My Design Work

The Art Assignment #3: Intimate, Indispensable GIF

In which The Art Assignment visits New York-based artist Toyin Odutola and receives the challenge to create a GIF! But not just any GIF–it must articulate something intimate that is indispensable to you.

My Entry: My (current) favorite words

Words: Intimate & Indenspensible

EPISODE 03 INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Think of something intimate that is indispensable to you. (It doesn’t have to be a body part. It can be an object, place, memory, anything.)

2. Depict it in the form of a GIF. You don’t have to make drawings—you can use photographs, make a sculpture, or whatever you like.

3. Upload and share it online using whatever social media platforms you prefer, being sure to tag it with #theartassignment so we can find it.

4. Fame and glory. (Your response might be included in a future episode.)

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Amor Fati – New Shirt Design

Amor Fati
Amor Fati – New t-shirt Design

A new addition to my Redbubble t-shirt shop – Amor Fati. The three Moirai, the Fates, Clotho (the spinner), Lachesis (the allotter) and Atropos (the inexorable).

This is one I didn’t draw myself, but found an old wood carving image (copyright free, of course) and scanned and cleaned it up in Illustrator. I’ve had it around a long time; years ago I had desktop wallpaper of a version of this design.

There is also a version of this in white on colors, if you like alternatives.

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Cat Tower Brainstorming

Some ideas I have for a project I’d like to do – a cat tower piece of furniture for the cats to have someplace to sit. The first was an idea I got from a cartoon.

Cat Bed Idea
A picture I took from a television cartoon years ago.

The other idea I’ve been knocking around is a combo clock/cat bed tower.

waveland clock tower

Not sure whether to combine these into one idea – a pagoda/clock tower? Or to do one or the other. I have some rough ideas about starting this, but nothing fully formed.

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Team Pie and Team Cake Shirts

I’ve been meaning to make these shirts since the first Twilight movie came out, because I never cared much for Edward or Jacob, but I do care a lot about dessert. I also have a vague recollection of having a (semi-sober) discussion (argument) with someone about whether cake or pie was better, which was quite a silly thing to have a disagreement about because everyone knows that pie is better than cake. Thankfully, I don’t remember with whom I was having this discussion, so I can’t hold their wrong opinion against them. (Notice I was nice enough to make a shirt for the misguided cake-espousers. Because I’ll take their money, even though they’re wrong.)

Team Pie Shirt

Team Cake Shirt

Team Pie and Team Cake Shirts, for sale on redbubble.com.

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Unreliable Narrator Shirt

Unreliable Narrator Shirt

I was reading The Story Within the other day, and in the middle of the chapter about points of view, they have a section on the concept of The Unreliable Narrator [An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised.] which is concept I’ve always loved. And the first character that springs to my mind when I hear that term is Holden Caulfield, although he’s probably not the best example. And when I think of Holden Caufield, I always think of this book cover….

The Catcher In the Rye Book Cover

Which is how I ended up designing this shirt. Which I proudly wear, because, hey, that’s pretty funny.

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Online Housecleaning

I’ve been doing a lot of housecleaning, site-wise over the past several weeks. I’m in the process of converting over some of my older blog sites to wordpress, shuttering others, and putting up fresh new “coming eventually” pages at all of the URLs I own. I’ve been playing with Foundation by Zurb as a CSS framework, in preparation for working on a portfolio of my design work.

Electrasteph.com has fresh new face. It’s pretty bare bones and needs a little more style, but for now it looks better. I’ve never used it for much except listing out the various sites I own.

I’m struggling with making my fortune cookie site do what I want. I’d like to be more than a blog site, but the template I’ve chosen seems to want to fight with me. I’ll get it done eventually.

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