Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Cut and Paste New York

New York is this week's theme on the 52 week illustration challenge.  I was in New York when I was 8 and 12.  I remember the huge buildings and being able to walk faster than all of the taxis in town.

Since cut and paste is so fun, here's my NEW YORK illustration, a collage curtesy of 2 copies of the New Yorker magazine discarded by the library.



Saturday, November 8, 2014

25 years ago...it came down

I dug out these images of Berlin from 2009, 2011, 2013. Nov 9  25 years ago, a 28 year old wall began to be broken, opening East Germany to the world and the world to East Germany. If it hadn't come down, I can picture many of my Ossi friends still in their flowered wallpapered homes watching Sandmännchen cartoons while snacking on Spreewald gherkins or Knusperflocken...wait...that doesn't sound so bad.

Today, pieces of the wall remind the world that walls can be built but they can also be taken down.
"...and now I have to congratulate you!  We are in wonderment.  The Berlin Wall is destroyed.  It is wonderful.  I congratulate all German people on this event!"
Nov 2013

July 2011

July 2011

July 2011

November 2013
on the east side of Brandenburg Gate

November 2013
on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate

July 2011 
The grass now grows where the wall once split West and East (left and right) at Potsdamer Platz





Saturday, November 1, 2014

Meet Klara...the yarn graffiti artist

Meet Klara.  She's a graffiti artist who likes to make her world more friendly and cheerful with yarn.  




Over the past months, I have been working on illustrations for Children's stories. I have experimented with quite a few art forms and I started producing needle felted characters to help me draw or paint characters in different poses and actions.  

Somewhere along the way I realized that I was getting better at making 3-d wool characters and preferred some of them to the drawings or paintings I was coming up with. I started to photograph scenes using characters and props that I had made, combining 2 of my strengths, 3-d art and photography. In time I realized, photographing needle felted characters and found objects worked like a charm for illustrating certain stories. 

This week, I found a window of 10 minutes where it wasn't raining sideways (common in the fall on an island in the North Pacific) and captured Klara climbing trees and covering them in yarn!  More adventures of Klara and other characters will come soon.