I want a taco truck

…but not for tacos.

I want a taco truck because of the nice shop window, and the abundance of space inside.
I want to convert it into a mobile art studio.

I’ve discussed a similar idea in a previous post. Though it mainly consits of my fear of the vehicle crashing and losing all the supplies housed within. It is still a fear. But maybe with a truck it’s less likely. Maybe.

The idea is that I can have this studio for farmer’s markets, traveling, zoos, and parks. Basically, anywhere there will be people and there could be me to draw them or offer them art.

I’ve had a (non-unique) idea of a free icecream truck before. I would love to (if one day I have excess income or am retired and well-off) run a free icecream truck. Just drive around towns and talk to people, and give them icecream. Even better would be to have one of my kids run it (that is of course, if I ever have kids). This could teach them the blessing of giving, and give them the wonderful customer service experience with none of the anger or frustration.
I would love also to do this idea with art. Just draw fun, free portraits for anybody who’ll spend quality time with me as I draw them. It’d be well worth the time.

Back to the farmer’s market.
Where I used to live we had a massive farmer’s market over the summers. And yes, there were food trucks. Quite similar to the ones that crowd fairgrounds (I guess having it at a fairground isn’t a bad idea either…). In this hopefully-not-so-far-off-world I would be able to roll up in my little art truck to the market, and it’d be all set up. So conveniently. Far superior to setting up and tearing down tents and tables each day.

Also at zoos, and parks, and venues. Anywhere I could make people happy with a bit o’ art, I could do so from my little truck.

I think it’s a great idea.

Creativity > Efficiency

Several months back, I bought a plush figure of Zedaph. People buy plushies all the time to support or remember their favorite entertainment providers on YouTube, but this one has a greater meaning to me.

Zedaph is a Minecraft content creator (which is how I was introduced to his style of content) but he isn’t at all like your average Minecrafter.
Your average mincraft content creator explores massive areas, collects resources excessively, and builds extraordinarily large projects and over-efficient farms.
Zedaph makes the wackiest contraptions anyone can think up, and completes the most obscure challenges in the game. He doesn’t focus on “grinding” (that is, making massive amounts of satisfying progress) but rather, having fun. He collects what he needs for his contraptions and challenges, but then enjoys completing the creative challenges instead of getting all the “best gear” and making the best farms.

The Zedaph plush to me represents creativity over efficiency, and that having the best things isn’t always the most enjoyable. Sometimes you just have to be a bit wacky to have a good time.

The Tipping Point (by Malcolm Gladwell)

Nope- this is not suddenly a book review website. But, I have read Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and quite enjoyed it. While it mostly covers other things, I feel its concepts also apply to this summer. Especially for my art.

The IWU art camp turned. me. around. And I believe in a better direction.
Shortly before the camp I stopped playing Minecraft. Now when I say “stopped” I mean suddenly I wasn’t averaging 6 hours a day of playtime. I was playing maybe an hour a week.
Now here’s an important note: Minecraft is hardly a mindless game. There is massive potential for incredible organization and true feelings of community and accomplishment. And I was part of a lucky group that has all that. My only issue was a decision I needed to make. I could either invest time and effort into the Minecraft universe… or I could invest time and effort into myself and those around me. Once I phrased it that way… the decision wasn’t hard at all.
People are very capable of doing both, of course. However, I am not one of those people. Those people carry one life: one in which they play Minecraft first, and do other things second. I was always leading two lives. One of art and one of Minecraft. I was never fully invested into either.

But now.

Instead of jumping into Minecraft, I can jump into art. Physical, tactile, messy, and plain fun art.
I was making things relatively often alongside Minecraft, but not nearly to the scale of this past month.
I’ve drawn more. I’ve sculpted more. I’ve painted more. I’ve even written more.

Gladwell’s book - if anything - clarifies that a tipping point is far from a single occurence, so I know the art camp wasn’t the only thing that turned me around. It’s a buildup that suddenly spills over. Picture this:
You’re filling a bucket with water. It doesn’t suddenly spill over once you turn on the faucet. It fills up slowly with low water pressure from a sink. It fills up quickly with high water pressure from a hose. Some buckets are larger and some buckets are smaller. But all of them have a tipping point if the water keeps coming.

I may never know what every droplet that contributed to my tipping point was. But the newly found time from dropping Minecraft, and the rejuvinated creativity and drive from the art camp surely helped create the excited, art-filled, new me.

Blank Space: The Game you 100% Make Up

One summer day I realized I had a blank poster board lying around with nothing on it. To remedy this, I grabbed some coloring utensils, cereal boxes, scissors, glue, and dice, and asked my sister and Mom to gather at the dining room table.

My family has played a dozen different games together plenty of times, but never before had we made one from scratch.

The idea of the game I call “Blank Space” is simple. You start with a blank space that’s able to be defaced (normally a large sheet of cardboard or a posterboard) and you make a game on it. Of course this only works in a cooperative and fun-spirited manner, as winning is a bit of a myth. Rather, the fun is garnered from the joint creative process of making the game as opposed to actually playing it.

The poster board “Blank Space”s I’ve contributed to were both candy-land-esque games. Meaning they had a large, snaking line of squares through various decorated areas, and the squares sometimes had challenges on them. Some squares from the game with my Mom included “compliment the person in front of you” and “draw a smiley-face somewhere on the game board” when you landed on them. If you got to the end of the line of squares, you just added more squares with a marker.
It can grow infinitely. You could bring in more sheets of paper. You could bring in a box and build stairs up to it. You could develop a castle and play “protect the princess” in a tower you built. The possibilities are limited only by your collaborative imagination.

This was the result of the second-ever “Blank Space” poster board game two friends and I made.

I tried this idea with a dryer box too and called it “Blank Space World”. I set it up in my room and added a gridded map to it. We even came up with a six-page rules/instructions book, made health-bar bases for some figurines of mine to be used as game pieces, made cards for each of the figurines with different attacks and an energy system, added terrain blocks to differentiate rounds… the list goes on. It was a nicely developed game.
Did we play it? Nope. Was it fun to create it? Incredibly.

This was how far the board of “Blank Space World” got before I evicted the dryer box.

The game “Blank Space” is a concept that, if solidified into one set of rules would ruin its charm. A game can last minutes to hours to days to weeks to I don’t know… years. There’s no way to monetize it. The Dollar Tree already sells most everything you could need for it. The hardest part (I’d say) is getting people creative and crazy enough to play it with you.

Duck Architecture is SO COOL

My first interaction with Duck Architecture was, of course, via the internet. Of course I had seen the Oscar Mayer hot dog vehicle before, but that’s hardly architecture. Besides, the internet showed me Paperville on creativebloom.com. Instant hook. It’s paper. After I’d seen it, months went by with it tickling my mind every once in a while. Then, bam. I attended an art camp and made some awesome new friends.
Incredible, really.
Anyways, we have kept in touch and followed weekly art prompts. When it was my turn to choose I knew just what to do. Duck Architecture designs Inspired by “your favorite drink”.
Hence my Apple Juice Aldi.

This absolutely isn’t the most in-depth post, and I really don’t know much about Duck Architecture… I just know it’s a real pleasure to look at! So if you didn’t before, at least now you know about it.

Now THAT’S how you run an Art Camp

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) Art + Design department’s second consecutive Academic Summer Camp. It is part of a larger collective of Academic camps that the school hosts including nursing, engineering, musical theater, and even urban farming. The 2022 art camp had seven campers, and was a blast, as it’s where my knife vest came to be. The summer of 2023 there were 24 campers. Was it any less of a blast? Absolutely not. Am I glad I had prior experience with the school, the profs, and even a couple other campers in a more tame environment? Extremely.

Now how do you host an “art” camp? Are group projects the answer? Is it a large collection of demos by various artists? How do you get the students to soak in all the strategies in such a short time?
I feel the IWU Art + Design department has the process down beautifully.

They begin with the standard tour of the department on the first day, as the camps are required and suggested to do. The second day is when it begins: starting with two or three back-to-back workshops demonstrating various fundamental art concepts at a collegiate level, segwaying into a prompt. The prompt is broad, but simple. This year’s prompt was a chair. How simple can you make a chair? The answer is quite. Presenting: the log. It’s a chair. You can sit on it. But who wants their chair to be that boring? Using the newly found (or freshly presented) knowledge of shape and form, the 24 campers were tasked with conceptualizing a chair that is more than the fundamental four legs, seat and a back.
The ideas that came forth were so varied yet so similar. Students flocked to nature, making mushroom stools, a sunflower cushion, a leaf-inspired seat, a spider web lounge, and even a roly-poly chair. Students made chairs out of cardboard books, into a viking throne, and an imposing snake. The variance of the ideas was present, and yet the concept was still closed-ended.
The year prior (2022) the prompt was “wearables” (as in you make something you can wear). Very broad. Yet specific. 2023’s was even more specific but somehow more broad. And that wasn’t all.

Any art professor understands their craft is to be taught over the course of weeks, if not months, after being learned for years, if not decades. The IWU profs are no exceptions. However, the art camp is four and a half days long, broken into nine 3-hour sessions. They don’t have weeks. So they warn the students about the overload of information and teach the fundamentals of graphic design in two hours as opposed to the week in which a college student would typically spend just familiarizing themselves with the program. Oh but also illustration… and sculpture… and photography.
The professors blend the proficiencies together seamlessly. That chair we designed? Used in the photography and incorporated in the lesson about photography lighting tools and strategies. The illustration and character design section? Used to conceptualize a character to sit in the chair we designed. The graphic design portion? Used to create a poster advertising our chair and/or character.
All the while the profs were interspersing just the right amount of student and prof-led demos demonstrating Procreate, Character design, Style, and Skecthbooking, among other things, between loosely individual studio time that could be used to collaborate or focus while creating.

It all flowed together. It wasn’t some imalgamation of different concepts and unrelated projects. It was comprehensive and related into two very clear larger projects. Yes there were process sketches and unused photos prior to the final results. But that is a hugely unrecognized part of art. For a final piece to be presented can mean dozens of undetailed or detailed sketches and ideas leading up to the creation of that final piece. The ideation process is hardly represented in mainstream media art. We were reminded of the story of how the character “Boss Baby” came to be. A simple sketch that sat ruminating on a bulletin board for years before it became the animated film and huge success it is today. Major motion pictures originated in napking sketches. The sketches show how an artist thinks, the final pieces just show what they can do.

If you already knew about the concepts like form and shape, or already knew how to use Procreate, InDesign, and Photoshop, fantastic. That just meant you could dive deeper and pick out the more minute details in each of the lessons that someone learning it for the first time is unable to decipher.

And that’s why I’m thrilled for next summer already.

Thoughts about My First Ever Workshop

Well first off, it was amazing. Second off, it was tiring.

There’s simply a way about kids that brings energy and yet saps energy at the same time. I’m not talking my age of “kid”, rather around the tween age (9-12). The group for my first ever workshop was an amazing group of tweens who regularly attend a group my library calls “Between Makers” (very clever naming). There were about 8 who really got into the activity, and it was amazing guiding them through the creation process. As intently as they could, they listened to my little presentation, in which I basically told them not to burn themselves with hot glue (the trick is to make it dry really fast by rubbing it if it gets on your skin). I’m glad I didn’t make the slideshow much longer, because they were ready to get making.

I provided a theme. Did they follow it? Mostly.
The theme was superheroes, and the task was to squish your favorite superhero to fit on a single cube, using smart detail simplification to condense the well known character into an adorable size.
Here was my example:

Did anybody end up doing it like that? Maybe one or two. Were there awesome results? Definitely.

Some of the library managers participated too! As far as I know, everyone was really happy with their results, and I think having the cubes pre-made helped them take the step to the final product immensely. The results all looked substantial, because their base was substantial, but the decorations were up to them and they knocked it out of the park.

My method of instruction was more or less that of my high school art teacher. A method where you circle the room, talking to each individual about their thoughts for the project, and helping them where needed. Some students are quite independent, some need a bit more of a nudge, and all of them get regular check-ins, though durations may vary. From my managers’ compliments I’ve gathered it works well in the setting I was in just as well as the high school setting.

What did I learn? I learned that tweens are a very creative bunch, and if they’re invested in something, they’ll see it through for two hours straight. The thing must be incredibly engaging though, so much so that they lose track of time. That’s the hard part. Different things engage different people, so having multiple options and things to switch back and forth from helps garner focus. With every detail I learn from these workshops, I can work to make the next even better.

The Legend that is Harry Smiles

I actually didn’t know who Harry Styles was until I was 14. If you still don’t know, Harry Styles is an English singer, songwriter, and actor (according to Google). He was a part of the famous boy band One Direction until they broke apart, and he still holds the hearts of so many teenage girls to this day. I had never joined the One Direction listeners, nor followed them into their individual music careers until a friend of mine forcefully recommended I do. 

I guess I kind of enjoy upbeat music, so I didn’t stop listening after three songs. But this is an art blog, not a music blog:

When I still didn’t really know who Harry Styles was, and that friend of mine did, I did the obvious thing. I drew a turtle with a microphone and a wavy swoosh of hair and named it “Harry Smiles”.
First I drew it on paper, but then I saw my friend’s white water bottle. With permission, I drew the turtle on the water bottle in pencil, then eventually in sharpie markers. It was fabulous, and is commonly referenced today, though the friend has been using various water bottles since.

Fast forward several, several months, and I am now regularly making cardboard figurines. Hence a Harry Smiles one..

Magnificent.

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Something about inside jokes and having the ability to keep them going far longer than they should, and make them so much bigger than they have a right to be, continues to be a joy of mine. There are so many interactions I have on a regular basis that are fantastic because of these small, trivial things both of us remember from a very insignificant moment that one of us found amusing.
Some of the best jokes are repeated time and again. The real art is the deliverance, and not overdoing it.

I think I’ve got it almost to a science.

The Heads or Tails Machine

A.K.A. another post about “What is really pointless?” Just kidding. This machine doesn’t even make an argument of usefulness.

The idea was sparked when I heard about a “probability” themed project in sixth grade Pre-Algebra. The idea being an overengineered coin flipping machine… of course.

Did we ever have the project assigned? Nope. Did I make the machine? Yup.

It was pretty cool to me at least, designing the little flipper, the slopes in the box to centralize the coin into a little viewing tray, the finger placement spot, the tally board on the side, the clip to hold the chalk. As a sixth grader it was pretty impressive. 

It’s gone now. Has been for years. But it shall live on as a fabulously unnecessary attempt at a good grade in prealgebra.

The significance of June 25th

Some preliminary research reveals that June 25th is National Catfish Day (I’m assuming the actual fish) as well as Strawberry Parfait Day, Color TV Day, Log Cabin Day, and Global Beatles Day. It was also the day North Korea invaded South Korea and began the Korean war, and was the day of the Battle of Little Big Horn (a day that left us questioning if it was just a medium-sized horn).
But it’s also the day my Instagram account will be deleted. On purpose.
I understand that Instagram can be a huge asset for artists in sharing their work, finding inspiration, and networking. However, returning to my personal definition of success as an artist: “Art is what I make of it” (paraphrased), I find that the comparative nature of social media is simply unecessary.
Sure, I could scroll for hours and come away with tons of cool ideas, inspiration, and newly followed accounts. But it’s just as likely that I don’t. It’s just as likely I will see a 30 second clip of a project that took an artist months. And I won’t see all the practice and perfection of the craft that prefaced such a masterpiece. It’s just as likely I come away dissapointed in my seemingly sheer lack of skill as a whopping sixteen-year-old looking at these artworks done by professional adults.
I’ve decided to stray from social media also because of its significantly negative effects, with ease of loss of time being the most unnerving one for me. Each individual has a relatively predestined duration of life on this earth, with too many being cut short, but few going past age ninety. However insted of using gaps in attention to better oneself by thinking, far too many Americans today fill it with the scroll of social media. So much research shows that these gaps in attention are crucial to personal development and thought processing. If you’re bored, it’s a good thing, as it is letting your brain rest. This gap so often filled with instant media should be used for individual thinking and processing, not more intake.
I could preach the benefits of removing social media all day, but only when I follow my own advice can I be sound in my beliefs.

June 25th it ends. But this website (a way to grow and develop personally, with my focused comparison being on my past self instead of those around me) will continue.