Year of the Monkey

Recently, the contest theme was monkeys, since this is the year of the monkey in the Chinese zodiac. I went with just the Chinese symbol for monkey, using the colors, white, gold, and blue, which are supposedly auspicious for the year of the monkey.



The colors are actually the same as the ones from the state fair ribbons. I looked up several different versions of the character to try to come up with a rendering somewhat like what would be used in a chop,

I had so much fun with this, I tried making versions for all twelve animal ideograms of the zodiac, continuing to use the recommended zodiacal colors as documented on wikipedia. You can see them all here.

My entry came in right smack dab in the middle of results. My favorite was this landscape of frolicking monkeys.

Papercut

This week's contest was one of those that requires a format, instead of themed content. In honor of the Chinese new year, we were asked to make red and white designs that looked like Chinese paper cutting. I decided to take a sly approach to it and made an arrangement of shapes that looked like the leftover snippets.



I got quite a few nice comments appreciative of the humor, but it obviously has more of a niche appeal when there were so many ACTUAL nice paper cut-style designs.. It got 56 votes and came in 133 out of 218, so just a hair better than last week. My favorite entries were the garden birds, stylized zodiac animals, patterned hexagons, and teapots. I also really liked the guitar-shaped dragon panel. And for a more usable general fabric, the simple clouds are a nice idea.