My Trucks at Two Boots, Jersey City


I'm currently exhibiting my watercolor paintings of trucks at Two Boots in Jersey City. They'll be up until the beginning of February and I'll be hanging out there with my kids on Monday, January 20th from 12-2pm. I'll have coloring activities for the kids so drop by, grab a slice and check out my paintings. Two Boots, 133 Newark Ave, Jersey City, NJ Artist Statement: Jay Boucher is surrounded by trucks. Trailers, dump trucks, delivery vans, garbage trucks; day and night they rumble and rattle past his ground floor studio. Seeing life and personality in these utilitarian machines, Jay decided to render them in the fluid medium of watercolor.

Play Games for the Holidays


I'm looking forward to playing some games with my daughters this Christmas. I just bought Mastermind a couple weeks ago and we can't stop playing. They're fascinated at how I can deduce which colors they've chosen based on the clues they gave me and they've gradually gotten better at figuring out the codes themselves. Playing games can be a great way to bring people together, challenge each other and learn a little in the process. Here's hoping everyone has a fun holiday! UPDATE: We got games for Christmas! We now have The Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride in our game library.

Let’s Make Games: Board Game Quest


For our final class in "Let's Make Games" we created board games based on the idea of a quest. We spent a couple of Friday afternoons drawing a maze, creating playing pieces and dice, and developing a story for our game boards. Students created rules to follow and made short cuts and dangers. During our final class we had snacks and played our games together using 10 sided dice. It's been a fun trimester at HOLA and we've had a good time mixing art, design and craft to make enjoyable, colorful games. The kids created imaginative and decorative pieces and it's been a blast. I've loved having such enthusiastic creators and I know they've enjoyed the projects too. None of my students wanted to leave our last class! See more posts about this game design class →

The Ms. Male Character in Video Games

Anita Sarkeesian's latest installment of her informative "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" covers the issue of female characters in games that are made up of clothing adjustments applied to the standard male template. In the video she outlines the history of the game Ms. Pac Man and points out that adding simplistic, stereotypical gender signifiers to an otherwise male design creates female characters that have no independent identity beyond the male that they are based on. I remember being disappointed when Rovio updated Angry Birds with a pink female bird because it seemed to imply that all the other birds were male by default. Sarkeesian's video covers the controversy surrounding that decision as well as Rovio's defense and subsequent addition of bows and lipstick to other birds. While it can seem silly to focus on entertainment characters as a means to facilitate social change, I think some game makers may not even be aware of what they're doing. There should be a broad range of both male and female personalities available in games, rather than a sole, girly Smurfette in a diverse world of enterprising Smurfs.

Let’s Make Games: Polyhedra


In anticipation of creating more complex board games we constructed paper dice. Everyone is used to 6 sided cubic dice so I brought in templates for 8 sided and 20 sided. We had enough time to make the octahedra but the students had to take the icosahedra templates home. Hopefully they were able to employ a parent to help because constructing a 20 sided dice is quite a challenge! See more posts about this game design class →

Let’s Make Games: Picaria


Picaria is a two person game that originated from the Zuni or Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest. The play is similar to tic-tac-toe, but consists of two stages: laying down pieces, then moving them to try to form three in a row. It's a quick game and after the students finished creating and decorating their boards we all had an opportunity to play a few rounds. See more posts about this game design class →

Let’s Make Games: CD Jewel Case Maze


I found this project on the Bloesem Kids blog and it's a wonderful way to recycle old CD jewel cases. Before class I emptied out some old cases from boxes of CDs I had stored in the attic. I had to reject a few that had parental advisory stickers attached (doesn't Prince's Purple Rain seem kind of quaint these days?), as well as a few that were cracked. The Bloesem blog advises using Fimo dough to create small balls to navigate the maze but I used ball bearings instead. Luckily our local hardware store has a drawer with loose steel ball bearings for $.20 each. A diameter of 5/16" was perfect; bigger than that and the ball would get stuck in the case, smaller and it would jump the sides of the maze. More →

Let’s Make Games: Play in the Pumpkin Patch


This week our class laid out board games. Based on a Halloween theme of a pumpkin patch, each student created a meandering path across a poster board, divided it into sections and filled it with four colors. We then decorated the board with pumpkins, gravestones and haunted houses. One child even made a pumpkin lake, a huge oval filled with pumpkins, which he thought was hilarious. Next week we'll make four-sided dice to roll and create a set of playing pieces from Crayola model magic.
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