Took photographs of Chicago.

And well, I guess, that’s all. See you next year?

The last four days of the month went to hell in a hand basket as far as TAD went, when I learned on Tuesday evening that our campus would be the site of a presidential campaign rally. Since I’m our campus pr/media relations person (and a one-person office at that), things started getting zooey on Wednesday and then became exponentially more so on Thursday and Friday.

From a pr perspective, it was really, really cool to watch how this whole thing came together with very short lead time, and even more cool to be able to help — working with the campaign advance staff, the Secret Service agents, etc. When someone says to me, “This is the end result we need to achieve. Can I just hand this over to you?” I am really good at (and really enjoy) the kind of problem solving and creativity that sometimes needs to be employed.

At the end of the evening, the handful of us campus staff folks who had busted our butts to handle all the logistical issues particular to our site were whisked backstage for a meet/greet/photo op. That was very cool, too.

But the price I paid for all that coolness was zippo production for TAD.

TAD has been a great adventure. It was good to push myself. I became rather obsessive about checking TAD to see everyone’s stuff. There are some folks whose work I’ve really enjoyed that I need to go back and comment on. Thanks, twicks, for getting Dopers on board!

I guess I could reword and repost it here, but why don’t you just head over to my own blog and read my little re-cap and requiem for Thing-a-Day 2008. And you can find out what the hell this thing is:

Thanks for a great month, everyone!

Phew!

Wow! I am SO glad I participated in Thing-A-Day this year. It was a whole new way of challenging myself, and I feel like I have gained a lot out of it!

One thing I’ve definitely learned is that I don’t want to waste another year until I decide to be creative again, so what I’m doing right now, for my final T-A-D is setting up my very own WordPress blog, in which I will document work projects (I’m a website designer), personal projects, or, heck, just use to talk about my day and how I’m feeling.

But I’m gonna keep this one much less personal than what I do on MySpace. I’ve gotten way too personal with MySpace since I started that horrid habit in January of 2006. So personal that I really have no choice but to keep my profile private, either that or go back through each of the hundreds of blogs I’ve posted and set private ones to Friends Only. And I seriously do not have the time to devote to that.

So I’m starting fresh on WordPress. I may not necessarily quit posting MySpace blogs, but I really want to shift my blogging habit to a more mature, more customizable, more blog-focused, less profile-focused format. And I’ve heard many people in my industry sing WordPress’s praises for a while now, and since Thing-A-Day, I’ve gotten to know and love the inner workings.

So here I am, to stay! On WordPress.

Now, the only problem is…. my entire blog audience resides on MySpace. Which means, I’m going to have to finagle some readers over to this direction somehow. And, while I’m at it, I’d love to make some new friends who are already on the WordPress train. So if you blog via WordPress, will you connect with me in whatever way WordPress does that? (So far, I only know how to post blogs.)

Now, I absolutely HATE to complete my Thing-A-Day journey with a post that doesn’t even have a picture!!!! So here’s a screenshot of my blog:

Yes, I know I’m a web designer using a default WordPress theme. I just started, K? I’ll design my own theme soon as I figure out where to go to insert custom CSS. (And soon as I have a few free hours to spend in Photoshop & Dreamweaver.)

So won’t you go read my first post? It’s about a website I’ll be working on this weekend. *Sigh.*

amandathomas.wordpress.com

Well, I did it. I made a thing a day for 29 days. I decided to sign off from TAD2 with another shrinky-dink-magnifying necklace. The charm says “create beauty,” and has a bird carrying an olive branch. I included the bird because I had been thinking about “cultural diplomacy” today. I heard the term being used to describe what the New York Philharmonic’s performance in North Korea was all about. I like the idea of vastly different communities coming together around cultural activities (i.e. art) in a way that fosters constructive conversations - who wouldn’t. These conversations may ultimately lead to peaceful solutions to foreign policy problems. The whole world could use some of that these days.

However my necklace came from a place much more personal than cultural diplomacy. My husband tells me that one of the reasons he loves me is that I “make our life beautiful.” He is not talking about my habit of spending evenings in stained pjs, with my hair piled on top of my head, while I eat Chinese food out of the container. He is talking about how I like to fill the room with sunshine, how I point out details in the world that he may not have noticed, how I make pretty jewelry and stationary, and how I love to throw theme parties. He is talking about my approach to life in general, and it is a most lovely compliment.

I love beautiful things. I like to create them. I like to share them. I like to keep them. I must continue to make them without TAD, because beautiful objects inspire me and making things energizes me.

For future musings and creations by yours truly (I have a handful I did not even get to tackle during TAD), check out my new blog Lady Lulu’s Braindump Hut and Craftarium. Although I will not be posting a thing a day, I do intend to keep up the good work. So set up an RSS feed and keep tabs on me.

-Lu

http://flickr.com/photos/94666736@N00/sets/72157603853927227/

I’ve been creating but not posting. The last week has been fairly intense. I received an order for five Wish Dolls, which are made to order. This entailed making armatures, covering the armatures and decorating the dolls with beads, making the small aromatic pillows, and decorating the tea light holders. My daughter enjoys doing that also - polymer clay with glass beads embedded in them. They are at my Etsy store. www.iggyjingles.etsy.com

I have also completed another Dream Star doll, and multi-day project and the last of this particular mosaic pattern fabric. As I look around on line at all the amazing fabrics, I realize that one way that I can do better with my dolls might be to create some fabric designs of my own as the base for my dolls. So part of my “making” has been thinking. 

Here at the end of the longest shortest month I have ever experienced, I want to express my immense gratitude to the organizers of Thing-a-day. Thanks to being part of this I was spurred to start a blog, put my crafts on Ebay (where I have sold 4 dolls in a very short space of time), and create an Etsy store (where I have sold out of one kind of doll and had success with others too!) . I did not post every day, but every day was full of making and designing.

I have embraced my new identity as a professional crafting artisan.  Truly it has been a remarkable month. 

At my office there is 500 or so blank floppy disks that no one has any use for. I was going to make floppy disk beaded curtains to divide between my office and the onw next door, but I started to make it and realized it was stupid. So, this is one strand of an aborted attempt.

It is a speaker. It acts as a microphone. It goes to an amplifier. It plays through another speaker. It hangs from the ceiling. Sometimes it makes wicked feedback.

Over the past month, as well as doing a ‘thing-a-day’, I’ve also been writing up a chapter of my thesis (in fact, I started it in October last year!). Well, tonight, I finally finished it. It has sapped all my creativity for today, so I’m going to have to leave things there.

On reflection, I’m really pleased I was involved in this project; I’ve tried out lots of new things, taken on a few challenges and surprised myself. I’ve finished this month a little more confident in my sketching abilities and addicted to knitting!

Can’t wait for next year!

Djinn signing off.

This last piece was inspired by the results of the last photoshop tutorial I did for yesterday’s post, some of the other artist’s work I’ve seen on thing-a-day, a hand one of my students modeled and my own desire to make new art. Everything was modeled in 3D using Maya and Zbrush and rendered in Zbrush. The shader / material is courtesy of Arran Lewis. No photoshop manipulations although it looks like I did.

Well its over. I never could have predicted or preconceived any of the work I did for this challenge. This was the beauty of thing-a-day for me. The spontaneity that is often suppressed by daily routine and habits has been restored. Thanks to all those who commented on my work and those who inspired and challenged be to pursue new directions. I would like to keep tabs on several artist I’ve come to know from thing-a-day and hope they will continue to keep tabs on me. All of you can always find my work on my website: http://elliottmitchell3d.com/index.php and look for me in a few days on ZBrushcentral.com and CGSociety.org forums. I’ll most likely be posting under my real name, Elliott Mitchell (unfortunately MrT seems to be taken).

Just a heads up, I am looking for freelance work and other employment options as of a few day ago. Please e-mail me if you have any leads, jobs, advice or need of consultation.

One amazing observation I made was the global interest generated by thing-a-day. I have had 1400 visitors to my website since 9 days ago when I put up a counter. I have been randomly sampling visitor’s IP addresses who visit my site after seeing my work on thing-a-day. In the last few days visitors from the following locations have looked at 4 or more pages on my site:

Karlsruhe Germany
Moscow Russia
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
Curitiba Brazil
Gothenburg Sweden
Dublin Ireland
Osaka Japan
Paris France
Falmouth UK
Chandigarh India
Sarajevo Bosnia and Herzegovina
Seoul South Korea
Lisbon Portugal
Vienna Austria
Tokyo Japan
Macau Macao
Stavanger Norway
MONTREAL CANADA
Vancouver BC
Amsterdam Netherlands
Canberra Australia
Rajkot India
Stockholm Sweden
Hong Kong China
Laxou France
Istanbul Turkey
Athens Greece
Villejui France
Basel Switzerland
New Brunswick Canada
And all from over the USA

“Be well, do good work and keep in touch.” - Garrison Keillor

This is dated the 29th, but it is actually my thing for the 28th (it was just after midnight when I put the date in I guess). We get one more last one tomorrow.

again concert after work, so not much for today:

and a concert sketch

s

(Click for larger)

This is a map of the place I always go in my dreams (not an island, just not fully colored yet).
Just playing with coloring it in here.

Also, I:
Made a shrinky dink:

based on a Mucha… it got weird and cloudy around the edges, not sure why. Also, it was a circle but it got deformed so i tried to cut it with scissors after it was shrunk… and it splintered a lot.  I’ll try again.

ALSO, I Printed owl cards!
I’ll take em to school to use the super duper paper cutter tomorrow.
They’re black prints of drawings on cream cardstock. Does that sound ok, or too plain? I’m kind of thinking about printing on fancier paper, then applying that to cardstock. Hmmmph. Today was one of those days where you get really caught up in all the possibilities and it starts to get in the way of actually moving forward.
Worked a lot on an animation, but fruitlessly, as I could not get the *&%#ing turbulence feild to effect the grass. It was probably just a glitch, but I lost patience. Yarg.

Only 2 more days after this? Is there a year long thing-a-day? This has been so satisfying.

on the other hand, i taught my daughter how to make real Ukrainian borscht.

I wanted to redo a still life I created as a demo for an intro Maya course I taught last semester. I used my own original photographic textures for the wood and background. I hand painted the textures for the fruit in Zbrush and Photoshop. I modeled the wood block and fruit in 3D. The scene is lit from the background image.

February 26th

I can’t post what I did here because I’m not sure if it’s okay to post an essay from my pending application on the internet. So I want to play it safe. I submitted my college application for Colorado College (as a transfer applicant) on the 26th, and so decided to use that for my thing-a-day considering I had just finished edits on several rather creative essays that were required for it. Basically, I was asked to detail and design my own class. I had a lot of fun doing it. Those on the lj thingaday08 community should be able to see it though, friends locked.

I’ve been thinking about some ways to creatively wrap packages, using some of the charming tags I scored from etsy. I like the slightly old-fashioned and simple look of brown paper very much. Yesterday, when I had some free time to think, I settled on what I wanted to do. After school today JT and I stopped by Michaels’s to see if they had what I was looking for. Bingo.

I am a sucker for stripes and polka dots. Put them on $1 ribbon and I’m in. So tonight I made a card and wrapped up a package with my new supplies. The picture doesn’t really do the package justice; I think it turned out very nicely.  And everyone loves to receive a package in the mail, so I’ve got that in my corner.

Today I suffered through a a bad back, a cranky baby and a crabby self - but I still managed to TAD! I decided it was time to create my blog Lady Lulu’s Braindump Hut and Craftarium. I realized that I could not leave being the blogging and crafting. I hope you some of you check it out, and of course let me know what you got going on.

It’s back to NYC for me tomorrow.  See you then!