I'm excited are you exicted? You should be excited, why aren't you excited? If you can't tell, its time to unveil another theme for the semester! This time it's Noisemakers. And I don't mean these:
I mean it more in the literal sense of objects making noise. This probably means that most of this semester's stuff will focus on rattling things, but perhaps a flute might be made or something. The theme did largely come about because of the inherent playfulness in making an item make a sound, and because the Click Clack earrings I made to sell are so named for the noise they make swinging around.
I'll admit I haven't thought about the theme much beyond rain sticks and jingle bells and poking around on Wikipedia has just turned up wierd instruments like the Vibraslap. I blame the alternative materials project and the six trips to the craft stores it caused as a distraction. When we last left it I had finished this:
and obtained Legos to make jewelry of instead. Also, please enjoy the above poorly cropped photo of the foam flower in action.
And here's that finished piece. I can't decide on a title for it; I go between something like "Up and At 'em" or "Into the Blue" (obscure movie reference ahoy!) since there's a fighter jet at the bottom.
Look! You can even tilt the plane up slightly... Okay I'm still annoyed that I had to pay for a brand new Batman Lego set just to get the traffic light colored pieces for the earrings and the compliment I got on them was when I was buying my third shot at beads from A.C. Moore.
It's the set in question! can you guess how much it cost because of licensing?
I tried salvaging some of them into this poorly thought out necklace with the car. Now that I think about it I wish I had access to a drill this weekend so I could have drilled some of the houses and hotels from Monopoly in order to make it seem like the car is on a street around your neck, but alas. A project for another day...
Since concluding these things is a bit of a bear, for the semester I'll just post some songs and sounds I like, starting with my current favorite song from OCRemix.org.
Here is the page where you can download it for free. I have always liked upbeat video game music and this is no exception.It's also the chief reason I bought F-Zero for my SNES. Expect many songs from here and a few video game and other sound effects. Not much that it has to do with making noise, but it is a noise I like. And everyone knows listening to music while working in the studio is perhaps the most essential element! In the meantime We can sit back and reflect on how programmers got catchy tunes out of five or so available channels on the circuit board.
I spent all summer thinking up a new theme for this semester of jewelry resulting in A Walk in the Woods. Although it is yet another nature theme I hope that it is enough of a variation to be different. The key to this is to look at the theme as nature tamed, as in scaled down to the things in our own backyards and parks. A quick example of this is my only idea so far for this, some Coke bottle caps arranged around a Pepsi cap by means of wire and rivets in order to resemble queen ann's lace:
This = This, apparently.
But this has nothing to do with the actual first project of the the year which is chasing and repousse. I'm looking forward to properly learning the technique this time, and am even enjoying making the tools, but I'm not as enthused about the project itself. I have never really enjoyed making narratives in art which is probably some strange result of trying to come up with a uniquely interesting comic strip when I was a kid, the naturally being what the project is on. So far all I have is a necklace that has repoussed elements cycling through the stages of a forest fire. To get ideas I've quasi-coincidentally bought a book called Weeds at Border's liquidation sale.
See? It's True!
Thus I have plenty of time to meditate on this problem (and read a book) until my pitch bowl arrives around September 7th!
A new semester means new jewelry projects to over complicate; this time to the tune of one singular theme. And, as a bonus, the entire process is to be featured live on The Musery blog! Without further ado, onward to the creativity!
As one may have guessed from the above picture (the eighth hit on google for science fiction) this semester's grand theme is science fiction. After briefly considering the usual idea of nature that leaps into everyone's head when confronted with a need for a theme, and debating the use of gears for the first project, kinetic adornment, it occurred to me that science fiction also uses lots of mechanisms and I like science fiction a whole lot. I'm also hoping for a shot at a quasi unique theme, even though I've outed my self as some one who can argue why the classic series of Doctor Who is better than the new one and how Captain Kirk defeated the Kobayashi Maru test in Star Trek II was cooler than in the 2009 movie.
What particularly endeared me to sci-fi is the possibilities for the second project, a tiara, since there has been no end to wild, wacky, and stupid head gear featured on alien females and a few males. And this theme should be helpful for the super special mystery secret third project, as science fiction has always been an opportunity for designers to go nuts, for better or worse. For evidence of this I humbly submit the infamous GM promotional short Design for Dreaming, made when sci-fi was the future and the future was sci-fi. (And if heavy doses of sarcasm are required the MST3K version is here.)
At the very least it ought to be interesting researching the hopes and dreams of tomorrow, fictional or otherwise in order to ape those smooth curves and impracticality that screams "The Future!" And the most excellent place to begin my search is with one of my favorite websites, Tales of Future Past, maintained by a David Szondy and chronicling exactly how we were meant to be living in the future.
