Grandma Never Threw Away Tinfoil

As kids, my Grandma used to scrape our plates at the dinner table and pile the scraps on her plate and eat the leavings. All five of us would always say, "Eww! That's gross!" (little kid style).  But Grandma never thought anything of it. As we grew older her habit seemed to cease, but Grandma still would scrape our plates with her short red handled spatula to in order to save the scraps for the dogs dinner.

And she never wasted a thing. She washed tinfoil, plastic bags, and  margarine tubs. She saved tinsel for decades, birthday cards, (cards are always reusable), and she never bought clothing. To this day, I don't know if I have ever seen my grandma go clothes shopping for fun. And if she did, she went to the used clothing store to get the $1.50 bag deal.

 Everything could be used again if the right job was needed for it. And boy could she store things...

My grandma is a veteran of an age past. I am spoiled in comparison.

But in a way, I have found that I'm doing a similar thing in my classes. Ideas form in one and I use them in another. I'm trying to squeeze every drop of life  out of this silhouette thing. During the semester, I have hit a lot of frustrating walls, but today was a precious moment. I am seeing a window open...

Today, I had two objectives:
to start to feel comfortable in the 3rd floor studio, and to make art for Whitney.


I used different hot light gels and a flash to get some color. I covered the flash in the gel paper and covered the flash with my hands. the more the flash, the lighter the silhouette.. and the lighter the color. This was very interesting to me. See another idea! I am hoping one day to start incorporating people to interact with shadows, but for now I am keeping it simple.