Month: July 2018

Corin’s lady : Sara’s lady

Here is a comparison that I think is just so interesting. My daughter’s and grandaughter’s rendition of a girl(s) — both approximately the same age when these images were drawn. My daugher Sara (on the right) in about 1986, the other by Corin (on the left) about 2016. The focus of each of these children is completely unique. Both are wonderfully dextrous and have great hand to eye coordination and are wildly creative. One thinks of her immediate world as dress-up, party style gowns with flowers hearts big hair-dos and puffy sleeves, pomp and circumstance and the individual insides those clothes is not really important to her. The other says, at this moment in my life, my hair, my feelings and my emotions are most important and I am expressing them freely.

childrens drawings tell all

Paper egg and polymer clay

In a previous post I showed a paper egg (from Michaels) which I had covered in polymer clay just as an experiment and found a disturbing result, that is, that the polymer clay shrank over the paper egg and split. So I reasoned that the egg (which was quite large, maybe 4-5 inches in height and 3.5 or 4 in diameter) was part of the problem and so when i found a smaller egg (about 4 inches in height and 3 inches in diameter that it might work.

So again I set out to do a test to see if i could cover a paper egg of this size with polymer clay. I made the coating over the paper egg about 1/8 thick, maybe a little thicker, and rolled it smooth and then textured it.  The polymer clay in this case was all “left over” and you can see the flower petals it in from previous Memory-beads.com projects (see the yellow clay and pink spirals), so it is not what one would consider anything more than an experiment.  But sadly, it also cracked (vertically) in one area of black and white clay, maybe a split an inch long and sixteenth of an inch wide (barely visible) and another smaller split along the bottom.  I used left over polymer clay from the same areas to “fill” the splits (doming it up over the to of the cracks and also pressing it into the cracks (not an easy task) and cured it again for just a half an hour.  The result seems stable and I was able to sand the polymer clay smooth against the rest of the egg so the split is almost invisible…. but I likely wont experiment more using these brown paper molds.  The split didnt occur because i forgot to put a pin hole for air expansion in…. i did remember, but something in cooling and shrinking just didnt work well together.

Save the Oceans: Octopus

Coincidentally I found a website that works to remove debris from the ocean and also found this really sad octopus that my granddaughter Corin (Corin’s cartoons as I call them) drew just before her fifth birthday and felt the two needed to go side by side.  She said the title was fine for her cartoon blog and then corrected my misspelling of “octapus” to “octopus, a silly phonetic typo. (@2016)

corins cartoons save the oceans octopus

So since I have a memory-bead business, I was interested in their recycled bead bracelets and contacted them hoping to find the instructions for making nice round plastic beads from plastic junk.  Their beads are however glass…not as earth-friendly as i would have liked since glass can easily be recycled and eventually breaks down into sand…but it sent me on a journey to find out who in the world has made recycled plastic beads and how to do it.  Long story short I got some leads, but I am still working on finding a method i like. But best thing is that Corin has learned that the oceans are critical to homo sapiens survival.  Check out the website for 4Oceans, reduce your plastic use, reuse, then recycle where at all possible.

Best friends forever — such happy smiles

This is a wonderfully uplifting cartoon, and hopefully the friendship here will be a long one. @2016 corin best friends forever

Bottom drawing I couldn’t resist posting, done on that old greenbar computer paper, spots and weather and all, it vectorized into a great rainbow.

corins cartoons best friends forever

As for happy faces…. not always……. i wonder what part of the brain is responsible for creating and seeing emotion in facial expressions and body language….obviously a critical place for civilization to have, and use, and with which to fluorish.  Some individuals just don’t have it — yea, somtimes whole civilizations just don’t have it.

What a great topic to study using kids drawings to delve into what kinds of civilizations (in the familiy, city, country, boundaries) they grow/grew up in

I remember my sara’s drawings……… lots of hair like corin’s drawings (hair is obviously an important identifier for little girls)… but saras girls were dressed to the hilt, extremely detailed with fringe, lace, loops, big skirts way to big for anyone to walk in, puffy sleeves, earrings, jewelry, kissy lips, etc …. but corin has adopted the icon of the “power puff” girls….. emulated their extremely simplified bodies, but has added to (and i might add improved) that set of icons an enormous amounts of emotion….in the eyes mouth and body.  Interesting.

Maybe i missed my calling… i could have done “kids art analysis” in stead of spending my life looking down a dumb microscope!  haha

Ouch! You bit me

I can relate to this bug bite, and the response,  bam! You will only bit me once.

Poor little girl here knows she got bitten. She distinguished her anthropomorphized villain with antennae  (brown tips) and a carapace (green).

There are about three kinds of insects and arachnids in my own yard (i hope not my house) that really cause a very itchy welts. Each welt is distinguishable by the inflammatory reaction to it but i have not googled types of welts to determine which bug is responsible…..just guessing 1) a tiny spider in my hosta plants, 2) a tiny chigger in the grass, and the 3) clear small spider that lives in my ewe bushes. It is easy to steer clear of the big wolf spiders and jumping spiders.

One type makes a very swollen 3 inch ring with a red center (but not a lyme disease type of tick bite), the other is a half inch red place with a pin point dark center the other is a medium red itchy welt. Then there are the mosquito bites.

@2016