Hiatus!

I'm off on an adventure for a few months! Time to explore the rainforest and practice my Spanish, and get lots of new material to write stories about. I'm still making cool things and will return with a full update in March when I move to London. Happy days!

Week Thirty Five

Click here for Make Something Cool (new items are at the bottom!). Pictured below: Another Wisconsin sunset.

London Underground

As part of my ongoing obsession with geography and cartography, and as part of my post-graduation ennui, I've made a map of the London Underground with cut paper. I used foam core as the base and all my leftover paper from my school projects for the different lines. I officially know more about the metro system than the engineers who designed it. I'm ready to move!

The map measures about 32" by 40" so I'm going to have to find a really big frame somewhere. I had to print out my template on something like nine sheets of tabloid sized paper and tape them all together. Then keep re-taping the template as I cut through it to make the twelve lines of transit. I omitted the overground trains to keep it purely the subway system and wrote all of the labels by hand.

The large scale was definitely a challenge, but next time it would be even more interesting to go in the opposite direction and make a tiny, handheld diagrammatic map.

I made this as a wedding present for Sam, my English husband. I imagine we'll hang it in our living room and forever be the people who know the best routes of public transportation.

Of course, if we need to take a bus, we're screwed.

Week Thirty Four

Click here for a new week of things. (Pictured below: Ain't that America.)

Week Thirty Three

Incredibly, I've managed to pull together another week of cool things just two days late. I picked quite a year to do this big daily project. So far I've received my master's degree and gotten married. Right now we're in the middle of moving across the country, and then across the oceans. It's a struggle. But I'm just that determined.

Click here to view this week. And then scroll down. Pictured below is Rhode Island in cut-out paper.

Week Thirty Two

Click here to see this week's Make Something Cool. Pictured below is a clothes line card I made. I think it would be appropriate to give this to my mom for her birthday since she's washed a lot of clothes in her life. Go, Mom!

Week Thirty One

Something Cool! (Pictured below: Oreo-lympics.)

Week Thirty

Click here for Something Cool. (Pictured below: Splenda in the Grass)

Cut-out States

Recently I made a birthday present for my dad. It was a paper cutout of Wisconsin. (I already had it under glass when I took pictures so everything is a little reflect-y.) Maybe I made it because I am missing my home state. There's a little star marking Trempealeau County:

This was a fun project and I thought, as we are moving soon and have tons of stuff going on, why not try to undertake something huge and ambitious and create a poster for every state? or at least some of them?

Mostly I just had a funny idea for one of the squarer states out West that I wanted to try out. This is what it looks like so far. Nothing is glued down yet and I'm thinking of putting something in the background:

I'd love to make a bunch of these of all different sizes for different states and do a gallery show eventually. Rhode Island will be tiny. How will I even cut it out?

Week Twenty Nine

Make Something Cool! Pictured below is the Connecticut River via canoe.

Week Twenty Eight

Click here for Make Something Cool.

Ho Chi Minh

As part of my senior thesis this last year, I wrote and drew a story about the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. This became a much bigger project than I anticipated. I had to do some extensive research, and, as I wanted to focus on his missing (and wholly undocumented) early years, this was more difficult than I thought it would be, so I had to be creative with the story and dialogue. I also drew everything in pen and ink and designed the story to be in comics format, but without panels or borders. 

Basically, I took everything that I don't normally do and am not comfortable with, and made one big project out of it. But what is a thesis for if not to challenge yourself?

 

 

 

                              

Week Twenty Seven

Click here to see a new week of Make Something Cool.

Week Twenty Six

Happy July! I'm halfway done with my daily project. Click here to see this week. Pictured below: the forest for the trees.

Week Twenty Five

Click here for yet another week of cool stuff. Pictured below is Pinkie from Brighton Rock (a novel by Graham Greene and also a bad movie).

Pints for Prouty

A couple of months ago I designed a pint glass for a local restauranteur who participates in a good cause called The Prouty where participants cycle, walk and row to raise money for cancer research. This was the design:

And this is how it turned out:

The other side was designed by some guy named Samuel Adams: