Sunday, February 3, 2008

Drawing: The 100th Post

Here we are - my 100th post. It arrived a lot faster than I thought it would.

In Honor of the 100th Post

To honor the 100th post and the end of January - A Drawing (almost) Every Day Month - and the culmination of the L&TofM5K Flag Makeover Contest, I'm going to do something really cool. For you, the readers . . . I will randomly select one person who leaves a comment on this post, and I will design them a flag! Imagine - your own personal flag, designed by me!

Defining Drawing

From the Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Unabridged, Second Edition:

draw, v.t.

  1. pull; haul; drag
  2. to pull back the drawstring of (a bow)
  3. to attract; charm; entice
  4. to bring forth; elicit
  5. to take into the lungs; breathe in; inhale
  6. to pull out; take out; remove; extract
  7. to bring about as a result; cause to happen; bring on
  8. to pull out of shape; distort

I love these different definitions, these different ways of looking at a word that we typically think of as meaning mark-making, or making marks as a way of representing something we see. We might also think of the mark-making as something that elicits a response, something you breathe in, an essence you extract from something, something that you distort as you view it, something you use to charm a viewer . . .

And Here's the Flag

Very flaggy. With a leaping Salmon. The green field represents an abstraction of the mossy, tree-filled state of Oregon; the blue band on the top represents the Columbia River; the wider blue band on the left represents the Pacific Ocean. The gold band running North-South represents the Cascade Mountain Range; the gold band running East-West represents both the Oregon Trail and our trade relationships with Asia and exploration of the sea; and the Salmon represents our natural resources and a long tradition of both Native American peoples and more recent immigration. The slight crookedness of the lines, well, that's just an accident.

4 comments:

claudia said...

Congratulation for your 100th post. Time flies!
A flag? Is there such thing as a flag with a squirrel(me) and a pigeon (my husband)? That would be funny :)

Chance said...

I like this flag a lot, but what I really enjoyed was watching the creative process.

Bridget said...

The process was definitely the fun part - I can't say I feel really satisfied with any of the final flags, but I had SUCH fun doing them! And Claudia, I see no reason why there couldn't be a squirrel/pigeon flag . . .

gl. said...

i'm a little afraid of commenting. what if i win? what will the next beamon be? :)

seriously, though, i'm w/ chance: i loved watching the flag process.

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