Craft

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Animation Craft

In ‘Felt Love,’ a Young Boy and His Mother Learn the Value of Spending Quality Time Together

A mother working overtime at home as a seamstress finds it difficult to carve out a few moments for her son in “Felt Love,” a poignant short film about family, togetherness, and quality time. Created by a group of students at San Jose State University as a senior thesis project in 2020, the piece combines a miniature 3D set with 2D animation to tell the story of a young boy who learns the depth of his mother’s hard work and adoration and how she learns to share that with him.

Go behind-the-scenes of “Felt Love” on the project’s Instagram, and you might also enjoy the stop-motion short “Visible Mending” by Samantha Moore.

All images © Felt Love Film

Art Craft Design

Remarkable Tessellated Forms Emerge in Intricate Origami by Goran Konjevod

All images © Goran Konjevod, shared with permission

In Goran Konjevod’s meticulously crafted origami pieces, countless creases, ridges, and folds transform into stunning forms (previously). Ranging from vessels to abstract reliefs, the artist draws on his experience in mathematics and computer science to create technically precise yet visually organic sculptures.

Konjevod taps into the endless combinations of color, scale, form, and complexity to fashion an array designs from paper. “In the last year or so, I’ve been exploring a new folding technique which allows me to fold curves over pleated surfaces. Normally curve-folding involves complications because paper is not elastic, but with a pre-folded set of pleats, there is more freedom for the paper to move,” he tells Colossal. Each individual object is a miniature engineering feat, while groupings illustrate the medium’s infinite possibilities.

Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

Craft Nature

Guardabosques’ Meticulous Paper Portraits Celebrate Diverse Bat Species in ‘Little Friends of Darkness’

Desmodus rotundus. All images © Guardabosques, shared with permission

Bats can be found nearly everywhere on the planet, except for extreme deserts and the poles, and there are more than 1,400 species with an incredible variety of traits. The tiniest is Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, also known as a “bumblebee bat,” because it’s less than 1.5 inches long and weighs only two grams. Then there’s the giant golden-crowned flying fox, which boasts a wingspan of more than five feet and weighs up to three pounds.

For Buenos Aires-based studio Guardabosques, the mind-boggling variety of the winged mammals inspires Amiguitos de la Oscuridad, or “little friends of darkness,” a continuing project—with its own Instagram account—capturing expressive likenesses in meticulously folded paper. Juan Nicolás Elizalde, who is half of the studio’s creative team, began the series five years ago, fascinated by the animals’ myriad ear shapes, snouts, fur, and colors.

Where Desmodus rotundus exhibits large, pointy ears and a pale nose, Nycteris grandis’s powerful ears shoot up like a rabbit’s, and Anoura fistulata’s long face and tongue are perfectly suited for reaching into crevices to catch insects. In their Guardabosques’ guises, the specimens are crafted from colored paper precisely scored, cut, and folded to shape each characteristic detail.

If you’re in the Northeast, you can find a few sculptures at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in the exhibition Bats!, which continues through July 28. Guardabosques is about to launch on Patreon, and you can follow updates on the studio’s Instagram.

Craseonycteris thonglongyai

Acerodon juvatus

Nycteris grandis

Pteropus capistratus

Clockwise from top left: Balantiopteryx io, Euderma maculatum, Hipposideros commersoni, and Vampyrum spectrum

Anoura fistulata

Micronycteris hirsuta

Clockwise from top left: Hipposideros pratti, Pygoderma bilabiatum, Hypsignathus monstrosus, and Mormoops magalophylla

Diphylla ecaudata 

Art Craft

Francine LeClercq Stitches Thousands of Pixels from Digital Surveillance Footage in Meticulous Embroideries

“Bike,” cross-stitch embroidery, 24 x 48 inches. All images © Francine LeClercq, shared with permission

Analogous to pixels, the tight grid of cross-stitch serves as a fitting canvas for translating digital footage to a handcrafted form. New York City-based artist Francine LeClercq’s embroideries of surveillance imagery capture the tell-tale date and time stamps and grainy black-and-white pictures in intricately detailed, monochrome compositions.

Embroidery has long been linked to domesticity, usually created at home for the home as embellished handkerchiefs, tablecloths, wall decorations, or gifts. Cross-stitch is often associated with samplers, which makers—historically women—would create to demonstrate their needlework skill by stitching motifs like the alphabet, figures, their own names, and decorative borders.

LeClercq abruptly challenges this affiliation with comfort and home by using imagery from CCTV cameras, measures that businesses and law enforcement—and increasingly homeowners—employ under the guise of crime reduction. The artist taps into the pervasive monitoring that is ostensibly marketed as a security measure, yet instills its own brand of anxiety or hyper-awareness.

Through hand-stitched scenes that portray wide-angle overviews of city streets, LeClerqc captures innocuous instances of people crossing the street or standing next to a parked car. She often weaves long threads throughout the composition that imitate the crackled pattern of a frozen video feed. Tens of thousands of stitches go into each piece, distilling 1/24-second clips into meticulously crafted meditations on society’s growing obsession with observation.

Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

Detail of “Bike”

“DC8,” cross-stitch embroidery, 24 x 48 inches

Detail of “DC8”

“SIKKEMA,” cross-stitch embroidery, 24 x 48 inches

Detail of “SIKKEMA”

Detail of “SIKKEMA”

Art Craft

Peter Frederiksen Dramatizes the Dark Humor of Classic Cartoons in His Cropped Embroideries

“The days keep getting longer.” All images © Peter Frederiksen, shared with permission

Chicago-based artist Peter Frederiksen (previously) pinpoints the most ridiculous, exaggerated moments in cartoons and animated shows to dramatize them further into absurdity. Cropping a single outlandish action or event, Frederiksen uses free-motion machine embroidery to stitch stylized compositions that, out of context, emphasize their dark humor.

Recent works include a Looney Tunes-style mishmash of feet and fists that burst through a bulging door in “Some locks won’t hold” and the tongue-in-cheek archery challenge of “Going easy on myself.” Often focusing on escalated tensions, the embroideries accentuate moments of high anxiety in a nostalgic, comforting childhood medium.

Frederiksen has started to switch to digital jacquard weavings for larger pieces. The base becomes a guide for his stitches and provides a colorful backing, which allows for less dense compositions. He’s also incorporated more unwieldy crops, including in works like “The days keep getting longer,” portraying a preposterously elongated filing cabinet.

In April, Frederiksen will open a solo show at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, along with a dual show in June at UNION Gallery in London. He plans to release a limited-edition print with All Star Press on April 25 and has a candle collaboration coming this spring with Varyer. Follow his latest works and chances to attend one of his workshops in Chicago on Instagram.

“Start in the middle and work back”

“Some locks won’t hold”

“Closer with every cut”

“Going easy on myself”

“Interrogation of desire”

Craft Design Nature

Emma Bruschi’s Rye Sculptures Celebrate the Humble Elegance of Ancient Harvest Rituals

All images © Emma Bruschi, shared with permission

Rustic elegance meets agricultural ritual in Emma Bruschi’s rye sculptures. Utilizing a traditional long-handled scythe on her family’s farm in Haute-Savoie, Bruschi harvests straw that she weaves and knots into jewelry and “harvest bouquets,” small works that highlight the natural allure of the crop. Many of her designs accentuate the textures and shapes possible within the humble material as it splays outward in tufts and tightly interlaces in rows, evoking ancient symbols of fertility and timeless growth.

To simplify the process of separating a single piece of straw into smaller parts, Bruschi collaborated with the PEF workshop in Pantin to create a special tool that zips up the center of the shoot. “Transmission is also part of my job so that these ancient techniques can live on. However, straw-working tools are sometimes scarce or of poor quality. So it seemed logical to me to reproduce these ancient tools with today’s means,” she tells Colossal.

Bruschi plans to develop additional implements in the future and is currently working on a book to share more about her work and process. Head to Instagram to see the straw splitter in action, and find available bouquets and earrings in Bruschi’s shop.