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Showing posts from November, 2018

MYSTERY GIFT: Ensō

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I shaved my head for charity last year. For a small number of donors I offered thanks in the form of a mystery gift, built around a theme of their choosing. This generous donor's theme was ensō, also described as the  zen circle . The final product is made of card stock with gel pen accents and silver paint in the center. I had a conversation with her once about a number of symbols that were important to her. I started with the symbol she had for herself, and arranged the others to radiate outward. This was a fun challenge! A lot of image research/tracing, a lot of meticulous design, and some arguing with the Cricut about how much detail it would allow me to have in my cut paper shapes. I started with the flowers and hummingbirds, doing research and image tracing as I added each layer. Lots and lots of tweaking, tracing new images and trying them out, changing the number, rotation, and configuration, layer by layer. Shout out to this tutorial for applying layer effe

Farewell Gift: pop up book page

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A beloved executive just left my company. He's a larger-than-life, eccentric personality who has had a positive impact on everyone around him and will genuinely be missed. A few notable things about him so this makes more sense: avid bicycler, surfer, and kayaker bicycle helmet looks like a watermelon has a small dog loves Mexican food He and I once shared a moment in which we exclaimed about the Hero's Journey  as written about by Joseph Campbell. For me, reading about that cycle was sort of like finding out that there's a mathematical formula that the whole world is built on, but with stories. He incorporated it into how he approached client pitches. As part of his sendoff, everyone in the Creative department was given the opportunity to make a single page to be bound together into a book. I didn't get photos of the collection, but it was overwhelming. Every page was heartfelt and thoughtful and completely different from the next. One created a minimalist