I have been wanting to play around with some stop motion stuff and it was relatively easy. You can’t beat cute kids and boy are they cute. It’s also a cool way to capture the family in 2011. It was fun putting it together and our friend helped us edit it all together which I am very grateful for or else I would be seriously even more sleep deprived than I already am.

This our way to help spread a little holiday cheer during this lovely time of the year. I did also tell my nephew that we would get more views than we did on our video last year (2,600) and we have a ways to go…so share share share!

Happy week before Christmas.

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Remember last week how I mentioned how interested I was in visually depicting families, blah blah blah. Well this was a little project I worked on that I am kind of obsessed with actually. I had seen this image on babble.com over the summer and was totally intrigued and thought it would be fun to try but then I had a baby and I forgot how to think. My SIL asked me if I would be willing to do it for their family’s first ever Christmas card (like she said, BIG DEAL ALERT as her oldest is 7) and it was just the creative boost I needed to get out of the newborn town I had bought land in.

After photographing their family and mine, I have decided that I love doing this Silhouette Project. I learned some new techniques and I see many possibilites for future layouts. I also like the blend of photography and graphics and I finally experimented with the studio lights that I was given and had been housing a village of spiders in the garage. Getting consistent light on everyone’s faces can be tricky especially with toddlers and newborns. So although the layout I did for my SIL’s family had consistent light, the kids looks a little angry so I re-did the layout with happier looking faces from our very first test shoot but the lighting isn’t as consistent. See, all the little details you don’t think of initially.

Did I mention that this really got my creative juices flowing?

So this is just the very beginning of some serious design fun times. It will be fun to have one for every year and see us all grow up and age. Serious keepsake. I am not completely happy with either of them  ( I have since improved) but I rushed to get it done so I could take full advantage of vistaprint’s Black Friday deal– which I have decided will also be my new tradition. That is the free part, not the rushed part. I am also developing (thanks to my big sister) this little idea of making these family logos in the style of the periodic table. Again, so many possibilites.

Like I said, I am keen to do more of these so let me know if you are interested in the Silhouette Project (or family logo) and we can work some family magic.

chris@sublimeeye.com

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Looking for a logo for your business? Contact me for quotes. I would love to work with you!

chris@sublimeeye.com

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Just as with my son, I am taking monthly photos of my daughter in front of a pillow her very own. We finally got the hand carved Mexican headboard, that we have had for 8 years, installed and I couldn’t resist doing a color picture with it but I also did a black and white version. I think I should do a color version of my son’s as well because the reason I bought his pillow in the first place was because it was so colorful. Whatever. Perhaps a little excessive you say? Yes. Perhaps. I swear they will appreciate these at some point in their lives but I am glad I do it.

She passed her 2 month mark the other day and I can’t believe how much she has grown. I honestly wound’t realize it if it weren’t for these pictures because I currently reside in the town of baby haze. She looks sort of scrawny in her first picture and all plump by her second. Of course, there are many multo cool monthly baby shots out there–much more creative than mine. Here are a few I have admired on pinterest if you search monthly baby photos.  I still like my pillow idea because I barely make the time to get the photos taken, let alone doing much else. It also guarantees my bed gets made once a month.

This one, of course,  blows my mind–mainly because of all the planning. My brain doesn’t function so creatively with a newborn.

If you think monthly photos would be hard to get, try these weekly photos! Aren’t the colors and patterns brilliant?

Part of what is so fun is visually measuring the growth which is why this one is fun, and this one, and this one.

This little kid is cute and I like the simplicity of this one too.

Recently, I have been very very interested in visually imaging families and visually depicting how we are genetically connected to eachother. I’ve been working on a few layouts that I will share next week sometime but this monthly project is another one that I love doing; it is fascinating to see how fast the grow. I also like doing this simple design project that involves my kids. The fact that little girlie face is adorable has nothing to do with it .(Note: do another post on how connected I feel to my daughter and how I never would have imagined this feeling.)

Have a fabulous first weekend in December. We’ve got the town tree lighting and Santa is visiting! Busy times.

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As a designer, I get a lot of inspiration from the incredibly vast blogosphere . Right when I think there can’t possibly be another beautiful design/lifestyle blog, I find 10. No joke. It kind of amazes me and sucks me in deep with all the pretty pictures and perfectly simple DIY tutorials. I start to get a bit overwhelmed by the sameness sometimes which is why I like pinterest– a lot.

I like that it is a community of everyone. There are so many perspectives. It isn’t just the perfectly curated blogs (they are there too which is great) but also your friend from grade school and friends of friends and lots of perfect strangers– so many people sharing what inspired them, their styles, their motivations, recipes, DIYs, and wish lists! It’s great and my first stop for inspiration these days. I still check in with my favorite design blogs but pinterest is the new blog–at least for me.

That’s where I got this incredibly simple idea to Christmas-ify the window of my husband’s office. I wanted to do some decals on the window but hadn’t thought about using a glue stick to adhere–duh. I found lots of people who had done it here. Thank you pinterest.

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I have mentioned multo times about my pal, Nathaniel Hansen, and this full length documentary short he made last year. It is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo great (that’s not even half as many o’s as it deserves) and this week he is waiting to hear back from Sundance. I feel a little nervous waiting to hear back–can’t imagine how he feels but I guess it is a long shot since there is something like a billion entries and it’s pretty political to get in but it deserves to get in because everyone on this planet should see it. That’s right, you heard about The Elders here.

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Oh hi there. No, I didn’t abandon this site. It’s just we added this little red head to our family and the last 2 months we’ve been figuring out how to keep a newborn and a toddler alive.  So far so good and I think I am finally adjusted back to the constant fatigue.

I have been working on a couple creative projects the last few days that have my juices flowing. I will post some pictures in the days to come. We are also gearing up for our 2011 Holiday Video for the Snapdragon that we will debut later in December.

I really hope to be back posting a bit more frequently but no promises.

Happy Holiday Season 2011!

–chris

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I just got word that our very own Snapdragon Inn has been mentioned on the Food & Wine website as one of American’s Best Inns! You can view the slideshow here and see the incredible list of establishments we accompany . We are absolutely thrilled by this news as we have just rounded our 1 year anniversary being open! If you haven’t ever checked out our site, we are right over here in Windsor, Vermont.  We also have a blog we try to update as regularly as we can.

It is always nice to have a bit of good news after a lot of hard work!

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Last week, I headed over to Pomfret to photograph some beautiful friends of mine. It was a couple days before Irene was meant to hit but already you could feel something changing in the air. My son and I spent the afternoon with them meandering the same spots I did in my youth but now as people in our 30’s with kids! It was a perfect summer afternoon. In the wake, of all the destruction that Vermont is enduring, these images just make me happy. Family.

a few more here.

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You know those people that come into your life that are remarkable?

I just got word that one of my absolute favorite people passed away last week. Rick Wells was my American Studies and Art History professor at University. After I took my first class from him and he used, “Moulin Rouge” in a lecture about post-modernity, I was sold. I basically took everything I could from him after that and was lucky that my department heads took a lot of credits from his claases in exchange for others.

It’s funny because I was rearranging the books on our shelves last Sunday night and glanced through a bunch from his courses that I hadn’t thought of in ages but love and have kept because of him. He absolutely, hands-down was the one to encourage me to study design in any way I could. He instilled confidence in me and my ideas. I wish I had the opportunity to let him know this. In fact, I do remember stopping in to see him right before I left to thank him for his support and mentoring me and in his slightly shaky soft spoken way, said “Oh no. I didn’t do anything”.

I worked for him as his TA and he mostly let me study and go through his books or we’d chat. He helped me form ideas for my final paper about the first travel artists that visited the Pacific. He let me use his office to write that final paper late into the night so that I had a quiet place to work that was also the best art history library on campus. It was that final thesis that took me to New Zealand where I met Mike and I remember how thrilled he was to sit and chat about my experience falling in love in New Zealand.He was not a man of usual communication like email or phone and I could never get a response from him but he loved when I dropped by the office to chat about love and of course art.

A few other thoughts:

He had a uniform of sorts. I only ever saw him wear black pants with black and white aloha shirts and red socks. Bright red sock. I asked him about it and he said he saw a black and white bird land near him one day and it lifted up its tail feathers to reveal bright red plumes. He said he loved the surprise of it and went on to wear red socks. I don’t remember what bird it was but the above image makes me think of it.

In my last semester, the art faculty put on their show and to this day, the work Dr. Wells showed was some of the most brilliant cubist color blocking genius ever. I remember wishing I had any money to buy one and now I am really wishing I could, just to have a piece of his passion, eccentricity, and love. I wish I could even have a picture of the series. They were remarkable, just like him. My friend asked what I thought he had done with his art and I told her that it was probably in a closet somewhere or he burned it in a bonfire on the beach. He was unselfish and self-effacing and even though I haven’t spoken to him since 2003, he has so much to do with where I am today and I miss him.

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