Relatively Rough

Our sleepy dinner guests at Chez El Nido.
Wow. Let's just say I've been unable to perform small acts for the last while. I got hit, one, two, from strong middlebesmurches. At the same time, my husband's younger brother, his beautiful wife, and their two sweet and funny boys, came out for vacation, just leaving tonight for their trip home to the UK. It ended up that they were completely self-sufficient guests and only a pleasure to be with. The outcome of their 10-day trip was a total success all around, without me having to do much of anything (guilty). I've spent several days knocked out on a couch, loopy from pain meds. The house is back in order now and all's ready to roll again. I just want to post a week's worth of Halfland bits that I've been saving up in my single-minded head.
One of the background characters in Halfland is a chicken painting at an easel in the yard. The human aspect of this animal is that it has a person's face. I think the allusion from my mind is that line vegetarians often say, "I wouldn't eat anything that had a face." Part of me too finds it difficult to eat animals philosophically, the butchering, the slaughtering, the killing of divine creatures so that I can eat meat. And at the same moment I want it. Meat. I love eating it, lots of it, with sauces. I think the chicken with a face is a quasi representation of my inner duplicity on the what's-for-dinner matter. A comment on a recent Rocketboom episode linked to a home video someone took feeding chickens some leftover rigatoni. There were several hilarious shots of the chickens looking directly into the camera for more pasta. These chicken face-on faces, rarely seen, will serve as inspiration for my sculpting the Halfland character's face.
Yanu, mothman hunter character, will be largely unseen in the first Halfland film series. Like a figment of the imagination, Yanu will be seen only out of the corners of the camera's eye. These types of branch silhouettes drive me wild for this disappearing effect. On the left is the recent artwork for the movie, Premonition, which shows the distinctive contours of star Sandra Bullock's face in the branches of trees. Paul found this for me and knew I would go crazy over it. The right hand image I've had for a while on the visual reference sheets it's a detail of an illustration for a folktale titled, The Invisible Prince. Can you see him?
Cassie Mae Chappell of Mommy Makes Roses, generously shared on Martha Stewart Living her marvelously life-like technique for creating paper roses out of... coffee filters! I couldn't resist trying it myself (especially since she charges about $75 USD to make each one! There's video there in case you'd like to try it too.) I found the method very easy and fun to do (see the raw white paper form on left and some finished blooms in the middle.) They resulted in surprisingly natural looking roses I thought. This answered my long lived wondering about how to get the right scale flowers for Rana's teacup rose bush for her garden--I'll make them! There's my first miniature one on the right, next to a new set of tiny porcelain cups and saucers I found last Thursday at the 99¢ store for this purpose.
Part of the couch based art bonus time was how I came to package the finished batch of paper roses as thank you cards for friends that stepped in to host the family this week. I put single large flowers into cardboard tubes and papier mached them shut with thin, green painter's masking paper. I LOVE the way they turned out. It reminds me of either a mini pinata in their mailbox to open--FUN! or a scene from a horror movie I saw as a kid of people being enclosed inside a honeycomb cell by giant bees. (Um, anyone else see that one?)