No to be too lofty or anything, that was my prompt as part of the Art House Co-Op Mystery Project.

I received a card with the prompt on it and a Prismacolor marker in leaf green and had to create a project of some sort and then place it out in public to be “discovered.”

With such a prompt as “the future of the year” I immediately thought about a calendar. About pages fluttering in the wind. “Blowing in the Wind” to be more exact. With something like seeds… flowers? something like a dandelion coursing along the wind.

So imagine my delight in finding a little pocket calendar with a purple flower on the cover, reminiscent of dandelions, to use as the base of my project!

I removed the first 7 calendar pages–through the end of 2012–and mounted them to card stock, painted them with watercolors in blues, greens, yellows and a red here and there, and then cut out the swirling shapes. Each side was embellished with the provided Prismacolor pen, the painted fronts with a dot-and-dash pattern and the plain backs with hash marks. Of course, if I’d thought about it earlier, I would have used the Morse code for “the future of the year”, but that was an afterthought.

The remaining pages of the book were glued together using a Neutral pH Adhesive (altered art friends in the past called it Perfect Paper Adhesive) in groups of 3, then every other section was folded in half to spread out the signature a bit, and secured with washi tape. The extended page groups were painted with green-tinted gesso and edged with more washi tape, the folded groups with purple acrylic. The painted tendrils were attached to the page groups so they looked as if they were crawling out of the calendar.

The covers were loosely brushed with the same tinted gesso as well as the promt card, which was then glued to the back cover. The plastic sleeve went back onto the covers to protect it, and a pom pom in purple and white crochet thread was taped onto a toothpick with floral tape and inserted between one of the center page groups and the nearest tendril. To “answer” the question the prompt began, I wrote “begins today” on the rear tendrils. Splatters of metallic watercolor paint were added to the entire project, just to rough it up a bit. (Frankly, I think more of the splatters ended up on me than the pages, but that’s the price you pay for playing with paint.)

Because my paper “sculpture” is fairly light-weight, I decided it needed an anchor. Digging through a  box of “alterables” I’ve been collecting throughout the years, I found the lid of a Harry & David truffle container just the right size and practically the right color.  I painted over the label on the top, loosely brushed the sides (again, with the tinted gesso), and then edged the sides in the same washi tape that edged the page blocks. To weight it down I glued some clear glass pebbles into the base, positioning the pages and pebbles in a way to keep them open and secured.

Finally, a message was added to the bottom of the base:

I am not litter! I am a public art project in conjunction with the Art House Co-Op. For this project my artist was given a certain color of marker and a prompt: “the future of the year.” She took those elements & created me! Please take me home or put me somewhere else so others can enjoy me. Or contact  my creator: randomactscomics@gmail.com.

I’m still trying to decide where to place my paper sculpture (I have until the end of the month), but it’s my hope it doesn’t find its way immediately into the garbage. Maybe I’ll even hear from whoever finds it if they happen to look at the bottom!

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Speaking of the future: I just realized that last week’s post on story-telling brought us to the mid-point in the 64 arts! Are you looking forward to the last half as much as I am?