Close to Death, Closer to Tears

We interrupt your scheduled programming to announce a new brief: an editorial illustration. Stop what you're doing and produce a visual response to this article!

Okay, I may have misread the deadline as two days later than reality, so expect things to be a little rushed. My impression of the article was that it was trying to argue drawing is a necessary tool to comprehend and respond to the external world. I wanted to try and convey the idea of drawing as an enlightening practice in the image I created, and I settled on the design of a pencil as a motif for exploring this concept.

After experimenting with a graphite stick and pencil, I settled on ink as a medium, though I opted to draw with a blunt instrument instead of a brush to make the line more raw. I was inspired by the landscapes of Escher, Noble and Supermundane, who to me all seem to depict the relationship with the artist to the outside world. With this in mind I set out to create some complete sketches.

This is the first image I completed, and I'm really happy with it, but it doesn't fit with the dimensions I had to used and I never got around to adding colour.

This is another concept I had that seemed pretty cool, but the execution is really lackluster. I think it could have worked if it were much cleaner and more intricate. Again, it doesn't really work with the portrait orientation, so I moved on to another concept.

This is the first attempt of my final image. The hands are kind of cool, but the composition is all wrong. I moved on pretty quickly from this.

This is my second attempt. The hands look really interesting in this one, kind of a Quentin Blake aesthetic. I actually like it more than the final image, but it still feels pretty sparse so I decided to give it one more try.

This is the final version. I thought about adding colour, but I decided monochrome would be a better when viewed against black text and a white backdrop. I don't know. I'm not really pleased with this, but editoral work is always really short notice so I guess it's something you have to be ready for. I just wish I could have made that centre glow less digital; I had to edit the scan to make it appear correctly because there was a shadow over it from the paper going crinkly. 

If I could go over and redo it, I'd explore my other concepts more, because I think there's a lot of missed potential in them. I guess sometimes you have to stab yourself repeatedly in the chest to churn out something for the deadline.

An Academic Glimpses Infinity

Today's project is postmodernism. I'm to promote or discuss the subject in zine format to be released at an undisclosed point in March.

Postmodernism is a broad cultural movement ranging from philosophy to architecture, beginning in the 20th century and arguably continuing to this day. Having only approached it from a literary standpoint, I don't have the best understanding of the label as an artistic genre, but like modernism it's mainly defined by its focus on the subjectivity of  conceptual relativism and its rejection of traditional artistic values, such as the distinction between high and low art. Where it differs from modernism is in its approach; while modernism is nihilistic in its portrayal of the world as a fragmented mess of subjective impressions, postmodernism instead celebrates this freedom.This is why pop art, minimalism and abstract expressionism can be considered both modern and postmodern in their approach to art. In general, something can be considered postmodern if it makes use of irony, deconstruction or metafictional themes.

After some initial research and letting the ideas build in my head for awhile, I started on visuals.

This is a response to the expressionist movement, a satirical pastiche of Magritte's The Son of Man. The lampshade is a metatextual icon, representing the convention of explicitly referencing the artistic constructs that make up an artform within the art itself. This is known colloquially as lampshade hanging, in which the offending trope is drawn attention in a way that paradoxically diminishes its artificial qualities. The idea is that this modernist icon has been appropriated as a demonstration of the fictional nature of art.

Still just experimenting, I tried my hand at pixel art. It's actually just a base image manipulated by hand to be more low res, but it's something I've never done so I guess it's not bad for a start. Digital art is considered postmodern, so I thought about making the zine as a blog of some kind, with content that exclusively comments on modern life through a digital lens.

This is an attempt at minimalism. I don't think it really works. The gradient is the wrong colour and I think the size doesn't work, but it's something I could come back to.

Continuing with the lampshade motif, I started to think about the role of the frame in art. Incorporating it into the image itself seems to proclaim that the presentation of an image is just as important as the image itself, and that when removed of the context of presentation it ultimately becomes meaningless. By now I'm stacking lampshades on lampshades.

I made an animated gif from the image to try and approach things from a digital-exclusive manner. I think it's about questioning the boundaries between art and reality, or alternatively nothing at all.

This is the inspiration for the painting gif. I created it at around the same time and saw a connection to the project, so I redid it with the postmodern iconography I'd developed.

That's about all I've come up with for now. I also considered randomly arranging website favicons to spell out cryptic and esoteric things. Maybe it could be a comment on how technology shapes modern life?

I don't know. I need to go to bed.

With Hearts Diseased as These

Finally finished my short, just in time for the new year. So glad to be free of it. Now I can focus on a̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶r̶d̶u̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶s̶i̶g̶n̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶  other comics that will in no way improve my grade. In seriousness, I'm pretty pleased with it. The dialogue is a little contrived and there are panels I'm not fond of, but I feel like I pushed myself to say something about myself I have trouble putting together in words. It's kind of like therapy, or an exorcism. Maybe now the voices will stop too.

You can read it here.