teaching myself Flash, and working on a webcomic that’s taking over my life. should be up tomorrow.
in the meantime, BROKEBACK TO THE FUTURE. sheer genius.
teaching myself Flash, and working on a webcomic that’s taking over my life. should be up tomorrow.
in the meantime, BROKEBACK TO THE FUTURE. sheer genius.
This weekend we went to the Cleveland Institute of Art with Don and Amanda to watch Amanda’s friend Mike blow glass. Here’s a drawing of him.
When we weren’t playing video games, Don and I talked quite a bit. He wants to do a thesis paper in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure book. I told him I thought that was a great idea.
I watched Jimi Hendrix play guitar today during lunch, and it reminded me that music is the coolest thing on the planet, and that if practicing art can teach you anything, it’s this: sometimes mistakes can be made into miracles, and take you places you never would have gone otherwise, whether you’re playing guitar, or blowing glass, or making soup.
While browsing Drew Dernavich’s website (his woodcut-like comics regularly appear in the New Yorker), I came across a page labelled “Graphic Facilitation.” On this page, Drew has examples of drawings and charts he’s done in real-time, sometimes on foam board, sometimes on white board, to capture the content of lectures, business meetings, and conferences.
Now, I’ve been doing this kind of thing in my notebooks for a while now, but I never knew it had a name, let alone that it’s an emerging field. Check out Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation blog. There are registered Graphic Facilitators all around the country that are available for hire to “use visual learning to solve problems.” Here’s how to get started.
Thinking about giant aunt and uncle sculptures made out of mashed potatoes and chicken gravy. Nouns, verbs, articles…teaching myself English. Wasted words. Rhythm. Studio 360. Kurt Anderson reading my journals. Electronic ink. Nicholson Baker, getting a character’s inner thoughts:
How clumsy, how broad, how expensive these cinematographic sign-systems seem, when compared to the dental trays full of pryers and pickers and angled mirrors that are the fiction writer’s rightful inheritance. Any mind Tolstoy wants to enter, he enters. It costs him nothing but a drop of ink….All the camera angles in the world couldn’t help you there.
Stories structured by an event. Ordinary passage of time. Repetition. Smoking into a wood-burning stove.
* title by Nicholson Baker
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