Plan inspired by a post on Dan Zettwoch’s blog and Stanley Donwood’s work for The Eraser:
Now I just gotta learn to animate using Flash…
WE’RE ALL SIDESHOW FREAKS SELLING OUR ODDITIES
– a midnight sketchbook page drawn after our annual viewing of Tod Browning’s 1932 masterpiece, Freaks
My mind is still a little blown by the idea that there were really positive elements to being a sideshow performer. Check out these words from an NyTimes article about Ward Hall, King of the Midway:
“Nowadays, it’s in the contracts: no freaks,” says Mr. Hall, who believes political correctness is putting people out of work. “Do-gooders run things. I’m telling you, this life was very good for freaks. These kind of people made money. They were hams, but they could never be actors. Who’s putting a bearded lady or a one-armed girl in a leading lady role on Broadway? This way they lived a great life. No more. It’s ridiculous.”
Then there is the strange but true fact that American society has gone just plain freaky itself, Mr. Hall believes.“The fat man — Howard Huge — he wanted to come out with us. But I said, ‘Howard, a fat man couldn’t sell 10 cents’ worth of fried chicken. Everybody in America’s fat.’
“You want to see a fat man, Mr. Hall says, try the Cracker Barrel, you’ll see a dozen at once.
THE IMPORTANCE OF DOODLING
To loosen up in the morning, I pull off a huge sheet of trashy sketch paper and doodle with my sumi-e brush. Sometimes I copy cartoons out of other books, just to get the flow going. Sometimes I work on the easel, sometimes I work on the coffee table, sometimes I work on the floor in the sunshine…
I can’t express how elated we are to be finished with the GRE. Pythagorean triangles are no longer invading my dreams. Take that, ETS.
But oh, will it be a race to the finish line for the rest of the year. The wedding, the applications, the book…one thing ends, and twenty other things take it’s place.
We’ve got company coming this weekend, so we’re gonna spend it celebrating! You should too!
HOW DO YOU SHOW THEM WHAT YOU’VE DONE?
A little exercise in information design/gallery hanging today:
What’s the best way to let total strangers know what it is that you do? If you’re a multi-disciplinary artist, how do you express the range of your work? How can a portfolio page engage a viewer/newcomer as well as a piece of art?
I like the blog format because I never feel limited by what I can post…but I do think that it can get fairly daunting sifting through a lot of the material that’s up here. And as an advertising device to grad schools it’s probably ludicrous. (Although I have had people say, “I’m having fun making my way through your site…”)
Right now, I’m working on a new portfolio page that’s a little more organized/intuitive than going down the sidebar and clicking on textual links. I’m trying to make it fun, graphical, and easy to use. This is a sketch of what I want it to look like.
This idea was a little inspired by McCloud’s pyramid chart of cartoonists in UNDERSTANDING COMICS (pages 52-53). I’m too lazy to scan it right now, but to way over-simplify it, the x-y axis of the pyramid showed the movement from realistic depiction of objects all the way to the abstraction of language.
Because I find myself constantly oscillating between pictures and words, I figured that might be the best way to show the range of what I do:
PICTURES <---------------|-----------------> WORDS
Comics are right in the middle.
WORKING ASS BACKWARDS
Most cartoonists wait til the final stage of their process to pull out the ink and the brush. Not me. I like to get out the brush early in the morning, and do my rough sketches in sloppy ink. There’s something about the brush, the way it can cover a lot of surface in a really short period of time, that helps free me up and go wild.
These are a couple preliminary sketches for an album cover I’m going to do. They’re probably stupid things to post, because they’re so abstract you can barely tell what’s going on…but what the hell. It’s November.
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