Last pillows for now, i promise!

Fine! I'm obsessed!

But while i was at home, i got so many pillow figurine ideas, and i knew i wouldn't be able to execute them throughout the school year. Fimo takes commitment, plus it slowly but surely dries...

So the last piece i manage to scramble up and finish last-minute are these newly-weds, a joyous after-party gift to my most recently married friends, Dana & Arbel !

Though i know D&A won't need a gold chain to keep them together, it was a nice suggestion from my mom, and i added the hearts.
Unfortunately, haven't nailed the delicate Fimo sculpting/baking conditions yet, so when they come out of the oven the pieces sometimes have little cuts and dots in them, so my apologies - since the groom's tux looks dirty and the bride looks like she's been terribly slashed! (with the power of true love, they see past each other's flaws..?)

I'm kind of proud of this little metallic corset "ribbon" i made for the bridal dress:

The Devil is in the details :)

and for dessert, an example of what I do when flipping through interior design magazines:

Working Pillows

Contrary to common belief, pillows can be career-oriented:

Dr. Ploo here was made and dedicated to Mishka, who just completed his first year of Med school!

An inspiration to future Dr. Mish, here is Dr. Ploo with his very own cabinet of med books and glow-in-the-dark medicine/poison bottles.
We agreed that each year Mishka completes, Dr. Ploo will get more accessories until he has his very own clinic and office !


More amazing, intelligent and altruistic friends! This tiny Doc is dedicated to Anna, who is now in the middle of her successful medical studies and will soon be taking off to Cambridge for a year to complete a Poli-Sci MA!!


These are her accessories: teacup for England, Globe for Poli-Sci studies, and syringe for Med school :)

Good luck, Docs!

More career options include Architecture! This one is for my dad :)

Pencil and ruler always at the ready, (glow-in-the-dark) building plans rolled and wrapped, plus hard-hat for on-site tours - pillow-safety first!

Ok, this one isn't really about a job, it's just a Brazilian pillow (or "pillão" in the native tongue!)
- for Mom!

Sharpener for scale, with jolly maracas

and last one, Sir Pillowingtonshireham the First - who you already know - only I noticed lately that he had actually been standing next to a British phone booth (aka tin box for tea) all this time, and it just seemed appropriate:

Toodle pip!

Here Come the Brides

Yay - more "Simchas" on my humble blog!

I've spent most of July working on wedding invitations for two of my friends, brides-to-be, who have always been awesome, and also lucky in finding their "other halves". So now we have four wonderful people, making for two amazing couples :)

This "commission adventure" was trying and exhausting, but also inspiring, fulfilling and a true learning experience. Plus, it's always fun to see satisfied clients, especially knowing them personally (and getting invited, too!).

So we start with Ela and Meir, who are getting married tomorrow (!!) -

lots of ideas had been raised, explored, tried, changed and canceled (most of which revolve around their beloved dog, Pasho):

As you can see, we went for the purple idea at the end, not forgetting Pasho, but also the happy couple itself:

Front

... and back

The gifts for the guests in their wedding will be lovely jars of homemade jam, so I also designed the stickers for the jars, which gave Pasho another chance to get center-stage:

some suggestions^

Final sticker design

Moving on to the eternal Dana and Arbel, who, after lots of easily-rejected ideas, went for the opening card:

Front

Inside

Back (it's a pilot thing)

See the magic trick? It's the same good old Dana and Arbel, only on this particular day they're more fantastically dressed :)

The animator in me wanted to do an entire (small) flipbook as an invitation, showing their abridged history together (they know each other from infancy!), but budget and logistics forced it out of the question. Oh well, two years ago i was commissioned to make them a comic of their life story, which is proudly hanging in their living room :)

~ Good luck to all the happy couples in their joined lives and their celebrations, spreading the love and all that jazz!! ~

UPDATE:
here are some official photos of the happy couples -
they look gorgeous! but do they look anything like the invitations?

Ela & Meir:

Thanks for orchestrating this one, Ela!

Dana & Arbel:

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

My grandmother had a birthday this month, and I love her!

She's such an interesting person to talk to, and has amazing stories. She also has amazing family photos that were lucky enough to be preserved.

Last summer I had digital copies made of them all so a) they are backed up and wont disintegrate, and b) i could carry them with me wherever i go :)

These photos are very inspiring (so more familial posts from the 20's are sure to come soon!) -and scrolling through the other day, i stopped dead when noticing a part of one of them:

This is my grandma as a baby in the early 20s in Romania, held by her beautiful mother:

I love how relaxed the brand-new mom is, and though probably sleep-deprived, she's glowing :)

here is my version of this bit (not an exact copy, just a stylized rendition):

I love you grandma! and here's to many birthdays to come!

Hallelujah!

I'm finally done with 3 out of 4 elective courses for the animation degree!

Since they're not supposed to be related to art and/or film, it's a chance to study something that might be interesting yet you never got the chance to get into.

One of those courses was Bible studies, specifically the book of Genesis. It also happened to be the heaviest elective i encountered:

A strange choice, most of my friends thought, for such a non-spiritual person. Actually i think taking this course may challenge the believer much more than the non-believer. We study the text from a literary research point of view, not a religious one. But hard as we try to treat this as any (ancient) literary text that's been put together by multiple sources over long periods of time - everybody arrives in this class with preconceptions about the "good book".
This might be true just about anywhere in the Judo-Christian world, but here in Israel we study the Old Testament for at least 11 years, as a mandatory subject we get tested on at the end of high school just like math and English. Not to mention all the religious-cultural-political (so incredibly sad) meanings you carry around regarding it, just by living here, just by osmosis (even the non-patriotic secular - even an atheist - can't turn away from those effects completely).

In any case, this class has a way of shattering a lot of ideas students have acquired through the years, by trying to analyze scripture as just what it is - a text, however heavy-laden with cultural, historical and, alas, spiritual meaning to many people. At least, I think, that's the objective of many researchers in the field. But reading many (many!) articles, we've also seen that even they tend to place too much meaning where there might be very little of it, or not any at all. The biblical editors were no doubt artful, but again this text seems to be difficult if not impossible to analyze without being biased one way or the other.

Perhaps this is the case in all academic research, but here you often get the feeling of people desperately trying to force meaning on the text - whether it's because the person analyzing it has a point of view to promote, or because the religious/cultural weight of it feels too great, or simply because it's a difficult, ancient text that inevitably leaves many questions open wide.

A lot of what we've seen researchers try in their articles is finding discrepancies in the ancient text and giving them explanations of all kinds.

But sometimes, in the name of common sense, you can't help but feel these discussions are kind of ridiculous. Take Genesis 17 for example, where Abraham gets yet more promises from his God.

I mean, here are well-educated grown men and women, PhDs at hand, arguing about how logically problematic in the chapter it is having the nighttime (stars act as a visual aid when Abe is shown how plentiful his seed will be) before the sunset (when Abe falls asleep and has a vision)... Really?? This is an OMNIPOTENT god! This is a god that can stop the sun in the middle of sky (Joshua 10)! Hell, he created the sun and moon just a few chapters ago!

I know they're trying to trace the editor's frame of mind, but they're not "problems" or even "gaps" at all as far as he and his audience are concerned! I mean, really - you take a magical dude making an entire woman out of a rib and a talking snake for granted, and you're worried about things not making sense?!

Thinking about all these things while studying obviously led me to doodle. Among the singing flying camels, sad piggies and snakes with speech bubbles, i also considered poor old Abraham. If he knew what would become of the stories of his family...

"Hmm, how did all of this happen?"

With or without all the problems, it is a beautifully written text nonetheless, and studying the storytelling techniques was a big factor for choosing the class. It's quite plainly, an awesome book of stories: human weaknesses and dilemmas propelling the plot guarantee drama and suspense. Even without the miraculous happenings you have the makings of incredibly memorable stories.

From that angle, it's not so much the god in the book that captures us, but the human characters (god manages to do that, i think, mostly when acting very human-like - ha ha).

I have always been fascinated with those, and one my portfolio pieces for the animation program, was my versions of selected female characters of the old testament (be merciful! it's from over 2.5 years ago!):

It's pretty amazing how much art these stories have inspired. One of my latest contemporary favorite adaptations is the "Awakened" photograph series by David LaChapelle: http://gayspirituality.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/awakened-by-david-lachapelle.html

and the not-so-contemporary tower of Babylon scene from Fritz Lang's 1927 "Metropolis": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlfvBgBDpm0 (which also brings me to this amazing Que Sera remix clip by Wax Tailor).

They manage to give the well-known characters and narratives new and profound meanings through their interpretations.

A really funny adaptation of biblical stories and characters can be found in the movie "Year 1" (clips of which kept me strong while studying :)).

On the face of it, it's a silly film exploding with anachronisms, but right under the surface you can find witty anti-religious messages (or even right on the surface - Spoiler Alert!! - the corrupt high priest ends up in the same furnace he had intended for sacrificing virgins..).

For example in this here clip, the sacrificing of Isaac is funny and all, but this and the subsequent scenes actually remind me a lot of things Richard Dawkins (*heart*!) has to say about religious practices (like them and the concepts behind them being perceived as legitimate and revered simply because they are "religious", but actually from any other consideration they present no real reason to be respected, and are simply F-ed in the head - though surely Richard says it better than me :)).

And not to finish on such a serious note, here is a clip from my favorite comedian at the moment, Tim Minchin:

(Keep your eyes peeled for "Storm", Minchin's animated beat poem coming out this year!)

This has been long, so thank you for reading - and i promise less eclectic posts with real drawings in them very soon!

Crumb Update

Well, boys and girls, if you've been following previous episodes, you know by now that my ankle isn't what it used to be. It has a new, uncalled-for guest:

a tiny talus crumb! or as i like to call him, Crumbberry Finn. Now can be witnessed in a live portrait photo with full color:

Actually the doctor thinks it's quite bad. It's all fun and games till someone loses a foot!
there's even talk of necessary surgery. I know it sounds serious and all, but it also sounds pretty ridiculous. So though it's quite restricting not being able to really walk, I have a hard time taking it too seriously at the moment.

See, most offices in the clinic are shared by a couple of doctors, using it in turns throughout the week. So instead of focusing on my crumby (ha!) predicament, I just think how funny it is that the room next to the orthopedist is shared by both a hand experts, and a breast surgery expert.

I can always trust Barney Stinson to illustrate silly dirty ideas:

(i'm just making a point, HIMYM episodes property of CBS, of course, i don't own this material, etc.)

Prom Night - or - I *heart* my colored pencils

Put on your best face - it's prom season!
Well, there isn't one style to unify all these girls, i just had a lot of fun coloring them with fancy Prismacolor pencils :D

the Jolly 20's

Based on this photo of Binnie Hale and Seymour Beard from 1925, featured in Alan Jenkins' wonderful book "The Twenties" (p.14, published by Book Club Associates in 1974, London), I drew this:


Don't you just love the 20's? :)