don't call me cougar

school has been keeping me pretty busy, so i haven't been creating much, but the itch has been growing. i decided that over christmas break, i'd either start a new lego project, or write down my latest script idea. well, legos won out when i decided to put together a lego version of the wsu cougar logo and donate it to the school.

this was gonna be an easy one. i did a pencil sketch on some butcher paper, then taped it to a sheet of pressed board. then i attached a rail at the bottom of the image and started stacking, building it from the bottom up. it didn't take nearly as long as i thought it would; in fact, i had it finished the day after christmas. it is approximately 34"x34".

the picture below isn't quite as sharp, but you can see the text in the corners better; it is indented, rather than a different color, as i didn't want to clutter the image. the red bricks are raised from the surface of the white background, adding depth and texture.

it says, "tri-cities" in the upper left corner, since i wanted it to go specifically to the richland campus, and there is a "2011" in the lower right corner, as that was the year i made it. however, i've had a couple of people tell me i should change it to 2012, since that is the year i will be donating it. i've been thinking about it, but i think i'm going to stick with the original year, since a) if i donated a picasso to the school, no one would expect it to be updated, and b) it would be a pain in my ass to change it. and i am usually ruled by my own convenience.

now i just need to get it framed and contact the university. i couldn't find anything at all about donations on the wsu website, but i've been told i should be able to find something through the alumni association. i am excited at the prospect of donating my work to my university. i've never been a team player, and am not really interested in going for any of the extra-curriculars or being involved in school government; leave that to the kids. i want to show my school support, but in my own way. i figure any of the hard science departments would love having a lego cougar, or if the university wanted, they could auction it off.

doing this project was an impulse, and probably not a very bright one. the legos and materials cost around $300, and considering i am unemployed, i would have been better served saving that money. but what can i say, once i get an idea in my head, it can be hard to shake it. i like giving things. it makes me feel good.

i also take a great deal of tactile pleasure out of manipulating my legos. once the project was finished, i decided to finally start keeping an inventory of my legos on the computer; organizing my bricks and creating the excel sheet to track my usage was extremely satisfying to my inner autistic.

it would be easy-peasy for me to duplicate this particular piece, if any alums or coug fans wanted one.

lego clock designs

summer before last, when i was struggling with hip issues, unemployed, and desperate, a couple of friends of mine got married. i very much wanted to get them something nice, but had zero dollars to spend. now, quite a few years back, i had made myself a clock made out of legos, just for fun, and it was hanging in the living room; i had received many compliments on it over the years. it suddenly occurred to me that i could make them a lego clock as well. i already had the legos and the clockwork i would need, so it wouldn't cost anything out of pocket, which was a plus; it was something they would find useful, always a plus, and it would be uniquely custom-made, yet another plus. so i made 'em a clock; it was similar to this one.

 i left the wedding before they opened gifts, but apparently, my clock was the hit gift of the night; two other people requested clocks of their own. long story short, i ended up selling a half-dozen clocks that summer, and gave away at least that many; parent's anniversary, sister's and friend's birthdays, my niece's wedding, even the red cross.  i experimented with  a few different shapes, patterns, and designs, as you can see.

but once i used up most of my lego inventory, i realized that selling them wasn't very lucrative, even at $50 each. each clock used around $40 worth of legos, clockwork, and other materials, and considering each one took 2-3 hours, that wasn't much of a return on my time. then i had my surgery, and everything else fell together, and the legos got put back in the closet.

 then last summer, i started goofing around with my legos again just for fun, and i came up with what i consider a pretty unique design for a clock, lego-wise; you can see what i mean below.

the legos are stacked in a stair-step pattern, rather than vertically or horizontally. remember the old video game q-bert? see the resemblance?

i showed a couple of friends of mine what i had come up with, and immediately got another clock request/order, which was cool. my clocks don't make me much money, but i enjoy making them for people i like. anyway, i'm pleased with the look of the new design, and intend to explore it more; i have more bricks on order. there are so many possibilities with patterns and such, and the hexagonal overall structure lends itself well to a clock face. of course, it would be worth my time if i could charge $80-$100 per clock, but who would pay it? ah well, the story of my life; so few are willing to pay me what i think i am worth . . . lol

i think my rack just got me a new gas cap.

     i went to see the fam down in oregon tonight to celebrate the twins' birthday. on my way back home, i realized i needed to stop for gas, and pulled into a station. i was wearing my new black dress, which i love; it has a lovely plunging neckline.
     as you probably know, they have gas station attendants in oregon, and when i pulled up to the pump, a pleasant looking young man in his early twenties trotted over to assist me. i gave him all my cash ($10) since i didn't want to bother with getting out and walking all the way across the lot to the storefront in order to use my card.

      now, i lost the gas cap for rigby a couple of months ago, so i have have been driving around without one (i know, i know.) the young man says, "you know you're missing your gas cap?" and i responded with a sigh and a shrug-- "yeah, i know. i lost it."

      "i could probably find you one," he offered.

      "really?" i replied, surprised.

      "sure. let me go check."

      i looked across the lot at the store. this offer was above and beyond. something occurred to me. as he was starting off, i called out, "don't worry about it, it's no big deal. i don't have anything to tip you with, anyway; i gave you all my cash."

      "oh, it's no problem at all," he said. "i'll be right back."

      and sure enough, he was. "i think this one will fit," he smiled, and i heard the sound of the cap being screwed into place. he stepped back to the window. "there ya go."

      i was delighted; i'm not used to strangers doing me favors. i smiled up at him and said, "thank you! you're my hero!" and then i realized he wasn't looking at me . . . not all of me, anyway. he was looking at the girls. 

      frankly, it's the nicest compliment i've received in a while.

     and i got a free gas cap.

mosaic quilt gallery

just posting pics; will fill in text later.

lego portrait gallery

it all began with bogie.

like most kids, i used to love to play with legos. unlike most, though, i never stopped. 

i had been going through a tower phase when the idea of building a mosaic first occurred to me. i would spend hours sitting on the floor in the living room, surrounded by legos, building towers; elaborate fairy structures with pillars and arches, some over five feet high. then, while chatting with my roommate joel one day, i began to think about making a mosaic, and my legos immediately leapt to mind as a challenge; using only the six principle lego colors (red, white, blue, yellow, black, & green) would i be able to portray someone successfully?

i had recently picked up a second-hand humphrey bogart biography, and had been struck by the stark quality of the black & white photo of bogie on the back, so naturally this became my first subject. i began by graphing out a pencil sketch outline of the figure on a 4'x4' sheet of pressed board. then i started at the eyes, as with any portrayal, the eyes are usually where you succeed (or fail) to capture the essence of your subject. i didn't want to glue anything together, so i initially attached the bricks to the drawing with rubber cement. i had about a two foot square portion of the work completed when it suddenly slid off the board and crashed to the floor, shattering; it had grown too heavy to be supported by the rubber cement. in all, it was a real learning experience; i actually dropped the damn thing and broke it on three different occasions before i finally learned how to keep it stable (i use small nails to support the structure as i work on them now.)

anyway, i was so pleased with my bogie mosaic that i began another, and to me, the natural successor to bogart was harrison ford. i purchased more bricks, but i had used most of my reserve blacks and whites on bogie, so i had a lot of yellow and blue to burn through, as you can see.

i was very happy with this portrait. i feel i really captured his expression, and i had fun playing around with multiple levels of bricks on the hair and the collar, to give it a subtle, bas-relief, three-D effect. not long after i finished this portrait, a friend of mine gave me a call to wheedle me for a donation to a charity group he was working with, and i ended up volunteering my latest lego portrait. i understand it was auctioned off for $495; i imagine it is still hanging in some nice oak lawn condo even as i write this.

my next subject, i decided, would be einstein; considering the whimsey of the medium, einstein seemed like an obvious subject (and i'm not the only lego artist who has thought so; google it sometime.)

the biggest challenges with this portrait were the glasses (my god, those fucking glasses drove me insane- okay, insanER) and the hair, of course. how would i be able to convey the wildness of that mane with such a limited color palette? i was afraid it would just look like a white blob. so i raised more bricks from the surface, as i had done with the ford portrait, creating textures and shadows in the hair.(it's a shame i'm such a poor photographer.) despite the aggravation of building him, in all honesty, i believe einstein is my favorite.

the following spring, i entered bogie and einstein in the allied arts juried show and made my first lego portrait sale; einstein was purchased for $1200.

i was working at the red robin at this time, and decided to make a red robin cartoon for my next project. once it was finished, i brought it into work and showed my it to my manager. i told her she could buy it for her store if she wanted, or if not, i could take it home and take it apart . . . and no, i don't consider that blackmail, just good negotiations. i sold that mosaic to red robin for $1600, and my lego "bird" also lead me to another sale; a seattle businessman passing through kennewick saw it and hired me to create his company logo in legos for the foyer of his office. (i regret that that commission is one of my pieces that i never got a complete photo of before it slipped out of my hands.)

i knew by now it was time to build a portrait of a woman, but who? i had very specific parameters in mind; i wanted an accomplished woman whose face was universally recognized, but was NOT known principally for beauty. it only took me a day to decide on lucy.

with lucy, i wanted to try something different, so i gave the mosaic an irregular, free-form border and eliminated the frame. this is the only one of my portraits that is actually glued together; it is also supported by a sheet of pressed board glued to the back. although i'm very happy with how lucy herself turned out, i don't consider the frameless border entirely successful, and would love to dismantle the thing and reframe it. unfortunately, i gave lucy to my sis, and she has threatened to dismantle ME if i mess with her lucy portrait, so any restructuring will have to remain a fantasy.

i don't remember why i chose to portray lincoln next, but i remember the difficulty i had choosing which image to base my portrait on. i didn't want to use the "money" pics from the $5 bill and the penny, so i started searching for other pics....and my god, but that man posed for a fuckton of portraits!

i finally got my selection down to six different pics. i tacked all six pics to the wall in the dining room and sat down to contemplate them for a while, when my roomies, joel and rex came home. rex commented that it actually looked kind of cool, having the multiple lincoln pics on the wall...and i ran with it. i went back to the library and started photocopying every lincoln portrait i could find. then i brought them home, broke out the scissors and crayons, and the three of us spent the evening covering the wall in lincolns! the lincoln wall was up for many years; i've included a pic of it here:

(just for fun, see if you can find the picture of john wilkes booth amidst all the lincolns.)

after i finished lincoln, i took him and bogie to a little "art" boutique in snoqualmie, just outside seattle, where they hung for a couple of years.

they never sold, so i finally retrieved my lego portraits from the boutique and brought them home. then a friend gave me the idea that a tupac portrait might sell. i was hurting for money at the time and couldn't really afford the money to buy more bricks, so i took lincoln apart and used those bricks to build the portrait below. i wasn't entirely happy with the checkerboard effect i got by mixing in the blue and green legos in with the black on the lower area of the face, but i think his lips turned out spectacular! i offered tupac for sale on ebay but didn't get any takers, and after a year or so, i ended up disassembling him as well.

not long after that, my truck broke down in a major way, and i did not have the cash to get it repaired. an aunt of mine found out about my trouble and kindly sent me the money to get my truck fixed. i was so grateful, and she insisted that she didn't want to be repaid, so i decided to make her something instead. aunt marilyn loves betty boop, so i made her a lego mosaic of betty.

the biggest challenge with betty was those long eyelashes; even the narrowest lego brick is over a quarter inch. i resolved my dilemma by building her sideways!

when i next opened my lego boxes, i observed that the vast majority of my bricks at that time were red, white, and blue. i contemplated a portrait of nixon for a while, but who would buy it? then i considered one of dubya, but i ended up deciding against that one because a) it would mean staring closely at that face for a couple of weeks (shudder), and b) anyone who would buy it would NOT get that i was being ironical.

i ended up deciding to make a flag....oy gevalt. the flag almost killed me. ever try making a five-pointed star solely out of rectangles? well, multiply that by FIFTY! actually, multiply it by one hundred. i put the flag on ebay and sold it for $400, but when i told my folks about the sale, they were really disappointed, as they had wanted it for themselves! so what's a good daughter do? you guessed it-- i made another one. and no, they are not identical.

in 2007 or thereabouts (i'm terrible at remembering dates) i was telling the above story to my former roommate rex, when he said, "you should do stephen colbert in red, white and blue." brilliance! i began the next day.

this one was fun, but challenging. i had a terrible time with his damned frameless glasses! i redid them three times before i was finally satisfied with my results; the glasses are the only thing in the mosaic that aren't red, white, or blue (they are yellow.) and i made sure to include his wonky ear!

after i was done, i ended up giving this piece to rex for his birthday...but only on the proviso that if he didn't want it anymore, he had to return it to me. he went to hawaii a few years ago and left the mosaic with a friend of his for safekeeping, and that's the last i heard of it until recently. i am hoping to track it down and either return it to rex or keep it myself.

it was pictures of the colbert piece that led to tom cruise. an advertising agency in canada was planning a campaign for dose.ca, which is like a canadian online version of entertainment tonight, as i understand it, and they commissioned me to make the portrait below.

here's the ad as it was released. i'm pleased to report that the advertising campaign my work was a part of actually won a canadian marketing award!

http://www.marketingmag.ca/community/award-winners/2009-marketing-awards-magazine-campaign-9214

the story of captain jack is already thoroughly covered in this blog. ain't he a handsome fella?

here's the cougar logo i made for my alma mater. it's hanging in the front office just to the left of the main entrance to west building on the richland campus. personally, i would have preferred they hang it somewhere where people could TOUCH it...touching my mosaics is half the fun!

in february of 2013, i completed heath ledger as the joker. he's a creepy son of a bitch, but ya gotta love 'im! you can read about my process building this mosaic elsewhere on this blog.

in late april and early may of 2013, i completed this mosaic, titled, "Here's Johnny!" i blogged about the creation of this one as well, which you can read about here--

http://inimitableiterations.blogspot.com/2013/04/heeeeeeeeerrrrrreeessssssss-legos-my.html 

of course, in keeping with the theme of the previous two, the next mosaic i build will be anthony hopkins as hannibal lecter. i'll be sure to blog about it as soon as i start!

My Iconic Monsters Series

thought i'd post some pics of some old artwork. i did these many moons ago, when i lived in texas. the idea of iconic characters in twentieth century film has been something i've had an interest in for quite a while. bela, of course, was the first, and the greatest. these are all pastels on paper, and are, appropriately, movie poster size (30"x40".) If you click on the images, you can see a larger version of them.

there was only one possible successor to bela, and that would be boris karloff. although i really wanted to include the mummy in this collection as well, i ultimately decided against it, and chose boris as frankenstein instead.

can't have a frankenstein without including his beautiful bride. elsa lanchester defined this role, this image, and this hairstyle for generations to come.

vincent price is the only figure in the collection who doesn't seem to have a definitive role, but that's only because of costuming issues. anyone who watched monster movies in the sixties and seventies knows that vincent price was the ne plus ultra mad scientist.

and of course, the wolfman. perhaps it's a personal preference, or just prejudice, but i chose lon chaney, junior over any other wolfman, hands down.

and the series finishes with lon chaney, senior. he was the man of a thousand faces, but the one we know the best, of couse, is the phantom.

these next two pieces are from an aborted series i started and then abandoned. in what was intended as a criticism of the twentieth century tendency to worship celebrities, especially the dead ones, my idea was to portray iconic film and music figures as gods. i chose a palette of earth tones and metallics to convey an idolistic quality. the two i finished are marilyn monroe as kali and james dean as christ. the ones planned but never completed where jim morrison (bacchus), john belushi (buddha) john lennon (african tribal mask) and jimi hendrix (i hadn't yet chosen.) in truth, i was never entirely satisfied with my results on the following two pieces, which is why i eventually abandoned the project. but i sometimes mull over in my mind the idea of starting the whole thing from scratch.