Graphic Punch

I love the impact that a really graphic and bold item can have, like the headboard below:

I want to add a graphic piece of artwork to my gallery wall, as right now it's mainly photos and paintings of dc buildings and scenery. I don't have a current photo of the gallery wall up on the wall itself, but this gives you an idea of what's up:

I was thinking of trying my hand at making some art myself, but while perusing Etsy the other day, I came across Jackson Fabric Arts, a shop with handmade batik and other fabric, and was really struck with this fabric:

It comes in other colors as well, but this would look fantastic in my living room. What do you think, would this look good framed and up with the rest of my gallery wall?

Is MasterCard your messiah?

I know it's a little early, but I ran across these Christmas cards on The Kiwi Tree that sum it up perfectly for me -

p.s. I totally took my title from the card description, but it was just too good to pass up.

Drum Roll Please...

So after getting quite a mixed feedback, I decided to freshen up my old banner and then have both at the ready, so I can mix things up. Right now I have the old style re-done up in the shop...look good?


In other news, I'm anxiously awaiting my mini moos...those are itty bitty business cards, and I'm in the process of designing and ordering labels for my bags. I'm becoming so professional! Stay tuned to see how those all turn out.

And this is why I am not a graphic artist...

So my banner for totables has been making me unhappy for a little while now, as the text is pixelated and I don't like how the white isn't really white, so I set out to make a new banner, but now I can't decide which style I like better. And that's where you come in....help me make up my mind! I like how the new one shows off more styles, but I also like how the texture of the original one really shows itself off. Which do you like better, close up of texture, or lots of thumbnails? Oh, and I've decided the capital T is just way to hard to read in my font, so it will be lowercase whichever way I chose to go.

Oh, and just to prove how much of an engineer and not a graphic artist I am, I lined up all the thumbnails in excel. :)

How Do I Look?

So, as you all probably know, I've been working hard on getting my etsy shops up and running. My photography shop is going well, although I plan on tweaking it a bit this weekend. My shop for bags, jewelry and accessories is taking a little longer to get off the ground, and it doesn't help matters that I managed to completely break my sewing machine the other night. Hopefully my mechanically-inclined boyfriend will be able to remedy that, but we'll see. So for the time being, I'm working on the appearance of my shops. What do you think of my two banners below?

ViewFound Photography is a portion of a photo I have for sale, and it seems to be my most popular photo so far, so I think it did well.

Totables is a close-up of one of my purses that I actually have completed, with a suede pin attached. I'm not sure if it's clear enough what it is, or if I should zoom out on it. What do you think?

Boyfriend got a lot of photo lighting equipment for his birthday last week, so we had a mini-photo shoot last night with the few bags that I have currently completed. Stay tuned for these!

Metro Art: Wheaton Edition

Most of the Metro stations have some kind of artwork, mural, etc, and someday my plan is to ride the entire system and take photos of it all. These tiles are from the Wheaton station, and were gorgeous in the sun, but it was hard to capture fully. The starbursts were mirrored and really glittered.

Laura's Travels: Philly Edition No. 6

And for the final Philadelphia post, I give you graffiti. On the train ride back to boyfriend's grandmom's house, I was fascinated by all the graffiti and subsequently embarrassed boyfriend by taking lots of pictures of it.

Ernst Haeckel and His Very Cool Prints

I love fishy things, and anything related to the ocean, pretty much. Any nature show that has underwater filming has me captivated. Somehow, I stumbled upon these prints, which are done by Ernst Haeckel, which depict all sorts of nature, but I'm primarily fascinated by his ocean-related ones. Ernst was a biologist, naturalist, among many other things, in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and his Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature) contained 100 prints of various organisms. The three below were my favorites, but several others are in very high resolution on Wikipedia. The detail is amazing, and I'm thinking about printing off some of them some day, but for now I just look at them every now and then.

Happy April Fool's Day!

So Gmail got me for about 10 seconds this morning with their autopilot system. It never fails to amaze me how in depth their April Fool's jokes are. Last year's was pretty great though, with the amount of background that went into the space colony thing.

In other news, the Washington Post elephant and donkey are back. Back in December, they disappeared, and I thought they were going to get a new paint job, but no, they looked identical this morning to the way they did when they went away. Maybe they were kidnapped? Who knows. It was a little anti-climatic though, I was disappointed

Silver Crosses

I was playing with my camera the other day and seeing how well I could fake taking macro photos with my non-macro lens. These are all of my silver crosses that I got in San Antonio. Two of them are actually ceramic that I spray painted silver and antiqued with black paint, but I like them better that way.

Fisheye!

I got my fisheye lens adaptor! It's not nearly as good as an actual fisheye lens, but a heckofa lot cheaper, and better than my fisheye film camera. Of course I got right to work playing with it.

If my feet had wings...

This has got to be one of the coolest tattoos I've ever seen. I ran across this at ACL a couple of years ago, and if I were to ever get a tattoo (don't worry Mom, I won't), this would be it. I guess it's not quite as applicable, as I'm becoming a slower and slower runner lately, but maybe it would speed me up a bit.

Pepsi Ad Addendum

So I was cruising the blogosphere this morning, and I came across a picture of the actual Pepsi ad on the bus on www.dcblogs.com. On the bus itself I think it's harder to tell that it says optimism, in my opinion at least. Ok, I know it's a mildly pathetic attempt to defend myself further, but it still stands. :)

(Image courtesy of www.dcblogs.com)

I promise I will stop posting about the Pepsi ads when they stop running them

I really can't help it that Pepsi has essentially bought the DC transit system, so you'll just have to put up with it. Today I was walking to the metro, and I saw a bus with this ad on the side:

(Image courtesy of Pepsi - http://www.refresheverything.com/)

Obviously I recognized that it was a Pepsi ad, but I was really confused as to what it was trying to say. I sounded it out out loud - Pt im ismmmm? What does that mean? Are they trying to just make a random sound? Ah, that was when I realized the O in front. Somehow this ad didn't quite translate as well in my head as the ones with the O in the middle. Am I the only stupid person here, or did you see optimism when you first looked at it as well?

Murals: DC Edition #3

So I pass by this mural all the time, but never really looked at it until a couple of weeks ago, and it made me laugh, because when I think Burger King, of course I think Oasis in the City. This is on K Street, which is the main corridor of the downtown business district.

An Oasis in the City

It's pop, not soda, not coke, and definitely not sodie pop

Obviously, I know Pepsi is not trying to support my battle that I will wage to the death as to what to call carbonated, sugar-filled beverages, but this sign just really made me happy. That is, until a couple of days later I saw one that said pop three times, utilizing the 3 new Pepsi logos, but unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me at the time.

Pepsi, the choice of an obese generation

I declare today Pepsi Day. I just had to laugh when I ran across this picture.

(Photo courtesy of ::bokeen)

I'm a sucker for a good font

So Pepsi's new ad campaign and logo fall into the same camp as the recent Ikea ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I do like the new font, I must admit.



In other pop-related interests, I have been mystified for a while now by a memory of a pop logo, which I used to think was an old Pepsi logo, that has the Pepsi blue and red circle thing, but instead of solid colors, it's done in bars, kind of like this, but I think that's a fake logo. An extensive google search does not pull up any such logo, Pepsi or otherwise, so if anyone has any idea what I'm talking about, let me know.

Bad logos, anyone?

So I have been mystified by this sign for about 2 years now. This is on a a school located on 16th street, but I just look at it and think immediately - boobs. Honestly, who thought this was a good logo for a school?

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

As I typed that title I had a feeling of deja vu, so it's entirely possible that I've already posted pictures of lions, but I'm going to do it again anyway. After murals, one of my next favorite photography subjects is statues of lions. I don't know why, I just really like them.

The lions at the Corocoran Gallery are what started it all.


I think my personal favorite lions have to be these two by a shop in Georgetown. They were supposed to have been moved a while ago, but I haven't been down in a while to see.