inspiration Archives - Page 22 of 29

I have pre-ordered exactly one thing in my life. It wasn’t a copy of Frozen for my kids or a must-have Xbox game. It was a book filled with the work of an artist who died not long after I was born.

Mary Blair’s artwork is a thing of obsession to me. Her work elicits such nostalgia.

Y’all, I literally gasp with every page I turn.

I’m not going to pretend that I know anything at all about art. I’m not going to give you a bio on Mary Blair other than to tell you that she worked with Walt Disney on visual concepts for Cinderella, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and on creating the It’s a Small World ride at the 1964 New York World’s Fair (which later became a ride at the Disney parks)….

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Elmer’s ProBond Advanced. All opinions are 100% mine.

I have a healthy skepticism of DIY products that promise the moon and the stars. Even though I know that it’s completely bull headed, it’s always hard for me to believe that there are really such big advances in things like paint or glue.

So, imagine my feeling when Elmer’s approached me to do a review of one of their premier glues – ProBond Advanced. Yes, the same Elmer’s that makes the school glue that I probably ate 30 years ago. They asked me to create a mixed materials project that showcases ProBond Advanced’s ability to bond wood to metal, glass to concrete or ceramic to drywall. I generally make it a practice to not make projects just to make them (ain’t nobody got time for that!) – even if someone wants to pay me to do so. This time, though, I did have a mixed materials project that had been on the back burner for some time, so I decided to give it a go.

Now for some history on this project. Back in May of 2012 (yes, almost two years ago!), my friend Pam of Retro Renovation sent me an email and told me to go see a guy here in Austin who had stumbled across a bunch of brightly colored plastic decorator panels from the 1960s (Pam wrote a post about them here, where you can find more details about their history and more pictures of the different patterns and colors of the panels). The guy’s father-in-law is a picker who got his hands on an unopened box of these beauties in an old Pennsylvania warehouse. I bought three of them from him – two are blue and have a bottle design and the other is green with a bubble design. He told me to lay them flat so that they wouldn’t break (they are a little brittle from age), so I slid them underneath my bed.

And they were there until a few weeks ago. Seriously….

Drawing Inspiration: The Artwork of Mary Blair

A Project Fifty Years (Plus Two More) in the Making