5 posts tagged “art”
I wrote a post here the other day, but I haven't posted it yet, because I have been working (by which I mean, "not working") on some images for it. Here is an entirely different, inappropriately long post for you. Which took hours to write.
The following is Full of Win:
It's a collection of punch-out cards, all of which have red flocking on them (that's velvety stuff). Every single one looks like it was produced at some point between about 1950 and 1965. There are envelopes in the middle, which are printed and themed to go with the cards, but you have to assemble the envelopes. At only $5, I think it's a really good addition to my ephemera collection. (My mom is in her early 50s. When she saw the book, she exclaimed that it was just like the Valentines that were given out among her classmates in elementary school in the early 1950s, so it definitely gets the retro seal of approval.)
Through a combination of circumstances that would be wearisome to describe, I have wound up thinking of buying myself some dolls. I used to collect dolls and some action figures in a casual manner. I bought a blonde 1972 Blythe before they became popular again (or, rather, at the cutting edge of that trend), but my girl needed some work and I wound up selling her to a Japanese collector a few years later because I didn't feel like doing things like rerooting her and finding a new leg for her and etc, and I figured that being paid $1200 for the pleasure of letting someone else do it would be ideal.
Anyway, when I sold my original Blythe, I also had a doll from the first issue of Rosie Red, who is very pretty. (I still have her, but a lot of my stuff is packed willy-nilly in boxes, and I have no idea where she is.) That doll is now worth upwards of $400, and I've considered selling her and buying Rosie Red Encore/Again, basically the same doll for a lot less money. However, I can't remember if I ever opened the box, and I have no idea what her condition will be when I find her. (The Rosie Red photo is taken from this Flickr page.)
I quit following Blythe for a while, because my heart was won over by a similar, slightly less-expensive doll named Pullip. I think it had something to do with a few of the earlier releases of Pullip having stars in their eyes! So, I got my first (so far only) Pullip about two years ago: Greggia. (The photo below is from this Flickr page.)
There have been a few dolls in the interim that I would have purchased (like Papin and Assa and Paja and Savon and a couple of the related Dal dolls, like Sooni and Fiori), but recently I fell hard for another Pullip that I wanted to add to my collection: Veritas. She's supposed to be "a Venetian explorer," but really she looks like Pirate Pullip Mark II, or perhaps more accurately Restoration Pullip; the first pirate Pullip was Rovam, who was more fantasy and less historical-looking.
Now, of course, since Pullip Veritas was the thing at the top of my Christmas list, with little stars and hearts around it and a note that said, "Everything else is optional but this is the thing I really want; I don't even need anything else!" -- of course, that being the case, Veritas was the one thing on my Christmas list that I didn't get. I got a promise to purchase it in January, but I'm pretty sure the person who made the promise (who was overly generous to me at Xmas anyway) can't actually afford to blow $100 on a doll right now.
The problem is that I've spent so much time plotting my purchase and sending telepathic "please arrive early" signals to my paycheck that I've had ample opportunity to look at other doll stuff, and found myself falling back in love with a few of the newest Blythes. So now I could quite easily spend my entire next paycheck on dolls (I didn't say I would, just that I could).
The specific doll that has caught my eye is Welcome Winter; she just came out very recently. I realize that she looks a lot like Pullip Greggia, actually: essentially neutral country print dress, pale jacket and head scarf, light brown hair. Her hair is ashier than Greggia's. I love that she wears a rabbit pendant, and then the same rabbit charm is at the end of the string that you pull to change her eyes (usually it's just a ring or, maybe, a tab... 72 Blythe had a ring but I think some of the newer ones might not). She has special, non-standard eye chips: two different shades of brown instead of a pink and an orangy golden brown. Before someone who has actually seen a photo of me gets around to saying it: yeah, when you display her blue eyes, she looks as much like me as a Blythe is likely to ever look. Maybe my hair isn't that dark. (The photo below is from this Flickr page.)
I have been looking around, though; I also love the following, and could be happy with any of them... in spite of their lack of a rabbit pull-string charm:
- Dainty Biscuit is very Victorian Princess (and not particularly hime-loli, I think), with long, wavy, light pink hair. To match her dress -- like you do. (Well, when I had pink hair -- darker pink than that -- I tended to have to match my clothes and lipstick to it!) She also has special eye colors, like purple! (Dainty Biscuit Flickr Pool.)
- Enchanted Petal has a dress that actually looks like it could have been decorated with candy sprinkles, and has light aqua-colored hair. She also has special eye colors. (Enchanted Petal Flickr Pool.)
- Pullip Prunella is one of the very newest Pullips; she is a special collaboration with h.Naoto, a Japanese street fashion brand (IE, very "alternative") and comes with a small human-size h.Naoto tote bag. Dal Hangry is also part of this line. These were hard-to-get in pre-order but for the moment people seem to be selling them for reasonable prices (more like a Neo-Blythe than a Pullip, but not too high).
- Pullip Blanche -- I don't like her outfit, but I do like her face paint and wig, and the wigs are interchangeable, so it seems like this might be one to buy naked on eBay at some point.
- There's a whole line of inexpensive re-releases of 1972 Blythe by Ashton-Drake, and there are several I'd like from that line (Medieval Mood, Lounging Lovely, etc).
- I could go on forever.
The worst thing is that I want a BJD really badly, have for around 5 years, probably an Elfdoll Lishe (here's a brunette Lishe and a blonde Lishe), and I was going to save up for that because it's like $600 and I really shouldn't buy it to begin with, and my plans are in ruins! I also need bookshelves! Egad!
I've left the role of Alice Cherry Blossom: Ballerina out of all of this; basically, I was going to buy her, instead of the Pullip doll, until I realized she's only five inches tall. Yeah, for $300, which was a stretch for me to begin with... when I thought she was more like 9 inches. She's cute but she's not that cute (that's like $60/inch!). Deciding not to buy her was what made me start to think about picking up Welcome Winter or one of the others.
Of course, the crafty application of all this is that I can customize them practically infinitely, and if you don't believe me, look around the Flickr groups I linked. When I had my 72 Blythe I didn't make clothes for her, but I did dress her in Skipper clothes and tote her around with me for a while. Now I've upped my game with some Re-Ment miniatures and so forth, and am working on getting or making or customizing some tiny furniture.
(The other doll thing I am super-bad at: I tend not to give them individual names. My Pullip Greggia is Greggia, which I pronounce "GREH-jee-ah", my Blythe was always Blythe, Rosie Red Blythe is Rosie Red, etc. Everyone else's dolls seem to be named things like Molly and Wren. If I ever got that BJD I'd probably just call it Lishe.)
All that aside: we are getting the sub-zero temps that have been sweeping across the Midwest this week. I just got a weather advisory in my browser that suggests that I cover any exposed skin before going outside. I tried to put the dog's sweater on her before I took her out this morning, and she was having none of it, trust me.
Finally, a few interesting (totally girly and appropriate for this post) art links:
Macoto Takahashi: Ultra-shoujo manga style, and I mean retro-shoujo. In 2001 I bought a little cardboard sliding-drawer organizer box at a NYC shop called Air Market that sold imported Japanese stuff; it had one of her illustrations printed on it. I also got some rub-on transfers of her art there at the same time (I gave one packet to a friend). I had no idea what the artist's name was until now.
Annika Wester: Sort of a cross between Jeffrey Fulvimari and Edward Gorey. Her official portfolio doesn't have a ton of stuff, so also check out this Annika Wester page and this Annika Wester interview (where they also bring up Edward Gorey; glad it's not just me).
My fiance is terrible at saving money to buy Christmas presents for people; therefore, he is running a sale. The "Chukthula" print in this set was featured on Juxtapoz's website in the last few months. His work has been published by Oni Press and IDW.
Some of the prints are also available individually; they are printed on thick, glossy paper. Visit his Etsy account to browse or purchase. He also has originals available, which are not on Etsy, and takes commissions for artwork, too.
A bit before my last post here, the one from March, my fiance and I got in a car accident. The car behind us was hit by a drunk driver. That car then hit us. We've had varying degrees of whiplash: Tom is bigger and stronger than me, and has a healthier back in terms of fitness, so he was better within a few weeks. I seem to have wrenched the entire right side of my back from neck to lumbar. Things are improving but I'm still really uncomfortable. I definitely can't knit, crochet, or embroider: I'm right-handed, and all those things cause me to be tense in the shoulder, and I can't handle any more shoulder tension than I already have.
(I imagine I'm doing better than the passenger from the car that was hit and then hit us: she had to go to the hospital wearing a cervical collar and strapped to a board immediately after the accident.)
That said, I picked up some knitting for the first time tonight, and I did OK. Still working in an intermittent manner on Knitty's "Branching Out." Recommended pattern: easy, relatively fast if you do a motif or two each night, good introduction to lace. I ought to have finished it ages ago, but it's a project I pick up for a few nights every couple of months. This time, no serious pain for me, so I can probably get back to a restrained amount of knitting.
A few days after my last post, I came down with a really bad cold, and have spent the last few weeks getting over it & fighting off a secondary sinus infection. I think that's all OK now. Ironically, I'm pretty sure I caught the cold when I was in the emergency room; colds usually take 10-14 days to take effect, and I came down with mine exactly twelve days later. It delayed physical therapy, which is one reason I'm still in so much discomfort.
In the second week after the accident, along with my last post, I was working on some stuff for my commonplace book (I feel pretentious calling it an "art journal," because I'm not very good at drawing). I have a stack of tea-stained photocopies dating back to a 2-D Design class that I took in 1999, and among them was a cool anatomical engraving of a pregnant woman by Pietro da Cortona. I thought it would make an interesting cover for my journalbook, on a dark green background, with gold edging, so I covered it in gel medium that I tinted a sort of sepia-gold after some trial and error. (The only paints I own, aside from a tube of Interference Gold, are black, white, raw umber, primary cyan, primary yellow, and primary magenta, so I mix up every color I use... it's nice to know how, but it's also honestly kind of tiresome when you aren't really a painter!) I set it aside to dry, but then I couldn't find a sheet that was the right size and color for the background of the cover of my journal. I was still thinking of that when I got sick.
(In the meantime, I'd taken the background of the engraving and put it over a page from an old prospectus from the Museum School in Boston, which was itself a repro of something from someone's sketchbook, that showed through in the shape of the female figure I'd cut out. I think it's pasting it into my book which makes the whole exercise disturbingly meta. YOUR sketchbook in MY... thing. I Don't Sketch. It's Not A Sketchbook. Or an Art Journal. Etc.)
I didn't do anything for a few days, then came downstairs one morning to find out that my dog had found my little cut-out anatomical drawing and "investigated"* its shoulder. Square one. I wasn't upset, except that I have since discovered that my current library system does not have the Pietro da Cortona book (you can see more of its engravings here), and that I think the similar engravings they do have, in a book by Vesalius, suffer by comparison. Vesalius is justly famous, but he doesn't deal with women much in his work, and his engravings, supposedly executed by the studio of Titian, tend to have stockier proportions and less harmonious layouts than those by da Cortona. Vesalius was a very great medical practitioner and professor of the mid-sixteenth century, and his anatomy books were done, not precisely by him, to provide a reference for his students. Plenty of da Cortona's work is redrawn from Vesalius, actually; it's just that I think he's the better artist, compared to the executors of Vesalius's drawings.
(And if you have enjoyed the last paragraph or two, you will probably enjoy Medical Sight Lines, a blog about medical illustration. "Knowledge Pictures," the most recent post as of this writing, is probably the most relevant to what I've just written, and includes a copy of one of the most admired of Vesalius's plates. It should be noted that Vesalius's work was in the form of woodcuts, the original blocks of which were destroyed in WW2, whereas da Cortona's was in the form of engravings, allowing for more detail. Since I'm more interested in elegance than medical accuracy, you can understand my preference! Also interesting: Visionary Anatomies, a splendid essay by Michael Sappol presented by the National Academy of Sciences, which contains the following: Given the complexity of the interior of the body, you couldn’t just describe it, you had to show it. And what was shown was the dead body. Early modern representations of the anatomical body took death head on: the dead mocked the living; the living mocked the dead; the cadaver was an effigy. It served as a reminder of our mortality, our fallibility, our folly — the fragility of human life and civilization.)
On the other hand, I'm about to have access to a scanner again, attached to the computer I actually use to post! I lent mine to my fiance a few years ago, on the premise that I'd sometimes come over and scan things, which I never do. This new scanner around the house means that I may actually start to post more images. Or not.
Newer people, I swear I usually talk about pretty yarns and beads and whether or not certain books suck, rather than illustrations of dissected cadavers. But for some reason, just after my injury, the idea of using a historically-distant anatomical illustration of a woman appealed to me.
*Chewed. But she's a very well-behaved dog and rarely destroys anything that doesn't belong to her!
Knitty's Winter Surprise - the extra patterns and articles that they put out between formal issues - went up yesterday. How does it stack up?
First of all, I picked on one of their most recent Surprise patterns, Smock, for being kind of shapeless on the top (you can see that post on the earlier iteration of this blog). I suggested that it would have been cuter with a ribbed scoop neck. Well, this season's surprise includes a really cute sweater, Thermal, that has a ribbed scoop neck. Thermal is the first Knitty item in ages that I'm likely to make. It looks like a great, comfy, not-too-bulky everyday sweater. However, I'm a slow knitter, so if I want it for next winter, I'd better get on it.
There's another cute-ish sweater called Dragonfly, but I think it has some design problems, and I don't know if I would bother to make it as presented. The issue is that the bottom half is in a variegated yarn, but it's also patterned with butterfly stitches. Optimally, the area with the butterfly stitches would have been done in a solid color, because those stitches depend on light and shadow for their effect, and the variegation interferes with that. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a patterning that will only show up close, and then look busy. There's a pretty, delicate dragonfly motif in the point of the v-neck, though. It would be difficult to decide to make changes to the design, perhaps by using only one of the designs all the way through (the variegated yarn would look great as a full sweater without the butterfly stitches) because the fit of the sweater depends on the yarn change. It might be better to make a shaped v-neck sweater in whatever yarn you like and add the dragonfly motif to that design.
The other two new patterns are basic, a reversible cabled scarf and felted mittens. So, all in all, this is a decent update as far as patterns go.
The articles got to me, though.
Specifically, I was bothered by an article by Julie Theaker about color theory. It's not that it's particularly bad, it's that when an article on that concept is written, it should probably be written by someone who's actually educated in the concept, rather than someone who's sort of picked it up along the way, as Theaker seems to have done.
The suggestion that people figure out which colors of yarn will go together by photocopying their shade cards and comparing greyscale tones isn't a bad one. But most people who have had any sort of art training whatsoever know that it's not at all necessary to go to the trouble of photocopying anything to see it in greyscale. If you want to see colors in greyscale so that you can compare value, simply look at the colors through a piece of transparent red plastic film. This can be a gel made for theatrical lighting, or it can be a piece of plastic cut from one of those flimsy report covers with the little sliding plastic spine. It only matters that it's very red, and that you can look through it.
I'm pretty sure I've seen an overpriced variation on this in at least one or two knitting catalogues (probably Patternworks or the old Knitpicks). You can also find a similar tool in study kits made in Japan, which come with the film, a green marker, and a red marker, so that someone can obscure answers to quiz themselves with; J-List occasionally sells these. At any rate, since most people don't have photocopiers at home, it's a much easier and more portable, sensible solution. Stick one in your craft toolbox. In fact, since you can do it so cheaply, stick a separate one in any toolbox you use for any craft that may involve making color/value decisions. This information is just as good for beaders and scrapbookers and so on as it is for fiber craft people.
I checked The Art and Flair of Mary Blair out of the library a few months ago, though I've been aware of it for some time. I don't have the book in front of me, and I'm not going to review it... rather, I'm just going to explain what it's about and who I think might like it.
Mary Blair was an artist who, among other things, worked for Disney in the mid-20th-century. She is at least partly responsible for the look of several of their films: Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and Peter Pan. She is just about fully responsible for the look of the "It's A Small World" ride, and a monumental mosaic mural in the main concourse of Disney's Contemporary Resort in Orlando.
Tim Biskup and Seonna Hong both like her and have been influenced by her. The people at BoingBoing have mentioned her more than once, not only in the Biskup/Hong context. Many people who like Jim Flora's work, which is vaguely similar but generally spikier and more surreal, also like her stuff. I can imagine you might also like her aesthetic if you are interested in Josh "SHAG" Agle or Margaret Keane.
I find Mary Blair's use of color, shape, and pattern to be charming and inspirational; if you think you might, too, definitely check this book out.
