scribble

This was the cover to a condolence card. 

When our group arrived exactly on time at the Brighton Armory the place was already packed in the large space in front and more so inside the larger fuller space behind the wall. It is a performing arts place now. 

The first family member I encountered said first thing, "We got your card. Thank you for that." The card preceded me. To be honest, back then when I got to the part of making a cover I thought, "What am I going to do now?" I just scribbled on scratch piece of card stock and framed it to imitate art. 

"And we looked all over but couldn't see where you signed it." 

I felt bad about not writing a message. I never know what to say. I'm hoping the card itself will say everything including who sent it without words. What would I say?

With deep affection. I don't even know what to say. Sad!

Nah. I'll just leave it naked. So long as it works. They can even recycle it if they want. But they never do. (That I know about.)

But I'm doing another related page right now that's holding my attention very well because each day I discover new things. Mostly what not to do. I have a whole pile of prototypes featuring various aspects even though in the end the thing will be fairly simple. There are various ways I can think of to have rows of wheat pop up and I zeroed in on mechanics underneath an entire layer. But that puts the goose nest lower than the wheat crop. And even geese wouldn't build their nest at the low point in drainage.  I just now landed on the idea of a mound for the nest lifting it above the level of the ground for wheat, a wide hexagram cone with a lid that's a table, so two mechanisms right there just to get the nest off the ground. Placed on the cone lid. The nest is a third mechanism, another hexagon built out with content to a nest. Placed on the twisting platform, the fourth mechanism, with a duck in the center, a fifth mechanism, with wings and tail that spread, six and seventh eight and ninth mechanisms. The background tilts back and drags with it rows of wheat, two mirrored platforms that pull back with the background, both sides tug rows of wheat and both sets of platform and flaps are  the same or similar but constructed separately, tenth and eleventh mechanisms. I guess it's not that simple.

But it seems like it is.

In the sixth grade, one of them in the mishmash of Air Force Base schools overseas, our Japanese Culture class at one point had us all folding paper cranes from paper cut into precise squares. That's the thing about origami, everything starts out as a square. The idea was to string together all the school children's folded cranes in equal lengths of crane-stings, I think, each strand 1,000 cranes each, then pull all the strings of cranes together into a hoop of dangling crane strands to 10,000 cranes. I think.

Maybe it was 1,000 but that seems way too easy. We folded A LOT of paper cranes. We folded our little fingers off. We all knew all the steps of folding cranes. We all learned the precision necessary or you'll end up with smashed crane faces and mangled legs. We could all fold a crane from a square blindfolded, by doing the same thing over and over and over again. It was ridiculous.

What an insane thing to have us do. I think it was in conjunction with schools outside the base, it was a community thing. For some reason the community wanted thousands and thousands of these cranes and apparently they wanted them by all the children of the all the schools. I think I made about ten. 

Duckduckgo images [thousands origami cranes]

      

That's what the nesting goose is like almost. I haven't tired of the project because I haven't nearly exhausted exploring. The little mound thing looks great and the slightly elevated ground for the wheat surrounding the mound looks great too, best of all the attempts, and none of the mechanics show so I'll just keep cranking out prototypes and keep experimenting, some specific repeated portions are like folding these Japanese cranes.

But that's okay, I have 2 new reams of card stock waiting to be opened and we're almost there. But that's  only 500 pages, not 1000 like two regular reams. And that's okay too because when the pile gets low then more reams are just a few days away. And the glee that I get from two new virgin reams of card stock is just amazing. It's childish. Each time I re-connect with my six-year old self presented with a whole box of white paper. It was cut wrongly and could not be used for its official purpose but I didn't care about anything like that. I'd say it was about four reams, possibly five or six. A lot of paper in a box too heavy to lift by myself. I don't recall ever actually lifting the box. I tore through that paper like a maniac drawing on page after page after page until they were gone.

That's why I sent a ream of card stock to my nephews, so they can be confronted with a pile of blank pages. And while I'm at it send some pens too. Check it out. Amazon sale. 80% off gel pens, set of 108 different colors.  Regularly $80.00, now $17.00.

I bought couple of sets, one for myself. I don't think they'll work for what I'm doing, but I need something wide to fill background. These are not wide. Acrylic paint and water colors curl and winkle the paper too badly. Colored pencils wear down very quickly. Three sets of colored felt tipped pens all ran out and dried out too quickly. Coloring large areas is a problem. Doing this high number of trials has allowed a very good comparison of approaches to adding color. I could stop it anytime, stop experimenting and switch over to higher quality coated card stock and get on with the project but I'm learning too much what not to do through this one etude.

And when I saw the kids coloring at the breakfast table and saw the whole house turned over to displaying their pictures I realized they might have as much fun with blank paper as I do.