This weekend was crazy productive. CRUSHING IT! All tees now have custom labels (hand stamped by yours truly) and we screen printed a whole new line of packaging that we’ll be mailing out starting this week. Glossy black ink on a sturdy kraft mailer. Pretty classy if you ask me but it’d probably best not to take my word for it. Head over to the shop and grab this month’s tee on product design and you’ll get to see one of these beauties in person.

After our workshop with Rob & Lisa we wanted to create a simple framework to explore the concepts addressed. At the start of our Thursday session we watched the above video recapping Today, a project by one of my favorite designer/artists - Jonathan Harris. Afterwards we discussed his project and the constraints we’d like to impose on ourselves for ours. The result was OurThreeThirty.

The concept is simple: take a photo everyday at 3:30pm regardless of where you are or what you’re doing. The object is to find beauty whether your surroundings are monotonous or magical. Then submit what you’ve captured into an open pool of other 3:30′s. The resulting collection with celebrate the differences (and similarities) in the way we experience time, space, light and life.

We want you to join us in this project. To view our 3:30′s and submit your own head to ourthreethirty.tumblr.com.

So pumped about this. Geoffrey Holstad (guest artist & friend) has a new project that kicked off this morning at 5AM. Cabin Time.

Cabin-Time is a series of intense art-making excursions to remote locations in Michigan and beyond.  The project is loosely designed to be a focused creative experience, making site-specific and site-influenced artwork (personal and collaborative) in the company of your inspiring peers.  The trip itself and its documentation are as integral to the project as the work being made.

Four Days. Zero Showers. Eight Artists (four of whom we’ve been lucky enough to make tees with). Excited to see the body of work that comes out of the project. Some of our favorite people in attendance – Christina Mrozik, Geoffrey Holstad, Ryan Greaves, Adam Wolpa, Pat Perry, Sam Snedeker, Drew Melton, and Colin McCarthy. So great.

BBC brilliance.

You will rarely meet a more talented duo than husband and wife team Rob and Lisa Walcott. This December we were lucky to have them join us for our after school workshops. Although their professional and personal work spans a wide variety of mediums (photography, drawing, painting, installation) a strong reverence for the temporal unites it all.

On the first Thursday in December they joined us for a photo-walk and studio tour. Rob opened with a video excerpt from a BBC program (shown below) exploring the four words the Himba (a tribe in Africa) use to describe color. The whole program is fascinating and the accompanying website is worth a read too. Back to the Himba – because of the words their tribe uses to classify color they are often unable to observe differences in certain colors you and I (assuming we grew up with ROYGBIV) can easily recognize. In playing a more elaborate version of “which one of these things doesn’t belong” the anthropologist shows the theory in action.

From here a simple yet profound metaphor emerges: if language shapes what we see, then a camera gives us access to a new kind of language; one that we are constantly submersed in by but rarely notice (or have the words to explain). From mouthes to eyes and back to mouthes again.

After the video we took to the streets like a horde of photojournalists. During our walk Rob, an experienced guide, pointed out often overlooked characteristics of light. Shadows were tinted a cool blue while areas bathed in sun were warm. Rim and fill light brought the two in close contact. Surrounding colors tinted skin tones one way or another. The whole tour made the everyday act of seeing quite magical…which, when you actually think about the act of seeing (a lens focuses lightwaves onto rods & cones that convert said waves into electrical signals that your brain interprets as color) makes it even more so.

Eventually we worked our way to their studio where he used a student model as an example to show how the size of a light source effected the shadow. Larger lights cast a softer shadow while smaller sources cast hard lined shadows.

Praxis. This word contains all that I love about our workshops; it’s the perfect blend of theoretical knowledge and hands on experience. I can’t thank Rob and Lisa enough for giving us a glimpse into their profession and the language they use everyday. Rob is a excellent teacher and it came through in the workshop. Afterwards several students expressed gratitude for how simply he explained the basic concepts of photography. It was quite brilliant to watch and I found myself equally (if not more so) enthralled. Thank you so much, Rob, for exposing us to a language of light that makes our life richer.

Be sure to check out the photography of Rob & Lisa at Walcott Imaging.

Microsoft. Burton. Lupe Fiasco. Reebok. Chicago Marathon. Target. Under Armour. Kaskade. Vans. Mountain Dew. The list goes on.

But it didn’t start there.

Taking full advantage of an extensive high school art program he was ready when community connections opened doors to start designing flyers for clubs he wasn’t old enough to get in to. He continued to gather steam and started NoPattern when he was just 17. Eventually the time came to graduate high school he chose (with his parent’s blessing) to forgo college to pursue the profession full time.

This past month we were lucky to have Chuck join us for a frank conversation on hard work, color, and experimentation. For this particular workshop the things said in Room 220 are best kept private but we’ll boil down a few of the main things we learned during our time together:

• Network — get your name out there! — send lots and lots of e-mails to magazines, publications, blogs, companies whose work you like, and whose work yours would work well with.
• Get Involved — the world is a web and the the more connected you are the easier you are to find.
• Be bold.
• Persistence pays off.
• Be kind of annoying, but not that annoying

This Month’s Artist Tee

1. Talk us through the creation of a piece from concept to finishing touches. 

You know, each piece is pretty different. Sometimes I get an idea and I can visualize it finished, floating in my head without putting a mark down. This could happen while reading, or sitting in my car, or falling asleep. Other times I am working on a sketch and I let it organically flow and change until it becomes an idea I can get behind. Needless to say, I have notebooks everywhere.

When I begin to put the idea down on paper, I usually start with the face. I sketch it out first because I want to be sure that I can capture the right feel and emotion, and if I can’t get it down, I don’t want to start over after investing 50 hours. Once I have that down, I could go anywhere with it. I don’t work in order… sometimes I finish one part entirely before I even have laid a light pencil sketch down for another part. My rule is keep working. So if I don’t know how one part of the drawing is going to turn out, or what I want it to be, I work on the part that I do understand. This helps keep me from dawdling.  Any drawing takes me between 20-140 hours, and are typically done with ink pens, markers, watercolor, and sometimes acrylic. I layer them over on another until the drawing looks as if it was made with one tool. When I finish a piece, sometimes I’m adding marks and I just know when to stop, while other times I hang it up on my wall and live with it for a couple weeks to see if I notice any changes or finishing touches that need to be added. Then I scan it, and try to find it a home!

2a. During our workshop you said that “everything we make is essentially a self portrait.” Explain?

We can only be ourselves, and because of that we can only make work that describes ourselves (our thoughts and perspective) in any given situation. Whether we are trying to understand something, to cope with something, or to grow in something we are never actually able to separate from ourselves entirely from the task at hand. I was noticing that there are times when I find myself making images that I can’t immediately explain, but when I look back on the piece, I always see a theme that somehow correlates to the different types of emotional, physical and psychological relationship that was directly part of my life when I was working on the drawing2b. Where do you see yourself in your work?

This is a probing question, and maybe a little personal, but completely correlates to what my work is about; inter connectivity. I often feel that I am metaphorically the main character of my drawings. Lately I have been creating animals that are physically linked to each other and their connection is both their life force, and their demise. I think that this is probably expressing different battles that are waging within myself and helping me see the good and bad within each struggle. For example, the war between what my mind wants to accomplish, and what my body is physically capable of doing. The strive for perfect love through faith and yet the unseverable tie to human fault. The need to grow independent yet also remain in tune with my family, even when that’s hard. We people are complicated, and beautiful, and irrational and changing. It does not matter our ethnicity, age, location, or gender, we are all constantly weighing questions trying to magically control or figure out our future. I think right now I’m making work about the struggle of being in between, and realizing that while my I am within every piece, so is everyone else.

3. What’s one thing you wish you would have known as a high school student?

Having questions is okay. Questioning leads to seeking, and seeking is one of the most important things we do in life. There will always be unknown paths and I know that we often wish we had things figured out, but it’s okay to question and grapple with the hard things in life. If you aren’t quite sure where your going, that’s okay. Just make sure that you’re working toward figuring out one thing at a time, even if it’s simply what to eat for breakfast. And when people ask, just tell them what you know, and don’t worry about the rest.

4. What’s inspiring you / piquing your curiosity right now?

Right now I’m trying to form some hobbies. Art was my hobby, but now it’s my profession! So I recently got a banjo, and am going to become a bluegrass star.  Just kidding, but I do love singing and have been trying to incorporate more music into my life. It’s a simple idea, but I believe the more venture’s I try, the more common ground I find between different modes of thought. It also helps me learn a lot more about myself!

5. What’s you’re favorite place in West Michigan?

There’s this park near Cannonsburg that I really love to go to, especially in the fall. There’s a creek that runs through it with little rock bridges and it has nice patches of hike-able woods and picnic-able grasses. I find it’s always a place I can center myself, and for some reason, cinnamon doughnuts taste way better there.

We sketched out the person sitting across the table from us using blind contour. It was a test of relinquishing control, practicing patience, and maybe a bit on looking someone in the eyes for an extended period of time.

After warming up with the faces, we moved onto blind contours of figures, using our very own Ambrose-goers as models.

We decided that blind contour works best from the inside out — concentrate on where the hips, shoulders, and ribs would be, and add everything else on top of that. Using a skeleton and our helpful volunteer models, we were able to work that out.

By the end of the session, we got comfortable with blind contour as a means to experiment with drawing — our theme for October. Although, I can’t say the models didn’t go home a little sore…