Bean Mosaics

Host: MC

This was a straightforward, slightly goofy, and especially fun project. Members collaborated on the week leading up to the meeting on what materials to get, settling on traditional dried beans, with the addition of aquarium rocks to provide a little extra color. Most members did a small amount of image-reference research, but in the spirit of BANOS, improvisation and on the spot creation and problem-solving was encouraged. Host Milton scavenged some wooden boards and primed them with a thin layer of neutral gray in the afternoon.

MC's snail with cigarettes

DH's Native American iconography

MR's portrait of his daughters, though most members agreed it's

really a portrait of his younger daughter with his wife

NG's bandito

Most members went figurative, and even Derick's decision to employ symbology rather than a figurative depiction of a person or thing shows how the media helped determine the subject matter. As you can see in the faces on Mike's and Nathan's, or the text on Milton's, the challenges as well as more rewarding aspects of the pieces were a product of using a fairly large shape as the smallest increment, or pixel of sorts.

Zine-Making

Over dinner, members decided on a theme for the zine, which turned out to be Fantasy and Sexuality. 

Source material.

Using materials that some members brought, in addition to stuff from around the house (a jar of vintage matchbooks), and a stack of vintage sports and soft-core magazines, we each created many pages for a zine. Each of us worked within the dimensions of half of a standard sheet of letter sized paper.

Completed pages laid out on kitchen 

floor for determining order.

We chose as a group which ones we liked, attempting an even distribution of works per member. Then we laid them out and called off-site member Harrison to determine an arbitrary order for the zine by asking him to name a random series of numbers.

We all used all 3 of the following techniques: drawing, collage, text. Furthermore, we often used two or all three approaches within one page.

Examples, after photo-copying:

Text

Collage

Text/collage/drawing

Drawing (back cover)

The next day members who were available to do so went to Staples and ran off copies, then reassembled at Milton's to collate and staple pages.

Contact us if you'd like a copy of the first official B(A)NO[S] zine, titled Mushrooms and Clams.