Illustration Practice MFA Studio I & II: Idea Book
experimentation & Documentation
Stacey Dugan Montebello
experimentation & Documentation Illustration Practice MFA Studio I & II: Idea Book
When you see these dotted lines scan the area with the smartphone app layar for extra content
* Special thanks to Whitney Sherman and Jaime Zollars for working with our class for the past year and helping us understand where we want to go with our illustration. Also to Sarah Jacoby for helping me bounce ideas for this book when I was struggling for a concept. I also would like to thank my proofreader Lily Katherine who worked her way through my dyslexic speak.
Contents
2 6
Special thanks
Introduction
7
Simple and Fun
9-10
Lightroom & Archiving Workshop
11-12
Paper Engineering Workshop
13-14
Pattern/Licensing
15-16
Baby book
17-18
Sketchbook Project
19
Made for Print
21-22
Tomi Vollauschek/Made & Sold
23-24
Handlettering project
25-26
Words on Wheels
27-28
Letterpress Workshop
29-30
Publishing Project pitch/ Publishing Project
31
Persistent and Complex
33-36
Image Harvest Project
37-40
Three Workshops Reaction Project
(Sewing/Bookbinding /Paper Engineering) 41-44
Art Market Project/Art Market Creative Brief
45-48
Melinda Beck/Stop Motion
49-52
Independent project
54
Idea Book
[My folding bike]
Introduction
T
[Me and some buddies]
[Shadow my adopted little big brother]
[My job at the OEC]
Stacey Dugan Montebello Home: Cayce South Carolina Age :23 Undergrad: MICA Illustration MFA: MICA Illustration Practice
o understand how I laid out this book you need some background information on me. I was privilege to grow up in a home with highly observant people and to have a history of learning disabilities (LD’s) in my family. On my mother’s side there is a long history of dyslexia, my great-grandfather, my grandmother, two of her nephews, my mother and her older sister are all dyslexic and so my whole family knew what to look out for. That’s why when I began showing early signs as a toddler I was taken to an educational psychologist and diagnosed. I went to a private school for children with LD’s and received specialized instruction in elementary school to help me work around my dyslexia, which was rather severe. I couldn’t read until the fifth grade when I suddenly went from not being able to read at all to a 12th grade reading comprehension in under year. This is typical for individuals with my type of dyslexia, that if they received the right type of early education they will eventually learn how to read. This allowed me to start public school in the sixth grade; at the end of my first year the principal sat the whole school down in the gymnasium and told us the importance of studying for the ACT’s and the SATs now instead of later. He said “if you want to go to a good school you need to think about it now not later, right now.” I thought to myself, “What do I want to be, what do I like to do?” I decided that I wanted to do something that I enjoyed, and for the next eight years I pursued classes, extracurricular activities and competitions that would help me get into the University of my choice where I would study ecology and get a job as a researcher and do interpretive education. From seventh grade to senior year I was drilled on the scientific method on statistical correlations and good research practices. It was not until the summer of my junior year that I entertain the possibility of art being my career. My grandmother is a watercolor artist my mother is a photographer, art and drawing were simply a part of self-expression in my house, I kept a sketchbook the way most people keep a diary. Art for me was easy, and public school had conditioned me to assume that nothing worthwhile is easy. But that summer at a precollege program I fell deeply in love with the art school curriculum because it was not easy, it was challenging and time-consuming and marvelous. I realized I could learn more if I was spending more time actually doing and less time struggling to keep up with my peers in medium where I was already at a severe disadvantage. But I never abandon everything I’d had learned instead I applied it to art, so I think it was only natural that I leaned towards illustration because I would argue that illustration is basically visual research. My undergraduate years were spent learning as many mediums as I possible so I could to see which suited me best and I became confident with my art. Grad school has allowed me to properly combine my background in the sciences with my illustration and that is how this book is laid out, I think of each assignment like a experiment.
the scientific method:
Experiment Question Hypothesis experiment/research analyze results conclusion future study
[My studio in Baltimore]
[My back yard in South Carolina]
= = = = = = = =
my Illustration method: project/assignment prompt initial sketches refine sketches/look at inspiration critique final illustration future application of piece¬
Simple and Fun These projects had straightforward
concepts and generally did not take more than a couple of days to complete and were very fun.
Lightroom & Archiving Workshop
The prompt for this assignment as recorded in my notes was as follows: “Will Knipscher, a photographer and faculty member of MICA will be coming in to demonstrate how to use Lightroom. You are to bring 10 to 15 images on a flash drive to add metadata and organize as an archive. Be sure to take notes during the demonstration and ask plenty of questions. You will set up your archive folder on the studio desktop, and consider how you can use Lightroom to help organize your personal images.” I had been using Adobe bridge to edit, archive/organize my images for several years and from what I’d heard about Lightroom I believed it to be redundant and unnecessary. However after the demonstration I revised my initial hypothesis, that Lightroom wouldn’t work as well Bridge and experimented with program. In class we learned three major things about Lightroom.
What I Learned Experimenting With Lightroom
Lightroom lets you import from either a folder form a USB. It creates duplicates of every photo you import, a original in your catalog and a preview, mirrored in your catalog but for the Lightroom interface to make it more efficient. (Bridge does not do this you work with the full file all the time and it can freeze/ crash your computer i.) As you import images you assign keywords thay are used by Lightroom’s search feature and are embeded into the image once you publish it. It can be used by search engines to make your photos were findable.
Lightroom allows you to export your images right after editing. You can rename all of the files and adjust settings such as size, mode , etc. This is very helpful because you can quickly make image libraries both for print and for web without having to go back and resize all of your images because the program does it for you. And another feature that is very useful is you can upload and preset watermarks and instead of adding them individually to each image you can simply check a box and all of the images your exporting will include your watermark.
Lightrooms search very similar to online image searchs such as Google or Bing. To do this, add keywords (metadata) in “Library Module”, you can also delete images and rate them using a five-star system. If there are several photos requiring the exact same keywords, you can select them all and click “auto sync” this will apply all your changes to all of the images you selected. You can search for images either with your keywords or by the number of stars you’ve given an image. You can also flag a folder to find something very specific very easily.
I was very impressed with the program after the workshop and I did further research. On the previous page I talked a little bit about using light room to archive and organize, with the research I’ve done I found why this is desirable. You can set up Lightroom to start as soon as you’ve plugged a device into your computer or you can customize it to ask you if you would like to start in order to backup your files. In class we were told that when we copy or move images with Lightroom it makes duplicates, and previews and links to the original files. And every time you make and edit a new image is saved unless otherwise specified. This leaves the original images untouched, truly creating an archive, unlike bridge which once you commit to the edit, unless you yourself save it under a new name, replaces the original file with the edited one. This means that Lightroom is a nondestructive program, keeping your data safe from yourself. Some of the things you can add to your images are, author, copyright, usage, timestamp,and you can even add special type of timestamps which keep track of not only when the original image was created but all of the edits you’ve done to a particular image. That way if you’ve organized the image in a folder using the date, which is very common, and then you edit it, Lightroom saves the original date so when you search for it it still connected to the image and not just the folder the images in. You can add keywords and edit the metadata and you can create groupings or collections within the images you’re working with. You can rate the images with stars, colors and flags. I also discovered more about “Develop Module” which allows you to edit directly in the program without having to open Photoshop. Although Bridge has a similar option is not nearly as streamline as Lightroom’s. Lightroom, like Bridge, is designed for photographers and the “Develop Module” has some photo specific tools, these however can be very handy if you’re documenting artwork. There is a built-in lens profile called “Lens Corrections “which makes adjusting images depending on your camera and lens type extremely easy. The major things it can correct are barrel distortion, blown pixels, and vignetting. The information on camera type and lens type is generally embedded by the digital SLR when the pictures taken. Lightroom downloads all this information automatically so you don’t have to manually put it in. Under Basic Edit you can correct color temperature by using the white balance tool, just like in bridge. And you can adjust clarity, vibrance and saturation like in Photoshop. Other features that are similar to what you can do in Photoshop include cropping, cloning and highlight, mid tone, and shadow adjustment.
Paper Engineering Workshop [Carol
This workshop was done by Carol Barton a designer & paper engineer with an incredible amount of experience making pop-ups and pop up books. She brought in a number of books and examples of popups, and paper engineering. The book she brought in that I like the best is one that she’d worked on called The Pocket Paper Engineer which is basically how to of paper engineering. We did very simple pop-up exercises to help us understand the nature of folded and cut paper. I was very drawn to the laser cut pop-up cards she showed us. We had this demonstration right for Halloween so I wanted to make a interesting a illustrated Halloween themed pop-up card. These are my Barton holding a card she brought] mockups, sketches and some of the illustrations I did. However this workshop was part of a series of workshops and the assignment we had concerning the workshops were linked. So I ultimately abandoned the pop-up cards in order to focus on the combined assignment.
[A mockup of the mummy card I was working on]
[Carol Barton holding a card she brought]
[Two of the pop-up cards I did in class]
[A mockup of the skeleton card I was working on]
[One of the pop-up cards I did in class]
[This design was of the skeleton holding its own head] [This design was of a bat, I scrapped it early on]
Pattern/Licensing
This project started with a workshop given by the pattern depicted at the beginning of the Simple and Fun section is one of the patterns I did in that workshop. We used regular paper, pens, and pencils and a copier machine to learn the basics. We then copied and taped together the sheets we printed to create wallpaper to see which patterns worked best. We then spent three weeks creating five patterns, and a mockup for physical product. In preparation for this our class attended a demonstration at the MICA print lab on the usage of the fabric printer. We had to come up with a theme and create a mood board before we started making our patterns. I was inspired by my work with the Smithsonian, and based my patterns on some of their exhibits. And the materials I decided to add my patterns to are things that you might find in their gift shop or on their website. Because we had such a long time to do this project I decided to do all of the sketching by hand, typically when we have a fast turnaround I do those projects digitally.
Julia Rothman,
Baby book
This project was done independently by the first and second year MFA Illustration Practice students for our professor Jaime Zollars who went on maternity leave towards the end of the first semester. Several of the students got the idea to do an alphabet book for her, and her baby. We used Google Docs share the book template, The final book was 8.25”x10.75” we had the illustration on one side and the letter on the other along with the cute little phrase. We then picked letters to illustrate, most people did two. I picked W and L.
“L is for lazy lanky Llama” The llama was the first illustration I did, I started with a very simple design and did a quick color up to make sure that it would read at the size I wanted. I did several color variations and share them with the other students.
“W is for humming winged whale” I worked on the humpback whale after I was done with llama, I had already decided on a style so I just kept with it. This one changed more significantly because when I brought the initial sketch around people said it looks creepy with its mouth open.
[Photo courtesy of Lisa Perrin]
During this project everyone was quite busy, and some of the illustrations were late coming in, N was one of those. So an email was sent out asking someone to do an extra illustration. I volunteered I got as far as the illustration on the left before the original in came in. These are the final illustrations and the cover, I went ahead and finished the Newt during the second semester in anticipation of doing collaborative zine for Moca having to do with creatures, however the zine committee changed the theme and by then I had decided to focus more on independent project.
Sketchbook Project
*These are selections of my illustrations from some of the sketchbooks
This project went for almost the entire first semester; it was done using the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project. All of the first year illustration students received a 5” x 7”, 32 page, saddle stitch,
sketchbook. The Brooklyn Art Library describes the sketchbook project as “… a global, crowd-sourced art project and interactive, traveling exhibition of handmade books. Our community is made up of over 75,000 people, and our permanent collection at Brooklyn Art Library holds over 27,244 sketchbooks from 135 countries around the globe.” On the back of each sketchbook is a sticker, with the sketchbook title, a barcode into it was assigned to. The sketchbooks we received were: Travelogue, Memoir, Narrative, Atlas, Chronicle, Chapbook, Documentation, Dwellings, Strangers, Diagrams, Lists, Creatures, Dinosaurs, and Mystery. I was initially assigned Dinosaurs, but each week we traded sketchbooks so each person had at least one full page spread in every sketchbook.
[These are the initial sketches I did to try and figure out what I wanted to do for my cover]
[Cover of Dinosaurs]
[Spread for Creatures]
[Spread for Dwellings]
[Spread for Memoir]
[Spread for Dinosaurs]
[Closed version of Documentation spread]
[Spread for List]
[Spread for Atlas]
[Spread for Stranger]
[Open version of Documentation spread]
[Spread for Mystery]
[This is a pattern I developed after the pattern workshop using one of the pages from the sketchbook project]
Made for Print These projects, from the very start, were be
printed
specifically designed to
at the end; this idea became very important aspect of these pieces.
Made & Sold/ Tomi Vollauschek
This project was done in conjunction with the German born Austrian artist Tomi Vollauschek one of the founders of FL@33, who is known for his work with and interest in 3-D type. In anticipation of his arrival the first year illustration practice students decided to make three-dimensional letters spelling out “Willkommen”, which is welcome in German, to welcome our guest. I picked “M”, and used soft craft foam cut in layers to form my letter.
The requirements for ARTWORK FOR PRINT were: use 4 different colors, illustration must be for print, should have general theme. The illustration should be at least 8.5” by 11”. For our final at the beginning of the second day we were to have one single visual full-color print. The second day was MODIFYING THE ARTWORK FOR BUTTON BADGE PIN SET we took the illustrations and made four black & white, 1” button badges. The buttons had to work with the initial illustration but also stand on their own. T he third day was MODIFYING THE ARTWORK FOR A FREE CHOICE PRODUCT, we were allowed to choose anything that complemented the concept of our initial design, we had to show it from two different angles and for the final we printed both the original illustration, the buttons, and whatever product we came up with.
“Creating visuals for a product range. The aim of this workshop is to develop skills of thinking beyond the edges of a sheet of paper, to create variations of a theme and to feel encouraged to use different techniques and canvases for your artworks.” The workshop is split into three days and the whole project was rather confusing to begin with, these are the sketches for the first phase workshop, ARTWORK FOR PRINT.
[Before our workshop we picked artists in FL@33’s Made and Sold; these are scans from the book of the artists I drew inspiration from: James Joyce, One Fine Day and Peepshow/Peepshop]
After the workshop over, I and many of the other students went back and rework the project based on our in class critiques and the final critique with Tomi Vollauschek. Many of us that this only are done we emailed him the for print design in the revised button badge design. These are the revised button badges in print. I shifted my focus from trying to be about thinking with dyslexia, to thinking in general, specifically right brain versus left brain theory and I turn the poster into an infographic of sorts.
Handlettering Workshop
The handlettering workshop was originally designed to be in conjunction with another project but there was a delay and it ended up becoming its own little contained project. The workshop was all about understanding typography, Whitney Sherman, our director handed out reference sheets and gave us a very informative lecture where she encouraged us to take notes and ask lots questions.
Each person was given a list of words to handletter I struggled a lot with this project as my dyslexia makes it difficult to deal with words. I misspelled, incorrectly copied, and wrote many of my letters backwards. A lot of the students focused on doing illustrations based on their words, but I was struggling enough as it was with the words as words, and I have found in the past that when I tried to take letterform and make a pictorial I have a even greater tendency for spelling errors. So I focused more on brushwork and mark making and incorporating some of the more unusual textural scans that I have created for my digital library. A lot of what I did was focusing more on the letters the words, I wrote out the word and if I didn’t like a particular letter within the word I continue to write that one letter over and over again until I got a form that I liked and then I scan the men and piece them together in Photoshop. This is also how I dealt with my kerning, and letters were too close or too far away I adjusted the spacing in Photoshop. My inability to spell and to write consistently was an area of some confusion during the critiques but ultimately, once I explained how I was going to accomplish piece in the words together the feedback I received was excellent.
Initially we were going to do lettering for refrigerator poetry. Each person was given a list of words, we were going to handletter them and print them out very small and mount them on magnetic strips. Then we were planning on either using a large metal sheet, or magnetic chalkboard paint to arrange them in the exhibit space outside of our classroom. This is a long narrow hallway with a fair amount of foot traffic, we’re going to have instructions asking people to arrange their own poetry using our text. It turned out that this idea was not feasible so instead we did and installation where each person use a combination of their own and other people’s letters to create a sort of abstract poem. These poems were printed and arranged on that same wall, but they were fixed and not movable.
I helped measure the length of the wall and figure out the height that we should print out each of the words, a template was sent around we all had to reconsider how big are text was going to be printed. We had some leftover words after all the lists of been sent out, and I volunteered to do several extra ones. On the day that the poems were decided on and put on the wall I was ill, I sent another student a text message asking what was going on, when she told me that they were arranging poems using the limited amount of words each person had we realize that I had slightly more words than everyone else and that within my group of words I could create my own little poems that were of similar length to everyone else’s. When I came in the next day everyone had already printed and hung the show, spacing was all set and there wasn’t room for two more poems, it’s my words never made it on the wall. A bunch of us really liked the initial idea of the positionable hand-lettered magnetic poetry so we asked the teaching assistant, who was initially sent out our word lists, to give us copies of all the words that were sent out. I specifically wanted to continue doing more hand lettering, as an exercise, because I found that the more I wrote the easier. So throughout the semester myself and several other students have been independently doing more hand lettering and we hope that when we each the entire set we can link them and sell them on Esty as little packets.
Words on Wheels
Words on Wheels is a very interesting project sponsored by the Maryland Transit Administration, it’s done conjunction with MICA illustration classes and the Maryland public schools. The schools give their students a prompt asking them to write a short poem that will be illustrated in and put in public buses in and around the Baltimore area. The poems are all looked at a handful are selected and sent to MICA, each student is given to poems, so that each poem has at least two artists. Each student separately illustrates both of their poems, is an initial sketch phase, a color mockup, and a final illustration. I’d actually participated in this project before as an undergrad and was delighted to do so again. This project was supposed to be in conjunction with hand letter workshop, but as I stated on the previous spread there were some delays so instead the hand letter workshop prepared us for what we would be doing here. We are finished with our final illustrations we place them on a table in our classroom and are professors and several other faculty members went around and chose illustrations they thought worked best with each poem to each person had one illustration that was chosen.
I had to be very careful , every time I wrote down my poems I immediately checked it with someone to make sure I hadn’t misspelled or dropped any words. The first time I did this project as an undergrad, I had to do a bunch of lastminute edits at the final phase because I’d misspelled several of the words.
[This was my final poster that was chosen.] [the Words On Wheels official meet and greet and presentation event]
[The inside of the bus with our posters mounted in it]
Letterpress Workshop
The letterpress workshop was the first workshop we did together as a class in the first semester. Before we went to the Baltimore Print Studio, where the workshop was held, we had to do a bit of research on polymer plates, used in modern letterpressing to do detailed illustration. We were instructed to use Boxcar Press, a letterpress studio in Syracuse New York with a website where you can order custom polymer plates of your own illustrations. We all ordered 6.5” x 8”, KF95 polymer plates from their website and then brought them to the studio. The great thing about the polymer plates that we ordered was that even after we use them all day and the letterpress studio we were able to peel them off and save them for future use.
[the inspiration]
The workshop itself was quite intense, we learned about three different types of letterpress machines (although we only printed on two). There was the VanDercook # four which could print about 14” x 20”,the VanDercook SP 20s which prints slightly larger at about 19” by 28”, and while we didn’t use it we were shown a Platen Presse, that works by clamping a small sheet of paper (about 6” x 10”) between two pieces of metal. We printed with silver and red inks, one on each of the letterpress, they showed us how to position our polymer plate, we also got to watch them position traditional wooden and lead type. They then walked us through the mechanism, doing several demonstrations and then each of us were allowed to pull our own sheets.
I brought in a variety of paper to experiment with, see which would letterpress best. The handmade cotton/abaca combination that I brought took the letter press the best in my opinion. This helped influence me to take a papermaking class in the second semester. When I realized I was rather proficient at making paper, I created my own mold and deckle, began constructing a variation of a Gutenberg press, which can be used with polymer plates for letterpressing.
Publishing Project
The publishing project was the first project our class did with Jaime Zollars, who had been working with the second years. It began with a demonstration by husband-and-wife/ writer-andillustrator team Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behrteam the creative minds behind Idiot Books. They introduced us to a type of small self-publishing publishing that many of us were unaware of. We then give a project pitch detailing what we wanted to do; we incorporated text and sketches to demonstrate how he wanted it to look as well. Over the summer between undergrad and graduate year I’ve been quite sick, and mild allergy I’ve had all my life suddenly developed into something more severe. I was quite stressed when I get stressed I have a reoccurring dream about a car accident I was and is a child. After talking with the school counselors about the dream they suggested I write it down to try and get out of my head. In the beginning of the dream I wake up in a car, disoriented and bleeding with someone leaning over trying to help me. And when I wake up again, within the dream, I’m the person leaning over the previous me trying to help.
For this assignment I sat down with my jumbled notations, and typed it up, and edit it down to a more manageable length. I then illustrated on top of the text and around the text, where there is dialogue I handlettered it. I represented the different people in the book with colors and the illustrations themselves were very simple and graphic, more reminiscent of spot illustrations than your traditional full-page spread. We also had a bookbinding workshop in which we learned different methods including saddle stitch, stab binding, and perfect bound to name a few. We then took the illustrated books we’ve been working on and printed out and assembled 35 copies of our book. My books were 5”x 7”, perfect bound, we used a guillotine cutter to make sure the edges were even and then I used a corner rounder at work to finish the books. Some of the students sold there’s at art market, I ended up giving/and selling a bunch of them away to friends and coworkers who’d been involved in car crashes, I sold for 30$-25$, depending on who is asking me for them.
*You will notice that the color of this section is the same as the cover of this book that is because I consider this book, as project, to a part of this category. At the end of this section there is more information about the development of this book.
Complex and Revised
These projects started out with very complicated ideas that tended to have a lot false starts and workarounds and while several of them ended up being printed they differ from the MADE FOR PRINT’s in that the projects did not start with the idea of print as a main concept.
Image Harvest Project
The overall theme for first year in the MFA illustration practice program was Lost and Found, This project tied directly in to that concept. It began with Whitney Sherman giving a presentation on how elements or concepts of a pre-existing piece of artwork to create a new piece of artwork. We had to propose 10 different ideas, using images from our portfolio. Ultimately I ended up doing 4 of my proposed ideas. The images above are the nine ideas I did not use for this project, to the right are sketches that I did use for this project.
The sketches were done in one of my favorite undergraduate classes, Visual Journalism. They were done from life during a performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, they were performing a piece from the Metropolis Symphony called the Red Cape Tango. The Metropolis Symphony is about superheroes; and the Red Cape Tango is about the death of Superman. It begins with a funeral march that rises into brass heavy climax, that then falls apart into deconstructive music. It was partnered with the Musicians Apprentice, which was performed first. Before the beginning of the program the conductor, Marin Alsop, explained why the two were paired together, they both incorporate funeral marches and a section where the music itself seems to fall apart, and lastly they’re both about fantasy.
[This idea inspired the theme for my three reaction piece]
[this idea becomes my art market project]
this idea inspired my stop motion animation]
[I used a crockpot and a brushes to paint the wax onto the fabric, and a black crayon in a tin can heated up on the stoveto draw the line art]
I decided to use a combination of torn cardboard, tissue and rice paper to symbolize the feeling of the Symphony, I wanted three large central panels to depict the orchestra hall, and how that surrounded by smaller square panels depicting close at illustrations of the musicians hands on her instruments. Out of the two sketchbooks I filled up for visual journalism I would say 1/5 of both books are musicians hands, it’s something that I’m very fascinated with and I enjoy drawing.
[One of the pieces with the wax still on]
[My first test piece, I hadn’t really figured it out at this point]
I ended up getting into a bit of a rut halfway to the project, I wasn’t satisfied with how the pieces were looking, the cardboard was curling, then to make matters worse when I mounted them and foam core I accidentally got black paint on the front of several of them. I ultimately wanted to have these finished for the first MFA and juried show, I managed to finish them the night before the show went up and I mounted them, still wet, in my space. The next morning when I came back with my labels, they had all fallen off the wall. Paint in the room that I was in was newer and therefore smoother than the paint and the rest the gallery and the adhesive tack that I used successfully in my own studio to keep them on the wall didn’t have enough surface to’s to hold on. Several of them were damaged and I became very frustrated and annoyed. At my end of year review I talked about my choices for the materials of this project and my frustrations with it. I also reiterated that I was still interested in making this work, so several of the guests critics and the director suggested but I approach the project from a different angle.
I sat down and I made a list of things that I thought of when looking at the illustration in the in the word “Cape” coming up, and that in turn made me think of fabric. Then I thought about the deconstructive nature of the music piece and I thought “why don’t I make the piece of fabric?” So over the summer experimented with batik, and translated my sketches onto fabric. When I re-presented my project the second time I was met with more positive feedback in the suggestion that I cut the fabric and sections and make an actual deconstructed “Cape”. So over the course of the semester, in between projects, I’ve been finishing the dyes, boiling off the wax, and laying out a pattern for my deconstructed cape. Above are selection of some of the finished and more successful pieces.
Three Workshops Reaction Project
we had four workshops that were given during the first semester, letterpress, sewing, bookbinding and paper engineering. We had to select three of the four and make a piece incorporating things that we learned from all three. I chose sewing bookbinding and paper engineering, and I went back to the image harvest and project I picked some very rough sketches I had done of dragons as a jumping off point. As an undergraduate student I wrote a short story for a philosophy class called “Toys!”, The prompt was taking game from your childhood and hypothesize how it could affect your future. The basic premise of the story is that children that grew up being nerdy and playing Pokémon were now adults who were inspired by the games they played as children to become geneticists so they could custom make genetically engineered/mutated animals. I cited the number of people that became engineers in the 70s because of Scotty from star track as my inspiration. I created two fictitious organizations, Abomination Pets inc, and Genetic Oddities by Design (G.O.D.), as the company’s that mutated and created real-life Pokémon. I focused on Abomination Pets inc. and only had G.O.D. as visual gag, but briefly explained it in my story as being the parent company that did larger more expensive animals. For the three reaction piece I decided to explore that idea some more and take the fantastical Dragon doodles that I had done and turn them into a catalog for ordering your genetic monster. I started by making the logos for the two companies, I wanted G.O.D. to be more sophisticated than Abomination Pets, and decided that the catalog would be done by God and not abomination pets.
I like many of the other students were slightly confused as to how much we had to incorporate from the workshops. Because of this my initial pitch in bold the cloth cover and a overly complicated folding accordion book. It was quickly pointed out that the look of my book didn’t match the idea and we realize that we had more interpretive freedom and how much of the workshops to incorporate in our piece. So final design split into two pieces, I really wanted to do an accordion Dragon book the looked as though in and kept as a journal. I did a test book using a Dragon patterned fabric that I found, a sheet of role paper that I carefully folded and my sewing machine. The book was half the size and I again decided that it didn’t match the concept I wanted and scrapped it.Instead I stretched the three concepts as far as I could go, without going to crafty.
I printed the book on a doublesided mate paper, not as heavy as card stock. Then I took a stripped of the left over mate paper and using my sewing machine I perforated it along with two pieces of thin cardboard paper. Using the holes I’d made as a guide I stitched the three things together, one piece of cardboard on either side of the strip. I printed my cover on one long strip and then wrapped it around the cardboard pieces and glued it down. And then I perfect bound the whole ensemble. So the book is a perfect bound book with a semi-softcover, because although the cardboard paper is thicker than the paper I was using it still very flexible.
Art Market Project The Art Market Project was done in conjunction with a Creative Brief writing assignment. The idea was to come up marketable product, make 25 copies (at least) , and sell them at art market. The project was threefold, the creative brief made us think about our target audience, made us consider future plans, to think about pricing etc. Then there was the project itself, we had to make 25 highquality pieces of art and they all had to be consistent and work well together. Finally there was art market itself, where network with our fellow students and see how well our product sold.
I have experience making fused glass, ceramics and experiencing in casting in many different materials. I have a
kiln and jewelry grade glass
left over from the last time I made fuse glass.
We were encouraged to experiment and to do something that we were very interested in, I’m quite passionate about darkroom photography, and about our national parks. So I decided to make pendants using a series of black and white photos I had shot, mainly at Congaree National Park. I took the negatives and made contact sheets, so each image was a tiny little photograph that fit in the palm of your hand. I had the idea of taking the contact sheets floating between two layers of glass fusing them in making pendants. However I quickly realized that the temperature of the glass would set the paper on fire and I would end up with a lot of nothing. I did some research, and found a couple of silverplated bezels that I liked and ordered them off Amazon. Unfortunately the size that I like the most was considerably more expensive than another alternative so I purchased two of them and cast them in rubber. I cast them in rubber after consulting a book dealing with metal Clay, specifically silver clay. I found that if you purchase this material you can heated up and make it more malleable and closer to a liquid a can then be placed in a large gauge syringe and injected carefully into a mold. After sitting for several hours it will still be soft but it will of hardened enough that you can pop it out of the flexible mold like one made of rubber or silicone. I consulted a book about silver clay, which is similar to polymer clay except that it’s actually made of silver and decided you fire it in a kiln onset of baking it in an oven. Again this was too expensive to buy so I went with premade bezels that I could afford, I ordered glass inserts for some the bezels as well. I then cut down some of my clear glass to match the shape of the bezels opening and melted them so that they were the same shape as the glass inserts I purchased, this is called slumping it creates naturally rounded edges on your glass.
[In the bottom right-hand you’ll notice my sonic screwdriver, I use the black light on the end to help set the UV resin before I put it under a stronger blacklight to cure]
Key Ideas sustainability, look don’t take, go back out into nature, photography is beautiful, black and white has a classical beauty, silver can be worn by anyone. Black and white photography is a elegant and classical medium and it celebrates the timelessness of our countries wilderness.
I Why
I Would Do This Project for Real
it has the potential to connect a society that’s very disconnected from nature. To bring us back to our roots and raising awareness about preservation, national parks and wilderness.
I wanted to use pendants to be both functional as a piece of jewelry and educational. I created little cards to accompany each pendant explaining what they were and where the particular photograph used in it was shot. In my creative brief I discussed that if I were to do this is an actual business I wanted to have series from different national parks and wildlife reserves for people choose from. My target audience was consisted of nature enthusiasts, people who enjoy photography, people who are conscious about the environment.
If I were to actually open a business and sell these pendants, I would want it to be a partnership between me, several other photographers, and a silversmith. I would want to only use silver-based prints and have all other aspects of the pendants to reflect this medium. I would use only silver, glass and light-sensitive resin. I wolud want the pendants I create to be more than just jewelry, I want them to be windows in to miniature worlds all but unknown to most people. At the heart of this project is love of our protected lands and a passion for traditional photography.
Melinda Beck/Stop Motion
The stop motion workshop really began with a demonstration by the dynamic duo of Sarah Barnes and Lisa Perrin, who had used a stop motion program called Dragonframe extensively for their thesis. They
gave us a demonstration and really helped us to think about the physicality of this assignment.
The actual workshop was done under the prompting and guidance of Melinda Beck, a skilled animator who uses a variety of methods to create her stop motion animations. The prompt we were given was rather open-ended, she told us that we would be shooting at roughly 24 frames per second, then we can use any media flat or three-dimensional, we can Incorporated drawn elements or digitally created elements that we printed out. They were really only four requirements for this assignment, we had to sketch out three different storyboards, we had to include cut paper, the animation needed to be 30 to 90 seconds in length and there needed to be sound. I’ve done several stop motion animations before using Adobe Premiere but I’d never used a program like Dragonframe before it was very excited as many the difficulties I had faced before could be solved for this program. I decided early on that I wanted to use origami in my animation and I wanted to incorporate the story of how the star Finch got it stars. I folded several different birds until I came across one that silhouette was similar to a Finch and that moved well when photographed it’s called Little Bird by Kamiya Satoshi. I also folded two Mason jars worth of good luck stars, a popular Japanese and Korean fold. The paper that I used, except for the stars, was all handmade in a paper class that I was taking separately. I got slightly behind schedule on the project and it wasn’t until I began shooting that I learned that Dragon frames live preview wasn’t supported on my camera. I went ahead and shot anyways which was a mistake. When I was reviewing my files went high at first seemed in focus was actually blurred and the white balance was off.
[This was my first camera set up]
[These are some of the scrapped images from my first shoot]
[The top storyboard is the one that I went with, all of them are about the same story I simply propose different visual depicting it]
[This is my second set up, I had foamcore struts with notches cut into them so that I could hang pieces of paper above the objects I was shooting to help control glare]
[My blacklight]
[I taped card stock over by clamp lights to give me a more diffused lighting]
I got slightly behind schedule on the project and it wasn’t until I began shooting that I learned that Dragon frames live preview wasn’t supported on my camera. I went ahead and shot anyways which was a mistake. When I was reviewing my files went high at first seemed in focus was actually blurred in the white balance was off. I went to the MICA undergraduate animation office and spoke with a teacher who had helped me on several projects before and asked his advice. We had a long discussion about how I wanted this piece to look, there is a section that I tried to darken digitally because I wanted it to be shot at night, but didn’t really work it just looked like a dark photograph. I also tried using glow-in-the-dark paper but it wasn’t bright enough for the camera to pick up properly. He suggested that I check out one of the Canon rebels for the MICA AV lab because Dragon frame tends to run smoother with Canon as opposed to Nikon (which is what I was using) also I would have the added benefit of a live preview. While I was waiting for the new camera I went back to some of the animation books I had and the discovered the perfect solution for my night scene. There’s a section in the Nightmare Before Christmas, where the entire scene was shot under a black light, Oogie boogie’s song. I had a black light from last semester (I used it to cure my art market project). So I folded some more good luck stars at a brighter paper and I reshot the night scenes using the blacklight the effect was exactly what I wanted.
Because I was using a tripod that had a crank shaft I could smoothly scroll upwards up without moving the tripod. I suspending my bird with fishing line from my foamcore struts. This allowed me to create some interesting effects. As the scene darkens towards night the bird takes flight and flies up but the camera remained stationary I wanted to show depth by having the bird be blurred because of movement but the background to be in focus. So I cut a longer line of fishing monofilament and attached it to the bird, I then set long exposure with my camera and slowly pulled the bird up as the picture was being taken. And then in another scene I wanted the entire scene to be blurred, for the stars to be sort of smudged as though you’re moving very quickly through a lot of space. To achieve this I manually tilted the camera while doing long exposure to the stars were smeared across the frame.
Independent project
The second to last project I worked on in the second semester was an independent project, I attempted to finish an illustrated book I had started about dyslexia when I was an undergraduate. I did nine finished illustrations of my book for the second half of my thesis as an undergrad (the first project was unrelated I finished it before the start of the second semester so I switched thesis instructors and worked on something new). I also finished writing the book and sketching out all the pages. I’ve wanted to revisit and finish it for some time now, this project gave me the opportunity to do so. As an undergraduate I wasn’t really sure what the book was for other than I wanted to do it, I got excited with the idea of making the entire book something like a Rorschach test, where each page of spread would mirror one another. I decided that the left page would have writing in text and the right side would have illustrations. I wanted to include patterns behind the text that were either mirrored or similar to the illustration on the other side. As a graduate student I more focus as to what I want this book to be, I wanted to be for both parents and children, for dyslexics and non-dyslexics continues to be easy to read for dyslexics but not difficult to read for nondyslexics. I decided that less is more and if the image has an unnecessary element that I should edit it out. I also decided to break pages that were very text heavy and content heavy into two pages, and to incorporate a little more humor to help me get my point across. I decided that point of the book was to give an easy-to-understand example of what it’s like to function every day with dyslexia. The book was initially designed to be a nonstandard size, I went back and reformatted my manuscript to that to be a 10 x 8 standard landscape and that instead of pushing the illustrations and text to the very edges of the page I would contain them within the page better. I also chose a font specifically designed to be easy to read for dyslexics but not too difficult for non-dyslexics treat either
[This is La Ferme by Milan Jeunesse, I drew a lot inspiration from this book, because it was clearly trying to explain farm life to city kids. I think this is a similar concept in a way to explaining dyslexia to a nondyslexic.]
[These are the original nine illustrations that I’d finished as an undergrad, they’re all very busy and difficult to read the green and yellow pages on the upper right have been split into two different spreads, because there’s simply too much information on the page]
[These are some of the pages of the half scale dummy book I made during the summer with my directors suggestions written on them. These comments and the long discussion we where I took lots of notes in my sketchbook really helped me to feel more confident about where this book was going.]
[this is the hard cover version of the 8 x 10 book that I did as a mockup of to see if the type and illustrations were of a good size]
[These are some the edited spreads, with the OpenDyslexic typeface, I went back into the original drawings and took extraneous information and rearranged layouts to make the images more readable]
idea book
T
his book was produced for a project called Idea Book, it’s supposed to organize and present our experiments, processes, notations and documentations and Asus synced and visually dynamic book. We were supposed to organize our books and lay them out to give the viewer a sense of how we think. The ultimate goal of this project was to give a full representation of our first year’s work in the MFA illustration program. A driving force behind my book, and in fact my entire first year as an MFA student was the year-long theme of lost and found. At the very beginning of the first semester we discussed the idea of rediscovery, recycling taking concepts and ideas and combining them in new interesting ways. That’s what this book was all about was taking the projects that we had done over the course of the year combining them together in a new and interesting way to say something a bit different.
It would not have been possible for me to design this book if I hadn’t consulted these other books:
Graphic Design Theory edited by Helen Armstrong
Layout Index by Jim Krause
Made and Sold | Toys, T-Shirts, Prints, Zines and Other Stuff by FL@33
Type Idea Index by Jim Krause
I would have not been able to get to the semester without these books:
Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton
Graphic Artist’s Guild Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines 13th edition by the Graphic Artists Guild