Happy Friday everyone. Be sure to go out and play today. 🙂
Category: play
Colored Pencil Shavings Transformed Into Playful Illustrations | World of Designers
I love found art and seeing artists be creative and resourceful and being inspired to create with what they have around them, especially things that would normally be recycled or thrown out.
Using an object as basic as a pencil shaving, artist Marta Altés created these clever, yet simple, drawings in which ink figures interact with colorful and textured pencil remnants. By repurposing the shavings, the artist transformed objects that others see as trash into beautiful and integral elements within each piece, including butterfly wings, a ballet tutu, and a lion’s mane. It’s incredible how many different ways she has morphed her doodles into these adorable drawings, with just these delicate scraps.
more via Colored Pencil Shavings Transformed Into Playful Illustrations | World of Designers.
As a kid I loved the shapes these pencil shavings created, so I’m glad somebody else noticed this too. There are some great images, so go check them all out at the link above.
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- Amazing Wall of 12,000 Colored Pencils: colourSPACE (design-milk.com)
Superkilen: Global Mash-up of a Park
Using parks and other playful spaces to improve urban neighborhoods and the residents’ lives…
The nearly mile-long Superkilen park in Denmark is a bold attempt to create a new identity for an “ethnically diverse and socially challenged” neighborhood in Copenhagen, Denmark. An in-depth community outreach process organized by the city has led to a place like no other, with a sequence of plazas that honor different ethnics groups living in the area. Designed by Bjarke Ingels’ firm, BIG, landscape architecture firm, Topotek 1, and artists’ group, Superflex, the massive project also accomplished a lot with a little budget: at just $34 per square foot, the landscape “packs a lot of bang for the buck.” The project, which has recently been all over the design press, also just took home the AIA Institute Honor Award for urban and regional design and an annual design award from Architect Magazine in the “play” category.
The AIA jury, which included Ellen Dunham Jones, author of Retrofitting Suburbia
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7 playful acts of kindness | KaBOOM!
The nice thing about this is you can do this ANY week!
Are you getting ready for National Peanut Butter & Jelly Day? What about No Socks Day? There are all sorts of random holidays, but this week we celebrate a different kind of random—Random Acts of Kindness Week. Here at KaBOOM!, we know all about t
he joys of spontaneous play. Whether you want to call them playful acts of kindness or random acts of play, here are seven ways to make friends and strangers smile, this week and beyond:
Monday: Give a high five—or five!
It’s impossible not to feel energized after a high five. Use this
week as an excuse to give out as many high fives as possible, to
strangers and friends alike.
Tuesday: Draw a hopscotch board on the sidewalk.
Turn someone’s routine walk into a hop, skip, and a jump by
sketching out a hopscotch board with sidewalk chalk. For extra fun,
target a business district to inject some play into the daily grind.
read on at 7 playful acts of kindness | KaBOOM!.
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- Going To A Playground This Weekend? Upload and Rate It! (rohitbhargava.typepad.com)
- 2013 ‘Playful City USA’ Application Open ~ Due March 13! (liamomahony.com)
Power of Play
What a beautiful collection of photos capturing people playing around the world. Happy Friday, go play! 🙂
A More Resilient Species – Boing Boing
Happy Friday! After a looooong work week, here’s a little more incentive to make sure you get some time to play this weekend.
[Okay, fine, for all of you who are too “busy” to read the article, here’s a basic breakdown: you need free play in order to recover from stress, and that if we don’t we’re basically setting ourselves up for early brain deterioration and death.
Now will you take a second to read the article?] 🙂
“A playful brain is a more adaptive brain,” writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in stressful situations.
In our own world filled with challenges ranging from cyber-warfare to infrastructure failure, could self-directed play be the best way to prepare ourselves to face them?
In self-directed play, one structures and drives one’s own play. Self-directed play is experiential, voluntary, and guided by one’s curiosity. This is different from play that is guided by an adult or otherwise externally directed.
more via A More Resilient Species – Boing Boing.
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- A More Resilient Species – Boing Boing (seculardiscourse.wordpress.com)
Happy New Year
Live Science Animal Gallery: Fun in the Snow
Snow-bunnies aren’t the only animals excited about snow; check out this great collection of photos of animals playing in the snow:
See the whole collection, including some adorable snow pouncing.
Even the president of the U.S. makes time for play
Reposted from Hypable:
Though U.S. President Barack Obama is probably one of the busiest and most stressed people in the world, he still has time to show his fun side as seen in the latest photo released by the White House today in which he’s gets caught in a young Spider-Man’s web.
Check out the adorable photo of President Obama fighting Spider-Man below, which was released across the President’s Facebook and Twitter pages earlier today. If you look closely you can even see that the President seems to be making a battle-style sound effect of being caught in Spidey’s web – something all of us have to admit to doing when playing with kids in superhero uniforms!
We wonder which villain the President was taking on. With his hands in the air could he have been impersonating Doctor Octopus? We’re sure the youngster’s imagination was running wild as the President indulged the Spider-Man battle!
Nice to be reminded that there are always opportunities for play, and no matter how responsible or important or busy you are, play is important.
Orcas at Play
This is amazing!
The endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales visited Vashon and Maury Islands on December 3, 2012, searching for salmon. As they passed Point Robinson, they burst into playful antics that have to be seen to be believed: cartwheels, breaches, tail slaps, spyhops, and beautiful synchronized swimming in their tightly knit family groups.
Related articles
- West Seattle Whale Watch: Orcas headed this way, northbound (westseattleblog.com)
- Orcas passing by West Seattle today (westseattleherald.com)
- Pudget Sound Orcas May No Longer Be Endangered (khq.com)
Mental Flowers 