Mini-Projects
Christmas Village Streets and Streetlights
Dec 21st
I have several Christmas village buildings and props that I put up each year on my fireplace mantel around Christmas. This year I decided to make streets and a backdrop for it. The streets and backdrop are ink-jet printed on thick photo paper. The backdrop was also glued to foam-core board.
Over the years I’ve accumulated quite a large collection of textures for use in 3D modelling on the computer. So I had some nice cobblestone, flagstone, grass, and snow textures on hand, as well as photographs of street details like victorian-era manhole covers and street drains.
I used the flagstones plus drop-shadows to depict the curbs. I masked the snow layer with a grunge texture to allow some of the grass to show through and used a textured eraser to remove snow from key areas of the street. The picture to the right shows one of the streets I made.
I Ate’nt Dead
Nov 26th
A couple days ago 
I made a couple fairly quick items for my sister’s upcoming 40th birthday.
The first is a wooden sign she can wear around her neck when taking naps. Such things are important as you get older. 
(Fans of Terry Pratchett will understand the reference.) I printed out the text on some decorative paper and then découpaged it onto a piece of wood that I had sanded and stained.
The second is the card I made to go with the gift. I wanted to photograph Nutmeg with a cane and use that as on the card. (If you’re curious, Nutmeg is a stuffed bear I got when both my sister and I were children. He’s a rather crazy bear.) I happened to go to the grocery store the day I was making the card and found a plastic cane full of psuedo-M&Ms for $0.89. The candies were made of a rather disgusting chocolate (how did they manage to ruin chocolate?!?), but at least I now had a cane. The body of the cane was clear plastic which probably wouldn’t look good in a photograph. So I printed out a wood texture that I had tinted purple, rolled that up, and put it inside the cane. The rest of the artwork on the card was inspired by the Paddington Bear T.V. series whose props and backgrounds were white with inked details.
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