My girlfriends mom is in town for her birthday, and just like when I was a kid I used my artistic powers to completely avoid spending more than about 10 bucks.
It's been a running theme throughout life to almost forget a friends birthday, only to come back gangbusters with about 48 hours until the party. Between the ages of 1-10 it was water colors and markers, and of course the staple macaroni necklaces and popsicle stick boxes. Christmas was often more of the same.
In middle school I graduated to acrylics and aerosol, creating good and bad paintings in a practice of dada like splatters and comic book graphics. By high school I was creating collages and mixed media pieces. All of them created in a matter of hours/days and without any extended time or process. There is nothing that says time=quality, but there are always things that you can miss when in a rush.
In retrospect I'm torn about wether I was an asshole or an artist. The people seemed to love it, or where just really kind.
So now I've entered a new stage of gift giving, my Photo-chop period. For mothers day I superimposed my moms face onto the classic
"WE CAN DO IT" Rosy the Riviter poster (gotta find a picture of that one). It made her "80's feminist with 2 last names mother" 's day.
For my mother in laws birthday my Girlfriend decided to get a picture cake with one of my quick creations. Since Lu's mom is self proclaimed herself "cougar" (which I think is kind of like people who call themselves artists, you either are or you aren't), we decided to make her societies ultimate cougar.
The best part was that when we took the image to the chain grocery store, they told us that there was a prohibiting the printing of copy-written images. The cake lady then asked "who is that woman in the picture?". We told her that the woman was our mom and that seemed to be enough. She was thrilled to be doing a cake for someone who knew Ashton Kutcher.
Who knew Art Center would already be paying off to this degree. Happy Birthday Anastasia!
