Sketches, Excercise

I hope everyone had a good Valentine's Day, Lupercalia, and President's Day!


Here is a page from my new sketchbook, with a comic at the bottom from my new class. The assignment was to draw: a person running, a car speeding, a ball dropping, someone staggering, and a newspaper blowing. I turned it into something of a narrative, I suppose, with the pun at the end being that the newspaper is blowing the canon in hopes of creating destruction worthy of headlines.

The sketches at the top are for a character named Howard M. Burgers, from another mini-comic I'm working on.

Face Test, Documentation

I spent much of Wednesday night in the shooting space at school, exposing my first 50-ft roll of Super 8 film. There was no real cohesive structure to what I shot, and definitely no narrative thread, but it was really fun and assuming nothing terrible happens, I've very excited to see the finished product.



My friends Molly Gilbert and Nick Jackson helped by letting me impose upon different parts of them a variety of faces, eyes, mouths, and holographic glasses. I drew on them with white out, eyeliner (liquid and pencil), lipstick, and ballpoint pen while we passed a digital camera around to whoever's hands were free.



Most film runs at 24 frames per second, but Super 8 runs at 18fps. I shot at this speed, as well as 9fps (for sped-up playback) and 24fps (for slightly slow motion, as well as a richer image). I also did several seconds of stop motion shooting, taking one frame at a time to animate Molly's creepy fake eyes and Nick putting lipstick on with his tongue.

I'm crossing my fingers hoping I didn't under- or over-expose. If it comes back from the lab alright you can all look forward to seeing it up here soon.

Tie Your Shoe, Beautiful Redux

On Tuesday morning I had to show up to my Artist's Books class with an edition of 15 simple books. So I took the drawing I made last Friday in my comics class and turned it into a little 10-page pamphlet stitched volume.



The covers are made of an old pair of jeans I found in the scrap bin. Everything you see printed has been silkscreened, because I love silkscreening. The paper is nice and soft, thin drawing paper, because I love paper. The flow of images through the book worked out really well, and I find it interesting to compare reading the comic to flipping through the pages.





It's a simple book, but it's well made and very pleasing to handle. These are the only two I have left; the assignment was to pass a copy to each of your classmates and recieve one in return. So now I have even more tiny books. I'm going to have to buy some giant bin thing soon, a side effect of being into independant comics that I had not anticipated.

Tie Your Goddamn Shoe

I'm in a comics class this semester, and so far we've only been assigned simple exercises in visual narrative (from a book I hate) like a ball breaking through a window or someone knocking over a lamp. The other day in class we had to draw 'how to tie a shoe' without using any verbal direction. I guess I'm better at drawing shoelaces now, but I find the assignments a little dull, so that's probably why my sketchbook is developing a profanity issue.

Sherrif Cat

A year ago, in my Video 1 class, my friend Nick Edelberg and I used to pass notes constantly, when we weren't commenting insightfully on our classmate's work. A couple times we passed comic games back and forth: for example, I would draw the panels and empty word balloons of a short comic strip, and he would fill in the text, and vice versa. Thus, Sherrif Cat was born.


I really liked Sherrif Cat as a character, the kind of asshole lawmaker who doesn't actually uphold the law, rather uses it for his own benefit. We also decided that Sherrif Cat must end every strip he's in by saying 'True Dat'. (Get it? Sherrif Cat says True Dat!) Here he is in a very, very nerdy comic, Sherrif Cat Fights For Truth In: The Fibb-a-Nazi Sequence! (See, it's a play on the Fibonacci Sequence, but about lying Nazis making math puns.)


Sadly, the original Sherrif Cat drawings have been lost, due to my sketchbook falling out of my bag while biking. People, I write my name and number in all my sketchbooks, but of the three I've lost, I've been returned zero. Losing a sketchbook is worse than losing your wallet, keys, and phone at the same time. If you ever find anyone's sketchbook, please return it to them.

P.S. I know 'sherrif' is actually spelled 'sheriff'. There's another comic about that where Sherrif cat is playing Guitar Hero.

Scroll

In the spring of 2007, in my Intro to Fibers class, I conducted my first experiment in beading in approximation of organic material.


I can't clearly remember, but I think that the only guidelines for our first assignment was that we had to bead or embroider something, and also incorporate felt. I never got around to the felt part, because beading an entire scroll takes a really, really long time.



To start, I took a 22'' x 30'' sheet of thick soft etching paper, roughly scored and tore it into strips about 3'' in width, painted in watercolor pale yellow lines down the length of the strips, laid them out on a wooden board, soaked them with water from my kitchen sink, and began scraping and hacking at the non-watercolored side of each strip until they had been satisfactorily decimated. I then stitched together the ends of each strip with a zippered blanket stitch, as well as sutured the most gruesome of my inflicted wounds.



After drying, I then attached old chopsticks I had covered in fabric to either end of the scroll, and began the decorative/decaying process of beading around the stitches and open holes in the paper.


I started at the left end and worked my way to the right, progressively darkening the color of the beads I was using, from whites, silvers, and yellow, through oranges and reds, and then to purple and black. I also increased the amount of beading, the spread of the mold.





The stitches that healed the paper were white, but the thread which bound the beads was gold. On the opposite side of the paper, you can see all of the stitching, and when the scroll is wound, the layers of beading and thread peek out.


I was thinking a lot about religion and spirituality that semester (as usual). I was interested in the boundaries between artificial and natural, and organic and inorganic, and the place that human religion and language take within those differences. What does it mean for us to worship documents created by our ancestors, and how does that practice compare to the worship of the natural world? When it is understood that all Bibles will eventually rot and turn to dust, all Torahs eaten by worms, and all our Qur'ans mold and disintegrate, what then is the highest power? As a species so inspired by beauty, we represent the holy in gold leaf and complex geometry; is there a better way? All of our most sacred documents are reproduced and represented in text. I find this to be limiting and unnessecary.

For class, I first suspended this piece, unfurled, in front of a light source, and then took it down to be laid on a long table. When light shows through the paper a completely new texture is revealed. You can see the ravaged fibers and the beads stand out like dark growths around the sutures and gaping holes.

Buttons

Here are some more buttons that were up for sale at the Holiday Art Faire. I use this rainbow fabric to make buttons a lot, because it's soft and fuzzy. There were a couple little kids totally entranced by these buttons.

On Holiday

These are my (artsy fartsy) favorites from a couple rolls of film I shot over the Thanksgiving holiday, in Chicago, and the winter break, in Bodega Bay. That's my little sister Jojo up above, after the first snow after Thanksgiving. Here she is running through a tunnel:


The film was daylight balanced, which is why everything under the florescents appears green, and everything inside (tungsten lighting) appears red:


(That's my kitchen!)

In Bodega Bay, where my mother lives, Jojo and our dad and I all took a walk to the tidepools on Jojo's birthday. Bodega Bay is stunning and it was a perfect day for photography, with overcast skies and lots of soft, cold, diffused light.




I was conciously playing with a couple of things in framing these shots, most notably the horion line - look at the angle of the sky in all three of the above pictures, descending from right to left at the very top of the frame. The sweep of the landscape in all of these is striking. Look at the barely noticeable black trees in the top right corner of the second photograph, and the tiny corner of incoming wave in the top right corner of the third photograph.

The colors of the landscape also struck me as particularly riotus. I was really happy how the development of the photos captured this insane green:


It also helped that I was using my grandfather's old camera, an old heavy Topcon, that vignettes the image a little bit. You can see it more clearly in this photo:


See how the corners are darker? That picture above is actually my favorite of all the photos in the batch. I remember standing there framing the shot (again, playing with the horizon - the sky takes up nine tenths of that photo) waiting for the perfect wave to stretch right across the frame. I was so happy when I saw this come out. Look at that subtlety of color gradation in the sky and the sea! Look at the palpable sense of serenity! Gosh!

The other amazing thing about that day were the rocks. The tide was very, very low so we were able to see all kinds of starfish and anemones and lichen and barnacles and shellfish:




Texturally incredible. You can really see the vignetting of the color and also the focus in that picture of the starfish. I love things that are gross and beautiful the most.

Of course the very most beautiful things there were Jojo and Ross:


I can't help staring at their eyes for at least a minute every time I look at this picture. And for a bonus, the one shot Jojo took for me, with really creepy Tungsten coloring and incredibly eerie execution:


I'm watching you.