Spring Sale at MassArt

Yesterday, I dropped off a month's worth of work at MassArt's annual Spring Sale, which starts today and goes until Saturday, the 10th. Twenty boxes and ten books later and I'm taking a well-deserved weekend off.

 

So if you're in the Boston area be sure to stop by!

Coming Soon...

Next month my books and butterflies will be available to buy at the MassArt spring sale, running from May 4th to 10th. Below is a sampling of what will be available for purchase.

Your very own small butterfly collection. Each butterfly is hand painted in watercolor and pinned into a handmade box lined with cork. Every boxes lid contains the name of the butterfly as well as a carved indent of its shape.

These blank sketchbooks are inspired by old furniture from auction catalogues. Each book is wrapped in hand drawn paste paper and decorated with a  cut paper piece of furniture. Pages of soft drawing paper are sewn into a durable spine of bookcloth.

Month of Love - Fetish

This weeks theme was Fetishes, so I chose to do Formicophilia, which is apparently an attraction to insects. I basically just used it as an excuse to make more bugs in a box, though these ones are a bit more risque than the butterflies.

Butterfly Collection

I finished painting these butterflies a long time ago, like October-long-time-ago. But I was waiting on all the other elements to come together. Finally, one day the Goodwill, I found a small shadow box for $3 (that's a price you cannot beat) from which I stripped out the kitschy elements of the interior and painted over the slightly scuffed exterior. I glued a strip of cork board in the back and took a handful of pins from the fashion department at work. Then my butterfly collection finally came together:

I would love to make several more of these smaller boxes, I have plenty of leftover painted butterflies that wouldn't fit in this box.

Butterflies in Progress

Halfway through painting them all, still so much more to go!

Butterfly in the Sky...or on my Bulletin Board

I feel like every time I put up a new post I am prefacing it with 'it's been a busy _______.' But really, it has been. There's still plenty of art getting produced, just never enough time at the end of the day to put it on the internet. This week I'm going to try and play a little catch up. And it will begin with my most recent project, a butterfly collection.

No that's not mine silly, that's from the Manitoba Museum.

I always have found butterfly collections beautiful but also a bit morbid cause those are dead butterflies. And I never knew, did they kill them just to pin them up? Because that doesn't seem quite right to me. So I decided to make a vegan cruelty-free butterfly collection. I have drawn many pages of butterflies and know am on to the painting process. Once they are all done I will cut them out and pin them into a shadow box or frame.

Here's a few sketches...

 

All the tape is there because I would draw one side of the butterfly and then trace it on tracing paper and just flip it over, cause symmetry's a pain.