. and so on. By “my pals” I mean myself and three of my friends Bob (aka “Foster”), Sean and Rob. Since I consider The Lost School a collective (like the Borg on Star Trek) names are not all that important. I mention us four because we’ve been drawing together the longest and also because I’ll be referring to those guys later on. Anyway, I have about fifteen of these books and there’s probably another ten or twelve of them out there in other people’s possession.”The books”, as I call them, date from 1988 to the present day.
This is a picture of the inside of one of the books. This one contains drawings we made on bar napkins in the year 1990 at the Paradise Lounge on East Main St. in Madison. The drawings are not as remarkable as the fact that seventeen years ago Foster took it upon himself to archive all of these on acid free paper and I still have them. The drawings are better organized than a lot of my tax information.
There’s a very strange quality to drawings made by more than one person. The end product is not usually a unified idea that starts in one place and ends logically in another. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. People tend to add the first thing that pops into their head according to whatever is drawn before. A lot of what’s drawn is not great, nor may it go together very well, but parts of it can be extremely funny and surreal–bits that one person may not have thought of if they were drawing by themselves. It is these “bits” that I intend to reproduce and make into a very long series of beads which will be sold on ebay. Cute animal drawings, such as the fish and squids that I designed solo, will also be available but won’t be part of the Lost School Series.
I have used Lost School artwork in my work before. In fact, I have a Cafe Press storeselling some bar napkin designs on t-shirts and what have you. The black and white outlines have been colored in using Photoshop to make them more appealing. The “I Am Picasso” design has sold the best. I made that one into a bead but it was too sludgy to sell. I’m going to give that one another try because the red bull was really pretty.
Here is the Vampire Star Bird With A Hat. This one will be going up later on today. Eventually text from our collective poetry will be incorporated into these and it will probably make about as much sense an the Vampire Star Bird itself. But it will be new, dammit. You better pay attention to this because I’m not going to repeat all this in every auction. Even though the sun doesn’t rise and set on your understanding everything I don’t want you to be completely confused when the strange beads start coming.
