Esotropiart

Last week I helped Dave with the final steps of an art project he had been working on. He was making name tags for a community event organized at his church this weekend. I attended part of the event last year, and it was a grand ole time, with games for the kids and great music for the older folk from the neighborhood.

Dave has already enlisted the help of several people in the various steps of creating these hand-painted name tags. The real work was done by those that came before me. I came along late in the process, simply helping to paint the lettering and aid in laminating. It was fun to spend a couple late nights working on an art project, an activity not foreign to Dave and me.

In high school we often stayed up ridiculously late working on homework. As often as encouraged to do so by teachers, we made art projects out of our homework. In history class, for example, we wowed the teacher with relatively ornate maps. The assignment was to fill in a photocopied map. We did far above the call of duty, earning as much as 150% scores with extra credit.

Here are some photos from the times I helped out with the name tags, first at a coffee shop, then at my duplex.

Night 1

This was my first experience working at a coffee shop. Dave talks about and praises it all the time. My vision of it was sitting in a Starbucks, teaming with people, too loud to hear your own thoughts. I've been in such an environment, and that is what I pictured whenever he spoke of such things. This was late at night, so less people, and a very relaxing atmosphere. Apparently most of the people come just to study or hang out... kinda like a modern age late night library. The only thing that would make it better for me is if it was a public place, so there is no obligation to buy something when I don't feel like spending money. Of course the business should be compensated for the use of their space, but I'm not a coffee drinker, and most of what those places have is fairly expensive and not really what I'm looking for. I settled for a can of Dr. Pepper and a cookie.

By this first night, all the cards were hand-painted with watercolor. This presented a small problem because watercolor is easy to revitalize, so some of the color bled into the letters we painted. Basically, we did a large part of the work in painting the letters over the designs. Dave will probably write more details. In fact, here are Dave's more details.

Night 2

The second night we simply used (and abused) our regular Thursday gathering to work more on completing the name tags. We finished painting the letters, scanned them into the computer, and laminated the cards, staying up until about 2:00 am to finish.