Thing-a-day.com

Oh man, I could officially be the last poster for thing-a-day this year. That’s either highly embarrassing or exciting. A little bit of both. Between being sick and visiting my friend in Chicago, I’ve been far behind with catching up on thing-a-day (I read them ALL and refuse to let me post my catch-up things until I’ve read them all). But, I finally finished reading them all this morning, and so my last few things…

Essentially, I bought this beautiful birdcage at target (I couldn’t resist) when I had come up with the idea to fill it with candles (including a bird one :p) and decorate it with fake flowers to give it a sort of beautiful natural wilderness look. I still am not sure if I’m done with it, I might add another flower at the top, etc… But we’ll see. I like it for now.

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!

wish good beginnings to all creative spirits!

and here is my thing for today:

and today’s theater shot:

well, a work day in the life.

actual life got in the way and I couldn’t finish the full day.

http://sh1ft.org/adayinthelife/

this project, chronicling leap day, seemed like the perfect way to end thing-a-day

thanks for the fun!

It is a rare sunny morning in Seattle’s winter, and I biked the three blocks to take a picture I’ve been wanting to take for a while now: Chief Seattle illuminated by sunlight. I took two pictures, and I like them both for different reasons.  The business in the background on the left image announces “Immigration & Citizenship Law”, the tracks behind are the monorail; the image on the right is with the space needle in the background.

A lot of people are expressing sadness that the month is over. It has indeed been an incredibly exhilarating experience. But I slowly came to realize the following over the last days:

The thing is actually just training wheels for truly living and creating and noticing and sharing. That is why it has to end today!

Thanks everyone!

today i copied craftykeg and made a haramaki/tummy warmer:

mine is very simple, not like hers with the cute pattern, but i like it still and am going to wear it today. i didn’t follow the instructions to the tutorial closely and chose to make mine single layered instead of double (basically, i just sewed 2 pieces of jersey together on each side)—i liked craftykeg’s idea of tapering for the waist and did the same. i like to layer my tshirts, so i think of this as an extra tshirt layer that i can interchange easily. i want to make more—with patterns and designs, i also think it’d be cute to add lace or a lettuce/rolled edge using a serger. i also might want to add long sleeve arms to a short sleeve tee following the same idea.

i also wasn’t entirely happy with my results from yesterday, so i re-worked one of them (the first one):

yesterday	today

i tried to make the vignette softer, but i didn’t really notice until afterwards that i probably could have softened it even more and made it lighter. i also backed off on the cyan/blue color tinting because i thought it was too heavy handed yesterday. similarly for the second photo, i took out the color tinting effect entirely.

i have really enjoyed participating in thing.a.day and am sad that today is the last day. there are some projects that i’d hope to do/do more of this past month that i didn’t get to, so i’ll try to do them in the near future:

• re-learn illustrator
• make tshirts from illustrator and/other designs—try iron-on transfers or diy silkscreening
• needle felting
• re-learn crochet
• crochet hyperbolic planes and sea slugs
• knit squares for a blanket
• make more stuffed animals/creatures

i’ll probably keep documenting my projects on my blog (probably not every day though) and look forward to next year!

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

I wanted to do something other than 3D today because thats all I was doing all day at work. I was interested in what invisible.co and cignoh were up to by manipulating photos to look like film. I did the same tutorial they both posted. I cropped the images to 16:9 ratio first. I had to change some of the tutorial settings because they seemed not to work on higher resolution images. I wound up recording actions in Photoshop to automate most of the settings. One could do this to video in after effects fairly easily.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

…I know, but here’s the evidence.  We pulled into the Tacoma bus station, our last stop before Seattle, and I had to run one block back to take this photo before the bus pulled away.  Perhaps it is ironic that this city is named after the longtime residents before Europeans arrived (it is also, incidentally the true name of the nearby mountain, that the Europeans renamed “Rainier”); this gun store display seems like the epitome of backwards, stereotyped thinking.

When I returned to the bus, the driver asked what I had taken a picture of.  When I told him, he said “there’s a dark history to that place; that’s where the ‘beltway snipers’ got their guns.”

When I got home, I looked it up, and, yup, it’s apparently true. Shiver.

Stop the war and all the other nonsense, now!!

This is a quickly made card for Michelle, who just sent me the Amy Sedaris book. Whoo hoo!  Another good use for my contact sheets. I’m glad I was “all vertical” for that roll!

today i copied invisible.co’s earlier post and followed the same tutorial to give a film-like effect to a photo. my photoshop version didn’t seem to have all of the adjustment layers/filters that the tutorial called for (exposure and lens blur) but i approximated the best that i could and tried the effect on two of my photos:

before	after

the vignetting effect on the top photo is too prominent/hard, i was going to add black bars to crop to cinemascope or re-do the vignette. i also saved non-cyan/blue tinted images that can be viewed here.

Thing-a-day #27 (belated by about 12 hours)…

- I did yoga. That’s always fun and sort of feels creative, even though you’re just doing what the instructor says. But, hey, doesn’t that fall under “Follow instructions”?

- The other day, when my husband got the car I mentioned in previous post, we had to get the check for the loan cashed. So of course, we ran to the house to shoot some rap video stills.

today i was super-busy. work was long and very active, and then i went to see Hairspray, which was kind of unexpectedly a breath of fresh air. the subway took a while to get me home and now i present my montage. enjoy!

As Thing-a-Day draws to a close, I find myself gearing up to continue the momentum I’ve discovered (and numerous projects I have in mind - how is it that one idea begets another which begets another? The creative process is truly amazing). I am wondering how to remind myself what I’ve learned about myself this month as the rest of the year unfolds and I wait until next February. What I’ve learned is that I do have the time, the energy, the inclination to create something everyday - and some skills as well but it’s the inspiration that I want to harness and keep close.

Today was the first day I did not know exactly what I would create when I woke up. I had some ideas, of course, but nothing planned. I thought about it a bit and decided I would make a book for me - one to fill with reminders of who I am, all I considered and created this month and place it somewhere where I would see it often. I think, in the end, I will bring it into work to place on my desk as a reminder of who I am while I work at a job that is interesting and creative but certainly not exactly what I’d like to be doing all day.

I used the turquoise Japanese paper again for because it is by far my favorite (and my new found resolution is to stop hording my most favorite things but to use them and get joy from beholding them).  It is an an accordion book but without a ribbon (too cutesy for me). The photo seems a bit boring but once it’s filled, it will be a wonderful object of inspirational reminders.

This would have been posted much earlier but I have been having all sorts of telecommunications issues. Is Mercury retrograde (governor of all this electronic and communications)?

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.