For a year or two I have been looking at animations on Vimeo, telling myself I'd love to try animating a story one day, instead of a website's flying menus or buttons. But without a story I had a dawn good excuse to procrastinate on my project. Then last summer I heard You're So Beautiful written by my friend and ukulele teacher Dean Vivirito. Many images came to my mind as I listened to the song for the first time and I thought hey, there's my story! Dean liked my sketches and so we decided to start on this animation journey. About four months into it, here's the first of the song's four scenes, which takes place in Paris.

The artwork is done using a mix of manual and digital approaches. From the sketches I trace shapes which Dean and I cut from various textured papers. I scan the shapes into the computer and then clean then up and treat them digitally with Photoshop. I originally thought of using Flash to animate since that's what I'm familiar with, but Flash is best at animating digital artwork. With scanned images After Effects was a much better choice. This means I have to learn it as I go, but it's something I wanted to do anyway, so I just jumped in. Thank goodness for tutorials!

I had a very full and fun day today making a diorama at the Machine Project space in Echo Park (coincidentally next to the Fretted Frog where I take ukulele lessons). There's nothing like having people around working on their stuff and a clock ticking to stir ideas you never knew you might have. I came in with only a vague idea of doing something inspired by Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle and walked out with a complete diorama, I'm amazed. Normally I would have probably dragged it over a few days. Artist Amy Jo Diaz and architect Casey Hughes were super helpful both with inspiring suggestions and hands on assistance. Thanks!

The year end inspired me to clean out my drawers and there I found it: my old agenda from 2006... wow, is that what we did before the age if the iPhone? So many things are now becoming obsolete with everything going digital. Except one thing. For a reason I ignore, we are still in 2011, almost 2012!, writing good old fashioned checks. What better use then for the agenda's beautiful red cover than covering those checks? Tear the pages away, stick a colorful paper on the inside cover, and voilà, a brand new checkbook. It's going to make writing checks almost too much fun!

 

Even though the flea ukulele has a fairly good reputation, I realized recently how much better a wood instrument sounds. So I did some research and visited a few store in town. There are times when I agonize making a decision, and I thought it would take me longer and taking advice from a bunch of people, but here it is! When I least expected it.

I was going to get a Ohana, probably the SK-35, but turns out Mc Cabe's had a nice sale on their Martin's this month. So I walked out with their S1 model. When I arrived home I looked it up online. Apparently the "sale" was just bringing it down to what you would pay for it online.. but that's cool with me, because I supported a local business, and no shipping fees :). And my gut guided me well: this review says nice things about it.

First post of the year! I’m not taking resolutions this time, except I need to either post more often or rethink my post strategy. It will probably be the later, soon as I get around to thinking about it! In the meantime, here’s my second collage on treehouses. It’s another tea house by Terunobu Fujimori, an unconventional Japanese architect whose work is playful and clever.

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Not far from where I used to live in Venice is an eclectic antique store and gallery named Obsolete. What a great name for an antique store. But don't go looking for old pictures of sailboats or a fifties dish set, your grandmother would probably not recognized anything on display here. Seemingly from an undetermined era, the carefully curated collection of unique objects, art, and furnishings on display are so cool and offbeat I would say they lean more towards trendsetting than obsolete! The store also doubles as a gallery and regularly features equally unusual artists. Each new artist is always a pleasant discovery but the one showing this month really hit home for me, since I love miniature installations. The artist reception for Tom Haney's mechanical sculptures, Undaunted, was Saturday November 13. I went the next morning and had the chance to take several pictures while the store was quiet and the sculptures were resting after an undoubtedly busy opening night.

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A simple three ingredients recipe that's a very good use of the sweet peaches I bought at the farmers market this morning. They shouldn't be too sweet though, you want them a bit firm so they keep their shape. Cut the peaches in half, remove the pits and scoop out the red part to make bigger cavities. Mix enough honey into about half a cup ground almonds to form a paste, and fill the peaches. Bake at 350F for about 20-25 minutes, and voilà.. how can something so simple be so good?

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As far as small structures go, tree houses are my favorites. Walking in my neighborhood the other day I saw one up in a tree, and I suddenly remembered how much I liked them when I was a kid. My brother, sister and I would gather whatever pieces of wood we could find, nailed them against each other on four sides, put a cover on top, added a few pillows inside, and it became our sanctuary. Never mind that spiders would find it just as comfortable as we did.

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Here's another ahem, not-so-weekly mini: a project I made last summer which I'm only now getting around to sharing, but speaking of crazy little characters made with wire, it felt to me like the perfect time to slip it in. These guys are not drinking coffee like the running man in my last post, but mixing their own drinks from self-serving pods, which I imagined would be the way to go if you were in a bar functioning like the internet.

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What can you make with an old can and a couple wire hangers? Aaron Kramer will tell you, a kinetic sculpture! I like things that move, but typically my thoughts go to animation rather than moving mechanical parts. You would think the opposite, since in some distant past I managed to complete a degree in mechanical engineering. But somehow I was better at the math part of it, which is probably why I now write code instead of designing machines. So anyway, back to the sculpture. Aaron gave a workshop last Sunday on how to make a moving one that anyone can learn to put together.

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