Minneapoils Details : Ford Parkway Bridge / Mississippi River Graffiti

Chris and I went on a walk with the dogs this weekend across a bridge by our house. We live about four blocks from the Mississippi River near a bridge that crosses over into St. Paul. As we were walking across the huge, expansive bridge, I saw a glimpse of some color under the St. Paul side. When we reached the far side of the bridge, we crawled down the bank, alongside the supports of the bridge and found a gorgeous, colorful mess of graffiti. Finding stuff like this makes me want to run around and explore the other nooks and crannies. I thought you might enjoy seeing what we saw.








As we stepped down underneath the edge of the bridge, we could see across the whole Mississippi. The giant bridge had been painted all the way from where we were standing, to the other side of the river. We could see the tags run atop the first supports -- all the way beneath the road, high above the river. If you take a close look, you can see it. I can only imagine how crazy it must have been to scale the underside of that bridge. It's quite a drop down...









The dogs were running around like crazy-dogs, over rocks, mud and piles of smashed spraypaint cans. It was beautiful, and weird. Sort of like a strange, hidden place. I wonder how many people have been down there to see it?

New Project: Minneapolis Details!

Hey everyone! We are in the early stages of a new project and we can't wait to share it!


Gotta love that sparkle

The project is tentatively called Minneapolis Details and it started during one of our daily commutes from South Minneapolis to Uptown. There are a lot of bits and pieces of Minneapolis that are worth sharing and we're planning on covering a couple different themes. Our very first trip was to document and gather details of one street in particular.

As we travel down Minneapolis' lengthy and diverse Lake Street, we always marvel at all the typography and hand-painted signage that might go unnoticed to the normal passer-by.

Each block has tons of personality and we wanted to get out and isolate those details we found charming.

We started on Lake Street in the Midtown area, but we'd like to expand East, West, North and South and cover as much of the city as we can! And who knows where else?

We're busy curating Minneapolis Details : Lake Street, Part 1 as we speak. Soon you can see what we see and love what we love about our city.

Daily Pattern: Photo-works

Alright, today's pattern needs a bit of an explanation: I've been thinking about trying to do a photo-based pattern since we started this project. I love my camera, and although I'm not a stellar photographer by any means, I thought it would be a lot of fun.

So I went to tonight's fireworks at Powderhorn Park with the goal of capturing as many clear, crisp photos of fireworks mid-explosion as I could. I expected the worst and assumed I'd bike home and have to start from scratch with no useable photos. But it went great. Now I have a massive collection of pretty perfect firework shots.



So this pattern is made from just a handful of those bursts. I didn't adjust brightness or color, or even size for the most part. Maybe I should have, but I was so enamored with the results of my photo session that I just wanted to keep it raw.

I'll probably be setting up a flickr set of my favorite shots at some point this week!

Beautiful day to draw & drink tea

Today is gorgeous outside. It's just a little cooler than it has been lately. It's light sweater weather. Just like I like it. The dogs are calm and we are plugging away at some pattern projects.


Twinkle likes to help Francesca Draw when he can.


He's not too harsh with the critiques


Strangely Delicious new tea with beautiful packaging

I got a new tea at Seward Co-op over the weekend and just got the chance to try it out. It's from Juniper Ridge and comes in this gorgeous container. I suppose I'm a sucker for nice looking packaging. They also sell a tea that is douglas fir tips. I wonder how that tastes... I see Bear Grylls making tea out of weird stuff all the time and it doesn't kill him. I'll let you know how it goes!

(This tea tastes like minty pizza)

Clement Valla

Clement Valla makes a lot of interesting art using unexpected digital tools.

In his project Bridges, he uses satellite photos and 3D landscape information from Google Earth to find bizarre photos that wrap man-made structures to the contour of the earth.







The result is almost a little scary.

Things Organized Neatly

Sometimes it's nice to tear apart everything in your room/apartment/desk and put it back together in a neat, organized fashion. Usually when I do that I want to re-alphabetize my dvds or sort my sketchbooks by date. But sometimes, you don't have enough time for that so you have to get your organizing fix somewhere else, like this crazy Tumblr blog, Things Organized Neatly.





The images vary from organizing simple desk items to taking apart large and complicated mechanisms. Like this car:

Pigeon Champs

These images of the Champion Pigeons on the National Pigeon Association's site are surprisingly artful! And in many cases, totally bizarre!

Wow! Go birds!













I could see this being a great inspiration for some bird-themed paintings!

Houston

There is absolutely no information about this artist, other than their name might be Houston (thanks to the clever URL and his Vimeo username. I even checked the source code of the site, and found all the images labeled with HOUSTON). Hmmm. It's a mystery to me.

That doesn't make me like these sculptures, installations and photographs any less.









Maybe it makes me like it more?

Ben Thomas

We had an earlier post about the tilt shift photography of Olivo Barbieri, some fantastic stuff that pushes the "teeny tiny" look to the max. Ben Thomas is another tilt shift master–with a focus on cities, much to my delight.

Alex MacLean

Alex MacLean is a pilot and photographer. As he flies over the country, he photographs the patterns and effect that man has on the landscape. It makes for some surreal photos.







Some are even downright haunting. Check out his site because there's a lot to see, and this smaller size doesn't do them justice.

Dan Mountford

Dan Mountford created this series of photos, titled The Worlds Inside Of Us, all in camera. He obscured parts of the lens while shooting double exposures, and the results are quite nice.







You can see more of his work on his flickr page, and you can buy prints at his store.

Eszter Burghardt

Eszter Burghardt is a Canadian/Hungarian artist with a passion for Iceland. And who can blame her? After completing a residency in Iceland, she began projects that recreated that epic scenery on a miniature scale.

The first series on her site, Edible Vistas, uses food (such as poppy seeds, coco powder, coffee, milk and chocolate cake crumbs) to recreate the varied and peculiar landscape of remote Iceland.





The second series, Wooly Sagas uses Icelandic wool to similar effect.





I've visited Iceland and found it immensely inspiring. I took over a thousand photos while I was there, but I think Eszter's dioramas recreate the calm and strange beauty of Iceland more convincingly than my snapshots of the real deal.

TasteSpotting

We here at Paper Bicycle Towers love to eat. I think we'd eat non-stop if we were physically able. And we love presentation, when it comes to food, which is why we love TasteSpotting is "a community driven visual potluck" where everyone sends in amazing looking pictures of food.



YUM. Even if you just ate a huge meal, I'm pretty sure you'll look at this site and feel hungry again immediately.

The website has different categories to make sure you can drool over whatever you're in the mood for.

Irina Werning

Although it's hard to feel too self-conscience about an artifact from our youth, we all have photos from our past that we might consider embarrassing, to say the least.

Irina Werning convinces her friends and family to recreate photos from their past with stunning accuracy. The results are pretty special.







Check out the whole series, which is an ongoing series titled 'Back to the Future'.

Taylor James

Taylor James is a Creative Production Studio, which basically means they create stunning imagery for print, motion and web.

I was really impressed with some of their amazing photo manipulations.







The woman shedding her skin is actually a 3D model and can be viewed from all angels. Creepy.