Lilla Rogers' Bootcamp... gone cuckoo!!

Month one in Lilla Rogers' Bootcamp has come and gone, along with February, so I thought I'd give you a quick recap! First of all, I wasn't sure at first whether or not to sign up for this course, but somehow I knew that once I started seeing all the beautiful pieces coming in, I knew I would want to get in on the action. I work better with a brief anyway, and bootcamp is a more affordable option to Lilla's classes. If you have been on the fence about taking one of her MATS classes, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet. The schedule is much more spread out, with a week for the mini assignment and then 2 weeks more to develop the final and upload it on the gallery on her studio site. In MATS, you have less than a week to do the same thing, so time seemed like a luxury.

Being a natural born procrastinator, no surprise I abused the time frame and essentially did it in a week, but somehow, it seemed far less stressful than MATS. I actually really liked the subject matter of cuckoo clocks! Being a collector of all things cute, german and wooden (a.k.a. smokers, wendt & kuhn flower children, angels and various other bavarian kitsch) , it appealed to me. We had a cuckoo clock in my house growing up. Can't imagine having one now with the chiming and cuckooing in the half hour, but you do get used to it. 

here's a little peek at my WIP in illustrator. I did everything in it.

The challenge came in when Lilla defined the end piece as a cell phone case. Cuckoo clocks are loaded with rich details, so it was hard to imagine how it would all translate well down to a such a small format. I played around with some different ideas, like turning it into a skyscraper type condo bird house, not unlike the ones you can buy for purple martins, or possibly making a city scape out of different clocks/houses, but in the end, I decided to focus on the birds. My thinking was that it might be a good way to fill the vertical space of a phone case and besides, birds are cute and fun to draw. As far as style, I went for a symmetrical folkloric look, kind of like the party paper assignment at the end of MATS B. What can I say, I'm a sucker for symmetry ;) It was fun to try to give some of them a little personality. 

The gallery of over 400 cuckoo cell phone cases is amazing. A ton of great pieces, so if you have the time, check it out here.  Enjoy!!