alliestrom

And you thought it was over?!

( Feedback commentary! )

IT'S STORYTIME! Well in a way. It's actually time to tell a story about trying to tell a story. It's been a long past couple of weeks with this project, and in all honesty I had no idea it was going to shape up like this until ... yesterday. I was just illustrating for the slides when lo, it became a little story all it's own. So far I've had nothing but good things come out of getting carried away this semester, so.. what the hell, lets roll with it! : D

( The Plot )

Hello digital logbook, it's another stunning monday and the semester is growing terrifyingly near to it's end. What are we now, two weeks and two days? Yikes! There really is never enough time.

Anyhow, this midweek post is about our studio practice. We talked about this in class last Thursday, we went around the room and everybody sort of took a turn commenting on what they do when they're doing stuff. Are we loners, do we prefer to be surrounded by noise, music, scenery, all the little factors we set up that enhance and enable our work practices. Today I get to dig up something in my logbook that demonstrates my practice.

There is one thing about my logbooks that illustrates my work, one that throughout the years has helped to build a fire-hazard under my bed: I am a keeper of multiple sketch pads. Back in the day, I generally kept one and drew everything in it. Nowadays, I have preferences. For instance!





Here's a bite from my Ideation and Process sketchbook, relating to my individual project. This is one of the pages from the 9 obstructions assignment, and so it's covered in writing, musing, troubleshooting, and a couple of doodles. This semester, I've really been using this logbook to journal-document what I've been doing, so whenever I have anything written especially, it goes here. I won't make 'finished' art in it, the paper is too slick. The size is also funny and I don't like the binding. But it's a very 'closed' book, and I feel comfortable writing and doodling in it. I know other people have to read it, but out of my sketchpads, I can consider it something one on one - a battleground in which ideas are cracked together like coconuts.



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I came to a point in my project where it was time to start drawing "for real". I began by making a few stray doodles in the pages of my logbook, but the paper was not growing on me and I found myself reaching for my strathmore pad. I wound up going out and buying an entirely different sketch pad for this part, because I wanted to keep the work for this project from getting lost in my personal doodles - to create a focused space for this part of the project.

It will probably grow fuller with concept doodles from the end of the semester on, but for now, it's a relatively freshly created forum for strictly developmental story-sketches. Character art and scenery goes here. Even the size factors in to why it in particular gets to be the sketch-pad for the job, but sometimes i'm not sure why. For this one, it made sense to me on the grounds that i would be essentially sketching single character shots and doodles of scenery, no need for a larger 9 x 11 or anything. Keep it condensed!



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But wait, there's another one. I have a third sketch pad now, for graphite drawings - Doodles to be digitally rendered do not go in here. I am toying with the idea of making the actual illustrations for the project like this, inspired by the illustration style of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but also by the urge to play with blending stumps again. I used to use them all the time, but I've never created anything fully tonal to be my finished art. So i'm scratching the back of my brain for everything we covered in Drawing, and just having fun. I keep referencing Hugo Cabret as kind of a ground zero 'how to', though it's not at all a tutorial.

Part of the reasoning behind the birth of this sketch-pad is I want to adopt a style for this that fuses pop culture with something a little less focused on a particular style school. Im definitely more for the eastern cartoons than the western. I love their storytelling, the expressiveness, the colors, I think it's great. But I don't want to pidgeonhole the work i'm doing visually into any one category, plus I think more people would enjoy it this way. It's pushing my work further. It's also a little problematic, I jumped into the art for this assuming I'd be taking it in the direction I normally do.. but these are things that tend to develop mid-way. It's just the nature of the beast it seems = =;. Luckily, this is what this project is about.

Anyway as you probably guessed, there was no way I was going to make these drawings in my concept pad, nor in the process book. Both were too small for my liking. The concept pad had a workable binding, but the sketchbook I bought for this one has some of the nicest feeling paper I have ever touched. It's hard bound like a book, and it lays perfectly flat even if you open it at the middle. It was about six dollars. I was sold the moment my friend Naki showed me hers.

So yeah! My studio practice relies a lot on specific spaces for the work I'm doing. Outside of ideation and process, I'm currently keeping four other active sketch pads, all for various purposes:



This one's a large Strathmore drawing pad, 11x14. I say large, its just larger than most I keep. Anyway I bought it last spring to be a process book for the same story I'm working on now! But really, it evolved into a sequential concept pad, so it's mainly home to a lot of comic and animation thumbnails plus a few scroodles.



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This one's a Strathmore drawing pad too, but a 9 x 12. I rotate this one with....



..this sketch pad, so between the two of them I can draw big or small depending on how im feeling. Sometimes I need to be cramped, sometimes I'm not into it. The work in these pads usually consists of art that's going to be digitized. I do a lot of my coloring digitally, but I always sketch traditionally these days. The quality of the art ranges from very very loose to very very finished, though the big one (up top) is just a baby and has a lot of filling out to do.



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And one more, my watercolor pad. It's fairly new, I don't like to paint so I decided to really try getting into it. It's a Canson pad, good sized, and all that goes in here is watercolors. So far the above is all i've managed to finish, but I am going to try and fill out the pages over summer. Fingers crossed!



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I also keep every sketch pad I either finish or abandon, so I have a huge collection of old art and process back home in the attic. ...My big sister keeps trying to get me to throw them away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTxwAyh_hm4&feature=bz301

Cat video! But a sentimental cat video. Actually I locked onto it for the scenery, I love garbage filled alleyways. But cats are also a part of my work, in many stories I've worked on before. They may not be as frequent as trees, but in their defense, they don't spring naturally out of the ground and would look very bizarre if not disconcerting if seen as a forest. That may be too many cats. Then, they would probably start fighting, and it would be noisy and unpleasant.

Now that i've thoroughly diverted from any sensible train of thought, everything is still running along. I feel like I've got a bad case of middle-mindedness, that dreadful point in the process where everything is in motion at the same time and you start to float. On a good note, I know for sure how i'm going to tell this story of mine!

Inspired by Nawlz, I'd like to try and build on the concept of a navigational comic. Sort of like the old pick-a-path adventures (what ever happened to those?), only incorporating a lot more art. On the web, the illustrations would be bitmapped - you would be able to find links within the image that would lead to a new scene, a new route or even an offshoot to the story. It would still be a linear story, it will go from a point a to a point b, but there's going to be a lot to explore along the way to help pad it out.

It helps a lot to have that kind of attribute. The setting of my story is a little complicated, I'd really rather not have to randomly inject explanations into the main story. Giving the option to "explore" the setting, I think readers could get their own feel for what's happening in the works, and build a better sense of atmosphere rather than just following the storyline alone.

Of course the deviations would progress the plot in a strange direction, and some of them will dead end, this also adds another facet to how this could work. I mean if it got really intricate, a person would be able to read the story multiple times, having a different take on it each time. Who doesn't love the multiple ending? ^ ^.

It's a different spin on just trying to write the comic or the novel with the illustrations, both of which I normally get over-crazy about and quit. I definitely didn't expect it, but hey if it does one thing, it gets trees back into the project as more than just a background element: the story, all of it's deviations and twists, if mapped out visually would resemble a tree. And that map is what the final product of this process-project is going to be : 3

I asked on my DA if anybody out there knew of some sweet modes of storytelling, and if they did, to send me a link. A fellow deviant, (not as in they commit unsavory acts, but everyone on deviantart is referred to as a deviant. It's the namesake,) Vandalk posted me a link to this one:

http://www.nawlz.com/

My instant reaction was "what do I do now?" but having navigated in, this thing's a beauty. Auditory, the flow, the navigation is something I'd never even thought of. I don't think I could do anything of that magnitude, but it would be amazing to build each part of the series as a website, like the old text RPGs from back before shiny graphics replaced good storytelling.

I've been derailed again. Thanks, Vandalk! (that sounds sarcastic, but it's not - it's a good thing!) I'll have to be sure to include a thanks to everyone in my presentation.

Cripes! I've been working in my logbook a little obsessively, I got on a train and there I went. Digital logbook, can you forgive me?

Today i'm continuing on with character designs for Crow, but so much has happened since the last time I updated. To quickly break it down-

-I went to class.

-I wrote a lot.

-I gathered a lot of information that I thought i would never think about again.

-I worked on the story 9 different ways:
as a recipe
with only font (as in the graphic font, not as in writing.)
backwards
as a music montage
from the perspective of a cat
as a dialogue
including trees
in one paragraph
with one word, one picture, of one mark

-I went to class, I realized I am still bad at explaining my story. Which, at the time was not finished. But i did way better talking about it this time than last time! Which should let you know that the first time I tried to make mention of it was disastrous. I'm expecting good things if this keeps up, and have begun assaulting people with information on it whether or not they ask me for it.

-I wrote more on the story, different configurations, different plot points and tries. Rearrange, rearrange, got frustrated.

-Nearly gave up. Took a break, fussed with character designs to make myself feel better.

-Had an epiphany, story came full circle. I taped a cougar to the door of my room in celebration. Im not joking.

-Executed a draft of the plan for my presentation, have begun padding it out.

-Characters designed, pencils are finished. Two are completely done, and have been posted to my Deviantart for critique, feedback, and to help rescue my gallery from the abyss it so frequently sinks into.
http://shirotsuki.deviantart.com/art/Rain-Remix-119898639
http://shirotsuki.deviantart.com/art/Edolie-Remix-119899803

I also typed a lot about my process in the entry for each of the images, so see those links for further info on that. Im so excited too, Deviantart is actually a bit more feedback-tastic than it used to be!

-plan is to finish one of the 7 designs each day and to continue to work on the presentation, which im hoping to do a powerpoint. IT WILL INCLUDE: (ive put what i've already got in bold, everything else is in progress.)

a grandma statement

the setting and backstory

the characters

the synopsis, a visual outline

the process

an example of how i want to tell it

a link to a blog where i will update with news about the series and eventually link a website to

at least one full-blown illustration


It looks like.. a pretty good sized project I guess. So far i'm finishing the character art at a rate of 1 per day, and in the meantime working my tail off on everything else simultaneously. The project is continuously shifting and shaping, but as long as it is moving forward to the goals I am along for the ride. Those being:

1- Establish a story

2- Work out the means of telling the story

3- Take note of how it comes together - the process is the project, one day i'm going to need it for another story no doubt.

So much to do. But at least i know where i'm headed now, more or less!

Ooooooooh!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTysF1E4Ft0&feature=related

Yes I realize I have done a lot of youtubing, but I can't help it. I'm being "monkey minded", and I like going from link to link to link finding things. And when your friends are media majors, you get subjected to stuff like this.

This is "I lived on the moon" by kwoon. I don't know very much about them, but this has been stuck into my head very solidly for the past several days and I've been growing increasingly obsessed with the rambling little melody the piece is set to. I finally looked up the lyrics today. They're strangely sweet, I didn't expect them all to be in english!

And, of course, that's probably the coolest tree monster thing ever. Go singing tree thing! Additionally though, this video is a mastery of timing. One of my obstructions was to "set it to music," as in a photomontage as the final instead of the website. "I Lived on the Moon" is so well timed to the music, sometimes the percussion and instruments sound like sound effects for the music. Then I get all fired up and crazy inspired.

..to paint.. in watercolor.

MONKEYMINDED!


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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfTGScoilHY

This is another example of what I'm talking about with "put it to music." This is a fan-made video somebody did just by using their line drawings like keyframes to the music. I like this format, I think I'd like to try making the elements move slightly just to make it feel less stuffy. I don't think I'd have time to really animate it, nor the expertise.. there's so little time to do this, and i'm dancing around everything else.. try as I might to not let things stomp on each others's toes. Tis the plight of the finals.

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One thing I know for certain, I'm adding trees into the imagery. I've felt bad, like I've diverted too far off my semester topic even if it is present in the way Ive been thinking all semester long. I love trees! I love everything they stand for, so I want my work to continue to reflect them. One thing in Crow that has always persisted is the industrial city-scape setting, so.. I'm going to try changing that up. Maybe I can use one of my remaining obstructions on that?

9 obstructions time!

For my midweek post this week, I have to post the most dramatic departure from my project proposal. This has been a little wonky figuring it out, because at the moment everything pertaining to the manifestation of my project proposal is like a delicate web of chopped liver.. it's just kind of shredded to bits and all laid out. AND IT SMELLS LIKE MEAT!

Maybe I should have some coffee before I go completely nuts?

Anyway, it does not actually smell like meat. And that has nothing to do with the next part, despite my using Beef Stew as my recipe for this.


OBSTRUCTION #1
Tell the story as a Recipe


In class we watched the "5 obstructions," in which a director (i think?) afflicted his pupil with five arbitrarily (it seemed) chosen tasks pertaining to the remaking of a modernish piece of film called "The Perfect Human." To test him! Or to rattle his cage? It was pretty sadistic. Anyway, now my class has to do 9 obstructions to our own pieces. I feel awkward, like my feet are on backwards. I first thought I should need some direction before I'm able to actually do this assignment, "crap, what do I do?"

It dawned on me that this was a good opportunity to really jostle my pieces around better. Since i'm in week 2, I now need to be looking seriously at and investigating everything I've gathered so far pertaining to this project in order to get a couple of good drafts on a synopsis going. This is a great way to get some clues!

My individual project's goal is to tell a story. So, my deviations from my proposal will be challenges to how this will be done. It will kind of borrow and twist on the first week's task, which was to just focus on and grab up everything I could remember about the series. The troublesome part was that in order to subject it to obstruction, I needed a few keys. So, here is my "perfect human:"


Crow is/has (thus far):
A Character driven story

A conflict, whether or not it's okay to affect and change the world these characters are both a part of and outside of, who has the right to, who has the right to decide if a person has that right.

A main character who is haphazard in his ability to cause change, and oblivious to most of the conflict.

set in an industrial/city setting, to emphasize systematic, cyclic lifestyle. "day in, day out."

Symbolism! Machinery, clockworks are always frequent members of the scenery, and I normally wind up throwing them on everything for good measure. They represent the "system," underlying structure of life as we know it, are objects the characters of concern can see and manipulate.

....I definitely wasn't planning to try and tell the story in any form until I felt like I was more comfortable in the soup I was standing in.





So I picked a soup recipe from the cookbook I got for Christmas a few years back, and defaced it with my new colored pens. I picked soup because it was representational of the problem I have right now - a total lack of order, stuff is being thrown together and tried out. The recipe turned out to be a great format for what I was doing, and by putting this obstruction together it helped me narrow down a KEY POINT that I can build on from here:

"The recipe is wrong."

Write that down!! Or.. tape that down.. I probably shouldn't have done that to my cook book, but to be honest it's a silly soup recipe and I probably wouldn't've used it anyway. And it worked out for this so I don't think I feel too bad. Anyway, the writing all over the recipe is a passive argument between parties over whether or not this recipe works. Both have their own opinions, both impose their opinions on the page and on each other. At the bottom I wrote "but it was fine before.." as something apart from the argument, outside of it.

Things that came up were no characters, which was instantly difficult for me. I always tell stories through characters, I guess in this one though you could think of the viewpoints as characters, even though they're just writing on the page. (A couple of the obstructions I'd thought of has a lot to do with turning my obsession of using characters to relate story on it's ear, as a means of knocking me loose.)

BUT! It's time to move on again, must keep moving. I don't know if this is the most dramatic departure that there will be in the bunch, but it's definitely not something I would have tried to do, nor did I expect it would do a decent job relating what I could scrape together up until now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ-i_u-znmg

This is a video that gave me a shove about a year ago, maybe a little less? I had originally found it looking for the song this person used, Yoko Kanno's "Is it Real?". The album was an import, expensive, and I just wanted the one song, so I went onto Youtube thinking somebody for sure had posted it. A lot of people had, a lot of AMV's - i figured there might be. It's a gloomy song, really melancholy. The piece it actually came from was really melancholy, it's a lovely shade of blue, which makes it AMV fodder. (Not that I don't like AMV'S)

(AMV = animated music video. Oftentimes, fans will assemble the footage from their favorite cartoons to music. The pieces can be very dramatic, to entirely too humorous, to just plain awful, there's a whole ton of them floating around the internet.)

Anyway, pardoning the departure there, the idea was to call up somebody's video and minimize it so I could listen to the song while I was working. When I found this video, I wound up spellbound. It's not the most amazing quality, but the footage chosen with the music, the imagery, the whole mood - and it's full of trees to boot! Everything about this piece was inspiring to me. So half the time it was just murmuring in the background, the other half I watched it.

It was a serious creative nudge for me, especially for Crow: A melancholy tale of the city where life moves like the rhythmic ticking of the clock, busy and frantic, absorbed and mindless; and the ones who notice the rhythm, and how they react to it, cope with it, and move on, or if they can move on. The story is another one of those "questioning the universe" kind of existential crazy-head rides, which makes it ridiculously hard to tell or even summarize. But I think I'm getting closer, and I wanted to call up the video that helped me before now that I'm working to pull it together.

Edit- Here's a link to a much better quality video-post of the music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE-m0fdprTI&feature=related

PROGRESS-
-Formulated 9 obstructions to the synthesis of my synopsis, posting one today! Executing another at some point before the day's out.

-Almost finished gathering history, starting to wonder what's wrong with my head. Plan is to post an illustration doodle relating to each of the "phases" of Crow as they've presented themselves, I think better when I doodle.

-played the piano, It was fun.

My progress tree didn't come out like i'd expected, I instead wound up making an illustration about how I felt about the way it's coming. A fruit with way, way, way too many seeds- too many beginnings, directional to the point of redundancy, and i doubt if planted any of those seeds would know quite what to grow into. Worse, they'd probably just grow into more confusedly stuffed fruits.

...And that's about how i feel right now regarding this project. Lots to pare down, but it's being difficult. I'm not quite done gathering all of the remnants so I'm trying still to be unbiased, but I'm also itching to move forward. It's hard not to start evaluating everything right away. But if I go about it now, I may wind up chucking something important.

PATIENCE.

Blah. So it continues!

Artists who inspire me- I got so caught up in Easter preparations I got blown-away sidetracked. But here are two things that make me go 'ooh!'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g-yVv94Ifc
Yesterday, there was a concert in town... Nobuo Uematsu was in Minneapolis. Or so I think, I didn't get to go- at the least, it was a Final Fantasy concert. Anyway, I love this man's work! It's the piano versions of his pieces I really go nuts for, though. This piece in particular, "Servants of the Mountain", I almost always have on my playlists. I'll admit it's a little clunky sounding next to a lot of the other pieces, but it's still my favorite. Especially the last bit, when the refrain really gets going.

http://joshuamiddleton.com/
Joshua Middleton! I found his work on the cover of a book in a children's book store somewhere in Minneapolis the other day when my Aunt took my sister and I out to see the city a little bit. Yes, I've been here for three semesters, and by golly I have no idea how to get anywhere in this city. At least not past eat street.

But this guy's art is amazing. I love his style, I still haven't been able to pore through his gallery entirely but it blows me away.

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SADLY this is all the time I get for now. I have to make a huge food something-or-another for the potluck in two hours .... gah, honestly, there is no time for this. But friends are important. I'll gladly be stressed out a little more about my lack of time to spend some of my easter with my MCAD "family."

'Course, getting super stressed out about things isn't good or particularly helpful. I'd better drink some tea and think calm thoughts. Life really isn't this dramatic, I'm just in the habit of looking at it that way. Perhaps this will be a later project.

It's already Saturday! Well gosh darnit.

I am excited for today though, today I'm going to the lunch-smart "retreat" with my friend and we're going to relax for a little while. Then it's back to the grindstone!

In other news, I am in the process of making lots of.. process. That page I've posted up at the top is one of a variable number of other pages i've written for my Independent project, I say variable because I don't know how far I'm going to wind up going. All I know is I gotta keep writing! But you know, it's fun to go back in time.

I'm going to be using my final four weeks of Ideation and Process to hammer out a storyline, with the goal of getting it ready to produce in the summer time. I've picked Crow for this, because I feel strongly about the story and the characters and It's a lot older than some of my other ideas. I feel like I owe it to be fleshed out? This is going to be something like the "Process Project", and over the next four weeks there's going to be lots of colors, patterns and tremors in the land of my imagination.

The first step to this project was to start pulling every bit of everything I have ever written/come up with/drawn for this project. The "drawn" part is problematic, since many of my old sketchbooks are at home in Louisiana. I had thought I might bother my family to send them, but I doubt they'd be able to figure out which book I was talking about. I haven't thrown away a sketchpad in years, and I haven't exactly kept my folks up to date with my brain-farts. (ew)

Well it's true, I'm always retching up stories! (ew, again, but it's an apt description. The advent of another inner universe is often involuntary, in response to a lot of stress, and a dead end so I don't bother explaining it anyway.) But.. I do believe they're good. At least, I believe they're okay. I've always been embarrassed to talk about my work, and afraid that without anything solid to back it up it wasn't worth it. So.. that's kind of another goal with this project, to get a little bit more confident. It's not that I'm worried people won't like it, but I am worried about my capacity to do it justice.

I've worked on a lot of projects, a LOT of projects, with and for other people. Myself? Half-way if i'm lucky. So here's to the probability of getting something a little more personal and a little more concrete under my belt.

And yah, that means for once, my work may actually have something to do directly with a story. GASP?!?!?!

(i'm excited. squee.)

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So here we go. Week 1 is drawing to a close, seems a little rocky. keeping track of changes to the original battle plan, I have been doing a little "staystitching" even though i'm not supposed to. When I revise my timeline/proposal, I will add that.

Today's goals!
- Write more! Write it all out, if possible.

- Draw the first "tree" relating to the progress of this story, post it tonight.

- Find two artists who's art makes me want to make rainbows everywhere

- Play the piano

- More later, if something should come up that I forgot. Which is possible; my room is messy, and I normally get flightier when my environment is out of sorts.

I have decided to attempt to corral my thoughts into something complete and workable before summertime, my goal is to be able to begin working on it as soon as the semester-end shock has worn off. I’m talking about getting a story ready to finally be told, one of approximately five bazillion that have been careening around in my brains for a very long time. The one I want to tackle in particular isn’t my oldest idea. I can trace it back for about five years, but I know there are some germs that occurred very, very, very early on. I hope I can find them, but since most of these bits of information is stored at home 900 miles away, I’ll be relying on associative clues in my memory of what I do have.

This is a complicated problem, since I have absolutely got the worst memory in the universe. I keep track of my life through my sketch pads, I can look at my old art and recall what was happening at the time I was making it. The books act like silent pictorial journals, they don’t have anything to do with the events of my life unless you count the meat of the material as something being affected by the events that had been unfurling – stressful imagery, or blissfully distracting imagery, in times of despair, etc. (Anyway, this is a problem to be explored as well.)

Anyway, so begins my search for project proposals to get my selfstuck gears going. I begin with a quote I scoured off the top of the Google search: “A good proposal answers questions; it does not raise them.”

http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Fuji/9270/proposal.html
This is the proposal for the Miyazaki Film “Mononoke Hime,” (pronounced: mono – no – kay he-may (be soft on the y)), many more people are probably familiar with it as “Princess Mononoke,” but both mean the same thing more or less, Hime meaning princess.

I have to say, straightaway, I was not expecting anything like this to pop up, and it blew me away. The proposal is written by Hayao Miyazaki, explaining the content and the meaning of the events, the symbolism, and the subtexts of the film. It is both concise and eloquent, it’s serving a purpose – not a script for the whole thing, not a book about the inspirations and everything that creator-knowledge would be dying to divulge to everyone. Just the why’s. It doesn’t even do too much to spoil the story, but acts as a tantalizing agent for a potential producer.

It finishes with the phrase “I want to make such a movie.”

This is powerful to me. “I want to.” I want to adopt that, rather than “I need to.” Possibly around the same time the story I intend to develop was hatched, I had sewn together a gigantic fan-fiction revolving around the pieces parts of two video games I dearly admired. I’d taken out the important parts, the idea was to leave the “real” stories alone and just make something happening in the background. I had actually drawn an entire first comic for it, and even right now it’s sitting in my dorm room locked away so no one can see it.. I guess I’m embarrassed by it. During the storyboarding, I remember a friend telling me, in so many words, that working on things that had already been made, finished, done, licensed – creating on something that wasn’t original – was a waste of my time. I think that’s about the part I became obsessed with what I “need to” do, rather than what I “want to” do.

Slowly the joy starts to slip away. This isn’t to say I prefer to go back to spring-boarding, I think it was a great exercise to kick me out of that mindset and get started trying to be original from top to bottom, rather than inventing original spins on someone else’s baby. But it caused me to reject the first story I’d ever written that had a beginning, a middle, an end. I could explain it from back to front, right down to every lump and texture. It took two hours to orate, I remember telling it from start to finish at least twice. And I remember being proud of it, whereas now when I hatch an idea, I constantly shred it to pieces and bury it in doubt.

Fluffy I realize. I guess I have that nature!

And now, because I need to keep trees somewhere in my churning thoughts:
http://www.hymatol.org/

Hymatol is a project devoted to phylogenetically organizing a specific group of insects that fall halfway in the hole of mystery in the great range of collective taxonomies over the tree of life. Not in moonspeak: they’re mapping out the evolutionary history of a certain group of bugs. This is a project combining both something I am hideously bad at, and something that I’m stupidly passionate about.

The stupidly passionate part- Biology. It has seemingly absolutely nothing to do with my day to day doings (unless you count what’s happening under my skin at the microscopic levels, and such), the things I think about from one minute to the next, I seldom contemplate mycota or Mendel when I’m up to my armpits in charcoal. but when I began studying it as just an elective, It just made me hungry. I got obsessively caught up in tons and tons of details that for the most part had no meaning even to the tests coming up, because I’m in love with the scaffolding effect – the building up from the bits and bobs into huge and complicated ideas, every next piece relying on a thorough grasp of the pieces that come before it.

With what I’m attempting to do in mind, this is becoming very relevant – it lets me in on a little secret I don’t think I was about to tell myself, regarding the way I like things organized. Which brings us to:

The “bad at”- organizing. I should say, being presentably organized. The proposal for this project is at the bottom of the link, and it is 32 pages long. Extensive! But in the spirit of leaving no questions raised un-answered, it’s covering quite a mass. It’s no small task to want to draw together a “tree” tracking the history of life, a journey that exists on the principle of fortunate accidents. In a way, just thinking about it.. kind of makes my head want to explode.

These guys are organization artists though. They have people from all over the world specializing in everything from fossil data to mitochondrial record-book keeping, all putting their heads together to describe this “tree.”

Intricacy. Detailed. Developed. Thoroughly and carefully designated, tracked, evaluated again and again. These are things I want to adopt into my ethic as well, I guess on the tedious spectrum of things. I think they’re already there, but they fall short in the sense that when asked nowadays about what I’ve been working on, heaven help me I can’t describe it.

“Uhh it has something to do with the universe and.. gears and stuff.”

For this problem, I think the spirit of these folks shall be my model.

And so continues! Or begins. But this has been going on for years, I’m hoping to begin to sew it together. And I’m happy to finally have an opportunity to do it.

So I was running around the Internets looking for information regarding our spectacular spectacle balloon release today, in order to check up on guidelines, if there were guidelines, etc. We're all pretty much committed to this thing at this point, I mean everything's lined up to make it happen, but at the same time, it would really suck if somewhere in the fine-print there was something that could get us in trouble. Course one of the counter issues raised was that we're releasing a relatively small number of balloons and it's doubtful anybody's really going to care.. which, as it turns out, is true!

But I was curious, so I looked it up.

http://www.nabas.co.uk/images/downloads/Code%20of%20Conduct.pdf

Tadah! I had kind of doubted this would turn anything up, but 'lo, here it is: Nabas, the balloon association! So here we go. There is a concern involving areas near an airfield or an airport, which we kinda are. Although our balloons are biodegradable, balloon releases interfere with air traffic. Working in our favor is the number of balloons we're planning to release, about 80-100. Releases of a scale of about 5000 are required to obtain permission 28 days in advance from the CAA, but even with smaller ones you're supposed to write in if you're operating in active airspace.

HOW WILL THIS SITUATION RESOLVE?! Actually it's down to where we're going to launch at this point. If we pick a location a little further out, we're fine.

In fact, i think the biggest problem is...... the string.

HOW UNEXPECTED! But yes, as it turns out, when planning a balloon release you're not supposed to string them, and never ever tie them together. Which is fine. We want them to scatter :3

So whichever way the wind blows, we're lifting off today somewhere. I'm pretty excited! It was raining and looking nasty yesterday, but today looks totally clear. *knocks on wood* Wish us luck!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree

This is evidence of my amazing ability to shoot right to the core underbits of a concept without first looking at the surface. This actually began as a joke, I decided to type "Tree" into google and see what turned up. I've had so much to do lately, I needed some kind of stopping point. But it was the act of doing that that got me thinking.. why didn't I do that before?

I never thought to just look to Wikipedia for "Tree". Just Tree. Not life-trees, conceptual trees, thought trees.. I fear I've lost the tree in my trees. This is monumental! Maybe only to me, but I feel like I'm seeing the tree in two forms now, and I'm not sure if they're both still trees anymore.

Anyway, I am going to do something a little odd and post some work for my next Illustration 2 project in here while I do it. Part of it is I feel like I am not perceiving this journal as a part of my daily life yet, I have certainly failed to establish good posting habits and here it is already midterms. So maybe if I start including it in my work as a part of my work, It will have a better chance of snaring on.

It's also because my next assignment is all about plants and trees, since I'm illustrating a peace about a community gardening group. And I think the visuals would be nice.

Additionally, I think I'm going to challenge myself to just write about trees more. Part of the issue I have with keeping the blog is I feel compelled to draw for it, and then if I can't draw for it, I feel as if there's nothing to post. I don't view my writing as a valid body of work, and I do think there's just as much potential to come out of word-doodling as picture-doodling. It does slow me down and force me to think a little bit, and I enjoy that aspect of journaling.

So much to do. Time to stop missing the forest for the trees.

Hark! Good morning digital logbook, I woke up late today. Yuck!

Todays update is a collection of videos from youtube, to help with my group project! As of last class, we've all begun to clump together to produce a single event of wonder and amazement. Ours pretty much has to do with releasing lots and lots and lots of balloons with little laminated cards attached to their ribbons - greeting whomever may eventually find the card with a doodle procured from an anonymous soul in the MCAD student body, and a small request to email us about where they found the card. The project is called "Stranger to Stranger," and we plan on documenting how far the greeting balloons will actually go by pinning the locations e-mailed in on a map, including a date of discovery, as part of this is to see not just how far they're going, but for how long society gets to interact with them : 3

So, yes. We get to release lots, and lots, and lots of balloons. Best idea ever!

In the spirit of projects involving releasing lots and lots and lots of balloons, here's a few videos from theballoonproject.org. I their work was pretty inspirational - maybe not totally akin to our goal of communication between two unknown parties, but definitely in step with the concept of the journey.

Warning: Some balloons may have been harmed in the process of making these videos!

Here's an introduction to what these guys are up to. It includes their process, and a little explanation as to why they started doing this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnDIdP5vmKA&feature=channel

Balloon Project Berlin!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND06VRnuelY

"Low over Lowlands"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi995DWHZ0w&feature=channel

And Balloon Project Times Square on New Years! It's got a bit of a production lead-in, but it's pretty neato.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YfoTqfuWd0&feature=channel

You can visit these guys at theballoonproject.org. DO IT!

Good morning, digital logbook!

Today's adventure is all about RAAANDOM ASSOOOCIATION! (you should say it aloud, in a big voice.)

Well it isn't necessarily random.. I should say it is a collection of thoughtful organizations of random componants. This began last Thursday in class with an introduction to a lovely on the fourth floor of MCAD, the Guillotine, a collection of magazines or otherwise bound media, and a bag full of words ranging from feelings to phobias to phrases about yelling fire. The idea was to take your magazines and hack them into post-it sized squares with a giant and potentially dangerous chop-chop apparatus, sort through the pile of loose paper squares for images lacking text, and then, without bias or judgement, to select a collection of 25 to pair with a handful of words randomly pulled from the big bag o' words. Then the squares were paired with a word each, and then with each other. The organizations could form groups, sequences, narratives, anything went.

Now as the week wears on, the assignment has morphed into the collecting of 25 pairs of magazine chop-outs, 50 in all, no words. I had at my disposal so far a Japanese Newtype magazine, an old calendar, and a stack of scrapbook papers, but I am hoping to run across another magazine, preferably one with nature in it. Much as I love Japan and Japanese cartoons, variety is good!

Anyway onto the topic of this post, I get to share some of my combinations. I will begin with my two favorites so far:




This one stands out to me above the rest by far.. but it is difficult to explain how that's possible or why, since the whole series represents a visualization of my internal dialog and self-interaction with all of the scattered pieces-parts. And I'm pretty sure everyone's gestalt is like their thumb print, no two individuals will ever arrive at the exact same conclusion. I digress! The images I have chosen here in particular resonate with me a key of nervous anticipation, or dissolving "reality".

I'll comment real quick that while the images I have paired together shape the "meaning" of their unity, the way I have arranged them on the page also plays a large part in the impression they give. (Yes. I seriously did move these things around like crazy before gluing them down.)
~~~





Heres a fun combination, the sensation of mystery and intrigue. There is writing on the lower sample, i am sorry; I couldn't resist the little photograph fragment, and I figured the writing, being Japanese, is sort of like more pictures.. at least to me anyway.
~~~





This mash-up is a contraction, specifically "don't", the apostrophe being the space dividing these. I always have to stop and think about "do" and "not" being paired together.. it's one of those things that makes me run in circles and I am not sure why. Do is a positive, Not is a negative.. and.. I know I am making no sense.. so carry on. (Additionally, the "don't" here is read backwards.)
~~~





I am aware these came from the same image, but seeing them out of context arranged like this makes me say "ooh!". And, unsurprisingly, it is called "ooh!"
~~~





Again, a simple recombination of a once whole image. Now it is a pattern.
~~~





This set is about how hard it is to remember. I can't explain it any more thoroughly than that. I am attracted to nighttime cityscapes, and any time I have seen one it has been while traveling to somewhere. Transition, movement, leaving, arriving, crossing, fading, discovering, rambling, moving on...
~~~





Here's a contradiction: Still movement!
~~~




And lastly I'll add this, a word on searching for something.
~~~


I don't believe any of these arrangements have to do with trees specifically, but they are an example of "groves". A grove of trees looks like it sounds, just a patch of trees. But under the soil each individual tree is interconnected at the roots and they depend on one another. As such, these images stand alone even in their pairs, but if one were taken away their deeper connotations would be destroyed.

Abstract and fluffy. But this is a train of thought we're talking about, here = =;

Good evening, digital logbook.

I found myself wondering today that if i spent more time on the internet, if maybe I would have more than my drawings to show in this digital log of mine. I feel I am using it more as a way to further delve into the things I am bumping into along this semester-long mental journey into the center of my process. I don't think this is a bad thing, so far I have also noticed that where in the beginning I had little idea of what to do with either this journal or my actual physical logbook, things are taking shape in a way that I find sort of addicting.

Anyway, I learned a fun expression last thursday: "Horror Vacui." It means a fear of empty spaces, basically, and manifests itself on paper in the form of innumerable forms spreading and crawling across the page like an angry swarm of fire ants. Sort of like this:






This is a page from my physical log. Actually it's two; I treat each open face like one big page and freely cross over the binding. It is part of my attempt to edit my perspective on how to keep a sketch pad. I use doodles as well as blocks of text as if i am journaling, and place them wherever I feel like actually. The whole process is very spontaneous, and every set creates this flowing tide of information that I look at and relate to as a visual representation of what was going through my head at the time, which is something I don't think i have ever really done before.




These two pages are about two of the sketch pads I had been combing through in the Library. On the one side was my adventures in the sketchbook of the artist Fan, Evah (B N 7433.4.F36), who's sketch pad's pages were filled with very, very literally illustrated "mad libs." A mad lib is like one of those pages you get where words are left out and you get to fill them back in, it always has a prompt such as "adjective", and what have you.

It is part of my assignment this week to find an artist who had a sketch pad similar to mine. My sketch book reminds me of an insane person, and so far I have not had much luck tracking down somebody quite as sucked into their own heads. Perhaps once I've better nailed down a theme that will get easier, but I have no intention of forcing it to take on a shape as long as it continues to "grow" ideas- remember, my theme is trees. But anyway, I decided to take my time and explore the sketch pads I came across in the meantime as if attending a lecture. I tried out Fan, Evah's process with my own spontaneous thought-writing, so on the left page there is a literally illustrated block of text I had created yesterday on the 14th. I chose it because it really seemed akin to the craziness that mad libs tend to shape into, the phrase had fallen together like this:

"I would do it wrong I would doodle in the margins and scratch cats on the back of their whiskers with a toothbrush last Sunday afternoon when i ran to the public restroom in pursuit of a thief who STOLE MY HEART and that's why I am all lonely"

It is very spontaneous. But, it is not a mad lib, so Fan, Evah is not my artist. She(she?) was a great experience along the way.

I guess I'd better point out that I freely nestle any random thoughtlets in while i am working in my logbook, and the effect is like starting a garden. For example, I had stumbled across an idea, just a fragment last thursday when looking at a photograph in which there was a very blurry crescent moon. I thought, "The missing moon," and I wrote it down. The Missing Moon is now a growing thought, and I am excited to see how my encounters and experiences over the next pages in my logbook affect its shape. Maybe it will dwindle back into nothing, or maybe by the time this is done I will have created something completely new? It is a seed. I'm just watching it, for now.

Now, onto the good stuff.





This is the work of artist Mary Fish. I couldn't get the call number, her book was not in a bag with a rectangular label (rectangular labels also became a micro-obsession in one of my pages). Anyway, Her work caught my attention. She danced around a theme, she called it a ritual that began with her menstrual cycle and ended when it began again. Each day for 28 days she went to a sandy site and with a set of very abstract rules added and subtracted and replaced stones in a circular diagram. Her writings are very logical sounding, but when you read them they turn out to be very nonsensical the way they're put together.

Obviously she's not drawing all over her pages like a maniac and stuffing every square millimeter with writing and doodles, but the way she combined her diagrams with the kind of writing she was doing clicked with me. It reminded me of my process so far, although hers is a lot tidier, and it inspired me to try and invent a ritual similar to hers and track it like she does.. though so far I have been unsuccessful in this. I haven't got a beach and it is still too cold to go outside for a very long time, my skin's too thin. I am thinking that with time I will stumble across an idea though, and I have hope. In the meanwhile, here is a quote from Mary Fish's book that is now forever stuck in my head:

"The moon is made of five parts, three of which are light, the fourth is fire, and the fifth is motion ... which is a compound."

Hello again!

This weeks post is an in-progress peek at my sequential, focusing on the earliest phases of my process. The assignment began in class with postcards and people exchanging postcards at a table, and then pulling out meanings and bits and information from any and every aspect of the cards they had come away with. Everyone got three, and the task was to organize an eight step narrative using all three of the cards as the inspiration.

So here are some thumbnails! I'm afraid mine are quite illegible, they always have been for as long as I have used this method.



I actually demonstrate this process when I do my workshops at schools, and I am excited to have a bit of recent physical proof to take with me the next time I go teach. And, again, I am sorry for how scribbly it looks. I first learned to do this when planning essays, since I had been a very slow planner and it was a huge source of frustration for me - writing for an assignment already makes me nervous. This was a great way to not only see everything that could happen, but to relieve that tension and just move, move, move across the page. I start by making a word-list usually, which either looks like a list of words or a block of text made up of "prompts", short nonsensical disconnected phrases that come to mind. Then, once that's out of my system, I just start writing. Pay attention to the good ideas, yes, but pay even more to the "bad" ones as they have more power to shape the project than anything else. If you think "chicken," then write "chicken." stuff like that.

In the above scan, I was pulling from the text and the illustration. By the time I'd hit about half way, the idea began forming - something about a woman on the sea collecting the lost well-wishings of someone she missed inside of an old locket. The sea theme stems directly from the illustrations of the cards, which are both boat cards. One of the cards says "all good wishes" on the front, the other is a Christmas card that has a beautiful patina around the border - that became the inspiration for the locket, it made me think "jewelry". The Christmas card also had these misty boats in the backgrounds, which made me think of ghosts, and the sea always makes me feel a little melancholy, so try as I might I couldn't get that tone out of my thumbnails.

So, it really is Just a lot of hopping around between various points that I'd noticed, and stitching them together. Since I am an illustration major, I am planning on pursuing this as an 8-page visual storybook without text. With the time constraints, I am a bit worried, But.. still excited :)

Oh, and the trees are going to be an invasive design element at every turn, you bet. The stories probably will not be directly about trees in any of the examples, but they will be there.





Here is just a continuation of the first process, with four more stories pulling from the cards as inspiration. After a short spat of freewriting, I would just loosen up and try out the sequence. I wound up with four more:

1- a story about a boat race and dying (abrupt, yes?) - upper left

2- a story about a cat who becomes a mercat - bottom left

3- a story about sending well-wishes to someone you love via birdsongs (this one i might be leaning hard towards, it sequenced very nicely) - upper right

4- a scary story about an old woman who is actually a water witch - lower right





I had had a little time left after doing the thumbnail sets, and decided to start picking on the actual manner of execution. Thus.. more freewriting, sampling ideas for character designs to help me form an attachment to one story or another since I only get to pick one, trying out an actual written narrative to accompany the pictures, things like that.

So, there you go. That's how it went, and here's hoping it goes well from there!

I found more trees in fireworks, this time not along the lines of concentric circles: Japanese ground shells! My sister did this once with just your regular black-cat artillery shell, and it had much in the way of the same effect (by the way, don't do that.), though I don't think anything can compete for size with these. Then again, it's a big world, and you see something new all the time..

First, A luminous tree-line:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZLbihG3Q74&feature=related

And one very stunning tree:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_DpnlJREto&feature=related

The post below this is what I've submitted for my midweek, but this is related to one of the themes I addressed in it. So, here's something extra on the topic of cyclical concentric systems. (And they're REALLY cool anyway!)

Tal Gilju Ground Fireworks
All of these were sent to me by my dad back in louisiana, who happens to be ten times the mechanism freak than I am - he's actually a machinist, who spends his time filling his house and his computer with things he collects,(He'd be really good at this class!) Anyway, these fireworks are amazing. They're essentially the Catherine wheel variety, but consist of a huge framework of gears that are all interlinked to produce a magnificent display. I can't say these video's are of great quality, but I do recommend watching them. They're really unlike anything I've ever seen, anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STsjeGIzR1g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zwNlHSSttM&feature=related

Gyro Tourbillon
This isn't exactly a new concept. The idea of the gyro tourbillon is to keep a watch mechanism moving so that it can't stay stationary long enough in any position to throw off it's timing, which any mechanical watch will do thanks to the effects of gravity on it's delicate little innards. What's awesome is here it's actually been done, and it is beautiful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbLITIynCgA

Enjoy, (and, again, please proceed to the next post for my ten examples)