We’ve just had a week or more of short summer thunderstorms. Every year, I find it harder and harder to bear the heat and humidity and just so much sunshine. I can’t help but feel that these thunderstorms are my temporary relief from summer, when I can huddle up inside near a window to listen and watch the weather flex its iron fist — even though the brief showers never seem long enough. So the morning after a particularly mighty evening thunderstorm, I headed out to the garden to enjoy the temporary dip in temperature and humidity and admire the post-rain spoils: beaded up water on the leaves of my satiated plants.

And then, well, I started noticing raised dots — like perfect water droplets — all around the house.

For anyone with an eye for design, stepping into a bookstore (or wine shop, or stationery shop, or soap aisle) might as well be stepping into a diverse and awe-inspiring art exhibition. An art exhibition where almost all of the works fall within your budget. And you want to take everything home because it just looks so good (although your husband informs you that you can’t). The bookstore is a designer’s inspiration heaven, brimming with spectacular typography, illustration, composition, and storytelling — all charm and wit. So yes, when I compulsively buy books, I always choose the ones that I like to see sitting next to me on the couch (when I’m not reading) — that way I can enjoy them all the time, inside and out.

Plus, you have to hand it to book cover designers. It’s a job that I imagine is extraordinarily challenging, but incredibly fun. Because — whatever our mothers tell us – it is human nature to literally judge books by their covers, and that means the cover design has to say everything that you need to know to subconsciously decide whether it’s even worth considering, while trying to stand out from all the other covers.

For example, I don’t often gravitate to the Mystery section, but the spines of this series offered a stark contrast to your predictable dark cover with foil-stamped serif type. That contrast drew my eye and my interest with it. The synopsis and early paragraphs carried them over the finish line to my wish list.

I carried Of Bees and Mist around the store for a good thirty minutes until I realized that I couldn’t go home with a half dozen new novels (somewhere between Keith begging me to stop getting distracted and threatening to restrain me from dashing all over the store) it came down to a battle of synopses and first pages, in which Bees lost out to Mathilda Savitch. But I still love watching those rose vines come to life with all the little images hidden in plain sight. In the end, four good-looking books have earned a new home on my bookshelf for ogling, and ahgling, and feeding my imagination.

We woke up this morning here in Southern Maryland to a gentle shower of snow and less than a half inch on the ground. Over the course of the day, I’ve watched the snow pour down on top of us and the accumulation rise to at least six inches. And there’s no sign of it stopping any time soon. It’s too cold for our heat pump to keep up, and — OH! all I can think of is how many ways I could be much cozier than I am right now.

Here are seven:

Clockwise, from top left: (1) White cable kit gloves with citrine edges from Afra, $26; (2) Flourish linen pillow – Sun from sarahkusa, $58; (3) Block Printed Pillow Cover from Home Sweet, $35; (4) Wool blanket/throw with hand crochet edge from Namolio, $95; (5) Porcelain Tea Light Delight N.1 from Wapa Studio, $35; (6) The Sun Always Shines shawl from Laslo Pezlas, $125; (7) Eco Toes in golden vintage plaid from Infusion, $45

How do you make yourself cozy on snow days?

I want to come clean: I regularly read wedding blogs. Of course, by “read” I mean “mostly just look at photos.” Aside from a general penchant for hyperbole and overuse of words like, “gorgeousness,” “gorgeous,” and — God help me — “lovely,” I find that they’re often a good source of inspiration for everything from graphic design, to interior decorating, to photography.

One such blog, Style Me Pretty, offers a tool for creating your own inspiration boards. For day-to-day design, I keep something more like an “inspiration scrapbook” (I like a hard copy to flip through), but using the SMP inspiration board tool sure is fun. And, as it turns out, it’s exceptionally handy if you’re planning any sort of special event, even one that’s not related to weddings. A special event like, oh, I don’t know…

]]> http://oomphasisdesign.com/2010/01/inspirationpalooza/feed/ 0 http://oomphasisdesign.com/2009/12/skoonberg/ http://oomphasisdesign.com/2009/12/skoonberg/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:12:37 +0000 Sarah http://oomphasisdesign.com/?p=250

Oh! Hello there. It seems that Christmas is closing in fast, in case you – like me – hadn’t noticed. This past weekend I actually achieved the sending of a small batch of handmade Christmas cards; though the big story really is that Christmas cards even made it from my hands into envelopes with stamps and addresses and stuff, and into the mail, period. All because we got a big, fat helping of SNOW! over the weekend, and as long as I was forced to stay indoors, I figured I’d stay on the couch in front of the Christmas tree, listening to Christmas music and eating a big, fat helping of peppermint bark while writing Christmas cards and wrapping presents. I’m trying to get in the mood.

6×6 no. 9, monotype and linocut

I’ve also been pushing myself to finish something that’s been working mostly in my head for a long while, only now I’m actually making it happen. Just a few finishing touches and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s all very crazy and mind-swizzling. You heard me.

Thankfully, there’s printmaker Hannah Skoonberg. I stumbled across her Etsy shop, which is chock full of gorgeous relief prints that focus on the spiritual, meditative nature of trees: beauty stripped to its bones. Seeing her work instantly makes me feel calmer; she expertly captures the quiet, stately beauty that I love about trees in winter. She’s a very strong contender for my next major art purchase.

Stillness, 3-color reduction linocut

Look! No footprints. It feels so tranquilizingly empty. I want to make snow angels.

Devotional, 2-color relief print

In the description, she says that Devotional (above) – at 18 x 24 inches – took her an entire semester to carve. I have a 5 x 7-inch block that I’ve been working on for a year and it’s still not done. Do you think she still has all her fingers, too? I don’t want to know. That would make her too splendid.

Meditation, 5-color reduction linocut

I just wanted to call your attention for a few moments to my Tumblog, which I am fairly good at forgetting about. It’s probably a really handy thing when you know what to do with it, and so it’s currently my new bright idea to start using Tumblr to “curate” (or round up, I suppose) works by other artists based on a theme. And since I’m getting ready to go camping this weekend, I thought I’d start there. I’ve put together a small collection of camping-inspired artwork — all by Etsy artists, incidentally — and you can find it right here, baby!

Northern Family Camp by David Hayward (Hayward Fine Art Prints)

The smells of the earth: the clean air, a crisp breeze, the early morning dew. The hypnotic dance of the campfire. The farther we go from civilization, it seems, the tighter we become with our camp company: clustered in a circle around a warm fire, telling stories, cooking food, making music, playing games, or simply sitting in silent contemplation. Why do we yearn for such primitive socialization, such rustic existence? Perhaps we’re drawn by an ancestral memory. And if we could read it, perhaps it would say that being submissive to the Earth is as much a part of the human spirit as discovering how to control it. That without knowing the most basic elements of community, we can never possibly be whole. That we must occasionally escape from life in order to survive it.

It was like September first came and when it did, summer hightailed it right on out of here. It got cooler, the humidity dropped, it’s been overcast and occasionally rainy. But the thing I’m most interested in is the overcastness, because as soon as the clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped, the colors got more interesting.

It reminds me of last summer, when it was still hot in Maryland, but overcast and cool in Michigan at my grandparents’ house. The colors blew me away.

It’s delightful. It’s refreshing. It’s inspiring. And I’d normally try to capture it with a camera. The problem is that I’m not always lucky enough to get a photo that reflects the true emotional impressions I felt at the time.

I guess you could say that I used to observe the world in brushstrokes. I realized it when I was in high school, after I’d studied art for a few years. Typically, we learn to look at the world and identify things, then assign an absolute definition to them. What I see is an apple. What I see is a flower. It is.

But once you start learning to draw, you end up having to relearn the skill of observation, to redefine your environment, turning what is into what appears to be. When you begin, you draw what you know a thing to look like. When you discover how to draw a thing as it appears to be — what you see, rather than what you know — the whole world transforms around you.

And one day, as you’re staring out the car window at a particularly striking sunset, you realize that your mind is busy mixing colors, making marks and blending lines, layering fields of color, pulling out highlights and intensifying shadows. You’re not looking at it: you’re recreating it, impressing it on the canvas of your memory. You observe the world in brushstrokes.

Then you run home and pull out your sketchbook and medium of choice, to spend a meditative hour or two letting your mind play lightly in the space between conscious action and subconscious reenactment of the painterly moment.

(Me? I always preferred soft pastels and charcoal; I say “brushstrokes” because it’s simpler. In truth, I really dislike painting. I always found that the best art tools I have are attached to my wrists.)

I realized recently that for the past few years, something had changed. Too many years out of the habit of drawing and the accessibility of digital cameras has transformed me from someone who created elaborate mind-paintings to someone who thinks, I wish I had a camera. For the last half of this year, I’ve been trying to get back into regular practice of the fine arts (which, ironically, the collegiate study of had drained me of energy for). And I realized that it all starts with drawing.

Art students, art majors anyway, typically seem to despise drawing class. I mean, drawing your hand 100 times over the course of a semester does seem a bit like a waste of time, especially when it takes up so much time, and especially when your focus area is photography, or sculpture, or ceramics, or graphic design, or something other than, say painting. Painting realistic representational paintings. Back then, I inherently knew it was a fundamental skill, and didn’t so much mind drawing class because I was always good at it. But I was still bored by it, and I still thought those three hours every Tuesday night could be better spent (which is not to mention the hurried hours working on out-of-class assignments).

I understand it now though. Practicing drawing isn’t so much about the act of drawing as it is about the act of observation. No matter how much technical skill you have, if you don’t look, you won’t see. So it stands to reason that the best way to get back into the habit of artistic observation — and to therefore develop a perspective, a voice, on which to base future works of art — is to practice drawing.

I decided that I’ve soaked up enough imagery and it’s time to be brave enough to let some of it spill back out. I filled up the first page of a new sketchbook with an impression of some of the subdued scenery I’ve been enjoying lately. Just a modest sketch, quick, unpolished, mediocre, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a place I’ve traveled past nearly every day for the past five years, and every day four months of the year for four years before that, and I know the landscape well. Today, though, I decided to see it.

What do you get when you have six polymer clay Moseses dressed in various colors?!

The Game of Exodus, of course!

It’s a game I created for an art project when I was a sophomore in college. The design could obviously use some polish, but the project was more about developing the total concept — and creating a playable game. I came across it in a box of other art school artifacts today. It was fun to look through everything, but I’d nearly forgotten about the game. Ironic, considering it was one of my favorite projects.

The premise?

You’re Moses, and your objective is to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt…

Across the Red Sea…

And to the Promised Land!

But first, you’ve got to make it through the desert, where you’re forced to wander for forty years…or however long it takes you to collect ten commandments.

But how do you get the commandments?!

By correctly answering questions about the land…

And avoiding setbacks along the way.

But hurry — because you’ve gotta get to the Promised Land before the other Moseses — Mosesi? — in order to claim the title of the Chosen People for your…people!

The Game of Exodus: it’s more fun than manna from Heaven!

Spring has been in full swing here for a while now. But since we’ve had such a string of gloomy, cool and rainy days here, I thought I’d cheer us all up with some photos of a few spring-time things that have been inspiring me with color, shape and pattern.