Day 106: Thrift, Horatio, Thrift.

Title: HummBuggle
Assignment: Go to a thrift store and buy something to work with today.

Materials: A broken faux Hummel figurine and a bag of big plastic bugs. Hot glue, paint, PS for smoothing. Once again my late afternoon sun, kitchen table and black board help me to create a mini studio shot.

Inspiration: This pathetic little doll really needed to be taken to the lab on the island of Dr. Moreau. The book suggests I 'give it back to the thrift store after I document it', but how could I possibly part with it NOW? ;-)

Day 105: Optical Illusion

Title: The Kindly Old Man Dreams

Assignment: Make something impossible. Can you trick the eyes into believing they're seeing something that they're not?

Materials: Pencil, Pen

Inspiration: I always loved 'topsy-turvy' drawings, and thought I could create a sort of Jekyll/Hyde face here.


Here he is asleep....

 And upside down, this is what he dreams he'd LIKE to be like...

Day 104: Regress

Title: The Monster in the Blue Room
Assignment: Work as if you were a young child or baby. Use the materials they might have access to and/or with only the skills and abilities they have at that age.

Materials: Crayons, lined notebook paper

Inspiration: Like a lot of little kids, I had 'monster in the closet' issues, or at least I said I did. I can remember BEGGING my mom to leave the hall light on (which took on magical preventative properties, apparently) and my door opened more than a crack because of it, but I think I may have just not wanted to go to bed before everyone else did. My punishment for making this up, of course, was that I was promptly visited by something like this in my nightmares.

Day 103: Napkin

Title: KootieKatcher

Assignment: Create something with the napkin you use for a meal today.

Materials: One paper napkin from my kitchen table napkin holder.

Inspiration: Fooling around with the napkin from my lunch, I somehow remembered how to make one of these, a grade school 'fortune telling' trick, and serendipitously noticed that upon folding, it naturally created two eyes and a startled expression.

Day 102: Palindrome, Palindrome

Title: Evil Eve
Assignment: Write a palindrome. Bonus: Illustrate it.

Materials: Pencil, Pen, colored pencils, PS, shot in the shadow of the venetian blinds in my living room.

Inspiration: Palindromes are HARD!! I know this attempt at one is pretty simple, but I didn't want to cheat and use one I found via Google. Watching the "Adam and Eve" plot line in Dark Shadows right now with Kris (and Anne last week!) inspired me to make a little sketch of fabulous Marie Wallace as the titian-haired fury who wreaks havoc wherever she goes.

Day 101: Open a Book

Title: Moju
Assignment: Flip to a random page in a book at hand and make something inspired by the first sentence you read.
Materials: printed out images of body parts and the book entry, cardboard shoe box, tape, Sculpey, flashlight, PS

Inspiration: I opened up my ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HORROR MOVIES and landed on the entry for a  'grotesquely fetishistic' Japanese film called MOJU aka THE BLOOD BEAST.
The plot deals with a "blind sculptor who kidnaps a young model and locks her up in a room with large blow-ups of various parts of the female anatomy." Madness and dismemberment ensue. Created this without looking at any stills from the movie itself - I can't watch movies like this.  The description alone was more than enough 'inspiration' for this little disturb-o-rama.

Whoops! Day 89 a little late...

Title: NCC-1701-A
Assignment: Work only with bubble wrap or any other packing materials you have on hand.

Materials: pressed paper packing box from espresso maker, styrofoam top from wine box packing, packing tape, Sharpie, a scrap of bubble wrap, a bit of PS to push the background.

Inspiration: Somehow I skipped right by this one a few weeks ago; just discovered the omission last night.

Every once in a while, my inability to throw away things comes in handy. While looking through my most dangerously crowded closet for bubble wrap, I came upon these weirdly shaped bits of packing box. I picked up the one from the espresso machine parts, turned it over and thought it looked rather familiar, like a nacelle...and a saucer section...I think for this one my handy black board and using the extra styrofoam bits as stars or exploding planets or an ion trail helped make it look like more than it actually is. And though The Enterprise is not monsterish in herself, I figured Kirk & Co were either on their way to or from a monster, escaping from a worm hole or wreaking their own special brand of mayhem.

Day 100!! T-Shirt

Title: Zizzle
Assignment: Make something new out of an old T-shirt.
Materials: One of the Ts I tie-dyed back on #80, ribbon, bells, green pipe cleaner, cloth paint, scissors, needle and thread, stuffing from #51.
Inspiration: Just wanted to see if I could make a stuffed creature freehand - without a pattern - and incorporate the pattern already on the shirt. I think he came out nicely cute-yet-creepy.

And hey! I've actually churned out ONE HUNDRED pieces. Yikes!!

Day 99: Insect

Title: Hellhopper
Assignment: Use the world of insects as your inspiration today

Materials: Pen, Pencil, Watercolors

Inspiration: When I was about 5 years old or so, I was over at Glenn McRae's house playing out back when Glenn ran into the shed we used for our clubhouse and slammed the door shut. I opened the door to follow and suddenly from off the door leapt this GIGANTIC MOTHERF***ING GRASSHOPPER - straight into my face. Needless to say, I now realize that grasshoppers don't have dripping fangs and red beady eyes, but this is what I saw in my nightmares after that. I've hated the damn things ever since. Come to think of it, Glenn provided me with a fear and loathing of SLUGS too when he threw one on my back sometime later, but that's fodder for another assignment. ;-)

Day 98: Time

Title: Cthulhu Kitty
Assignment: Work with time. Try making something tat is only visible in a long-exposure photograph. Drawing with a laser pointer, flashlight, or a sparkler are a few options; you can even create an imate by moving the camera itself.

Materials: Spike, fringey bouncy cat toy, a lot of PS.

Inspiration: My new camera is nice for most of what I do, but a long exposure isn't one of them, so I strayed a bit from the brief. I experimented with catching Spike in fierce midswat, then played with adding some PS filtering to make him look a bit like a pet of one of the Old Ones. ;-)

Day 97: Invitation

Title: Procrastinationmonster
Assignment: Make an invitation to an everyday event you wouldn't normally invite people to.

Materials: Pen, pencil, colored pencil, Scalin book.
Inspiration: As this is definitely an everyday event, I created the grinning idiot monster in my brain that always keeps me from putting pen to paper.

Day 96: Work Backwards

Title: Jack
Assignment: Work in front of a mirror, looking at what you're creating only in the mirror until you're finished.
Materials: Pencil and paper

Inspiration: This was a quick sketch, as my hand started cramping! I just started doodling and this guy appeared. REALLY difficult to get my hand and eye coordinated. I do like the "disturbed child" aspect to it and decided to leave it as is - along with regular dolls, these jumpy-outy buggers always scared me!

Day 95: Ask a Stranger

Title: Sandy's Demon House

Assignment: Ask a stranger for a suggestion of what to do today. Explaining what you're up to is part of the experience!

Inspiration: The other day I happened upon a great swap meet up by Everett, and decided to spring the assignment upon Sandy and Stan, a friendly couple who sold me some cast iron pans. I was a bit leery about imposing, but I'd brought the book and showed them the assignment, talked a bit about it and Sandy IMMEDIATELY went into this amazing story about the most DEMONIC thing she'd ever seen. One of the houses they'd been paid to clean out had belonged to a family of Orthodox Ukrainians. Now just about ANY house that has years of accumulated STUFF and has been left to the elements and the meth heads is understandably horrible, but she said this had one especially creepy room where the owners had kept their mentally ill daughter, and IN THE ROOM was this ghastly "sewn together stuffed animal/doll thing" with a unicorn head and Sandy couldn't remember what else but it still gave her shivers to think of it. That, along with telling me that they could still see the shadows of the Ukrainian crosses that had hung on the walls and her sinking feeling there would be a ghost around every corner gave me the inspiration for this picture.

Thanks so much for the help, Sandy and Stan! Hope this doesn't give you nightmares! :-)))))


Materials: Pencil, pen, crayons, pastel, on the 2nd draft I tried adding some PhotoShop warping, but I think I prefer the original now; the colors are better and it gives a little more focus to the ghost and toy, rather than the whole picture being nightmarish.

Day 94: Nothing Rhymes With Orange

Title: Look Inside Yourself, Clarice

Assignment: Work only with orange materials today.

Materials: watercolor, pen, pencil, PS

Inspiration: Rather than get bogged down in the question of ALL ORANGE materials, I decided to make that my primary color, and pondered whether anything DOES in fact rhyme with orange.
No, but there ARE half rhymes: 4 inch, door hinge, and storage came to mind, which then made me think of a scene from SILENCE OF THE LAMBS...

Day 93: Nuts and Bolts

Title: We Are Totally Screwed

Assignment: Make something with any nuts, bolts, screws or nails you have lying around.

Inspiration: Rifling through my tool boxes to find the needed materials, I came upon a light switch and saw two shocked faces looking up at me as if they were found in flagrante delicto.

Day 92: Letter to Myself. Or not.

Assignment: Write a letter to yourself at another time in your life (past or future). Bonus: Send it to someone who is that age and discuss it with them.

HELLLLLOOOO there!
I've been out of the 'studio' here for quite a while, unfortunately. Lots of art seen and done in other formats, though. Spent a great week in NYC seeing shows, did some fun traveling with Kris, then got submerged in directing two shows at once. No excuses any more, though, other than the fact that this frickin' ASSIGNMENT #92 kept pissing me off. It seems so UNart-inspiring and a little too personal psycho-therapy cute. So take it as given, I've written a note to myself at age 64. You'll just have to wait ten years to read it.

NOW ON WITH THE MONSTERS!