That wasn't so bad, was it?
Last week I was morose and full of fear and self loathing. How things can change! Before I'd even got to the class I had sternly reminded myself that this is really just something I'm doing *for fun* and to stop taking myself so seriously. Yes, it could well become someting more serious in my life, but right now no one is expecting me to be the next David Carson or Kate Moross or Chrissie Abbott (I wish. Incidentally, I can't take the credit for the illustration above, that's by Chrissie Abbott. Pretty nice, isn't it?).
This mindset has worked wonders, but I have to say the icing on the cake came when I got to the class. Guess what? Not everyone else is a fucking genius after all! Yes, there ARE lots of good ideas floating around but at the end of the day, the irksome issues facing me are also facing others - even those with seemingly more time on their hands.
I'll hopefully be taking some pictures of my projects and uploading these at a later stage, but here's a brief run down. the fonts were chosen from a book I already had in my bookshelf and have used repeatedly, especially for embroidery projects like the panel I sewed for the insert of Piney Gir's 'Hold yer Horses' album, but I can't find any reference to the book online and it doesn't give font names.. I'll fill in the details when I can.
-- Idea One --
Done the lazy girl's way. Quite frankly my backwards approach to the brief was a main reason behind why I was so annoyed with myself. I spelt the word toast using the medium of..toast. But it seemed to do the trick, as people had questions and Ruth broke out her camera to take a couple of snaps of the results.
After researching high tech materials that wouldn't catch fire, then discovering the cost involved, I was struck by the realisation that the answer had been there staring me in the face all along: cardboard covered in aluminium foil. Thus ensued an evening of careful cutting out and covering of stencils in foil, followed by the buring of almost an entire loaf of the cheapest bread known to Budgens.
-- Idea Two --
Another simple one that I would really love to have made larger than life: letters built of lego. I was able to replicate the font exactly using these handy bricks, but it would have been so much more fun to have made them ten times the size. As it was they were about 30cm tall, but even at this size they used an incredible number of the tiny plastic bricks. I had intended to made a lego base for them to appear out of, rather than just be free standing letters, but in the end this was beyond my resources. The word I'd chosen was puzzle, so I wanted to build a labyrinthine lego structure to reflect this. When I see things like this I wonder - aside from the sheer amazing funness of it - how much it cost. Lego love is an expensive business. Can I have a house like this for Christmas, though?
-- Idea Three --
This is the one I really put the most thought behind (though the idea developed as I was working on it), and the one I'll make sure I finish beyond it's current prototype stage. It's the word propaganda hung as bunting, constucted out of two tone foam (glued together with my own fair pritt stick) and canvas printed with pages of celebrity gossip magazines on one side, archive newspapers on the other. When I've finally finished, I'll post it with it's full intellectual (!) reasoning. I'm lacking a nice bit of string at the moment.
Next week we're off to Borough Market for some drawing. Feeling the fear but not going to rely on a camera. I will develop and hone my own lopsided style, and I WILL be proud of it!
