More Adventures in Layout

We're going somewhere. Some more initial layout:




I'm thinking of using this for the final page:



I'm actually really getting into this. The computer allows the process to go a lot more quickly and I can work on it pretty much anywhere if I have the right files and images uploaded.

On another note, another childhood love I've been getting back into aside from Tintin is Ranma 1/2. I hadn't read the comics in a few years, so I forgot how completely ridiculous and fun it is. The basic premise is that Ranma is a teenage male martial artist whose accidentally gets knocked into a cursed spring while training in China. The spring has a tragic history of a woman drowning it in some 1000 years ago and now anyone who falls in turns into a girl when splashed by cold water. Hot water reverts them to their original form. So Ranma turns into a buxom red head every time he's hit with cold water. There are all sorts of springs, and throughout the series new characters who have fallen into springs of drowned cats, pigs, ducks, and yetis riding oxen while holding an eel in one hand and a crane in the other, pop up.


So anyway Ranma and his father go to live with his father's old friend Soun Tendo. The father's decide that Ranma will be engaged to Akane, Soun's youngest daughter. Both Ranma and Akane are vehemently against this and what follows are a bunch of action packed (mostly) silly stories. I'm one of those weird people who laughs out loud if I'm reading something funny, and I laugh a lot during Ranma. You can, if you so desire, read it all online for free here: The New Ranma 1/2 Project. It also has a lot of T&A. I'm not sure if it's normal to seem topless teenage girls running around all over the place in Japan, but this was apparently a series aimed at children. Anyway, if you're not offended by black and white line drawings of boobs, it's fun.

Dean from Gilmore Girls and Marica Gay Harden, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

This appears to combine schmaltzy Hallmark Channel Christmas movie with Thomas Kinkaide. I think a teenage crush just died. *sigh*

Layout

So I'm laying stuff out on the computer and I'm not terrifically over the top happy with anything yet. I think I need to do some more stuff by hand to scan in or something. It just feels kind of amateurish at the moment, although I do think the cover is pretty close. I've been working on that a lot and only just started on the pages, so I think it's a matter of just continuing to mess around with it. It's a process and given time constraints, the computer is really the best finalizing tool because I can undo with a click. I think I'm learning, too. The other plus is I can present several of them in crit and get feedback and then simply fix it on the computer. So perhaps in this experimental phase, this is best.

I got some more vintage photos that I ordered online from New Jersey this weekend. Some of them just give me the heebie jeebies! I'm pretty sure that some of the babies are dead in the photographs. It wouldn't be surprising as taking a photo of the recently deceased was a pretty common thing 90 or so years ago. It's pretty weird looking at all of these photos of random people from the the beginning of the 20th century knowing that they are either very old or very dead now. The photos all reek of another era. It's a strange atmosphere. Some stuff I've done with new ones:


Paul said the lower one looks like a vampire, which I am not going to argue with. I actually think it looks a little like Batboy:



Hee!

COFFEE

Hey, you know whats kind of fun? Screwing around with an antique photo by putting gouache on it and then scanning it into photo shop and screwing around with it some more there.

I'm actually enjoying myself and I'm not super stressed. About this project. At the moment. I do actually have about five more pages to write for a short story tonight plus two free verse poems, so that's nice.

I give you . . . Sheep Girl!



Her power is her phenomenal sense of fashion. She is rocking that giant velvet hair bow.

The Sheep Child

So for my final project of the semester I'm going to get a book done. So I can do this without having to worry about the writing aspect of it (I am having a lot of trouble feeling that any of my writing is in a state to be published at this point and setting it in stone is only going to stress me out) I am going to illustrate a wonderful and pretty famous poem by James Dickey called The Sheep Child. I've also decided that due to time constraints, lack of resources, and a lack of technical skill on my part, to do the illustrations, scan them into the computer, pair them with the text and mess around with them in photoshop or illustrator or whatever, and get the thing published on lulu. I am sick of not being able to mess up and learn because I don't have the resources here or the time with resources. If I mess up on the computer, it's no biggie. Just get rid of that layer. I, of course, am going to continue hand making books in order to get better and more technical, but I simply don't have time for a crummy badly bound hand made book. I want something crisp and clean this time round.

So anyway. I got a bunch of antique photos of children and babies from the early 20th century at one of the local used bookstores. I'm going into them with goauche, though I've only messed with one so far. I scanned it in and then selected the oval. Then I just added a bunch of layers and text in photoshop and came up with the first draft for the cover. I don't know. I'm going to let it mull and show it to some of my friends in graphic design to see what they say.



I can't wait for this semester to be over.

OMG!

So I am just amazed at all of this. I can remember just a year ago saying, "If there was going to be a first black president, it would probably be a republican." I'm so glad that I was wrong. Granted, if stuff hits the fan in four years, it might be different for a woman, but I'm not going to think about that horrifying possibility right now. Anyway, just from having done all the research I've been doing now and over the summer on the foundings of slavery and the civil war era really makes this moment extremely emotional for me. It's bittersweet because of a huge loss across the board as far as gay marriage was concerned, but I guess we can't have the first black president and gay marriage in one night. What are we, the Netherlands? I still can't believe there was such a huge historic event happening just a few hours away from me in Grant Park. I really wish now that I had been there. I guess I'll go out of my way to go to the rally for the first woman president that I actually want to vote for.

As an ending note, here is Obama's amazing speech, "A More Perfect Union", from after the whole Jeremiah Wright brouhaha. This was what really sealed the deal for me. He spoke to the American people about the tense and complex issue of race like we were adults. Like we were people who could move in the right direction, who could understand these issues and really turn things around. Like we could see that things aren't black and white. Like we could try to understand, forgive, and heal.

WOOT!

In honor of my brother, I'm letting this wonderful song speak for a nation:



What a night! Now just to finish it off with a defeat of prop 8 . . .

Books, Specifically Covers

So I've always thought that a great job would be designing book covers. I mean, I am definitely guilty of buying books that I thought looked mediocre just because they had a stunning cover. Granted, this is more in the graphic design realm than I am now, but over at RISD they have a class just for book cover design. I would definitely take that class, especially after checking out some of the awesome book covers at The New York Times Book Review and The Penguin UK Blog. One of the coolest sets of book covers I saw were done by Penguin designer Coralie Bickford-Smith when they were republishing a bunch of classic horror stuff for October. The coolest part? They are cyanotypes! My favorite kind of graphic design is the stuff that has an element of hand work in it. It always just seems to have a lot more depth if there is some part of a photo or hand drawing in it. That's just my aesthetic. But these covers are just GORGEOUS:





















I think what I really like about them is that they are spooky and haunting without resorting to the cliche of black and red and white. You can see her talking about the process of making them here:


Design to get you hiding under the covers from Penguin Books on Vimeo.

In other news, I am currently reading an extremely interesting book called Jonathan Loved David by Tom Horner.

I think a lot of people who have read the story of Jonathan and David in The Bible (Samuel I & II) would agree that they were probably pretty much gay for each other. This book talks about middle eastern attitudes toward homosexuality in Biblical times, and much like their Greek and Roman brethren, many men were getting it on with each other. I found this very interesting because it sounded like there were a lot more men sleeping with each other than would count for a contemporary gay/bisexual population. It would seem that a lot of men were unabashedly bisexual. This started to make me think about how probably a lot of our own preconditions on our sexuality are socially conditioned. I mean, obviously all of these men were sleeping with other men because they wanted to. It's not like when they slept with women in order to procreate. There was really no motivation other than wanting to, and perhaps in some instances a power play. I am really interested by this ancient world idea of manly men who heroically love each other. There are several stories of it: Jonathan and David, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Achilles and Patroclus. Was this a love between people who considered themselves equals in a time when love between a man and a woman could not be about respect because of the socially constructed sexism and gender segregation of the time? I wonder about "love" between men and women from that time. After all, it would have been very rare for a man to have viewed a woman as more than an object. And yet, they would think they were in love though they knew next to nothing about the object of their affection. These are the themes I am going to explore in my next short story, I think. You can read Jonathan Loved David online on google books here: Jonathan Loved David.

Also: Lot is a douchebag. What kind of man offers up his own daughters for rape? That is messed up.