Mini Art Car Covered in Swarovski Crystals

A Swarovski-covered Crystal Mini Cooper is displayed at the 'Ripley's Believe It or Not' museum, in central London,on August 21, 2008. Famous for being weird, strange and bizarre, the new attraction opened on August 20, 2008. AFP PHOTO/Shaun Curry

Art Cars Invade the Sac Auto Show

H1 Humvee Art Car Cake for the Pen Guy:)

What else whould I want for my birthday than a home made art car cake. I started with one slab of yellow cake mix, small block of friendship cake and an assortment of candy. I had no idea what it would look like when I started building this thing but when I finished It ended up looking like a chopped down H1 Humvee, in retrospect I would gave added Ding-Dongs for the tires. It was good.

BALANCING INSPIRATION AND PERSPIRATION

Illustrator Chris Van Allsburg once said that he spent only a small percentage of his working time making creative choices. The vast majority of his time was spent on the manual labor of implementing those choices. He would spend days and days painstakingly drawing individual blades of grass and leaves.



Artist Bernie Wrightson seemed to work the same way. He spent a great deal of time mechanically implementing his initial artistic decisions:



(In my view, this often resulted in a mountain of effort for a molehill of a result.)

Illustrator Robert Vickrey had a similar laborious style. Once he designed a picture, he would spend weeks filling in backgrounds such as concrete surfaces and brick walls.



I was thinking about this trade off as I was marveling at the paintings of Dreamworks artist Nathan Fowkes. Fowkes works at the opposite end of the spectrum.



Note the simplicity and economy with which he created that notch in the nearest line of mountains, or the way he conveyed important gradations of color within a single brush stroke.



These are small paintings (most are less than 3x5") that were painted very quickly (usually in 20 to 40 minutes) yet each one contains the entire genetic code for a larger, finished painting.







These sketches demonstrate all of the hard artistic decisions (commitments to a composition and a design, selections of color and technique) by which a finished work of art might be judged. They are pure artistic choice in its most concentrated form, without all the numbing labor and secondary refinements found in the finished pieces above.

Don't make the mistake of thinking there is anything crude about these paintings just because they are sketches. The subtlety of color in this next little beauty is absolutely breathtaking:



While they are smaller in size and took a fraction of the time, Fowkes's sketches convey far more information, with far more insight, than the larger finished works of Van Allsburg, Wrightson and Vickrey above. Each stroke or color choice by Fowkes has real significance.

I particularly enjoy the rich variety that Fowkes finds in the view from his window. These tiny pictures are so dense with knowledge, they must have the atomic weight of weapons grade plutonium:




I find his curiosity about this view quite contagious.

Van Allsburg, Wrightson and Vickrey are all talented fellows and I admire their work, but there is a separate beauty to Fowkes's economy, and I commend his work to you.

Bottle Cap Art Car

Bottle Cap Art Car

Bottle Cap Art Car

Bottle Cap Art Car

Stephanie made her 1993 Honda Accord into an art car - covering it with bottle caps we collected over the winter. A couple years ago, we went to Louisville, Kentucky for their annual Art Car Weekend, and had a blast. We were lucky enough to get much of the car finished to attend the Art Car Show this year.

We're replacing the Honda, which is her currently daily driver, with a new little VW Rabbit, which just arrived. The Honda is in pretty good shape, but just turned 200,000 miles and essentially has no trade-in value.

So there was no reason not to hold on to it and have some fun. Stephanie toyed with several different design ideas, but finally arrived at an intersection of the art car she's always wanted, and her childhood love of bottle caps. Her dad even dug her original collection out of the garage attic and brought them to us.

We collected and sorted bottle caps all winter long, with the help of friends and the nice folks at the restaurant Ralph's Great Divide.

We finished the project up on November 1st, so that we could turn the car over to her niece. We finished up the whole car except for the roof, and Raven will be working on that.

The project was lots of fun and really entertaining, and we're already planning to do another one.

Via Bottle Cap Art Car Project on Flickr

(sorry, I was too darn lazy to write so I cut and pasted the entire article)

Obamination Road Trip Comes To An End - What will they do now?

It's been a long four year election and this "Obamination" road trip has come to screeching halt. The election process produced one of the largest collection of Obama Art Cars which hit the road in support of the 44th President of the United States. President Elect Barrack Hussein Obama owes part of his election victory to a few of the most dedicated "Obamaniacs". The question now is: What will they do now, that the election is over? What will they drive? What about all that that extra time? What cause will give them back the will to live a normal life? What will they do with all those bumper stickers? The Onion did an expose they called "Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are" which I call "Post Traumatic Obama Syndrome" or PTOS.


Via the Onion

We Have Winner!!! - "The Thing" is Back Online

I thought it fitting to post this beautifully ugly vw car called "the thing" as a reminder to us all of what George Santayana once said: "Those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it."