Public Service Announcement #357: Exercise Your Teeth

Advertising Executives

THEME: Advertisement

Have you ever been flipping through a magazine, looking at advertisements, and thought, "Hey—I could do better than that!" Well, this is your chance: create an advertisenent—real or fictional, small or large, any language, it's up to you. Have fun!

Snowing

Bowler

Tutti possiamo

I Wait for You

Four Guys in the Woods

Emma Pioneered the Halloween Pop-Up Store

Page from a Taschen Halloween book featuring disposable decorated party ware. Found photo of woman and her dog is from ?? she was found in my pre-cut box.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

green shower

The green piece was cut, without any breaks, from one piece of paper.

Terrible Harpoon

Another colour plate from the 20,000 Legs Under The Sea book I found the other day.

Jigsaw Feeling

I Found My Scissors...

Envy

Straight From The Oven

Freshly baked!

Strange Soup

strange sunset

From my archives.

THEME: Three pieces of paper

This week I'm going for "less is more." Any theme, any subject, but no more than three pieces of paper. An all-white or an all-black background doesn't count as a piece of paper, but any other background does. Have fun!

Tree House

One from the archives.

She's Leaving Home

I have always loved the Beatle's song "She's Leaving Home". The doll who appears to be doing the same has been cut out for some time and I decided now was the time to paste her down. I have always loved the artist Ralph Blakelock. The background is an oil on canvas, circa 1885, entitled "The Three Trees". Lastly I felt the collage needed more than the doll and the painting so I pasted them all down on the cover of a brochure I picked up. What you see is a portion of the Société Anonyme Signboard, no date, paint on panel, artist unknown.

Marie Toilette's live performance of her 'Apple-tree Dance' ..

Unfortunately Marie couldn't find the right apples so she improvised with balls of wool, but due to her very expressive dancing style these almost got her strangled.
Luckily for us she turned back to knitting warm undergarment again ;))

Family Tree

the object of their attention

My husband Bob, who has a PhD. in botany, says the tree is a laurel oak, and based on the vegetation growing on it, places its location as in or close to the panhandle of Florida.

In the News

Three current news stories that loom large in my mind. First "The Wall" that continues to be talked about. The background is a scene from Big Bend National Park, Texas. The Rio Grande emerges meekly from Santa Elena Canyon. The cliff on left is Mexico, the right one, in the United States. Second, the palm trees represent the destruction of recent hurricanes Irma and Harvey. Lastly, today NASA's Cassini spacecraft took a death plunge into Saturn which it so brilliantly photographed for the last 13 years in orbit.

Through Bush and Brier

trees by steinweiss

While thumbing through a set of old vinyl album covers in a datebook, I was surprised to see that five out of the twelve covers had trees on them.

All drawings of trees—presumably dated 1940s—from a book titled Alex Steinweiss: The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover. Black-and-white photo (1947) of Alex Steinweiss himself.

THEME: Tree(s)

This one is straightforward: just include a tree, or multiple trees, in your collage.

The Roman Cult of Mithras

I found the image of the bust of Mithras, ca 200AD and the hand in the same book, but they were not linked in any way. I pasted the bust and the hand down (on an image of the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico) and then cut up letters to serve as asemic writing. I was going to make up a story about a "secret handshake and password" to enter the caves where the followers met. AND THEN I GOOGLED Mithras and discovered this! (I swear I did not know what the initiates called themselves--please read.)

From Wikipedia:

Mithraism, also known as the Mithraic mysteries, was a mystery religion centered around the god Mithras that was practiced in the Roman Empire from about the 1st to the 4th century CE. The religion was inspired by Persian worship of the god Mithra (proto-Indo-Iranian Mitra), though the Greek Mithras was linked to a new and distinctive imagery, and the level of continuity between Persian and Greco-Roman practice is debated. The mysteries were popular in the Roman Military.

Worshippers of Mithras had a complex system of seven grades of initiation and communal ritual meals. Initiates called themselves syndexioi, those “united by the handshake”. They met in underground temples, called Mithraea, which survive in large numbers. The cult appears to have had its centre in Rome.

Mumblecore Script Read-Thru

Subtitle: Tracing Paper A-Go Go!

Not only the asemic babbling was a bit weird about this family ..

Human Cannonball Circus

Some minimal reference to asemic writing here but you have to look for it!

'got those old asemic blues

Black asemic writing by yours truly.

talkin' 'bout that weird beast

Chrome shark by Philippe Pasqua. Black asemic writing by yours truly.

By the way, if you happen to like sharks (I sure do!), go to usps.com and check out the new shark stamps—way cool!

Page 31

asemic numero uno

From my archives. Cut-paper collage with acrylic paint: my first attempt at asemic writing. (The border is asemic writing, as well as what's inside.) I should give glancing credit to Nigel Pennick's historical compilation, Magical Alphabets, since I flipped through it quickly before making this piece. The background is a collage of paper tapes from 7 Gypsies.

THEME: Asemic Writing

"Asemic" means "having no meaning." Your challenge this week is to incorporate some asemic writing in a collage. You can use the asemic writing as a background; you can write it on a strip of paper and glue it down; you can scribble it on top of your collage; you can use pieces of paper to make one big asemic ideogram... any way you want to do it. I'll be posting an example of asemic writing from my archives, but if you haven't done asemic writing before, I encourage you to google it and look at more examples for inspiration. Have fun!

ALTALENA GIRL