August 2007 Archives

Spray enamel on Denim

Simple cartoons are much like one sentence stories. They're almost fractal - in that they express more than what can be seen in one glance. They're almost like a computer program in that same way.

My favorite one sentence story is of course is the dinosaur one - it makes you ask so many questions. How did the dinosaur get there? How did YOU get near a dinosaur? What were you doing, sleeping?

Novels are usually ruined when everything is packaged up at the end and the characters aren't allowed to live their own lives. I never liked that. I'm better off having the characters hate me, the reader and go about whatever it was they were doing, alone. In privacy.

Dinosaurs are somewhat important to me - historicaly. I can't say I've thought about them all too much recently, but they're a part of a coincidence I had, dealing with why I moved to Colorado. I can't find the paper online right now - I must have not posted it? So unlike me. Here are the relevent bits:

I had a geology class. We went to Red Rocks, in Morrison Colorado to to talk about rocks. We had a good view of the Dakota Hogback, one specifically called, "Dinosaur Ridge" - and guess what they found there. Yup, dinosaur fossils.

The crazy thing was, I used to, as a dino-maniac little rug rat, go to the Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT during birthdays and look at the fossils they dug up.

I had asked myself, earlier in the day, before going up to Red Rocks, why I had moved to Colorado and if it was a good idea. The coincidence with seeing where famous fossils were dug up - and that I've seen these very fossils, almost 20 years before was enough to make me feel that I had made the right decision, even if I didn't have the, "why". Do people look for such coincidences? I don't really have a religion anymore, but I use the random pairing of unrelated events together as my own attempt at establishing order in my life.

You know? Some people have all-power entities that rule their life, I fit puzzle pieces of my life together by mashing them until they fit.

So, anyways. Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs on jeans. It's. It's: a brontosaurus. Brontosauruses don't actually exist - it was a cobbling of different fossils from different animals.

So the bronosaurus on my jeans? It's not really there either. Is it?

White Spray Enable on Trendy Bicycle "Messenger" Bag.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this on this journal, but I'm an avid bicyclist.

Bicycling in the city is inherently dangerous. I tend to think that traffic can't see me and act accordingly. Or more so - If I wasn't wasn't there, how would I navigate a busy street successfully, safely and with speed? It's a more complicated idea than it first let's on.

It's an interesting concept - the idea to convey a message that's almost not even there. It's also interesting, to me at least, to have messages that express what it is to be the message.

Note: the image up top has been twiddled about with the contrast. The message on the bag is not quite as obvious - the yellowing of the bag is not quite so yellow.

Digital Collage from crow quill pen and ink drawings on sketch paper.

...something about replacing flowers in a vase, with hands. The fingertips would make the pedals of the flowers. I guess that morphed into the hands actually holding the flowers.

In another life (it seems), I used to give away a lot more flowers than I do now. Maybe it's that there's less people that I see that deserve them, or less flowers to steal.

Sharpie, Acrylic and Varnish on Linen.

I think I was more interested in the comparison of the line quality between the portrait and the typography, than actual content.

Sharpie, Tria Pantone Pen, Charcoal and acrylic on Glossy Photo Paper. ~34" x 34"

My studio currently looks out into a parking lot. The parking lot itself has a large billboard that rotates at odd intervals. The current one looks like this:

OK - I'm not that dense of a person - perhaps I was sick. But I look at the sign - at the 8+ foot letters (B RSPBL) and attempted to make sense of them.

"BE RESPIBLE"

Right.

My associate, of course, figured it out right away, "Be ResPONSIBLE, it says".

OK. I got the idea, but I didn't get the follow through. Maybe it's a well-known (this - this, "BBRVTN") digital txt-SMS-internet... "thing" that I wasn't privy to.

What makes this even more funnier, is that the helpful URL, below the main text is made up of five letters, that totally blows the initial pun out of the water.

I think I forgot all about the billboard, got better and finished the above drawing last night

This morning, I noticed the billboard again and - curses! There was probably the initial inspiration to my little pun.

Or not. I was also listening to MSTRCRFT, after looking at stuff from Death From Above and CSS. Let's make love, baby.

Condensing may in fact be a form of obfuscation. Doing away with what seems to be uneeded elements to you may make your message harder to understand for others. Another term similar to condensing is, Simplification. Most drawings are simplifications of the original subject. Using pen and cross hatch lines is a simplification of difficult and complex shadows.

Simplification done well can make the underlying idea easier to understand. Simplification done poorly can hide the underlying idea and make things harder to understand.

Pencil and Crow Quill Pen (Black Pelikan Drawing Ink + Windsor Newton Vermilion) on sketch paper.

Pencil and Crow Quill Pen/Ink on Paper.

My good friend, whom has become both very talkative and very flirtatious in the past week, told me of a silly story about DJ'ing at a small, hip place on 17th. The waitress, whom he was flirting with made him a special drink. He had asked for something like a White Russian, but, you know - fancier. Upon receiving the drink, the waitress told him to, "look out for the Magical ingredient on the bottom". My friend - who is almost deaf in one ear (too much music making), miheard this as a, "Vaginal Ingredient", on the bottom and was quite taken back on this drink in front of him.

Turned out, it was just creme at the bottom - but Vaginal things - at least to flirtatious DJ's can be quite Magical, if you think about it.

Coffee and Pencil on Butcher Paper.

Acrylic and Sharpie on Photo Paper

Pencil/Pen on Paper.

Traveler.

Sketch: pencil, ink and coffee on paper.