Sunday, July 24, 2011

thirty-six chairs in an hour

I have been working on a pop up book about classic chairs and as part of the process, I sat down for an hour and drew a bit. Then I made a poster from the drawings.
If anyone wants the poster, I put it up for downloading.

There are no names or dates on the image, so it would be fun to see if anyone can identify all 36.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Sfumato

I was fooling around with the scanner today making crazy pictures when this idea happened.


Sfumato, from the Italian word sfumare "to evaporate like smoke," was a renaissance painting technique which used subtle and gradual shading to produce soft forms. These portraits, made using polyester pillow stuffing placed directly on a scanner bed, reminded me of the smoky technique.


Here are some pictures of how it was done.
When you invert the colors of this image, the face becomes apparent.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

I took a few pictures of a drawing that I made using a tack. It is a side view of a pelvis.



 The light shines through the drawing to make a negative.



I call it TACKtile illustration.

Monday, July 11, 2011

where am I?

In New Jersey playing badminton with a real feather shuttlecock. Also croquet.
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Saturday, July 9, 2011

lamping

In the summer, some people like to go camping. I prefer lamping, or making lamps.

I have been traveling this week, so I decided to come up with a train sized knitting project. The result is a felted lamp based on some earlier textile studies that I made. I don't want to overuse it, but the texture fits so many contexts. I also made a sort of decorative pillow ball. I'm not yet sure why, but it looks ok.

Please excuse the sloppy formatting, I am working with mobile this week.
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Sunday, July 3, 2011

The NYAFF has started!

For the past few years, I have been going to the New York Asian film festival to see crazy Japanese splatter films. This year I decided to go for something a bit less strange: the opening night Screening of Milocrorze: A Love Story.
 The movie is really complex in terms of plot, and so I am not going to try to summarize it. Instead I want to mention that the visuals for the film were excellently expressive and appropriate. They made it easy to differentiate between the three main characters (all played by Takayuki Yamada) and storylines. The above picture shows the pastel world of the young Ovreneli Vreneligare. The visuals are kind of a combination of a childs drawing, 90s photo manipulation, and a rainbow.


Suddenly, there is a change of style and the setting changes to a pseudo-retro game show. The overall feeling is 70s sleaze, kind of like if Austin Powers was set in japan, but a lot funnier. The character of Besson Kumagai is so terribly obnoxious with his backup dancers, platform shoes, and hair bowtie. This middle part seems to be mostly a comedy, but is just as visually thorough as the first love story. The characters wear afro wigs and body suits, striped turtlenecks, and have a vintage style that sits on the edge of ugly and cool. There are fewer after effects type animations, and there is no more glitter.
The story segues into an ancient (or current?) scene, set in a gambling parlor. the noble Tamon seems to have transported himself back in time to find his lost lover. Everything is black, white, and shades of red. It is hard to think of the connection between the three stories (visually, there is none) besides the love story in all sections. There is a really amazing fight scene that seems to go on forever (in a good way). It was shot with special high speed cameras that capture gravity or the seeming lack of it in a novel way.

There are tatami flying everywhere.

So that is what I did yesterday. I saw one of the most visually interesting films I have ever seen. You should see it because i cant really describe how cool it was.

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