This 20,000-balloon octopus flew over Sodus Bay in 2003.

That’s right. This is the week that we’re octopying RIT. As mentioned last month, we’re doing another installation for RIT’s Innovation and Creativity Festival, Imagine RIT. We’re building Monday, April 30 through Friday, May 4, in order to complete our project in time for the start of the festival at 10 AM on May 5. Of course, octopi aren’t all you’ll see if you come to the festival. We’re throwing in other sea creatures just for the halibut.

After last month’s post, a couple dozen people signed up as volunteers. There’s always room for more help too. If you have time and you happen to be in Rochester, feel free to drop in to the Center for Student Innovation at RIT. We’d love to have more hands helping out. It’s easy to take part. Don’t have time to work with us for long, but still want to contribute? No problem. We’re going to have balloons set up just for making fish. You can come by, grab a couple fish balloons, decorate them at your leisure to make a really cool creature. It can resemble a real fish or be a species we’ve never seen before. We’ll hang up what you bring us to turn the Center into a giant aquAIRium.

As with many of our projects, we’ll have a couple live webcams so you can see the project develop.

Book signing

May First Friday

Other non-Airigami Art?

Larry's winning shot of "lace" in Chrysta Rae's Photo Scavenger Hunt

Our household is full of art. When we’re not doing the work you usually see from us, we’re off experimenting with other media. I only got into photography in order to shoot balloons, but as the Airigami fine art prints started to take off, I found myself developing a greater interest in what I could do with a camera. (A huge thanks to Pat St. Clair for teaching me and always being willing to help when I needed it.) It was no longer just about balloons. I started looking for challenging things to photograph. That’s when I discovered Chrysta Rae’s photo scavenger hunt on Google+. I was just looking to learn more about my camera. Much to my surprise I took second place in the “lace” category in the March hunt. That doesn’t mean we’re changing the direction of Airigami any time soon. My focus is still on the creations I sculpt with balloons. But it sure has been fun shooting other stuff from time to time. I’m taking part in the scavenger hunt again this month.

Upcoming events in the Airigami Studio

We were invited to be part of a promotional photo session for Bella Weddings and Events. While we’re used to being front and center, it’s nice to see our work woven into a larger non-balloon setting. This balloon chandelier was a subtle and elegant addition to an already gorgeous tablescape. We can’t wait to see the final photos!

Underwater creatures will cover the RIT Innovation Center during Imagine RIT.

The World Balloon Convention

There are always people surprised to learn that Kelly and I make our living sculpting with balloons. Even more surprising to many is that we’re not the only ones. We’re proud of the fact that no one creates the kind of art we do with balloons, but there are a few others out there that create their own incredible art. The largest convention the balloon industry sees every other year (yes, there is a “balloon industry”) is the World Balloon Convention. We just came back from Dallas, TX where 900 or so people gathered to show off and learn. That number may seem really huge to some that never considered so many people working with balloons. When you consider that it takes people coming from 47 countries to reach a count of 900, you can see why I say there are a “few others.” As always, it was really exciting to see what others are doing out there. I’ve taught so many years at the convention, it was nice this year to just enjoy and learn from the work of others this year.

Imagine RIT

Last year, Kelly and I led a team that consisted of students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, artists, and assorted community members, in building a massive jungle that was used as a backdrop to an interactive game of sorts. That project received one of only a few ribbons awarded during Imagine RIT. I’m happy to say we’re planning another amazing multi-disciplinary installation in the Center for Student Innovation. I’m working with the Innovation and Invention class to create a seascape that integrates cutting edge techno-wizardry. I’m truly excited with the plans the students are working on- be sure to mark your calendars now! Imagine RIT is taking place May 5, 2012. The event is free and open to the public.

We’re going to build the sculpture April 30 through May 4. If you’re interested in helping with the build, let us know by signing up online. You don’t have to know anything about balloons to help. The more hands, the merrier. But it does help if we know ahead of time so we can plan for the number of workers we have.

Visit us for First Friday

The artwork of Something Else Studio will be available on First Friday at Airigami Studio.

Once again, we’ll be open for First Friday on April 6, 6-9PM. This is the usual family friendly studio hopping event. A bunch of studios in the Hungerford will be open. This month, we have a special treat. We’ll have a guest artist, Jannelle Olmstead from Something Else Studio, who will be showing and selling her purse pockets and other gifts in the Airigami Studio. Her craftsmanship is impeccable, you really need to see them first hand.

Piggy Update

Some of you have been asking us where things stand with The Three Little Pigs. As I mentioned recently, this project turned out to be harder than we anticipated, but we want you to know that we haven’t dropped it. It’s still the highest priority item on our list and we’re still pouring time into it. We’re really happy with the way it’s coming along. We’ll have more to show soon…stay tuned!

Of course, it’s not just our art that’s so much fun for us. The stuff kids draw for us keeps us smiling. On a recent school visit, I performed my How to Catch a Mouse show. In just the time it took for me to pack up, sign books for kids, and load the car, one class had already drawn pictures of their favorite parts of my show. I was blown away when their teacher presented me with a class set. I must have shown the drawings to a dozen people that day. It was incredible to get a glimpse into the minds of the elementary kids in my audience.

Kid's eye view of "How to Catch a Mouse".

Asked to draw what they saw, the kids even drew the audience.

Other things Airigami is doing with kids these days

We’ve been offering classes in the studio for some time now. While we’ve promoted individual classes with special guests, we haven’t actively promoted custom classes for groups that wish to come in. There’s been a greater interest recently in scout groups, birthday parties, and other small groups coming in to the studio for a beginner lesson and discussion of the art in the studio. We’re structuring this as a low-cost activity for kids and parents to get their hands on balloons and try out a new art form. Contact us if you have a group that might be interested in this.

We had quite the crowd First Friday

R's self-portrait recieved lots of critical attention...

...and now has a new owner! (An art teacher no less :-))

We’re so glad we could be a part of your adventure little man- Keep up the good work!

You can read more from Melissa at Rock & Drool about how things worked out with school/resolved with R’s art teacher.

Chloe, experimenting with snow on glass.

Eventually the stillness is broken- but in a good way- more like hatching than destruction. A little person will walk into the kitchen (object d’art proudly leading the way) head tilted up and smiling at a job well done- even before I’ve said a word. When I see them beaming, it makes each stepped-on-lego, every tantrum, every pile of laundry just disappear. Well, at least for a precious moment or two, while I bask in their pride as they explain tiny details, choices and discoveries.

Now not every piece is one for the refrigerator, but each piece is a step. I won’t even say a step in the right direction. Art is experimentation and observation. It’s embracing serendipity and reverse engineering the good mistakes to do them on purpose the next time. You can’t possibly create something new without trying something different! I think the best thing we’ve done as parents is not just given them access to tons of materials and processes and ideas, but granted them the freedom to just make stuff. They can choose from those experiences what to keep and combine and what to toss away. This is innovation! (and why we need MORE art integrated into the classroom-but that’s a whole other ginormous topic… I digress)

The story that inspired this one…

I stumbled across a blog post “Art and Judgement” by Melissa at Rock and Drool. She described how her second grade son, who hadn’t often shown interest in arts and crafts, was suddenly inspired to work on a self-portrait assignment in school. She wrote about the details he added to his shirt, how he challenged himself to make spirals in the background and proudly illustrated his uniquely colored eyes…

And then this is the part that broke my heart:

He could barely hold back the tears as he told her how his teacher had gotten upset with him. See, rather than waiting for a putty-colored crayon the other students were using for skin tone, apparently he had used a gray crayon to color in his face. He said the teacher had gotten angry with him for this choice.

After he told me all about this incident, he never brought it up again, it seemed to have been forgotten…

Until today…

When he brought the ostracized, rejected picture home with him.

He held it, crinkled in his hand, and thrust it at me.

“Here”, he said angrily, the upset resurfacing, “This is the ugly picture that my art teacher wouldn’t hang with the rest of my class.  I suck at art Mom. Duh”

I was not there. I do not know the exact words that were exchanged in the classroom, nor the details of the assignment.  All I know is they resulted in these words: “I suck at art Mom.”

Several hundred NO!s ran through my brain. I had to reach out to this little guy, those words were a cruel foundation to a wall I just couldn’t stand to see him build.

So I contacted Melissa with a note for her son. I let him in on the big secret- adults aren’t always right. I told him that Larry & I are artists, and that we’ve also run into some who’ve disagreed with our choice of materials in our artwork and that he wasn’t alone. “You are strong to use something different to make art!”

Melissa was kind enough to let us share not only his story, but his piece. Tonight (2/3) is First Friday, and the studio gallery will be open as usual- but along with our work, we are honored to feature a daring and controversial print by an emerging artist from the Midwest. (And mom says he is super-duper excited about having his artwork exhibited in a Gallery!!)

UPDATE: what happened next is awesome…

Mudita -- joy. It is especially sympathetic or vicarious joy, the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being rather than begrudging it. The traditional paradigmatic example of this mind-state is the attitude of a parent observing a growing child’s accomplishments and successes, but it is not to be confounded with proudness as the person feeling mudita must not have any interest or direct income from the accomplishments of the other.

I can’t believe how many hours it’s taking me to write a single column. I really thought this would be an easy one that I could knock off in a few minutes. I hadn’t expected to get lost reading the BalloonHQ archive and all of the old memories. With each old post, I started wandering down another path. I found early discussions about the history of balloons, which started me on a quest to find articles I could recall from various people. I found discussions about the first T & Jam convention in 1999. (This was the first international balloon twisting/entertaining convention.) That got me looking through old photos from that convention which, in turn, sent me looking up old friends that I haven’t seen in a while. I found email describing my plans to attend my first International Balloon Arts Convention (this was a convention focused on balloon decorating). In short, I found dozens of stories I wanted to tell. Then I decided to just stick with where BHQ began. Maybe some of those other stories will be told over the course of next twelve months.

Late in 1991, when the Internet was something that only a few people had access to, I was paying my way through a college degree in computer science by performing magic, juggling, and twisting balloons on street corners and at birthday parties. Magic and juggling were easily studied by spending hours at a time in libraries or with the existing magic and juggling clubs. Learning about balloon art was quite a bit harder. A few random books existed, and I studied every one I could get my hands on. That just wasn’t enough for me. I turned to the fledgling computer network. I invited other magicians and jugglers to join me by posting to Usenet (a distributed messaging system that predated today’s web forums). I began pulling people together to discuss our common interest. We were building an online community for a niche field that just didn’t have enough people for regular offline meetings. The term “social media” wasn’t to appear for several more years, but in retrospect, we were at the forefront of the social media movement. When the world wide web developed, we transitioned to that format. We existed prior to Yahoo!, Google and Facebook. We saw MySpace come and go. This is a huge deal, when you think about it. But initially, all I saw was that I was meeting people that wanted to talk about balloons. In that niche market, we never reached the size of any of those services, but we’re still here, still sharing ideas about our common interest.

We only had a dozen participants in the first year of BHQ. Today, we have several thousand. We serve as many as 500,000 web pages a month. We have a database that contains nearly 100,000 photos of balloon sculptures and decorations. Most importantly, we have an archive of every message ever sent out to the BalloonHQ community. This means that the history of our young industry has been carefully recorded for the last 20 years. The difficulty I had in learning about the art and history of balloons won’t be a problem for future artists being drawn to our medium. They’ll have a place to turn, both for stored information and for the friends that can help them learn the field.

I did a little digging and found the initial notes that I sent out to other networks while looking for others with interests like my own. Here are those notes that were sent to alt.magic, rec.juggling, and the very first note sent to the BHQ mailing list.

Coming up …

First Friday this month falls on Friday, Feb 3. The studio will be open 6:00 – 9:00 PM.

... and he puffed - Pigs on the run (work in progress)

Piles of Pigs

I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions. Two weeks into the new year, most of them are already forgotten. And if something is worth committing to, why should it wait until the first of the year to get started? That said, I will go out on a limb and make one resolution. We’re going to finish and he puffed (our version of The Three Little Pigs, which was started as a Kickstarter.com project). We’ve been working on it steadily since the project got funded, and we’ve learned quite a bit along the way.

One of our greatest accomplishments so far on this project has been development of the characters. We didn’t realize how hard this was going to be. Our past storybook characters only had to appear in a single panel. In a full storybook containing lots of repetition, there’s a need to show the same characters in many different ways. Balloons aren’t the easiest medium to use when subtle variation is needed. Adding to the challenge of getting lots of different expressions on the faces of the pigs, there are three brothers that had to have similar and yet distinctive looks. It took a lot of time to pull this off, but we’re glad to have worked through most of it. The rest seems (almost) like smooth sailing from here on out.

Now that the December holidays are over and the kids are back in school, it’s time to get back on track. To get all of you as excited about the book as we are, we thought we’d share one more image from the story.

Behind the scenes of our holiday card

A couple of weeks ago I posted the video holiday card that we worked on with Etsy.tv. Thanks to all of you that shared it. We were quite proud of our work. Of course, Cathy Stratton, the video producer, gets all the credit for the amazing video. We concentrated on what we know how to do -- balloons and illustration, and were quite happy to have someone else worry about the presentation of this one. We’ve put out a number of videos of our own, but they pale in comparison to what Cathy was able to do with our work.

When I posted that video, my goal was to get it out as fast as possible in order to still be able to call it a holiday card. Now that things are a little calmer, I wanted to take a bit of time to share some behind the scenes images of the project. A look at some of the pics in the gallery below show it going from a concept sketch to the final piece.

Some interesting (I think) notes regarding the video:

• As always with balloons, the scene had to be done quickly. The sculpture was done in two very long days.
• It took quite a few takes to get the balloons flying through the air at the start and end of the video to look just right. What you’re seeing in the video is the ceiling of our studio as balloons were gently tossed from two ladders. Jen stood on one ladder while I was on another releasing them over poor Cathy who was lying on the floor with a camera pointed up. We had to slow down the balloons themselves in order to make it work. We did that by inflating the balloons with some helium. We didn’t use enough helium for them to float. We only used enough for them to fall slower than normal. A different amount of helium in each balloon meant they fell at different rates.
• A challenge for us has always been lighting our photos. But we can do it because we set a scene, point a camera, and capture a particular spot in the studio that we’ve lit well, and a specific moment in time. Working with ongoing video for two days meant that we had to get consistent lighting throughout the studio. This, among other things, slowed dwon the construction of the sculpture quite a bit.
• Working in front of a video camera was interesting. We have lots of experience in front of cameras. We do time lapse videos all the time. TV interviews are short. Someone capturing the entire build process of a piece was different. Always making sure the camera caught the interesting bits of the construction was important, and therefore also took time. It wasn’t a bad thing. It just changed the way we had to work. Somehow we imagined that we’d just do our thing, and this person that never saw us work before was going to magically know what to look for and record.

In case you missed the video, here it is:

Commercial illustration

I mentioned last month that we had done work for the Celebrate Bandra Festival in Mumbai, India. The images below show the finished pieces that were used to promote the event. The campaign was created by Ogilvy & Mather and sponsored by Vodafone.

Upcoming events

There’s a lot coming up in the next few weeks. I hope to see some of you at the upcoming events.

• Friday, Jan 7, 5-9 PM -- First Friday at the Hungerford. As usual, the first Friday of the month is open studio time in the Hungerford (1115 E Main St, Rochester, NY). Crocus Clay, across the hall from us, is doing their Winter Soup(er) Benefit. It’s a great fundraiser. Buy a handmade bowl and get a meal with it. All proceeds go to Healthy Sisters. If you come for First Friday, please watch where you park. If our lot is full, you can park at the credit union and Vietnam Vets thrift store. Parking is not permitted in front of the deli or too close to the railroad tracks. Cars will be towed and those of us in the Hungerford have no power to prevent that.
• Wednesday, Jan 18, 6:00-8:30 PM -- Balloon jam in our studio. While this is mostly local balloon artists gathering to have fun and share ideas, it’s open to anyone that wants to get their hands on balloons and try stuff out. Feel free to pop in for a few minutes or the whole time. We always love to see new faces. There’s no cost to hang out with us.
• Jan 25-29, Mystic, CT -- Clown Jamboree. Clowns, balloon artists, and other family entertainers can attend this event to improve skills and network. I’ll be teaching a full day of balloon classes on Jan 24 as a kick off to the event. There are a few slots still open. We’d love to pack the place.

We just wanted to end on a happy holiday note. Thanks to Etsy, and especially Cathy Stratton, for working with us on the following video.

Catch me if you can.

Snoopy balloon at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on parade morning before the parade started.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade

There are some things we just have to do for the fun of it. This year was my second year in a row as a balloon handler in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Last year, I got to walk with the Buzz Lightyear balloon. (check out my visit last Thanksgiving.) This year, it was Snoopy. This is nothing like the balloons I work with year-round. Maybe that’s what makes it so much fun. I played no major role in this. I was just one of 70 or so volunteers walking through Manhattan holding what I guess we can think of as a really huge dog leash. One of these days, I’ll get a chance to build a really cool parade balloon for the Macy’s parade. I’ve done big stuff for other parades (the Pulaski Day Parade float we made is a great example), I figure it’s just a matter of time before I meet the right people to make that happen.

Airigami balloon-based illustrations advertised the Celebrate Bandra festival in Mumbai, India

Celebrate Bandra

Most of my international work has required the hassles of airplanes, passports, jetlag and, frequently, massive language barriers. This time around, however, Kelly and I were able to work in the comfort of our own studio to create fun pieces for the Celebrate Bandra festival in Mumbai, India. Everything from the festival program to billboards advertising the festival displayed our balloon-based illustrations. It was fun creating music and art themed pieces targeted at an international audience.

Crazy Art and holiday shopping.

This new book by Chantal Alles was a treat to see. Of course I knew I was going to have some of my work in it before it arrived, but I was blown away by all of the other work in the book. It’s just a fun and very well produced compilation of unique art by quite a few artists from around the world. Up until now, our online store only included our own books and artwork. We decided this was a must have book that we wanted to make available to others. So while you’re poking around our shop looking for holiday gift items, make sure to check out Crazy Art.

We’ve been slowly adding other new things to our shop as we’re able and hope that you’ll come to us for some of your holiday gifts this year.

Miracle on E. Main St and other happenings this weekend.

If you’re looking for a way to support not only our work, but the work of other local artists, this Friday and Saturday we will be part of the Hungerford Holiday Sale (1115 E Main St, Rochester, NY). Studios will be open for touring and shopping on December 2, 5 – 9PM  and December 3, 11AM – 4PM. Be sure to stop by, we’re planning a large installation piece in our studio!

Rochester Contemporary Art Center is holding it’s annual member exhibition this month, with the opening also this weekend. In addition to one of our pieces being in the show, I’ll be taking part in their event, The Days the Artists Spoke. On December 3-4, many of the artists participating in the show will speak for a few minutes each on the artwork they’ve submitted. This should be a really fun event.