Author: lauramchugh

I’ve taken the doodling art done over the past several months and added some images from a vintage biology textbook to create some fascinating juxtapositions. Here is one example. The rest can be seen by clicking on the Picasa Web Albums link to the right.

The story with these images is as follows:

I doodle absent-mindedly. Sometimes in bed, sometimes while watching television. I don’t think too much about the image I’m drawing. I use fat Lyra colored pencils. I usually do the basic shapes, guided as always by colors first, then geometrical shapes. After I do the initial layout image, I may go back and enhance the colors by layering over more colors, filling in and refining the image and background. Sometimes I will add decorative detail, like the spherical shapes in this image.

At any rate, what is magical is that I put all these doodles away after the last bit of refining, thinking they were finished. Then recently, I pulled out this old biology textbook I got at the thrift store about a year ago. Combing through there for images that matched the colors of my doodles, I found some fascinating additions. Each one has it’s own story to tell. What do you think?

(Remember, you can see a lot more detail by clicking on the image itself, and you can see the whole collection of 30 pieces at my Picasa Web Albums site.)

We are on the brink of a new administration. Out with the old.

I’ve been really waiting about 6 years for this day. I didn’t really think Bush was too much of an idiot until early 2002, right after 9/11, when it became abundantly clear that he really didn’t have a clue how to run this country.

This project, a series of six teabags and their wrappers, pays homage to the insanity we have been living with these past several years. Poor Obama – he has his work cut out for him.

This is Donald Rumsfeld. His image, as a faux postage stamp, is inside the spent tea bag.

On the teabag tag, the “daily meditation” reads: We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. Cheney’s will be the famous “Go f**k yourself” line he uttered to Sen. Patrick Leahy, during an angry exchange on the Senate floor about profiteering by Halliburton, June 25, 2004. There weren’t as many famous stupid quotes for Cheney as the others. He is a quiet guy, or possibly he spent most of the past eight years dozing off.

On the envelope back are a series of the individual’s most famous verbal gaffes, strung in a continuous line, with only the font altered for a little visual relief.

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started. We do know of certain knowledge that he [Osama Bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead. I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it’s what I said. Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months. I’m not into this detail stuff. I’m more concepty.

All the players…

The faux stamp fun continues! Now I used Powerpoint to take the one stamp and replicate it into a sheet of stamps, just like you get at the post office, except these are free, and won’t work to send any real mail.

There is something very satisfying about making your own stamps, and about seeing the pattern repeating on the sheet.

Yum! Tomorrow, I’ll use some of these in an art piece, instead of the stamps from Ireland or Singapore.

These are different color versions of a graphic I did on spec for a major corporation’s holiday card. They chose the red, with some swirlys added. I’ll post that cleaned up version on Friday here. I’m available for your commissioned work! 🙂