DailyNightmare
I thought my eyes were wrung out and weary of smooth, digital illustration but perhaps I was only irritated that so much of it fixates on happy-puppy subject matter. Check out these pieces by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa. The Medusa is my favorite of the “Spooky” portraits but my heart truly belongs to the Dracula paper puppets. Hours of fun on a rainy afternoon, I tell ya. And reasonably priced.
Everyday for a whole year, a different skull appears on this wonderfully creative blog. Some are pieces of jewelry, some are actual skulls, some are pieces of origami, one was a computer typeface, another was a desktop pattern… you get the idea. All over the map in their media and let’s be frank, the quality of their execution but every post is a skull of some sort or another. It’s all free; it’s all fun. It’s likely the kind of thing that would appeal to someone who likes to read about nightmares and fear. The site has spawned a legion of similar projects but Skull-a-Day, as far as I can tell, was nearly the first.
Given my love of weird papercraft, one of my favorite entries is this one for a papercraft skull complete with an articulated jaw.
There are cool limited edition t-shirt to support the site, ones with the logo “Nevermore” and a bird (my guess is that it’s a raven) and, you guessed it, a skull.
I was walking through a suburb very much like the one where I grew up except at the edge of a cluster of houses instead of a woods, there was a wide expanse of water, possibly an ocean, possibly just a Great Lake. Leading up to the water was a long flat sandy beach and on this beach were houses just like those of the suburb though much farther apart. From one of the houses, I heard cries, then screams. Someone was being beaten, then murdered. I recognized the assailants but since there were three of them and only one of me I didn’t intervene.
Later, I was at a small bookstore, so small it was the living room of a house. They were having an art exhibit and when I looked at the names of the artists, I recognized them as the three young men who had killed that person. Evidently everyone seemed to know that they were guilty, but that no one seemed to care too much beyond the fame it brought them. The artworks weren’t extremely compelling, though they used some materials in slightly novel ways. One of the artists for instance seemed to paint with melted wax crayon and to paint inside old cooking pans. Interesting perhaps but his brushwork and composition were barely competent. The bookstore owner noticed my attention and said the artists themselves would be stopping by later. It was as if he didn’t know how dangerous these young men were. I was afraid and I left.
I was walking home from the exhibit, angry and scared, through the suburb I grew up in, in fact just a block or two from the house where I lived. I passed a liquor store and two men started following me. They were twins, slender, brown-grey, in ragged suits with crumpled hats. They talked as if they were drunk, or more precisely as if they were pretending to be drunk. They were following me rather closely. I tried to let the pass but they jumped me instead. One held me while the other kicked and hit me. It wasn’t like they wanted to rob me, just to beat me to death. I struggled and broke free but they chased me. I ran up to the house of a neighbor. Oddly enough, I didn’t try to run to the house where I once had lived. No one came to the door. I woke when the men reached the porch where I was standing.
Ravensblight.com is a fun, well-conceived and executed concept website that takes as its central metaphor a haunted town. The MOST fun part for me at least was the “Toystore” which features a couple DOZEN creepy papercraft models to print out and build.
Papercraft for those not familiar with it is a craft somewhat similar to origami in that you start with a flat sheet of paper and you end up with a three-dimensional object. But since the “rules” of papercraft allow scissors and elaborately printed paper, the object are — to be blunt– WAY cooler than origami. The technique behind papercraft is a pretty cool mixture of high-tech and low-tech. High tech computer-aided-design tools are used to create 3-d models of things… in Ravensblight’s case, for instance, mechanical bats or the tiny coffins shown above. Then another program “unfolds” the object into a 2-d surface and saves it as a .pdf. From a crafter’s perspective, it’s all low-tech simple: all you have to do is download the .pdf’s, print them with a color printer ideally on stiff paper and assemble. It’s a great rainy day activity and heck it’s a blast to have a little line of coffins on your desk!