Curious Art Lab

Art & Oddments by Leah Palmer Preiss

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Just a little sneak peek of the painting I’m now working on: a Halloween offering-to-come for my Etsy shop! Apologies for the image quality– this was taken with my phone.

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Blue Carbon Based Flowers, for AlphaBands.

So... I'm cheating a bit here. I began this image in homage to Carbon Based Lifeforms, a Swedish ambient music band that is one of my favorites to listen to while sketching. Their music is mostly instrumental with wordless vocals, but lyrics do come in from time to time, such as these:

"Only illogics can find Hidden flaws in a straight logic line. Only erratics recognize Errors in patterns of a perfect design."

These particular lifeforms were of course heavily influenced by the work of Ernst Haeckel, with the central structure inspired by an allotrope of carbon popularly known as the Buckyball.

Unfortunately, some very erratic household chaos kept me away from the computer last week, so I missed my chance to chime in with the "C"s for AlphaBands. But as it happened, my choice for "D" was the bizarre alter ego of Kool Keith known as Dr. Octagon. Though his music could hardly be more different from CBL, (and, I should warn, it is mostly extremely NSFW) some of his color-crazed & hallucinatory lyrics somehow wormed their way into the picture:

"I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope  Listen to your heartbeat, delete beep beep beep  Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap  Look at the land...blue flowers!  Drawing by the purple pond, in the purple pastures blue flowers!  Drawing by the purple pond, yellow ink that flows blue flowers!  Drawing by the pond, look, it's raining yellow" 

So, consider this the visual equivalent of a mashup. It's just a pity that Buckyballs are constructed from hexagons & pentagons, with nary an octagon in the picture.

Photoshop with text scanned from Steele's Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry, 1876

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AlphaBands entry for B:

The Bobs, “Mr. Duality”

More info including lyrics on my blog.

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Animal Collective for AlphaBands!

Leah Palmer Preiss

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This Time Tomorrow

Hey artists, tomorrow is Monday, January 20th, when we will begin accepting submissions for #AlphaBands!  Head on over to the tumblr page at http://alphabands.tumblr.com/submit to find out how you can contribute.  ROCK ON!

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& now... an ampersand to go with my Curiotype Alphabet! More about it on my blog.

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My latest custom Dunny, Inky! For more see my blog. 

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While waiting for paint to dry on the Dunny I'm currently working on, I thought it would be fun to combine the progress shots for Dunny Ultramarine into a little gif. (Thanks to the magic of Photoshop, it is now possible to dance with one's own backside.) ;-)

For a closer look at the finished Dunny, along with some info about the process, please see my previous post here or my website blog.

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Finally I have prints of this piece available on Etsy! Individual parts or all six elements in a bundle, in case you'd like to genetically engineer your own example of Zoorobotany!

p.s. If you're interested in how this piece came to be, there's a slide show on my website's process page.

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Dunny Ultramarine

This little guy is a commissioned 3″ Dunny (actually more like 2.75″ in real measurement). I was lucky enough to have a free brief, so I made several different sketches & the client chose this concept. The text on his back is from an old dictionary, & includes the chemical formula for synthetic ultramarine. The little trident is made of polymer clay and a “stick” jewelry finding I picked up at the flea market. I rolled gold leaf onto the green polymer clay before cutting the fork, & painted the back of the brass handle with diluted green paint so that the metal resisted it a bit. I thought it was quite interesting how similar the two textures turned out in the end. That’s why I love Nature’s chaos!

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Shroomdweller

Acrylic on collaged paper on canvas, 12"x6"

This mushroom, like its climber, is entirely imaginary, but it was inspired by various real species. If you are a fan of fungi in its many fanciful forms, be sure to check out this fascinating tumblr: When we die, we become one with the earth. Beautiful photos of some amazing shrooms!

The background engraving was scanned from The Practical Standard Dictionary, 1943; the borders were from an old map.

The not-so-secret message in the annulus refers to a series of books by Eleanor Cameron that I loved as a child. Working on this really made me want to reread those books!

p.s. This one’s dedicated to my friend Heather, an avid mushroom-hunter, & my father, a soon-to-be truffle farmer!

Prints of this painting are now available on Etsy here:

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Free Goodies at SPX! Curiotype stickers & more.

I've been coming up with a bundle of new stuff to share at SPX. If you're coming please be sure to stop by my table! (I'll be at D8-9a with Isaac Cates & Sam Wolk.) Please drop by early so you can grab the Curiotype initial of your choice!

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These days I'm putting my Epson R3000 to the test, churning out archival prints to bring to SPX 2013. This is my first comic convention ever-- I've never even attended one! So I'm pretty excited to be tabling along with Isaac Cates of AlphaBots & Cartozia Tales & Sam Wolk, a fellow Alphabotter. There will be comics, cards, prints aplenty! If any of you plan to come, please stop by our table, D8-9a, & say hello!

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Hello! Here’s the cover for Cartozia Tales #1 which will be out at Autoptic this August! You can preorder this issue or sign up for a 10 issue subscription that will be delivered every five weeks (NEAR MONTHLY!). Cartozia is a fun comics anthology built around a shared map, bestiary and lore. We even have guest cartoonists each issue! 44 pages of comics (kid friendly!) and one suh-weet map! Cover by Leah Palmer Preiss.

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Wow-- the end of another Alphabet Project! Of course I still have a few stragglers to fill in, but I must say I'm happy to be (nearly) done with this one. Over the past six months I've certainly learned a lot about Adobe Illustrator,* but frankly I've lost much of my zeal for vector & robots, & I'm itching to get back to more organic artwork, both in subject matter & technique. I have a completely different & fun new series in my head & can't wait to get started! I'm hoping to have my first piece up in the next week or two-- stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out everybody's AlphaBots from A to Z here!

*I just learned about the Distort/Roughen effect, which I used (twice) on a zig-zag path, to make the zap of electricity on this guy's head look more convincingly random.

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I’m not sure what this bot is yearning for, but I’m yearning for more time to do all the things I need/want to do (including catching up on the missing AlphaBots)!

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You may have noticed a glaring lack of UV in this alphabet-- no, it's not due to excessive sunscreen use! The last couple of weeks have been a brain-frazzling swirl, but I do intend to fill in the gaps at some point. (I've done the sketches, just didn't have time for AI.)

This is not the time of year when I'm prone to wistful reveries-- they usually hit me when the days are short-- but this song can sometimes bring them on, especially when I'm chained to the computer!