Vintage Miel

for my niece Miel’s birthday, i did a card decoupage using watercolor paper (which opens in the shape of an M, her initial) and a distressed photo of her (a combination of nail polish remover and vigorous rubbing, hand-torn at the edges for that “ragged” look).  i put the photo on an attempted transfer (it didn’t transfer as well as i wanted), and applied glue varnish to seal the image onto the card.  the glue varnish, applied with a flat brush, gave a canvassy texture to the photo, which i really like!

inside the M-shaped card, i wrote “is for Miel” on the lower right corner.  my grandmother thought i had forgotten to write a dedication—it was that minimalist!

i did put a title at the back: Vintage Miel, and added: “made on the occasion of Miel’s third birthday, 6th of January 2011.

“lovingly crafted by Ninang Laurie.”

happy birthday, junior me! :)

p.s. note that my niece is wearing glazed purple nail polish.

thursday #52. nothing to hop for.

[by ige trinidad]

this last project of the year is brought to you by the other thursdaykid ige trinidad, a.k.a. mr. ige/the boyfriend/my collabidabs.

[to give you a bit of art writing here which i actually am bad at]

contrary to the rather depressing (yet witty! genius.) title and image, the piece is really looking forward to the new year.  see those cute squiggly larvae who just made a holiday feast of the widdle wabbit?  they’ll be badass monsters soon enough.  yep, that’s the spirit!  

happy new year, everyone!

to view more of his work, do visit ige trinidad’s portfolio here.

that’s all folks!

thursday #51. holiday cheer!

since Christmas is just a couple of days away, i decided to add a little holiday cheer to my bedroom wall by making “bubbles” my t-rex can play with.

my niece Miel was a lot of help!

after putting the circles on my wall she took some time to have her pictures taken.

saying hello to my t-rex (“barney”) and his girlfriend

my wall after miel was done with it

i added smaller “bubbles”

ta-da!

p.s. i take colorful inspiration from Katie Sokoler, whose blog never fails to brighten up my day!

happy holidays, everyone!

thursday #50.  turquoise and more.

trying to get into the holiday spirit by buying colorful round rags and having my nails painted turquoise.  i just came from a very demure pink for my bro’s purple wedding and now i want to be all christmasy, so fun color it is.  :)

also, it’s been a busy couple of weeks and i wasn’t able to do anything “creative” at all…  it’s almost the end of the year and the end of the project, and somehow i want to end it with something really special.  :)

thursday #49. carry on, passerby

this project (last thursday’s) is a collab between me (photo) and mr. ige (concept & layout design).  he actually has a very interesting story about it:

“carry on, passerby” is from Carrion Crow (Corvus corone),a member of the passerine order of birds. rook and jackdaw are birds from the same order. 

we wiki-ed.  haha.  jackdaws are very cute.

i also like the counting crows very much.

thursday #48. white, but not too white.

because it has colorful pages!

i had a notebook made by binding origami paper of different colors together.

hmm. the project really isn’t the notebook itself (because someone else made it and i just bought the paper for it anyway), but rather what would be written or drawn or folded within its covers.  :)

thursday #47b. (title other than vortex)

complements the earlier post. no other explanation.

okay i like this photo too.  it makes me feel like hitchcock.

thursday #47a. the space of flows.

sorry for the late post.  the phrase “the space of flows” immediately came to mind when i took this photo.  i didn’t really remember what it meant at that time (bad memory, *facepalm*), so i googled it.

here’s what i got from Wikipedia:

The Space of flows is a high-level cultural abstraction of space and time, and their dynamic interactions with digital age society. The concept was created by the sociologist and cybernetic culture theoretician Manuel Castells to “reconceptualize new forms of spatial arrangements under the new technological paradigm”; a new type of space that allows distant synchronous, real-time interaction.

cool huh?

geeky stuff aside, when you take away one letter from the title, it means a different thing, and one more appropriate to describe how i feel this week.  it’s one big sigh, and the thing you see there in the photo is actually my breath

okay enough drama.  i just like the photo, and i think it’s potential raw material for something else that would make more sense (not that it has to make sense, of course, because art is blah blah blah).

thursday # 46. these longer nights.

the nights really are longer now and it’s getting more difficult to get out of bed.  aside from that, well, i’ve been pretty busy both at work and at my other interests, and mr. ige (i have decided to call him that from now on, web-wise) has been pretty busy with overtime work too.  so i guess i’m feeling kinda somber.  i hope we can take a walk somewhere soon.