blog

Here are a collection of my musings, thoughts and updates. Sometimes I’m too busy working on projects to update, i.e. all of 2023, but otherwise I’ll share my best thoughts here. ❤️

Get well soon flowers - Pre-School edition

When we found out that one of our neighbors was ill, we thought of going to the flower shop to get some flowers until we realized our time and energy constraints so we ended up deciding to make our own get well flowers.

I thought maybe we could use some of the sticks from our stick collection.

Stick collection? In our home, we love our nature collection. My pre-schooler has a collection of pinecones, acorns, sea shells, feathers and especially sticks. For our household, anything beyond the size of the designated container must stay outside. Also, as beautiful as leaves and flowers are, they do not get added to the container as they are too fragile and disintegrate into fodder for our vacuum cleaner.

Materials

  • tissue paper - we saved them from previously received birthday presents

  • sticks

  • at least 3 pipe cleaners per flower

  • leaf cut outs (not pictured above)

here are the steps

  1. Gather and cut the tissue paper into a large flower. Trimming the tisue paper into a flower with petals is an option too, but not necessary.

  2. Cinch the tissue paper in the middle and wrap the first pipe cleaner around it.

    • Use the two ends of the first pipe cleaner as stamen of the flower

    • Repeat this step, so that there are 4 stamen.

    • Roll down the ends to act as anthers

    • Thread the third pipe cleaner through the back of one or both of the first two pipe cleaners and wrap this around the top of the stick

  3. We had leaf cut outs, so we attached them with another pipe cleaner

Here’s the final. It was noted that these flowers would not die unlike fresh flowers.

Paper Kites for Pre-Schoolers

Sometimes our ideas with the most impact, are for our most important clients, our little ones. From time to time, I’ll share some creative projects created with children. I’ve always had a close connection with children and sometimes I blend right with them and they don’t realize that I am an adult.

My favorite projects to teach are the ones that introduce concepts of engineering, after all the kids are mini scientists and artists. Last May, I had the opportunity to teach 14 3-4 year olds how to create kites.

It was a multistep process:

  1. create a t-shaped spine of the kite with three bamboo skewer sticks: 2 for the height and 1 for the width.

  2. create 4 indicator dots on the wrapping paper by putting the spine on top of the paper and then adding a dot at each of the 4 ends of the sticks.

  3. using a pencil, draw 4 lines to connect the 4 dots. it should hopefully look like a diamond.

  4. cut along the 4 lines and free the kite from the paper.

  5. using 5 pieces of tape, attach the t-shaped spine to the paper:

    • 1 for the middle slightly below the intersection

    • 1 for each of the 4 stick tips.

  6. cut a short piece of rope, and a long piece of rope for the spool

    • on one end of the short piece: two inches above the wooden intersection, poke two holes on either side of the kite and run one end of the string through. Tie a knot.

    • for the other end of the short piece: poke two holes two inches below the wooden intersection. run the string through and tie a second knot.

    • for the long piece of rope, tie one knot around the center of the short piece. spool the other end around a long stick or toilet paper roll.

  7. Your kite is ready! Fly it on a slightly windy day where the wind speed is between 4 and 13 mph.

In the classroom, as much as possible, I provided verbal instructions and then a visual demonstration of the process. Of the 3-4 students at the table, for the one student that needed the most help, I re-demonstrated the process while repeating it verbally at the same time. Some students pick it up immediately and some would pick it up on the second demonstration.

The students were incredibly proud of their new kites!

new business cards

I decided to take a new approach while designing new business cards. Motherhood has made me very practical. How do I look for new business if I spend half of my time at the playground or shuffling my little one to and from playdates and ballet lessons?

The solution: new business outreach and new playdate outreach can be combined together by adding a picture of myself to my business card. But it isn’t any profile picture, it’s me as a mom. Somehow the professional portrait of my looks so stodgy and I just look too serious. So I lightened up the mood and created five image options for the cards. The most fun ones are of course the ones with my little one: Coco!

I also knew that if I met any twenty-somethings or even early thirty-somethings that do not have kids on the brain, that they would not at all be interested in the cards with the kiddo. So I always present a range of options and the lo-and-behold, these early twenty-somethings like the more traditional looking non-kiddo options.

I can’t tell you how many times that I’m looking at a recently acquired business card and I have no idea where I acquired it or who I got it from. Hopefully this helps with the cards “stickiness“.

Custom Rubber stamp art project: Star Wars Artist Sketch Cards.

Recently, while getting something notarized, I commented on the notary’s impressive rubber stamp and even more impressive embosser. I told her that I had a project involving rubber stamps and it brought me down memory lane to one of my favorite projects from 2009: Topps Star Wars Artist Sketch Cards.

Topps, the maker of baseball cards, is also in the Star Wars business . They gave out cards to artists to customize, which were later sold with deluxe sized sets of trading cards. The collectable cards then get traded on Ebay, as these have for the last decade and a half. (Here’s one of mine. Also don’t ask about the artist name, I didn’t make it up.)

At one of the group shows for this series, I met one of the collectors of my card series. He was an art school teacher and really loved the colors and the textures of the cards. He also kindly told my parents about how all things that you see around you were conceived and thought about by an artist first. My parents were still on the fence about my career choice and his words was the first notch of many that began to change their mind.

The cards were initially primed with spray paint, then inked with multiple layers of lighter colored high quality Japanese ink by putting the card directly onto the inkpad. (By the way, that’s like dipping the canvas directly into the paint, but ok.) Then I’d finish by dipping the Vader rubber stamp into the matte black ink pad. I found the result to be much nicer if only one side of the stamp was dipped because it created a very dramatic gradient effect across Vader’s face. The card would end up very over-inked which created this fantastic texture, but somehow the low res photographs from 2009 fail to capture it.

The Darth Vader rubber stamp was made the old fashioned way with an initial pencil sketch and then carved with a rubber stamp kit that included U & V shaped cutters. I learned all these skills in my 6th grade graphics arts class. Shout out to Mr. Ericsson!

And if you’re still wondering about the artist handle that I used to use, it was from the mind of this supervillain.

HOW ARE SNOWBOARDING AND CREATIVITY ALIKE?

PASSION

In order to be great at snowboarding, you need passion. You need to be madly in love with the whole concept of it before you even try it. Because by the time you’re doing your first run down the bunny slope, it means you’ve already had at least half a day of catching edges, face planting forwards and backwards, 20 slips, 100 falls, bruises everywhere and lastly you just watched a group of 6-year-old experts whizz past you. And you think to yourself, I’m never going get th… but then you interrupt yourself mid thought, get back up and try again.

Becoming a good designer also has the same shift back and forth between inspiration and passion. Maybe you saw a piece of design that really inspired you, like a movie poster for Johnny Mnemonic or a painting by Vermeer. It was just mind blowing how perfect the art was. Then you create your first piece of art. You revise it so many times, and somewhere around the 60th revision, you’re pretty sure you have no future in this at all. Then you get over the hump and taadaa it’s done. There are probably still tweaks that needed to be made, but for the few skills and the limited time that you had, it’s totally perfect. It’s a piece of crapola if you put it next to that movie poster, but something clicked, that eternal flame gets lit for the first time and it pretty much never goes out. 

 

BEING FAST AND TUNED IN

When you’re shredding down a slope at top speed you pretty much notice everything that you need to know. You are very attuned to the environment around you. The little kid on skis is about to cross in front of you, most of the run is roped off, you’ve been skidding on ice for about 30 feet and you’re scanning the texture of the snow for just a little powder for you to turn on. It continues this way for the rest of 20 minute ride until you see your friend’s fluorescent jacket as he waits near the lift.

Editing video is exactly the same. You’re already made selects of video and you’re trying to create the perfect edit to represent this new brand that you’re working on. Oh yeah and the project manager walks by to remind you that they need it an hour and you’ve been in a meeting this whole time. You pick up your trusty tablet pen and sink in. A few minutes later, your headphones are on and if the world stopped outside, there’s a possibility that you might not even notice. In both cases, it’s like you have been hypnotized into a trance. You’re so in tune with the work that you know every bite, every gesture, every frame and that’s when your cuts bring the characters and story to life. 

 

PROBLEM SOLVING

Snowboarding is basically real time problem solving. There are a million things in your way and the trick is to get around ALL of them. If the last run of the day from the main gondola is at 3:30, and it’s 3:00 now and you’re at the summit, which run has the most blacks and blues so you don’t need to slow down for any of beginners going back to the lodge on the greens. Or maybe you’re shredding fast down the mountain and haven’t used an edge in while, there’s a big deep left turn coming up with a little roller that you can totally get some air on. What’s your next move? Oh yeah, the terrain just changed and you’ve transitioned from hard pack into slush. And also it just started snowing, but your goggles are hanging off the back on your helmet. Now what’s your move?

Creative solutions are the same. There are a million creative little decisions that you are making and only 100 undos. You can only go forwards and though you make take a step or two backwards, very rarely do you start from scratch. On set, the hand model was hired to show designer acrylic nails, but her hands are on contract so she can’t wear them. The lights are melting the ice cream. The actor can’t remember his line. The actresses got in a fight the night before so the claw marks on the face need to be covered up. Right before delivery of the campaign, someone just thought up a new line of copy and it’s a really good idea. Now all the artwork for the campaign must be revised, but you know that at this point it’s pretty much perfect. Now onto the après ski!

Stepping off the gondola in Jackson Hole, Wyoming sort of felt like landing on the surface of the moon.