Covered in Glitter and Screaming

I work for a marketing agency that specializes in rare diseases, and for a significant chunk of last year I'd been spending a lot of long hours working on one specific brand. My office has an annual Halloween party, and last year a few people dressed up as concept art they had worked on. My official Halloween costume (Zoolander) was too much work for the middle of the work day and I liked the idea of coming up with something (relatively, for me) quick and simple that would only make sense in my office. So I made an orb. This is a piece of cover art for a brochure I spent a bazillion hours on. It's for a drug used to treat a condition that has to do with neurotransmitters not properly sending signals to muscles. The illustration of how the drug works is what's hovering in the orb. Supplies: clear plastic sphere, lots of colors of tissue paper, Crayola modeling clay (love that stuff, it's nice and light), Tacky Glue for adhesion and tissue paper formin...

My company uses an instant messaging program that allows users to put an emoji next to their name. I noticed that one of our editors changed his every day for several days, so I asked if he had been telling a story. He hadn't been, so I started to. I keep a list, and when I have both time and inspiration, I write a little scene incorporating those emoji in the order they appeared. This is the first one: black joker, new moon, saxophone, chicken, piggy Black Joker never removes his garish jingly hat. He wanders around the starlit barnyard, barely seen under the new moon. He plays a somber, keening tune on the saxophone, a request without words for a volunteer. Chicken does not meet his eyes, she remembers last time a little too vividly. Piggy is skeptical, but seems drawn to the music. Could this be the chance for adventure he’s always wanted? I put the whole collection on Imgur. (Click the image to go to the album on Imgur, where they will appear large enoug...

I'm working on a number of projects at the same time, so we went low key and high fashion for Halloween this year as Zoolander and Mugatu from Zoolander . Mugatu is wearing the finest  thrift store sweater  with felt letters glued in place (with Tacky Glue ) and tubes of black fabric hand stitched to the cuffs. The collar didn't actually need to be attached, it just plops in place when the sweater is zipped up waist cincher  from the internet black pants  that are unremarkable except for being part of this fabulous ensemble Makeup consists of black eyeshadow and pencil eyeliner Hair done with silver hair wax  (he is naturally a ginger) Zoolander in the most chic basic black tee shirt and jeans covered with strips of black trash bags and duct tape Makeup was kind of trial and error based on low-res screen shots and these two YouTube tutorials. Supplies were my regular foundation, black eye shadow and pencil liner, white cheap-Ha...

I ordered some dahlia tubers for my mom as a birthday gift, but they don't ship until later in the month, so I made a placeholder gift for when we celebrate. On its own, the flowers were a bit top heavy, so I added scraps of cardboard and a ton of hot glue to the bottom to balance it out. Blossoms: shiny origami paper and  this tutorial Stems: green pipe cleaners Pot: half a toilet paper tube covered in construction paper Dirt: a couple chunks of compostable padding that came in my meal kit delivery

This year's costumes were the Egyptian gods Bast and Anubis . Anubis I had a more clear vision of what I wanted for Anubis, so I started there. I opted to build it on a baseball cap instead of as a mask to give the appearance of a longer neck, and that was definitely the way to go. Clumsy paper template, edges removed from the hat bill, then a less clumsy paper template to get the basic shapes right. Translation of paper shapes into craft foam shapes Articulation of the cheekbones and brow ridges (so it wouldn't look so much like a duck). Lights in the eyes: a strip of red LEDs wrapped around the baseball cap under the foam face. The foam cheekbones aren't glued down to allow access to the lights just in case it was needed. The LEDs are diffused by a few layers of packing foam. In real life you can see the points of the lights, but it photographs well. Ears added, some black paper clay added to smooth out the shapes, then layers and layers ...