my office

This is the front end of my work shop. Often folks pull up and ask if the restaurant is open? "No" I tell them "and get out of my backyard". I just happen to have a SPORTSMAN GRILL sign hanging in my back yard, right outside my work shop. Inside my shop I have a mess. I'm currently making 4 pieces of art for a new restaurant. It is a sushi restaurant so the paintings need to fit. I was given a crude xerox of a photo of a door at at Japanese restaurants that looked like an umbrella. You know like a huge version of the paper umbrellas in your foo foo drinks at the beach resorts. I was asked if I could do some kind of umbrella type thing around 6' in diameter. Sure I could. Could I give them an example of what I would do? Sure I could.
So I gave them this. By the way "them" is the architect firm Peace Designs. They are doing the design for this sushi restaurant.
Anyway I did this small sample of my idea for the umbrellas with different paints and papers for collage.


It is hard to see, but I have collaged different papers for the umbrella. Some of it is Japanese newspaper, some is silver leaf, some is different color tissue paper. I dripped paint for the seams of the umbrella.
These guys also wanted to have me reproduce the back side of a Japanese playing card. This is the image they gave me.



This is what I did. It was small about 2' square. They (peace design) liked it and wanted it to be 6ft X 3.5ft. No problem I told them.


So this is what the "office" is looking like right now. It's a mess.



I bought about 10 Japanese newspapers. I used those to collage two of the umbrellas. For the third umbrella I used the yellow paper with the red print from the sample above. I spent about six hours on each just applying the paper. Some of it I tore into pieces about 2 inches. Some I cut into pieces about twice that size. I then glued each piece down to plywood.

This is what they are looking like right now. Stand by for the finished product.

DON'T MESS WITH LIL' LADY aka STACEY

You can tell by the timing of my last two post Mardi Gras is long gone for 2011. It was a great year. All the right people came to town, except one Chef who was really missed. All went well, we had some folks march with the Fish for their first time, we had some guy from Hawaii show up with his dog. Everyone fell in love with Kola and his handler. Hope they come back next year.

Next year? It's gonna be our 20th parade. It's gonna be special and I'm sure painless. We expelled all the pain this year.

Expelling pain, that's the last thing I remember.

Last thing I remember Stacey was chasing some guy out the back door of our cottage.
The guy just walked in the back door looked around, called out "HELLO" and helped himself to my bottle of Ketel One. Stacey caught him on the back stoop and he was lucky I was there to stop her from beating his ass. She was mad. And scared. Don't mess with mad and scared.

That's the last thing I remember.

No wait, the last thing I remember is falling in my moms backyard and landing on my nose. Nothing but my face and the pea gravel walkway. That sucked. And it hurt. You don't want to mess with sucked and hurt.

That's the last thing I remember.

No wait, the last thing I remember is riding on a KOR float on Mardi Gras day wondering where the hell Jeff was.

That's the last thing I remember.

BUILDING THE 2011 MYSTIC FISH

This year Stacey and I trimmed off parts of last years fish and built off of the remainder.
You can see the side fins are from last year by the left over paint job. A good part of the body was left in tact to build off of. This years idea was just to build a pretty, symmetrical fish.
The symmetrical part went well til I got to the ass end of the fish and then......
Oh well, this years fish had a big fat ass. But, she was pretty. And yes, those are nerf footballs cut in half for the eyes.