From what I can tell, a prize in a contest, the contest being guessing when somebody that nobody likes dies. I think. Maybe you can do better at figuring it out, I didn't look much past the paper.
Because the paper is heavy, handmade, not so expensive, has fiber in it that is beneficial to paper, unbleached, somewhat hippyish, excellent for drawing, and in part made out of rinsed out elephant poo. It has good texture and irregular bits in it. Looks like this.
Ellipoo comes in different weights, the artist likes the heaviest 330gsms.
Grams per square meter. It's heavy. Apparently discontinued for a while due to lack of interest, but I looked and it went into a basket, where other selections say "out of stock" so available now according to the information on their site.
The sweasel artist said they do not care for white paper and other darker papers are worse and up to now the Bristol was best. They said they are pleased with the purchase and the shipping was remarkably fast.
One of the Bristols is best for pop-up cards too. It is somewhat expensive per sheet for that sort of thing, drawing crazy shapes all over the place, chopping it all up, wasting large portions, and gluing the bits back together. And I like to have several tablets of that on hand, and that is 120 LB as the weight is expressed in the US. But because I go through reams trying to figure things out I buy regular card stock instead and that is 110 LB. And it works fine.
I'm always on the lookout for good paper though. I need the kind that slides, and is rigid, and is thin. These are the pop-up paper criteria: thin, rigid, slippery. There is a very good art shop a few blocks south on Broadway, Meininger's, with hundreds of choices of paper, but all of that is expensive especially the handmade paper, and Bristol is the best I can find there, and online too. I decided this ellipoo paper will not suit my pop-uppery, even the thinner 180gsm board. But I still kind of want to buy some just to draw on it.
You can get rhino poo paper too. They each have their benefits.
The right paper, the right pen and pencil and brush. The right pen that goes with the right paper in your hand. It's an artist thing.
The ellipoo place has other product available too, handmade silks, paper with other fibers in it, cotton from clothing, wood dust from specific places like boat shops, one I noticed was shredded currency.
I have that too. A very large bag of it. That was part of my job at the FRB, chopping up currency, it took teams, two teams, comprised from employees pulled from various departments to avoid collusion. Imagine throwing bundles of $20.00 into a tree chopper, except more fierce than a tree chopper, you have to stand on a stool to feed the bundles to it. Say, pile a desk up full of bundles of currency like a haystack and chop that up in one session, that was a portion of our jobs.
They give it away to school children in tiny souvenir packages. It's a big hit.
My bag of shredded currency fits tightly into a box that held ten reams of copy paper. I use it for fiber in my plasters.
I tried other fibers, and still do, but the shredded currency so far is best. It doesn't take much, just a handful, or the plaster turns out a little bit too fuzzy like this one did.
Here's one where the currency fiber is not so heavy. It holds the plaster together, Egyptians used hay. I tried hay and didn't care for it. Too rough. So you can see how hay processed through an elephant and rinsed to harmlessness would be similar to fibrous currency at the end of its usefulness.
Incidentally, this is one of the things that made me not such a good fit at the FRB. I stuck out there because of this type of activity. Collectively they thought it was cool. They need such things for their newsletter so I was featured in that for this as a result everybody who worked there knew about them. They were also given away as prizes in United Way fund raisers. They bought two of my paintings for their own collection. If you will allow an anecdote.
The one of the flutist was such a United Way offering. This one here is the second of the same composition. I own this one, but someone else owns the first. The first went to United Way, but it was not the main signup giveaway prize, a trip to anywhere for two was the main prize that time.
When the drawing winners were chosen all the employees collected for that in the cafeteria. Several prizes were offered to entice employees to sign up and they all elicited an audible response from the crowd of some 400 employees, but that painting had been on display for a full two weeks in front of the cafeteria so every employee passing for twice a day would see it. One woman remarked to her coworkers of all the prizes available that time, this painting is the one single thing she saw through the years that she would like to win, but alas, she never wins anything. In fact, didn't bother to attend the drawing and kept at work.
When the name of the winner for that painting of the flutist was drawn the crowd altogether said, "Oh."
In different ways, "Oh, damnit I didn't win," and "Oh, I know her," and "Oh, so that's who," etc., all kinds of Oh's but the same sound verbalized at once by the crowd in all individual voices with individual meanings. I never heard that before.
)))))) O (((((((
I felt an "O" pass through by body, I physically felt it, as I stood at the edge and I was suddenly energized to fly off and paint 50 paintings. A woman raced out of the cafeteria and sped upstairs to report to the woman still working her name had been drawn for the painting and she burst into tears at her desk. She lifted her head and said, "I can't believe it. I know exactly where it is going."
The woman reporting this to me was sobbing.
!
So. It honestly only took 5 minutes to draw and only 20 minutes to paint, and it may not look like much to you, but it means a lot to somebody else and it's the only piece of art she owns.
14 comments:
I'm sure you've seen or been to Two Hands Paperie. If not, you might enjoy a visit.
The flutists are wonderful.
April, all I cared about were the hands.
I wanted to see how the fingers could be exaggerated as if they don't have bones. They did not play a flute like that. This is a modern flute, theirs was double reeded, both hands worked the holes of both reeds.
But I wanted to see what this was like so I drew the hands then drew the head and torso attached to that. I gave her modern unEgyptian hair.
It's only one woman. The same template flipped, to create a lyrical sense of flowing movement that a band of floating notes would do in a cartoon. That's how it went so fast.
Those are beautiful. How thick is a plaster?
Thinner than the wallboard but heavier. In fact, I kind of want to try ripping off the paper from one side of wallboard and try that. I did that when I was a kid and I want to try again and do it better.
Chip's ballad of the thin tags.
lol.
Sounds porous.
Yes, porous. You have to load up the brush then for a line set the tip to the plaster and draw the line in one steady fluid movement as the plaster sucks the paint out of the brush. It's a matter of knowing how much to load the brush, which brush to use, and a very steady hand that can follow a line. The best lines follow the full profile with one single stroke. It does take skill.
That is why I was so deeply and immediately gravely offended I believe my face turned red because it sure went hot when my brother standing directly before it said , "Too bad you can tell you used a felt tip pen."
I could have choked the sonofabitch with my bare hands on the spot I meant to say, bless my brother's heart.
"... ripping off the paper from one side of wallboard and try that. I did that when I was a kid and I want to try again and do it better."
The Chip Axiom: within each of his posts lies the seeds of a new post.
When I saw, "ellipoo", I thought it was about what's left when the ellifants pass by.
You are too cool for school, dude :)
I love those. I would put them in my home in a flash! What a great story. I makes me feel happy that someone somewhere is getting pleasure from your drawings. No matter how long it took to make the actual artwork, there is a lifetime of work and a gift of natural talent behind the work. She is very luck.....and so are you.
I remember when my daughter's grade school class made paper by tearing up construction paper, soaking it, pressing the water out and letting it dry. Hee.
Here's a cute idea my sister and niece did once, using the above idea. Using white paper, they pressed flower seeds into it. When dry, they put it in a card for my mom with instructions to plant (on the soil surface, I think) and water.
God Chip, those are beautiful, I love those. But in a manly art-appreciating way, not in a gay way.
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