LEGO Digital Designer as after-work balm

I hurt myself at the gym and am feeling the stress from keeping so many balls in the air at once. My solution is generally either a shower or LEGO. Since my blocks are mostly in storage, I looked into downloading LEGO Digital Designer, LEGO's official virtual tool, and Bricksmith, a less-polished but more useful independent program with an extensive library of pieces. The latter will feel familiar if you've ever used Google's Sketchup or any other bare-bones 3D software.

Building the base for a pastel looky-loo using transparent blocks and of those WONDERFUL eyeball-printed blocks. They come in angry and non-angry varieties.

Turtle garden.

If I can't run my hands through a box of LEGO in person, I'll happily settle for this instead. It takes me an hour just to place one brick but I'm practicing putting up walls efficiently using the Clone tool. I'd like to build a temple or a mausoleum.

High glitz

I haven't had much time for the studio until today, Sunday, and I got in early before everyone else, basked in the sunshine pouring terribly, beautifully, through my skylight, and played with a few things....

A sort of sketch with origami papers, saltwater and gouache.

Crystalline little coastlines.

I added some crystals and tried to re-imagine the scale. What if these were a distant range of mountaintops?

Gold and silver foiled origami paper. See how the salt crystals only clung to the un-foiled white paper? That was unexpected.

I've also unabashedly been having great fun playing with sequins. I source mine from Cartwright's and I have kept about a hundred or so varieties and colors for about three years without knowing exactly what to do with them. I like that they add 3D and volume in miniature doses. I love the glitter, the iridescence and the plastickiness.

Transparent colorless mini-sequins.

Using a light adhesive to create clusters solid enough for a salt pour.

Novelty sequins can be so humorous and pretty at the same time. I like the slight milkiness of the wet gum cement here.

Like lilypads crowded onto a pond.

This month, we're also going to begin shooting these sketchbooks I worked on all through 2013. The first three volumes have 50 images each, while the contents of the final book are more nebulous––this is when my paintings started getting larger more regularly, more three-dimensional, and more difficult to contain in a book.

Compiling these black books into a digital book format will be an ongoing project.

My second-most favorite pair of Dansko clogs...

Lastly, these lovely little air-plant arrangements have appeared, quietly, along the walkway by my studio. Who has put these here? I love them so very much!

Aerophytes in geometric arrangements!

A variety of results & progress around the shop...

The dyeing went wonderfully. The cats got into the skeins in the middle of the night, so they're looking a little bedraggled, but the colors took beautifully. I did a second round yesterday since the rig was already set up, where I tried various levels of dilution with spring water, and I love the results. Pastels on gleaming fibers, my dream!

They have a bit of "bedhead"...

Maybe I haven't gotten the hang of Parme Rose (some dyes are trickier than others), but I keep getting a camel-ish tone. It's lovely, but not as pink as I'd like.

Oh, that lavender, though...

I checked up on the salt-and-sequin pour. I find the result very humorous, but perhaps I've hit an end with this line of inquiry, at least for now.

Maybe a map of an island?

These crystals are smaller and more uniform. I'm not a chemist but I assume the smaller puddle evaporated more quickly and didn't give it time to develop those lavish, massive encrustations from the earlier salt pour.

My father picked me up some Aji-no-moto MSG (monosodium glutamate) from the Japanese market and I left this guy in the studio today to dry down overnight. I'm a huge fan of MSG conceptually and practically, though I use it extremely rarely in cooking (once in a while, a pinch in a pot of rice is magic). There's so much cultural and gustatory interest in the chemical for me; the idea of "umami" is fascinating; the branding of this flavor-awareness as Asian-specific is also fascinating. It's less neurotoxic and scary than people think. I'd like to play with MSG as a material for a while...

Dust from an old cup trapped in the solution.

I unboxed some murrine I created in Kait Rhoads' fabulous workshop I took a few years ago and have been arranging them loosely while imagining some fused worry stones for anxious types like me. People are so fond of the idea of murrine being a cross-section, as well as the notion that it is drawn thinly to concentrate a pattern and give a high degree of intricacy. Of course this interests me, but I also like thinking of these murrine in a totally different way: as each individual piece being a prismatic little beacon that light shines THROUGH, giving geometric and colored light projections.

Finally, on my way out the door, caught the shop owners working hard on a Sunday night...

Sister site Ok-Toki & some gallery adjustments

Proud to announce our sister site and my graphic design home portal, OK-TOKI DESIGN STUDIO! It's a brand-new venture that lives inside the gorgeous Box Graphics studio in Chelsea. For now, it's just experimental branding and self-given projects, but hopefully expanding to take on clients by next month.

Also, on this site, some gallery adjustments...some things are disappearing and reappearing. We're just testing out how much content is enough content. Because there's a lot of content. But you don't need all that content.

:)

Sequins, kiln unload, more salt & alchemy

At the studio today: unloading the first batch of kiln tests/future pendant blanks. "Blanks" meaning here that they are unshaped, raw pieces that will eventually be cut, faceted, and polished in a cold shop.

Testing laboratory glass slides with specimen wells, Glassline brand paints, white glue + mica flakes, Uroboros powdered colors and handmade sheet glass (blown cylinders from Spectrum 96).

Also continuing with the salt solutions––picking up and examining yesterday's dried vellums, and pouring new batches onto little plastic sequins to see what sort of half artificial/half crystalline formations we can create.

Carefully staged action shot...

Iridescent little flowers...

Examining one of yesterday's paintings in the sunlight pouring in through the skylight...click the image to see the studio shots.

We then moved on to organization. Over twenty different kinds of hand-dyed cultured pearls in all types of gorgeous nacred pastels and jeweltones, rebagged into glassine envelopes.

We had some sorting of silver and gemstones to do, as well...so I used my folded-silver boat ring from my very first jewelry class as a scoop...

Scars, hairs, African textiles from ASOS and my most favorite birdie scissors.

We've got the "gallery wall" on the close-side wall of the studio up and running.

Finally, my long-awaited copy of Cumbrian Alchemy, featuring the work of my friend/atomic priest Bryan Wilson and his colleague Robert Williams. You can purchase a copy by contacting artshop@cumbria.ac.uk.