Art Giveaway Draw and no gerbils were harmed in the writing of this blog

My daughter helped in the draw. In fact she got pretty into it and orchestrated the whole thing, adding all the names of the girls in her class to the hat as well. Not boys of course, because boys are poopy-icky still and I'll command her to maintain that attitude until she is at least 18. (Me? dysfunctional parent? nawww) .

The first grown up person's name she drew was...Veronica!

Congratulations Veronica! Please email me at ellesereda(at)gmail(dot)com with your address so I can send you the crow drawing.

The Kiva sale still continues. I've discovered that 97.78% of loans to Kiva are paid back. That means there is a 97.78% chance that the artwork you buy through my sale will end up being COMPLETELY FREE. Excuse me for a moment while I sound like a infomercial, but I can't help it...
97.78% FREE!!!
97.78% FREE!!!
97.78% FREE!!!

The only thing better than 97.78% free is 97.79% - 100% Free OR 97.78% free and a bonus gerbil. However, they tend to chew through bubble wrap and don't ship well.

Another artist friend of mine has also decided to donate a portion of her art sales to Kiva. Check out Paula's amazing clocks and artwork made from found objects and materials. She is generously donating $100 from each of RR Plate Limited Edition Clocks available through her Etsy store to Kiva through her Kiva account . I own this clock that Paula made and it's super cool awesome and makes me happy every time I look at it.

I will be back to blogging soon (without asking you to buy anything). To quote a dear artist friend of mine, my blogging voice has laryngitis these days. I think I'm recovering though, as I'm finishing off an epic post with lots of embarrassing pictures and personal anecdotes that may very well start several lawsuits against me. Ah, what the heck, it's my blog. I'll be back.

Art Giveaway and Kiva Sale

This past year I've sold, given away and thrown out a lot of older art. I have a few eclectic pieces I've held onto, ranging from children's illustration I like to do from time to time, to older linocut prints to semi- abstract paintings. I like all these pieces for one reason or another but want to declutter my art studio so I'm having a sale.

Here's how it works. I've put a selection of art for sale here in my Etsy shop. All shipping is free and EVERY penny you pay for the purchase of the art goes directly to Kiva. Kiva is an organization that pays out micro loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. You decide who and where you want to give the loan to from the Kiva website. You may get the loan paid back one day, you may not, but it's a great charity for helping people out of poverty into self sufficiency. If you see something you like for sale, but it exceeds your budget, make me an offer at ellesereda(at)gmail(dot)com, I'm pretty flexible. It's a win win win situation for everyone. I get to make more space in my studio, you get some very affordable original art and someone, somewhere gets a little help to make their own livelihood.

I promised a giveaway in my last post and so here it is. Blue Crow

This is an original mixed media piece I just finished - pen, coloured pencil and acrylic (5"x5"). The background is not grey but a lovely metallic silver. I think I am spending far too much time with crows because every time I look at shiny things I become MES-MER-IZED, the silver paint is so pretty, I just like to stare at it. This scan doesn't do justice to the drawing. It comes matted in a 9"x9" white mat that fits the inexpensive Ribba frames available at Ikea.

I was going to give this piece to the first person who bought something from the Kiva sale, but that wouldn't be a giveaway, that would be a little attempt at bribery. So instead, I'll do a draw for this piece for all those who comment in this post for the next week. However, if you'd like to promote and support the Kiva sale, well, that'd be nice. And of course, if you do and win this crow artwork then I certainly must bestow upon you a pack of Freakin' Magical Unicorn Gum just to spread around a little more happiness.

Everyone loves Unicorns!

2 weeks since my last post. In blogging world that means you're dead, in Twitter world that means you're mummified. I was going to report on the Twitter awards, because these things exist now. The winners have advice on how to be a famous twitterer? twit???? I didn't have the attention span to read the entire article because I'm a 21st century gal and the myelin in my brain has become excessively frayed from years of lighted screens.

The first rule of success has something to do with having mobile internet access in which you tweet every 20 minutes and glance down at your mobile device every 28-47 seconds for 12-14 hours EVERY DAY. Never mind that every relationship you have in the real world will fall apart because really, it's your online connections that count as your true friends. Never forget that.

I know most of you have stopped dropping by. Yet the numbers of visitors to this blog has exploded due to 2 side by side random words left in a comment 6 months ago that unintentionally forms the name of a new person on the porn scene. I (of course) had to google all this to find out what the heck was going on. So, sadly only horny and then completely disappointed people have been the main visitors to Creative Laundry lately....Yay...

I'm working on a little pet project that I'll be posting about within the next few days, and to entice you back here, I'll be giving away prizes! Yep, a free piece of original art (TBA) and THIS! the most awesomest thing ever! Freakin' Magical Unicorn Gum!

Fruit flavoured deliciousness that as you can see from the back of the box will give you magical powers of sunshine pooping happiness!

See you soon!

TV Doodling

I finished a painting a few days ago I quite like that can be seen here. I'm working on about 5 pieces of art at once. Jumping back and forth from piece to piece lets enough distance and time pass for me to determine if they're worth finishing or not. In between bigger pieces I've decided to carry a pen and pad around with me and draw something, anything, whenever I get a chance. It's liberating to draw randomly from your head without reference material or without a plan. Just do. I did this one last night while watching TV. Now looking at it, I think I was a influenced just slightly by seeing the movie Coraline on the weekend. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders play two flamboyant elderly actresses in it. Love those gals.

As for kids movies, how refreshing to see a movie like Coraline that isn't so Disney-fied with annoying sarcastic jokes, predictable feel good plot and wacky spectacle. My daughter loved it and the creepiness of the story and visual craft of great stop motion animation sold me. Take a look at this video of Althea Crome, the designer and knitter of the teensy tiny clothes for the film.

Scenes from My Town

No one I know who lives here has really taken note of this sign on the corner of our downtown strip. There ARE shops to the right of this sign. Goofy city hall.

The Power of Irony

I'm not sure why bloggers always feel a need to apologize for their absences. Perhaps because when looking at our stats we see the same computers checking in day after day and we want to say sorry you had to waste that clicking effort to see the same old, tired post decorating this little piece of cyberspace.

I have no excuse for not blogging other than I felt like harassing people on Facebook instead. Oh, and I've been doing things in the real world. Recent sketches for Dinah's traveling sketchbook can be found on my daily (ahem, cough, hack...) art blog Luule.

I've also been busy with mom stuff. My 9 yr old daughter needs help deciding on what simple machine she should build for a science project.

She said, "A robot that will clean my room!"
I said,"a perpetual motion machine that will power the world!"
My husband said, "a guillotine"
She is making a simple battery.

I'm eternally grateful problems in my kids life are so small and easily remedied. Life is good and we're so lucky. I saw this ad on TV last night. It's funny, ironic, uncomfortable and makes it's point. Many people thought it was real...sheesh.

Here is the link to War Child, the organization behind the ad if you want to learn more and help.

Dear Inauguration Crowd - please go back and pick up your litter.

You can turn yourself into an icon at Obamicon. What fun!

Not to be completely narcissistic but as I was listening to Obama's beautiful speech today I realized a tiny noble purpose in my life could be to be suburbia's (weak and whining) conscience.

All this talk of change and preserving a way of life. Forget about those lofty ideals of freedom, democracy, yada yada yada. Archaeologists centuries from now will discover as much about us by the garbage we left behind than our art, literature or what remains of our ideals. And it won't be pretty. So if the world wants real change, not just a bunch of rhetoric and wishful regression to some idealized 'good old days', then we'll have to change more radically than just being inspired by perfect lovely speeches. Sorry to be an inauguration party pooper. I'm ecstatic Obama is president, but the poor man has impossible expectations put upon him.

My first task as suburbia's good conscience is to make living here more sustainable. If I could build community veggie gardens, local markets with useful local artisan goods and wonderful walkable communities I would. The truth is I hang my hypocritical head in shame as I've let a lot of my good, green habits slide the last year and an half. I quit composting as my nemesis on the street, a rhinoceros disguised as a Labrador escapes from it's yard, tears open the bags , strewing potato peelings 100 metres in every direction. That beast really pisses me off. But too bad, I have no excuse not to compost so I went to City hall today to get my orange sticker to put on my bin to mark it as compost. They're all out and I'm on a waiting list for orange stickers. It took me until the end of the day to figure out I could go and BUY something orange sticker-like and put it on my bin. D'oh. I shall do that.

For serious inspiration on sustainable living you can turn to Colin Beavan and his blog No Impact Man. Beavan lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. For one year his family lived as carbon neutral as possible, even passing on the toilet paper (yeah, you heard right). The result is the documentary No Impact Man which just finished debuting at the Sundance Film Festival to standing ovations. I've been following this blog for a while so it's great to see the success of his family's effort and hopefully the film will get a sizable theatrical release. A recent post that had me thinking was posted by a guest blogger living in a village in Japan explaining how they don't heat their homes in winter but sleep and eat under a kotatsu - a table with an electric heater underneath. It reminds me if everyone lives by the same then it isn't considered a hardship. Suburbia is a cesspool of conformity and we're generally a species of followers, in spite of the fanatical individualism we've suffered from too much. Wouldn't it be nice for us to adopt uniform green technologies, that may be slightly less convenient, but become perfectly normal through habit and conformity? Maybe one day. For now, I know I need to work on my own change.

And since I don't want to part without a little art, take a look at this eye candy, origami and paper sculpture taken to new heights, amazing. I'm especially impressed lately as even basic origami is harder than it looks. It took me 3 freakin' days to figure out how to make this butterfly. Although I'm especially inept at these things.

New old music

I'm in desperate need of new music. I've worn out the 70 or so songs I downloaded 2 years ago and need new music to surround me in my studio. I've been shopping at itunes lately. One song I knew I had to have was this one. It was also used in one of the best movie intros ever made, Lord of War. The life of a bullet...

Snow Forts and Steampunk

I have labeled the architectural details of my snow fort in case the subtle genius of my design is not apparent in the photo. I built this for my youngest daughter. Her enthusiastic gratitude made me wish I wasn't so three dimensionally challenged. I wish I could have sculpted something like this for her...

(image from the Ice Hotel in Sweden)

I've had a nagging urge lately to construct things. I keep passing by this painting in my studio, and I can't help thinking only the first phase of it is complete. I realize it's not enough as a painting. And it needs more than just a frame. It needs some kind of structure surrounding it, something I have to build. I think all the paintings I'm working on in this series need assemblages surrounding them to complete them. And then I think bleh, I'm not mechanically inclined, 3 year olds have completely surpassed me when I've sat down and played lego with them. I build lego towers and that's it.

So how can I possibly carry out the vision in my head? It'll involve learning, experimenting, failing several times over and probably some blood, literally, as I managed to cut myself a few times when I made this small 3D artwork a few years ago. I'll attempt it because I know directions that are right to take are ones that nag at you, get you excited and fill you with some fear or discomfort. If it's too easy, it's probably not worth it.

But before I face all that discomfort of having to do all that pesky thinking, take a look at what procrastination unearthed. A Steampunk laptop from Datamancer.

This received a lot of press, but I think it deserves more. His creations are beautiful.

What is Steampunk? A genre of fiction, fashion, music and art/design, a form of Victorian styled modern geekery and gadgetry . A comprehensive definition can be found here. But from The Library Militant, a good brief definition of the elements of Steampunk:

• Steam power
• Victorian setting
• Twist of science fiction or fantasy
• A mixture of historical setting and attitude combined with contemporary technology highly stylized for the time period

Fringe elements that we can recognize in many Steampunk works, but are almost too intangible to be used as a means of classification. For example:

• The colors; in Steampunk we will often observe many earthy shades of color such as the shimmer of copper pipes, the dark browns of wood, the glow of gas lamps against the dark, and so on.
  
• A slightly, though usually not completely, dystopian setting.
  
• Technology that has not been mass-produced, but appears cobbled together and always just of the verge on falling apart...

I love the Steampunk aesthetic. I want someone to redo my kitchen to look like this. Impractical yes, but will make the experience of cleaning out the dogs food dish so much richer. The link is from Brass Googles, a wonderful site for all things Steampunk with even a name generator. My steampunk name is Miss Moxie Brogley, so I'd like to be called that from now on please.

Here's another fun site. If you're feeling unappreciated, input your first name here and you will be immediately showered with compliments, you'll start feeling like your computer truly loves you, just you. Yes, programmed, automated flattery has the capacity to make me feel good. Humans are vain, whaddaya gonna do?