Barn Burning 2: The Burnaning

    I have a few larger independent projects going on this semester. This is great, as am I am learning how to balance the workload for these along with the smaller stuff that is due week by week. I'm also way more invested in my work. It feels like a culmination of everything I've been working toward for the last couple of years.
       The most gargantuan of these is an artist's book of William Faulkner's short story Barn Burning. This story has been on my radar since 2007 when I read it for a modernist literature class. I'd already read a bunch of Faulkner's work, but this story stood out as it takes the themes of class in a postbellum and post industrial revolution south and explores them fully in a condensed fashion completely from the point of view of a seven year old boy in a sharecropper family. The father is a terrorist who, when he feels wronged by the landowners, will set fire to their barns. The boy is torn between the loyalty he feels to his father and the unhappiness he feels from being despised by the general population and from being constantly and violently uprooted. Though they are more in the background, there are also themes of race and gender which I am trying to explore more through imagery.
       So where does one start with 22 pages of text? Well, last fall I made an experimental mock up of this book for my advanced drawing class. Initially, it was going to be a one off, but as I grew more engrossed in the text and the way I made images for it as well as the book making process itself, I realized that this was just the beginning. This was a great project because I was able to experiment with using old photographs and chemicals and leafing in my drawing process. Most of all, it was fun. Often, drafting is the most painful part of the image making process for me, and this book was not about drafting images. It was about printmaking and layering and taking away and layering again and making my studio smell like wintergreen solution and bleach.

Barn Burning Mock Up, 2011

       This is what I began with this semester.  My goal with the next version was to incorporate the text into the imagery, create drawings to go along with the prints that I was doing, as well as create visual flow through the story.  I will be updating more soon with how the process is going.  I've been learning a lot, like that books have a lot of components and that they take a huge amount of planning.  Also to remember to scan the pages before I bind the book.  

Summertime

        Her mother washed her clothes in the old washer, which spat soap out of a long black tube and rumbled violently on the concrete. After she trudged outside with a pile of moist fabric in one of those five-dollar plastic baskets. Two gnarled poles jutted into the sky. They were connected by shoelaces knotted to shoelaces. Once the shoelaces had been pristine and white in crisp paper on crisp shoes with fresh rubber soles and a fresh leather smell. Now they frayed into their knots and swayed dully in the wind. Clothespins interrupted their drab horizon. Cotton and linen and poly blends hung and swung to and fro with the horizon and the breeze whispered through the holes in the weaves until the damp was blown away and what remained was dry and wrinkled. Clothes dried by the wind are permeated by it. They are duller no matter the detergent you use. 

        Today after her mother took her school uniform that she had dropped ketchup and mustard onto from a lunch full of condiment overestimations. She ventured outdoors in underwear alone and saw the pleated plaid skirt and sweater vest fluttering and dancing. She ran over in bare feet and briefs and stuck her nose into the damp. The cool must filled her and her little heart beat faster and she suddenly wanted it to rain. She gasped at a low rumble of thunder and felt wet on her cheek. The clothes grew heavy and slumped to the grass below. Her briefs clung to her body and she tugged them down her skinny legs. Her limbs slipped in the mud and drew her into a recently seeded field. There was no growth so she was flung into it. She kicked and splashed and squished. The thunder roared a giant lion roar and the rain fell harder and she felt she was so wet that she would never be dry again. 

        It wasn’t ever going to stop raining because Day-oos was angry and she was going to drown but what better way to go? She saw it clearly. Her little body floating upside down in a vast green sea. It was too late to make a raft, too late to apologize or pray. But she was naked as the day she was born and was slippery with Day-oos’ wet earth. 

This is the beginning of my final comic for my comics class this last semester based on a short piece of writing I've had floating around for a couple of years. Below is the corresponding writing. To churn out a lot of drawings fairly quickly, I worked with drybrush india ink on larger pieces of cold press watercolor paper. When it was working for me, I really enjoyed it, and it's a style that I want to explore more and feel that I'm just discovering.

Dust

This past winter session I took this class called Merging Worlds. I guess it was kind of an Illustration 101 crash course. There were a lot of freshman and sophomores in it, which was interesting and different. A lot of people used marker and ball point pen for the first couple of assignments, which was something I hadn't seen in a while. Anyway, I kind of used the course to refine the digital sketching technique I've been using a bit here and there over the past couple of years, and I was very happy with the result. The first successful assignment was a shaded pencil drawing (I KNOW). Pencil always takes me a while, but I really do love the result I can get with it. Pencil is just so pretty. The assignment was to create a human animal hybrid, so I took a photo of my room, took a photo of a deer head from the nature lab, and started piecing things together. The dress is a dress from an old photo that I basically mostly had to paint in photoshop as the light was completely wrong. The arms are my friend Esther. It was a really fulfilling process to plan something out so well and then draw it and have such a complete reference for something that I made up.

This is the reference I worked from.

This is the final drawing. Pencil, 12"x16"

Homecoming

These were a project from mixed media last semester.  I wanted to show a soldier navigating home through different times of day.  I wound up doing sunset and evening.  Morning to come at some point, perhaps?

Watercolor, Goauche and colored pencil on arches cold press

Salem

A couple of old friends came to visit me from the midwest over wintersession break which led to doing a bit of local exploring. On the last day we went to Salem, MA of witch trial fame. It was a pretty drive, and the town itself was pretty cute and, according banners and melting evidence by the roadside, had just recently had a choclate and ice sculpture festival. The highlight, however, was the Salem Witch Museum. It seems there are a number of museums peppered throughout Salem, including a Witch History Museum, a Pirate Museum, and a Witch Dungeon. This one was chosen at random, and I am so happy that we went. It cost nine dollars, but was totally worth it. It consisted of a theatrical portion in a dark room with large, elaborate dioramas with costumed mannequins and spot lights on every wall. Each portion would light for its portion of the story, told in stereo in and old, theatrical style by a deep voiced man. Words cannot express how delightful this was to watch. It was genuinely well done, but had enough cheesiness in it to make it amusing as well. In the center of this dark room was a huge red glowing circle with all the names of the victims of the Salem Witch hysteria written around it. It was a little creepy. The second part was a basic education of what "witches" throughout history have been. This also involved more mannequins (thank god) as well as a strange timeline and and entire wall that had a picture of Joseph McCarthy and the words "Scapegoats" along with several examples (gay community and aids, anyone?) written out in bold letters. I highly recommend a trip to this museum if you are in the area as it is a little odd look at history, and anytime you bring dioramas and and mannequins into the mix history is immediately amazing. This is a close second to the Scotch Whiskey Museum in Edinburgh, which was maybe the best 12 quid I ever spent.

It was also nice to be by the ocean and not completely freeze the way we had earlier that week when we went to Newport, RI. Last but not least, here is a bunny from a while ago for my mixed media class.

                                                         Gouache + Colored Pencil

November

I had so many sheep paintings pinned up in my studio, I thought, why not add another?

Goauche and colored pencil

Happenings

Hmm. Well, a lot has happened. I moved out to Maine in early April, got a couple of jobs, and have managed to pull out of my year and a half long "oh, I just dropped out of the University of Illinois with naught but 12 credits to go, but I'm transferring to finish up at Rhode Island School of Design, but they haven't accepted me yet, well the accepted me last year but I didn't have enough money or where-with-all then, so I have to apply again for this fall" stage of my life. This was not a very fun period, for, as many had pointed out to me, RISD is an exceptionally difficult school to get into, and what will you do if you don't get accepted. Fortunately, I never have to think about that in a literal sense! Now, it's "I'm moving to Providence in early September, and I'm starting school on the 15th, and I'm majoring in Illustration!" Much shorter and less embarrassing and more specific. Also before people find out that I have like, five hundred credits already they aren't all like, WTF are you doing, girl?

So I'm pretty psyched. I haven't gotten much art done this summer for, as my mother warned me, it is difficult to work jobs that have nothing to do with my art and have the mental or physical energy to actually do other work. Especially when it's two jobs. And one of them is in a kitchen. And you're not in your studio environment half the time because the other one involves living like a hobo, moving from house to house, dog sitting. I hope to rectify this next week, however. We'll see. On the plus side, I may get a few days break from ramen next year.

Finally, I noticed that I did not post the cover for the new version of The Sheep Child that I had been working on. While it's not the greatest thing ever, I'm pretty pleased with it because I managed to get the type to interact with the painting I did.

Ultimately one of the things I have to learn at RISD is how to make paintings and drawings and mixed media pieces by hand and then add type elements that look natural and interact well with the images in Adobe CS. I don't think I'll get that in my first year--I'm taking Illustration I, Drawing I, Painting I, and a mandatory art history class my first semester. But all my liberal arts and gen eds transferred, so I won't have to take any liberal arts classes unless I want to, which means more room for studios. Mostly I'm excited that somehow, even though I didn't pick them (the transfer office of a small school is surprisingly bureaucratic) all my classes start after noon and I get a three day weekend. Whoo!

Also of note: thank you to Christina Rodriguez for prompting me to do this far past due post. I got a copy of Storm Codes, and it is gorgeous!

Extra Super Awesomeness

while ago, I posted about Long Ago & Far Away. At the time, I couldn't really find any videos on the internet of it, and I kind of think I wouldn't have known how to embed them anyhow. I'm a little amazed, looking all the way back then, that this blog has been around for three years at this point. Anyway, I was looking back at those old videos again because my younger brother and I decided to watch an old paleontology program that we used to watch all the time when we were little. I randomly looked them up on youtube, and lo and behold, someone's posted quite a few of them, including one of my favorites, Svatohor.



There are three parts in all. It's a pretty intense stop animation. I think I get some of my creepy, aesthetic leanings from having watched these things. My mother said there was also a creepy french circus claymation one, but I have no memory of it. It is actually one of my aspirations to, at some point, do a stop animation with dolls and a set I have designed and made myself. Stop animations have such an interesting atmosphere to them that really adds to stories like this Russian folklore.

Of course, one of my other favorites was the phenomenally done Wind in the Willows.



This was also a stop animation, and it was terribly British in an awesome way. Of course, it features animals that are known only by what species they are (obviously there is not more than ONE Rat, Mole, Toad or Badger. These creatures simply appear and are only men for some reason). Mr. Toad is akin to a Bertie Wooster who hasn't a Jeeves, and Mole, Rat, and Badger are the straight men who smack him in the head from time to time. Like Svatohor, the stop animation lends a great atmosphere. Because a great deal of time was spent on these projects because they are stop animation, it often feels as though their worlds have more depth to them then a good deal of the cgi stuff coming out now. A prime example of this would be Tim Burton's latest version of Alice in Wonderland, which felt exceedingly one note, obvious, and flat to me. Like anything else (for example, mass manufacture over something hand done) there are pluses and minuses, and budget cuts and time saving leads to a loss of attention to detail and an obvious passion in the project.

Finally, I finished my RISD application a week or so ago. We were supposed to send in three drawings: one of a bicycle, one that used both sides of the paper, and one of something from three different perspectives. I am really hoping they haven't gotten any bicycle drawings quite like this yet:



I really like tea.

Heh heh . . .

ood grief, I'm terrible. I suppose it's hard to get back into doing something when you haven't done it for awhile and your brain feels like mush a good deal of the time. At any rate, the least I can do is update with some images from my illustration class last semester as well as some new images from my most recent project, a reworking of the book I made a year or so ago, The Sheep Child, based on a poem by James Dickey. Given formatting issues I have when I try to put strange spaces in things in blogger, I won't even try to type it up, but you can read the full text here. I will more than likely go more into the challenges of illustrating such a thematically rich piece when I've finished, and the book will be available for purchase on Lulu, though I don't think I'm allowed to make any profit off it because I don't have rights to the poem.

Anyway, here is an illustration assignment from last semester. I was supposed to do a pencil drawing of a hand holding an object:



This piece was basically the first serious pencil drawing I'd done in a LONG time. It was nice to remember how to handle the medium, and that I can get some pretty rich results from it, though I think general use in future will be in mixed media pieces. I also got some water soluble pencils, so I'm a bit excited to experiment with those.

Next is a ink drawing of some mushrooms. the assignment was to do a full value drawing in ink of vegetables. Now, I discovered last semester that intricate full value pen and ink drawings are not my cup of tea, but I am glad that I know how to use them, I suppose. Again, such a technique will also probably only be used in a mixed media piece, but I quite like this piece because it only took a couple of hours and though it is full value pen and ink, it is a full value pen and ink that is true to my way of working, which is messy and fairly expressive but also given to moments of specificity and intricacy and detail. Or, at least, that is what I hope I achieve.



I have a few more, of course, but the size of the assignments is just outside the range of my scanner, and I have to piece them together, which is fecking annoying. I've been coveting a larger scanner for not a terrible price on Amazon, but I'll wait until I move to purchase most likely.

Here are the new pages for the book, though I'm posting the at the moment as is and without text because I'm still messing about with that stuff. I think they're both terrifying, but generally people I show them too disagree. Perhaps I've been spending to much time with the text as well as staring at them in the early hours of the morning. They are both a mixture of watercolor and gouache.





I'm only reworking 6 of the pages, and some are collages with old photos, and some are simply abstract paintings, so for the ones I was reworking I wanted to find a place in between the concrete imagery of the photos and the abstract backgrounds. That place is in these slightly stylized lambs and sheep in atmospheric settings.

If anyone randomly would like a high quality giclee print of any of these or any of my other images, please email me (spittingair@gmail.com) so we can chat!

Now I've got to finish one more page, and then its off to the publishers.

Hokay, here we go again

pparently some people actually look at this, (and by "some people" I mean close friends and family, but whatever) and they keep telling me to update it, so here we go again. Hopefully at some point I will figure out how to make a website and this will just be a link on a larger website where there will also be my full portfolio and a store and such.

I took a couple of classes at NIU this past semester (Illustration I and Watercolor I) which were a good, though in some ways a somewhat painful, learning experience. They were painful mostly because I had to start at 8 am, which, unless you are a morning person, is pretty much horrible, especially since in studio classes you generally have to actually DO things as opposed to sitting mindlessly in a lecture. I also learned how to do full value ink drawings, which, while I'm glad I know how to do it and will probably use parts of the technique in other work, am looking forward to (hopefully) never having to do again. The intense tight line work is not at all my style, which seems to be leaning more and more to water media at the moment. I learned a good deal about watercolor and the things it is capable of doing this semester. It was a little strange because I was in a class with a bunch of students who, while only two years younger than me, made me feel quite old, simply because there is a pretty big difference between a sophomore in college and a senior. It also seemed that I was pretty much alone in really wanting to learn how to use watercolor and in loving the medium. It felt like a lot of people were taking the class because they had to, which, while understandable, was a bit strange after having only taken upper level classes with people who were taking what they wanted to take for the past couple of years.

Though I did about 10 paintings this last semester, there were really only two that I felt brought me forward, only two that really did anything differently from what I'd done before. In the first one, which was done earlier, I was doing a reworking of of a painting from when I was doing My God. This is the orignal from around a year earlier:



Here is the new version, done around two months ago:



In the second one, I used a lot more color and there is more of an awareness of texture. I don't think this is the final version of this work, but one thing I appreciate about watercolor is the fact that all I have to do is staple a wet piece of paper to a board and I'm good to go. If I want to do multiple versions of an idea I can much more easily because, unlike oil, I don't have to worry about making a canvas stretcher, stretching canvas, and gessoing before finally getting started. It's much more pliable in this way.

The second piece was much more personal. Both of my grandparents on my mother's side passed this last year, so I wanted to paint a portrait of them for posterity and for my mother. It had also been awhile since I'd done a portrait, so I guess I also wanted to see if I was still capable, as once I mostly did figure study. I looked through some old photo albums and found a picture that my mother took maybe ten years ago when we were all on Martha's Vineyard together staying at my Aunt's house. While somewhat unconventional, I chose this photograph because it was a time I remembered distinctly, it was a time we were all together, and it feels joyful. It also has figures interacting, but not in an obvious sort of fashion. It doesn't feel pose-y, like many of the other photographs I looked at:



I then tried to mesh tight painting (which I am much better at then tight line drawing) with an abstract color background. I think this painting is a big step forward for me, and I am going to be very interested in working with figures more in the future. I had forgotten how much I enjoy portraiture.



So that's all for now. I will be uploading my adventures in illustration I at some point fairly shortly as well.

A Spot of Tea

So. One of the projects I'm working on this summer is a book about chinese tea with Nick and Lali. This is the first draft of a cover:


S'il te plait, click on it to see a larger image. It is a watercolor painting and I put the text on it in Photoshop. I wanted to block out the text with masking fluid and then erase it away so it was all white afterward, but that didn't allow me much room for error or messing around with the type, so this was a much better choice I think. Also I kind of enjoy the hard graphic edges of the type in contrast to the organic nature of the painting. The type is, of course, now subject to minute changes that the normal person will probably not notice, but will be a big deal to graphics people. Specifically typographers. I've never taken a typography class, so I'll probably run this by some people I know who have.

Also, today I bought this amazing stereo that has bluetooth, has a dock for an iPod, has a dock for a usb, can play regular and mp3 cds, can play FM and AM radio and has an alarm clock. I was super excited because it was everything I ever wanted in a pretty cheap package, and I thought I would be able to connect my computer to it wirelessly (the bluetooth) only to discover upon trying to connect my computer to it that there are different kinds of bluetooth, and the stereo was a2dp or something, which mac osx 4.11 does not support for some idiotic reason. So I was thinking I would have to return it, because most of the reason I got it was so that I could play music and watch movies wirelessly on loud, quality speakers when I discovered that apparently you can buy a usb device that adapts your computer to a2dp bluetooth. Or something. I'm not even really sure why there are different kinds of bluetooth. Anyway, I don't really know what I'm doing, so I'm going to call Best Buy tomorrow and have them tell me what to buy so I know for sure that it will work with a mac. Ridiculousness. It seems every time I buy a new technological product, I have to invest in something else to make whatever I just bought work the way I want it to. C'est la vie.

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.