Horns for Motley Crüe

On July 2nd, Motley Crüe started their final tour.  Two weeks before that I was asked to design and create a set of horns for their dancers.


 I wanted them to look like they were growing, with roots, right out of their heads.


I also wanted them to look they could also fit in on a runway.  The final horns have obsidian glass shards on the roots and running up the base.


Pictures below by Renee Sola




Seraphim: a short film by Kip Kubin





      I just completed work on a costume for the film, Seraphim, directed by Kip Kubin, starring David Malius and Mary Arwen.  It was one of the most enjoyable design experiences yet.  I had so much fun designing the necklace the the helmet.  My dear friend Renee Sola created the dress and the cape.  Mary Arwen wears it so well in the film.  She was a joy to dress.

Preliminary sketches of the helmet.     



Kip gave Renee and I this photo for inspiration.  It's a dress designed by Valentino.  Kip and David created a pinterest to conceptualize the Seraphim character.  You can view it at http://www.pinterest.com/rugby80/seraphim-design/



 3 dimensional conceptualization to get the ideas flowing.  Poor Barbie had to lose her hair for this.


The helmet was made out of foam and then gold leafed and I added real gold glass shards to the front piece.  It was made in two parts so that it could be moved up and down to adjust in case the actress needed to move it.



This photo is what inspired me to make a large necklace.  It looks as if the top piece is a neck shield.  It felt very holy army to me.


These are the pieces that went into the necklace.



The finished piece.



Night of the fitting.  Everything fit surprisingly well.

On location



















The Grandeur of the Forest Floor: Making a tree stump

     Early in the design process for "Search For The Sugar Puff Hollow" I came across an inspiring image from an old set of science booklets.  The picture (below) was so dreamy and mysterious I wanted to capture elements of it for my book.  It portrayed a grandeur of the forest floor that I hadn't seen before.

I went about figuring out how to make an almost life-sized tree stump.  I didn't want it to be heavy so I needed a structure that was extremely light weight.  This was before I had a soda stream and I was going through a lot of Perrier bottles (and feeling guilty about it).  I love finding ways to recycle plastic bottles and I had begun to save the bottles just in case I could use them for the book.  SO I hot-glued all my perrier bottles together and and made them into the tree stump structure.



After that I covered it with tinfoil and papier mache to create the exposed roots and the top of the stump.  But what to cover it with?
     I had been using yarn to cover some of my trees and really wanted a special yarn to cover the stump since it was a close-up of a tree.  I had found a few sources on Etsy.com for coiled yarn.  My favorite was a shop called faroeviking in Ottawa.  I contacted Heidi who spun and died all of her yarns and she made me 2 skeins of custom dyed and coiled yarn.  You can read more about Heidi here.  It really turned out beautifully.






Oldies But Goodies: Venus Hum

I was just going through some files and happened upon these images I did with Kip Kubin for the Venus Hum album The Colors In The Wheel.  That was a really fun project.  I was told to just make whatever I wanted.  What a dream.  This is how the bees for Search For the Sugar Puff Hollow were born.  They started out with a story about some bees who ran away from home and died.  They became ghosts, forever hunting for their hive.  It was a sad story but I was really into dreamy, dramatic stories at that time.  Who am I kidding, I still am.  For the new book I used the same character, changed their look and brightened up their story.  Here are some of the images from the album artwork for Venus Hum.










Introductions: Search for the Sugar Puff Hollow

I would like to introduce you to some of the characters from my new book, "Search for the Sugar Puff Hollow".  I created 17 new characters for this book.  In all, I constructed over 80 creatures (many duplicates) to tell the story of 3 bees who run away from home.


Peapod the caterpillar


Sweetie


Teacup


Nickel the grass mole


The Schusselfuss


Nimble the butterfly

"Search for the Sugar Puff Hollow" will be available on September 14th at the ProtoPulp children's book festival in East Nashville.  More info will be coming soon.

My Cat's Life

For about the last year my living room has been a forest while I've been taking pictures for my latest book.  In an effort to cope with her new surroundings, my cat, Ella took to finding nooks within the trees and flowers where she could hide or nap.  Near the end of the process she even starting jumping into the shot.  Bad kitty was never so cute.










Teaching the Teachers

In June of this year I was invited to teach a workshop on puppet making to a couple groups of Art Teachers for the Middle Tennessee Art Education Association Summer Conference at Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art.  The workshop was titled: From Tichenor to Treehouses: Artists Who Bring Stories to Life.  I was asked to teach the process of puppet making in the style of Tom Tichenor.  In case you are unfamiliar with Tom Tichenor, here's a brief summary.  Mr. Tichenor started his career in the late 1930's at the Nashville Public library.  He later moved to New York and while there created the puppets for the original production of Carnival! on Broadway.  He later returned to Nashville and continued his work at the library where he stayed until retiring in 1988.  After retirement he continued crafting small houses out of felt and cardboard until he died in 1992.  

Honestly I didn't know much about Tichenor before being invited to teach this workshop so I quickly went to work researching his life and his puppets.  Morgan Matens with Wishing Chair Productions, who was teaching a workshop on making Tichenor style houses at the same workshop, graciously agreed to give me a peek at the puppets that are housed at the library.  Below are some of the photos I took while there.  I love the way they are stored.  The placement of puppets from one show next to those from another makes me think of what might go on when no one is around.



























This owl is what the workshop puppet was based on.  I created some patterns based on a hand puppet version.   It was refreshing to see what everyone created.  I work in a professional environment where all of the features of puppets and the methods are based on directions and measurements and we're very strict with those directions.  With this workshop I was able to give everyone the freedom to create puppets however they wanted.  The results were fantastic.  It was such a great experience.  Special thanks to Andrea Steele at The Frist and Karen Kwarciak at Cheekwood for this great opportunity.









An Inheritance of Imagination and a Beautiful Heart


"I slept and I dreamed that life is all joy.  I woke and I saw that life is all service.  I served and I saw that service is joy."  - Kahlil Gibran

My father was a very generous man.  I can't even tell you the countless items he made me.  He was a carpenter, a painter, a teacher, a sculptor, a builder, a magician and a mentor.  He passed away in August of this year.  I would like to use this post to share his imagination with you.  My father approached his craft much the same as I do.  He worked a job during the day and then came home at night and on weekends and worked in his workshop.  Even today the smell of sawdust reminds me of watching him work.  I've never had the desire to work much in wood, but his influence in my work is very strong.  

These are some photos from his first workshop that was located in the basement before he built a much larger workshop in the backyard.  He built all of his shelves and labeled each one with drawings of what was inside and he also painted silhouettes on the wall where each tool hung.  He did the same in our garage.  He knew when a tool was being borrowed or used because it was missing from the wall.





My father started to lose his hearing very early on in my life.  When I moved to Nashville it was difficult to communicate with him because he couldn't hear me over the phone and at that point email had not yet become integrated into all of our lives.  My solution was to start writing letters back and forth.  I would write a letter and send sketches and draw on photos and he would write letters back doing the same.  I don't have many of those letters anymore (yes, I'm kicking myself) but I do have some absurd birthday cards he had sent me.





Before he died, he gave me a stack of cards on which he had designed all sorts of projects.  Some are very basic, some beautiful.  I love the morel mushroom vase!







When I was a child he made this Grandfather clock in which all the parts were made of wood.  I remember so many people coming over to just to see it.  It actually worked too!


 He made this 6 panel piece for me because I really enjoyed his pieces in which he inlayed circles of different types of wood.


He gave me these flowers and cattails before he died.  That man LOVED cattails.  There were so many things he designed with cattails in them.  





I miss him very much.





Moments With Mushrooms

The show that I'm creating the book for has been postponed.  It's given me a little room to breathe but I really haven't stopped working on it. For the last few months my world has been all about mushrooms and trees.  These mushrooms are based on Stropharia (Geophila) Aeruginosa mushrooms that are blue and green.  I made them pink and blue to make them a little more foreign.  I missed a great photo opportunity with them yesterday.  I was spray painting the mushroom caps and just as I finished a huge bumble bee landed in the middle of one and started exploring the whole cap.  Usually when a bug lands on something I'm painting I get it to move off but since the book I'm working on is about bees I just sat and watched for a bit.  It was very curious.  In my head I imagined it was confused and thought it was a real one.  I'm sure that was not it all.  I rushed in to get the camera and looked outside before I went out again.  When I glanced out the window, not only had the bee gone but the wind had picked up and was carrying away the mushroom caps.  Oh well.  Some things were meant to be experienced and not recorded.  I feel that way a lot with trying to capture the wonders all around me.  Sometimes I'm scrambling to capture moments in my sketchbook or with a camera and sometimes I put these things to the side and just let myself be there without any motives.  Some moments become the secret playground for our imaginations and others are given to us to pass on.  This one was a little bit of both.

The photo below is half of the mushrooms.  The photo was taken with my ipad in low light so it's bit grainy.


Gift: Poem

I made this as a poem within a creature.  I've always liked making strange boxes with messages inside.  In most cases, like in this one, the message is written on a long piece of paper and connects to the lid so that the viewer unrolls it as he/she opens the box.




Lonely Robot

This guy was originally a prototype for an installation I wanted to do.  He was going to be remotely hooked up to a computer with an artificial intelligence software controlling his voice and his movements.  He would interact with viewers and other elements in the space.  He would be about 4 years old mentally, but stand around 10 or 12 feet tall.  His mother would come to him as a Greek goddess and his father a bead of light.  Maybe someday.





Lizzie Thomas Web Images

A little over a year ago I was asked to create some images for my friend Lizzie's website.  Some of the images were tweaked a little from the images I'm posting but you'll get the idea.  The theme was Art Deco.  I did a bunch of research into Art Deco jewelry and graphic arts before setting down to illustrate.  These were done 100% with Adobe Illustrator, which is unusual for me as I like to draw ideas out by hand first.