Update

I've been working mostly on designs and concepts this week. I have one pattern for a modular design down, and I've been doing a fair bit of research on symbols. This particular design is comprised of a stylized grain pattern, crosses and stars, with meanders. It's just black and white for now as a design. I might do it on a brown egg, however, for more of an earthy feel- if I use it for the egg and the painting, that is. Maybe substitute dark green for the black. I'm not quite sure.

I've also been trying to think of how exactly I'm going to go about my concept. Whether it will be an egg and a painting with different designs to represent the same idea (ex. harvest vs mass-production-processed-food?), eggs and modular designs abstracted from the egg design, traditional eggs and modern designs or modern eggs and traditional designs in paintings. I'm thinking I'll probably just experiment with it, but I'm liking the first two ideas rather a lot.

I've been doing a fair bit of work for my internship in art, which is nice. I made a coloring page of a mural with permission from the copyright holder, and which took me about a week-and-a-half. [You should probably know that I loathe taking such a long time on projects. It's one of the things that's been driving me consistently crazy this summer, planning for next year.] I also learned the joys of trying to get exactly what you want from a printing service. Augh. They had to reprint twice; the first time, the image was about 8x4 (or possibly smaller- I didn't actually get to see the first printing as someone else picked it up) on 11x17 inch paper and the second time, it didn't have the title of the mural, the artist's name, or the museum's name. @_@ But I'm also working on other artsy things for the museum. Namely thaumatropes and other optical-illusion toys. Those I probably will be able to post pictures of, since they'd be my own designs rather than a derived work.

One short actual post

There are apparently a /lot/ of mustard fields in Mecklenberg-Vorpommern (sp). I don't know if any of you have ever seen one, but they are amazing things. We drove from Hamburg to Rostock, and from there to Rerik, on the Baltic coast, in search of family roots, and saw tons of them! Great swaths of vivid yellow stretching to the horizon over rolling hills. (And I do mean /vivid/. I took pictures on cloudy days and it's only slightly less saturated than lemon-yellow-ish.) Often, the fields would be near groupings of trees or unused fields, spacing them with green. They also tended to have designs running through them where farm equipment drove through them.

There is actually a point here: often, pysanky artists would employ intricate paths to trap evil and keep it away from the person the egg was gifted to (I'll find that source soon; Mom's comp doesn't have my bookmarks, alas). SO, my thought is to use the path idea to create a more abstract (possibly non-objective?) design. The color palette would be: mustard yellow, with linear designs in dark green, and a greyish purple (observed in a tilled field).

Trial and Error

I hate my cat sometimes. It took me about an hour trying to hollow out the duck and quail eggs. The duck eggs went fine; the quail not so much. Out of 6 attempts, I got only 2 un-cracked, hollowed eggs. So, naturally, my cat decided to tip the carton off the table to play with. C'est la guerre.

I ordered 4 pre-emptied emu eggs and some shell pieces on eBay last night. I'll probably start working on a design now, and practice on the shell pieces before trying my luck on the actual eggs. Here's hoping Dad has a dremel tool, as I forgot mine back at CNU. I should probably look into getting one of those pen-like attachments, so it's a little less bulky.

I've also been poking around the internet, and finding more books and artists to check out. My current plan of attack artist-wise is to see if there are other pysanky artists out there and what they're up to. Whether it's turning an egg into a Dalek or other contemporary design (which I've seen and loved- just need to find the link again) or using traditional designs on non-traditional eggs (like emu and ostrich eggs- waiting on a response from that artist re. use of images). I'm also going to look through other modern/contemporary artists and see if anything strikes me. A little broad, I know, but at the moment, it's what I've got.

Adventures

Well, since I'll be gone for two weeks, I decided to try starting early. Unfortunately, things never seem to go quite how I plan. I was elated that I actually knew where the Reston Whole Foods was; in the same plaza as our Michaels! I then proceeded to get lost in my own home town trying to find said plaza that I've been to hundreds of times before.

I'd seen online that Whole Foods carried ostrich and emu, and other types of eggs, so I went to price things out. MY. GOODNESS! They wanted $30 plus tax for one ostrich egg! I think I can get two for that price on eBay! At any rate, they did have a good price on large duck eggs (4/$3), and they had a small case of about 12-15 quail eggs for $6. So, I'll blow those out tomorrow and see where I go from there. The quail eggs are naturally spotted with dark brown patches, so, depending on the designs, I might have to cast them instead. We'll see. Maybe I can integrate the splotches in the design. As for the ostrich and emu eggs, I'm watching several on eBay to get a sense of the prices.

[On a totally unrelated note: thank goodness for strawberry season!]