Painting Speech

Winners: DB International Bookbinding Competition

2009-06-25T23:19:00.002-04:00

Take a look at the winners of the DB International Bookbinding Competition. Here's a little more information about the competition. The book being bound in each case was a specially commissioned fine press, limited-edition (500) publication from Incline Press, entitled Water. It contains poems and illustrations about water.

I love to see all the different approaches to the same subject. I'm probably denigrating this exhibit to compare it to a challenge quilt exhibit, but I love both in the just the same way. They're both testaments to the individual creativity of us humans. The image shown here is of the 2nd prize book, made by Jenny Grey.

Exchange envelopes: catching up

2009-06-23T17:56:00.005-04:00

With all the chaos here, I had gotten behind in my exchange envelope commitments. Not anymore. I'm all caught up ... until July 1. In keeping with these hard economic times, the theme for these is Frugality. Recycled envelopes, a dried-up Zig calligraphy marker, and a re-purposed Zig Millennium mark cut to a chisel edge with an X-acto blade.

The envelopes frame a bit of doodling. I don't know what to do with it, so it just sits on the table reproaching me for my indecisiveness.

As usual, click on the image to get a closer look.

Shop Class As Soulcraft

2009-06-19T11:22:00.003-04:00

This wonderful article, Shop Class as Soulcraft, has been expanded into a book of the same name that is on my short list of books to read.

In this article at The New Atlantis, Matthew B. Crawford compares today's trend toward design that hides how it was made (automobiles which have "another hood under the hood") with the full-disclosure philosophy of bygone Sears catalogues which used to include blown-up parts diagrams and schematics.

He suggests that we resurrect the ideal of manual competence, and describes the goodness of concrete work which is integrated, diagnostic, individualistic and fulfilling. There's a lot more; read the article. I'm going to read the book.

This discussion has some parallels with what I've been thinking about the past couple of weeks: the fate of specialized manual tools in today's world. I've been cleaning out my studio in preparation for a move. Over the past 24 years that we've been in this house, I've amassed duplicates of many of my tools. I've got a box started for Goodwill, but what is the use of sending a lettering guide (I have 2 extra) to Goodwill? How many customers will recognize this little piece of plastic as a valuable tool for calligraphers?

Thanks to Dave Allen for mentioning this on the Book Arts-L.

Constructing a pentagon / decagon

2009-06-02T08:05:00.005-04:00

One of my summer my art history classes is French Gothic Cathedrals: Chartres, Reims, and Amiens. Tomorrow we'll be out on the green, laying out the apse end of a Gothic cathedral, using a rod (okay, 1/2 rod, out of PVC), hemp string (okay, nylon), and stakes. Bonus homework for tomorrow is to draw a decagon on graph paper using only a compass and straight edge. I'm not a good instructions reader, I guess: I drew mine on plain paper with a compass and square. I had a blast. I've made a PDF of the above diagram with step-by-step instructions that you can download from this link or from my experimentation website.

Inkscape Series, Number 2

2009-05-27T18:16:00.003-04:00

This is one of several pieces I did last month for the show "Made" at Railroad Square. Now it's headed to the summer showcase, a juried invitational event at the Thomasville Cultural Center 25 miles up the road from my house.

Extraordinary Paper Art

2009-05-25T23:17:00.004-04:00

This piece of paper-cut lusciousness, by Bovey Lee, is one of the 100 shown in a recent blog post at Web Designer Depot. I've mentioned some of these artists before (Peter Callesen and Su Blackwell in particular), but the image list is impressive. I've listed links to other paper-cut artists in this earlier post.

Whew!

2009-04-26T11:12:00.003-04:00

The spring 2009 semester at Florida State University is officially over. What a sprint. It's all over but the cleaning up (except for there is this one lingering project ...). I believe that this week I used nearly everything in my studio at least once.

I had the acrylic inks, sumi ink, colored pencils and gel pens out for the pieces I made for the Senior Design Seminar show, Made (link requires Facebook login). I also used cheesecloth, Saran wrap, tapes, bubble wrap, squirt bottles, spray bottles, drop cloths, hake brushes, sponges, and so on.
I had the framing supplies and tools out, for the next step in the same project. That included the mat cutter, the foam-core cutter, the frames themselves, glazing, framing and hanging hardware, rulers, and so on.
I had the collage supplies and tools out for the final Color Theory assignment. And the roll of kozo paper, and the wax paper for flattening/drying, and the glue and glue brush and the glue palette.
And before I settled on collage for the final assignment, I had the gouache and brushes out for a my first attempts. And the palettes and masking tape and so on.
I had my paste-painted and otherwise-decorated papers out for both Color Theory, Print Design, and Animation. Those papers were in and out of storage all week long.
I had my balsa-wood lettering out to scan for Print Design. And I went through a whole bunch of portfolios of my work for scanning as well.
I kept cutting long pieces of paper from the roll of paper that makes me think of the paper tableclothes from potluck suppers of my childhood. That was for lettering trials in preparation for lettering Hebrew on long strips of muslin to be sewn into a quilt. And then there were the various pens I tried on the muslin, the water-eraseable pen for guidelines, the measuring tools, and so on. I ended up using a Zig calligraphy marker because it bleeds very little, and is lightfast, waterproof, and fun to write with.

Whew! It's good to be finished with the semester ... almost. It will be nice to see the surface of my drafting table again.

An April Fool's post

2009-04-02T21:47:00.003-04:00

... that is right up my alley (or is that abbey)!

First Day of Spring in Tallahassee

2009-03-20T10:04:00.004-04:00

This is the view from my studio window. Nice, huh? I will miss this hedge very much. The front yard is even more spectacular this year.

Edited to add a couple of photos of the front yard. It's fairy-tale beautiful right now:

Too addictive

2009-03-11T16:14:00.001-04:00

This font shooting range game, Deep Font Challenge, is wa-a-a-y too addictive.

Animation

2009-03-03T14:05:00.005-05:00

Here's a frame-by-frame animation I did for class, using rotoscoping. It's 76 quick sketches. At 12 frames per second, that's ... 6 seconds. I enjoyed the sketching more than I anticipated.

Print Design -- a double spread

2009-02-28T22:31:00.004-05:00

Click on the thumbnail above for a larger image.

Some fun with type punched out over a pasted-painted background, and hand lettering over a wall of Velvenda Cooler type, done for Print Design class. The quotation is from Henry Adams. I'm working toward integrating hand lettering with type. "Toward" being the operative word here. The print version of this has better contrast, by the way, and at 11" x 17" the background type on the right was a more noticeable and readable list of adjectives.

Color Theory - dimensional color study

2009-02-28T10:33:00.002-05:00

In Color Theory we've been working with Color-Aid pasted onto bristol. This image fulfilled the assignment to make a color study which gives the illusions of three-dimensionality, rendered through a consistent depiction of light and shadow. I missed making the light and/or shadow progressive. It's hard to hear when I'm looking at color. And when the 400+ different colors of Color-Aid are all laid out on the tables, I feel something akin to panic.

The craftsmanship of these exercises is challenging -- a bunch of little pieces of painted papers adhered with PVA onto one side of a 9" x 12" sheet of bristol. And as we all know, pasting anything on one side only will cause cockling, wrinkling, generall drawing-up of that side of the paper. Can't fight physics. The study shown above is 6" square.

Why the lull in activity here?

2009-02-28T10:04:00.002-05:00

Well, there's a lot going on now. I'm in the Fine Arts Graphic Design program at Florida State University , and this semester I'm taking an unprecedented 15 hours ... and they're all studio classes:

Animation
Print Design
Senior Design Seminar
Dynamic Web
Color Theory

I need to graduate in December, so this semester and the summer semester, in particularly, will be a slog in terms of class load .

Shockingly enough, on top of that we still need to eat and have clean clothes to wear, things still break and need repair (we've been riding on a wave of those), children still need help with their homework, and ... I've got regular customer in my free-lance business who still call me on a regular basis.

As my grandfather said, "It's a great life, if you don't weaken."

In Defense of Doodling

2009-02-27T18:42:00.003-05:00

part of a doodle from last year

I always knew that doodling helped me concentrate in a meeting, but here's a scientific study that backs up my intuition. The new study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, shows that "people may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate," says study co-author Jackie Andrade. Read more about it in the blog post at Wired.

A Designer’s Portfolio, 16th Century-Style

2009-01-30T10:13:00.003-05:00

A recent post at CR Blog showcases The Macclesfield Alphabet Book, a 16-century pattern book, the precursor to our modern black-vinyl-and-plastic portfolio books.

According to the Rare Book Review, The British Library is trying to acquire this recently discovered manuscript. The purchase price is £600,000, partially because these pattern books are so very rare.

Her Morning Elegance - stop-motion videography

2009-01-29T07:56:00.002-05:00

Awesome stop-motion music video: "Her Morning Elegance." I love it.

Directed by: Oren Lavie, Yuval & Merav Nathan
Photography: Eyal Landesman
Featuring: Shir Shomron

Two favorite videos (or more)

2009-01-07T20:48:00.003-05:00

I really like Denis Brown's 2008 new year's greeting to fellow calligraphers. It works as a time-based greeting card, encouraging the viewer to slow down and reflect on the passage of time. Because of his background in sound production, I'm sure he produced the sound as well as the video, making this an entirely original piece.

I also like this kinetic typography piece based on part of "Lions Roar" by the Hush Sound. There's a lot going on.

A longtime favorite of mine is "The Child," created by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet for the french dj Alex Gopher, way back in 1999 -- or maybe earlier.

Time across two pages

2008-12-19T06:50:00.003-05:00

This two-page spread (click on the thumbnail picture for a full-size image) was created for the centerfold of a 12-page book designed in typography class this past semester. These were the only pages that had no photographic images, and my aim was to try to synthesize my experience of lettering into a modern piece that would work as hand lettering in a typography setting. I don't know that I succeeded, but the experiment was interesting. All of the quotations in this piece revolve around the theme of the book: time.

When I was in high school, well before I took up lettering (or maybe not, now that I think about it!), I made these elaborate doodles I called "scribbles", which relied more on color for their design. Looking back through this blog, I see that I've never posted one of those, although I still have several of those early scribbles. I'll plan to do that sometime.

The future of literacy

2008-12-15T22:00:00.003-05:00

The essay question at the end of the final exam in History and Theory of Graphic Design directed us to speculate on the future of the book. It was an interesting question, and after I walked out of the exam room I continued to think about different aspects of the question.

At The New Atlantis, there's a thought-provoking article by Christine Rosen entitled People of the Screen. In it, Ms. Rosen predicts what may result if we trade in the literacy learned throughout our 500-year-old history of book technology for "digital literacy," as she calls it. The article is long and covers a wide range of issues. Two are particularly interesting to me. First, there is the connection between screen vs. paper reading and extrovert vs. introvert personality:

For centuries, print literacy has been one of the building blocks in the formation of the modern sense of self. By contrast, screen reading, a historically recent arrival, encourages a different kind of self-conception, one based on interaction and dependent on the feedback of others. It rewards participation and performance, not contemplation. It is, to borrow a characterization from sociologist David Riesman, a kind of literacy more comfortable for the “outer-directed” personality who takes his cues from others and constantly reinvents himself than for the “inner-directed” personality whose values are less flexible but also less susceptible to outside pressures. How does a culture of digitally literate, outer-directed personalities “read”?

The second issues is related but not identical:

[When encountering a novel,] you must first submit yourself to the process of reading it—which means accepting, at some level, the author’s authority to tell you the story. You enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master.

She finishes up with a rather harrowing picture of a monastic society of readers which dwindles to arcane hobbydom, gradually leaving the mainstream of society to fade into oblivion. This picture doesn't seem likely to me, but it does somehow remind me of the surprise and sense of "otherness" I feel on discovering that someone I thought I knew well lives in a house which contains no books at all. It's a divide which seems unbridgeable.

Feathers, Fins & Foliage - now online

2008-12-15T13:29:00.005-05:00

Didn't get to Tallahassee in October for the artist book exhibit at LeMoyne Center for the Arts? Not to worry: the online exhibition of Feathers, Fins & Foliage is now ... online.

It was a pleasure and an honor to handle these books while we were mounting and taking down the exhibition.

Wonderful

2008-12-08T23:46:00.008-05:00

The semester is nearly through -- only one final exam to go -- and all the projects are done. Maybe not exactly finished, but done.

This image is a screen shot from the kinetic typography project I completed in Graphic Design III this semester. I used three minutes of "Wonderful", one of my favorite songs in the Stephen Schwartz's musical, "Wicked". It's a Flash file, my first ever. I had a great time with it, and I'm very pleased with the way it turned out.

Maternal Legends

2008-11-30T04:32:00.004-05:00

"Maternal Legends", a juried exhibition of artist books, December 5 at 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, Oregon. The online catalog is here.

My book, Personal Space, is in the exhibition.

Click on the image for a size that's readable.

Seasonal papercraft madness (a.k.a. Make your own Thanksgiving centerpiece)

2008-11-25T10:11:00.004-05:00

Well, the title of the post says it all. I love the hand-mixer legs. If you've got all the cooking done, go on and whip up this centerpiece for Thanksgiving.

Click on the title of the post or the image at left for links via Creative Techs Tips to the original PDF with printable turkey parts and some truly amusing Google-translations from the Japanese to English. To illustrate just how amusing, here's step 1:

"Each component crop. The center of the fuselage parts, maintenance hatch Crop Please be sure to complete the hole this will be a great help to me.
Put a finger, please ensure that the size of a peach but also slots in the slit, please remember to put a slit."

via Boing Boing via Make

Shawn Sheehy's pop-ups

2008-11-25T08:51:00.002-05:00

Shawn Sheehy's pop-up artist books are pretty cool. Take a look. (Beautifully designed website, too.)