Maybe? I hope so. I don't know about everyone else, but I've always felt the illustrations/covers of Harry Potter (the American Edition, don't know about the others) were just all right. Not really my style, I suppose. Examples:
They certainly look like children's books, which I suppose to an extent they are, at least the first couple. But really they have become a lot more than that, and each one grew in maturity and I wouldn't really recommend the last book to an eight year old. These new designs (which, as far as I can tell, were done for fun and are not going to be published) are classic, mature, and really just well done aesthetically.
I am iffy on the fifth one (Order of the Phoenix) because the image of the world in someone's hands is a cliche and this hasn't really added any twists to that. However, the seventh one (Deathly Hallows) is especially brilliant because it subtly introduces the concept the the idea that the seventh book hinged on, which was that everything at that point was polluted and controlled by the evil doers (Voldemort). I also enjoy the sixth one (Half-Blood Prince) because can totally see that scene in the book. Overall, I would say these would be a nice change of pace to the children's illustrations that seem to be de facto for Harry Potter covers. You can see them in their home environment here.
It has been a while, I see. I guess I went through a bit of a . . . creative death for a few months. This last semester at UIUC has not been good. Frankly, I'm ready to close this chapter of my life and move on . . . by going back to my hometown to study for a semester at NIU! Hahahaha! Oh wow. Can anyone tell how awesome I am?
Anyway, I did get into RISD, but I am going to defer for a year. And because they don't let transfer students defer, I mean I am going to reapply next year with a really amazing portfolio. They gave my a $15,000 scholarship, which pretty sizable and makes the whole thing doable, but I'm hoping that if I step up my game next year I'll get even more. Also I really feel like I'm not in a place right now where I can handle the stress of taking a lot of hardcore studio classes, having to worry about living in a new place far away from anyone I know, and getting a good part time job. I need a year off. I've been in school for 17 years for goodness sake!
So this summer I'm living at home, but so are Maddi and Vanessa. It'll but just like high school, only now we can all drink! Whoo! My goals to get back in the creative groove consist of the following:
Start sketching. I had to do three drawings for my RISD application, and while I was doing them I realized that I hadn't actually really drawn since the end of my sophomore year of college, or something like two years earlier. Doing rough sketch outs of what goes where for the first part of a painting is not drawing. It is part of the painting process, which is completely different. So I will do at least one fully developed sketch a day of whatever I feel like sketching. I want to become really adept and fast at drawing. This skill set has always slowed me down because I'm perfectly capable of it, it just takes me a little longer than it should. Annoying.
Make at least two master painting copies to work on my technical skills. These will probably be Turners, a John Singer Sargent, and maybe an Odd Nerdrum.
Rework The Sheep Child so I've actually finished a freaking project.
Work and finish this new book project that I've been discussing with Nick and Lali. They want to write a text about Chinese Tea. I like tea, and also have an idea for a cover, so I hope to do all the graphic stuff for the book and then we can publish on Lulu.
Work on illustrating my mom's short story. Hopefully if I can do all of these things I will have not one but three completed books to put in my portfolio for my RISD application next year. Whoo!
Here are some of the paintings I am hoping to copy:
JMW Turner--The Burning of the Houses of Parliament
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
In other news, I am currently reading an extremely interesting book calledJonathan Loved Davidby 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.
