The purple and green problem

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Japanese science-fantasy animation series. A friend asked me a long time ago to make him a chair that was based on a giant bio-machine called an Eva that features in the anime. Okay, I said. I'm not afraid of a geeky challenge but when he told me the two colours of the Eva unit were purple and green I started to regret saying yes. I had no idea how I was going to attempt to make a purple and green chair beautiful. I still have no idea And I've almost finished this project. 

   The unit 

    The sketch 

   The chair (so far) 

The plan

Today I did some simple calculations. If I made and sold a Christmas card everyday until December 25 I would almost have enough money to buy the people I love a modest gift. 

£3 per card X 61 days till Christmas 

- 20 % commission 

= £146.40 

Sorted. 

The fish tank

Once upon a time, (less than a week ago), there was a little common goldfish called klaus. He lived with many other little fish that looked just like him but he didn't like any of them. He just pretended. One day a big giant net came and hoisted him out of the big tank of water and placed him in a little bag of water, just a puddle really. And then everything went dark. Not long after the light returned and he found himself living in a lovely new big glass house. Klaus was surrounded by fake trees and plastic ornaments. The floor was made up of so many pebbles with so many different colours he had difficulty counting them all. As luck would have it Klaus had only one other fish living with him in his new house. They didn't talk much or swim around together but it was nice to know he wasn't alone.  A massive stream of water would push Klaus around in the water if he swam too close to the top, but of course he always forget this because he had trouble remembering things. All in all Klaus liked his new house. What he did find rather unusual though was the giant girl that spent hours sitting at the big blue table across the room constantly cutting up pieces of unusually shaped fabric and putting them back together again. The machine that helped her with this process made an awfully frightful noise but with time Klaus realised the girl and the machine were no threat to him. Occasionally she would press her face to the glass and smile and place some nice dinner into the glass house through the roof and then wander off and that would be it. Klaus liked his new life. The end. 

The Hour

I have to wake up incredibly early for work tomorrow but my body refuses to go to sleep before a certain time. I had an hour to kill so I decided to spend that time doing some sketching. I used my good old 5B pencil and some mono printing. 

The scrap heap revisited

So. A few years have passed and I am still making curious little stuffed squares and triangles with faces on them and toys resembling animals. What has changed is the way I am documenting them. Instead of just placing them on a chair, taking a photo and calling it a day I am trying to add context. It would make no sense to depict a cup cake flying through the clouds in a hot air balloon basket just for the thrills, a kitchen work top will do just fine for that photograph. But seeing as I am a grown up without children of my own, drawing a little house with chalk and placing said scrap animal inside the drawing of the house would make sense for the photograph of a child's toy in context. 

 

P.s I would like to retract my earlier statement about Hot air balloons. This would be an excellent way to document cake. 

The food colouring

So, halloween is approaching and curious as ever, I wondered what would happen if I emptied an entire bottle of black food colouring into a Victoria sponge cake mix. Obviously I knew the cake would turn out some shade of dark. But is it possible to find black cake not only visually pleasing but edible? Answer. No. And to further the level of grossness I mixed a gloriously grotesque shade of orange into butter icing and slapped it on top of the cakes. Wow.