Work 1: in Progress

Beginning with this image:



I traced the image in Photoshop Elements and began to manipulate it, rotating and repeating it to create this design:



After several more repetitions of the pattern above, I repeated the process with the original photograph to include color and additional detail:



My next step is going to be a drawing of the bird in the original photo. I will also probably include another layer of designs from another photograph, and alter the width and possibly color of the lines.

The symbols within the work are:
Bird: messengers of heaven, fertility, fulfillment of wishes, good harvest
Green: renewal, freshness, hope, victory of life over death
Brown: earth
Tree: strength, renewal, creation, unity, growth, eternal life
Leaves: immortality, eternal/pure love, strength, persistence
Nets: containing of knowledge, motherhood, giving life

Doodles

Here are a couple "doodles" I did in photoshop. Sketches for modular designs, if you will.





They aren't as refined as I'd like, being done with a mouse rather than a tablet, but the gist can be seen. These took about 15-20 minutes and are from the same photograph (my personal image). By hand, they probably would take at least a few hours to get the same number of squares (4). I'm beginning to think more and more that I'll need to invest in a cheap desktop, large monitor, photoshop CS5 and Illustrator CS5, if only to help preserve my sanity.

quasi update

Sketchbook: 78-88% complete! Huzzah!

I'm working on the artists research as Word and Excel documents, so I'll get around to uploading that information either this week or this weekend.

Pieces: two modular designs 50% finished, sketches for elements of other modular designs, sketches of potential applications of the finished modulars, and a mock-up of a 3D modular work 20% finished. Photos to be added when the internet is less flaky.

Doubts and Musing on Concept

I suppose it's better to be having doubts now than later. I haven't been satisfied with the few pysanky I've actually produced so far, and I'm becoming daunted by the level of skill this would actually require- that I don't yet have. And then, a frightening thought occurred to me: If I don't do the pysanky, what will I do? I've been thinking about this for about a week now, and I'm starting to form some possible alternate ideas.

- modular designs (pysanky inspired- modernizing traditional designs)
- modulars and batiks (ibid)
- printed modulars (etchings + watercolor? litho? woodcut?)
- print + drawn modulars + batik
- modulars + batik + costume design*
- wax as a medium/link between mediums: ie. pysanky, batik, wax-resist painting/ceramic, lost-wax sculpture/jewelry, encaustic*
- batik + costume + ink/paint sketches*
- re-purposing materials (glass dress, etc)*

* (requires more thought on actual production and/or additional theme)

I want to work with something I feel comfortable enough in my skills to experiment without loss of quality. I've always felt strength in design, and in sewing, and I want to incorporate things I learned last semester in Costuming if possible. Batik is something I feel comfortable working with; the dying process is similar to pysanky, and I found it a fair bit easier than working with eggs. I also think that woodcuts are a potential double-tool: I can use them to produce variations of the modular designs relatively easily, and I can use woodcut blocks as stamps to create batik patterns in addition to free-hand designs. (Heck, maybe I could even try literally printing on fabric, rather than paper.)

I went to the Freer Gallery in DC today, and stumbled upon a show in the walkway between it and the Sackler Gallery. It was a collection of prints by Whistler, mainly architectural "sketches" of Amsterdam and Venice. One of the signs talked about how Whistler experimented with different types of papers, methods, etc until he was satisfied. And at this moment, I find myself thinking more and more that a little experimentation might help. I've been so focused on techniques and designs, and I've honestly wanted to chuck my sketchbook across the room in frustration. I think the pysanky concept, while potentially interesting, is not the best choice for such a relatively short period of time. It's something I'll have to work on over several years.

For now, I'm going to keep sketching, taking photos, and thinking.

Update

I've been working mostly on designs and concepts this week. I have one pattern for a modular design down, and I've been doing a fair bit of research on symbols. This particular design is comprised of a stylized grain pattern, crosses and stars, with meanders. It's just black and white for now as a design. I might do it on a brown egg, however, for more of an earthy feel- if I use it for the egg and the painting, that is. Maybe substitute dark green for the black. I'm not quite sure.

I've also been trying to think of how exactly I'm going to go about my concept. Whether it will be an egg and a painting with different designs to represent the same idea (ex. harvest vs mass-production-processed-food?), eggs and modular designs abstracted from the egg design, traditional eggs and modern designs or modern eggs and traditional designs in paintings. I'm thinking I'll probably just experiment with it, but I'm liking the first two ideas rather a lot.

I've been doing a fair bit of work for my internship in art, which is nice. I made a coloring page of a mural with permission from the copyright holder, and which took me about a week-and-a-half. [You should probably know that I loathe taking such a long time on projects. It's one of the things that's been driving me consistently crazy this summer, planning for next year.] I also learned the joys of trying to get exactly what you want from a printing service. Augh. They had to reprint twice; the first time, the image was about 8x4 (or possibly smaller- I didn't actually get to see the first printing as someone else picked it up) on 11x17 inch paper and the second time, it didn't have the title of the mural, the artist's name, or the museum's name. @_@ But I'm also working on other artsy things for the museum. Namely thaumatropes and other optical-illusion toys. Those I probably will be able to post pictures of, since they'd be my own designs rather than a derived work.

Travel Inspiration

While I travel, my best friend tends to be my camera. This trip, I had to buy a new memory card, I took so many photos (by the way, souvenir shops on the way to Musee d'Orsay- ripoff on memory cards)! I figured I'd start with Germany, since we only spent one or two days in London, and I want to keep my museum visits in separate posts.




These three images are of the mustard fields in Germany. The first is from along the road from Hamburg to Rostock, and the other two are from Rostock to Rerik and Rostock to Berlin. Having traveled by train in the US, and driven, etc, and growing up in the suburbs, such vast amounts of farmland are astonishing. Not only farmland, but primarily mustard crops. I'd never seen mustard in anything other than a jar before, and the color, even on cloudy days, took my breath away. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there were often trails or green or brownish fields bordering the mustard, leading me to the idea of a bright yellow egg with green or brownish trails.

One short actual post

There are apparently a /lot/ of mustard fields in Mecklenberg-Vorpommern (sp). I don't know if any of you have ever seen one, but they are amazing things. We drove from Hamburg to Rostock, and from there to Rerik, on the Baltic coast, in search of family roots, and saw tons of them! Great swaths of vivid yellow stretching to the horizon over rolling hills. (And I do mean /vivid/. I took pictures on cloudy days and it's only slightly less saturated than lemon-yellow-ish.) Often, the fields would be near groupings of trees or unused fields, spacing them with green. They also tended to have designs running through them where farm equipment drove through them.

There is actually a point here: often, pysanky artists would employ intricate paths to trap evil and keep it away from the person the egg was gifted to (I'll find that source soon; Mom's comp doesn't have my bookmarks, alas). SO, my thought is to use the path idea to create a more abstract (possibly non-objective?) design. The color palette would be: mustard yellow, with linear designs in dark green, and a greyish purple (observed in a tilled field).

Adventures

Well, since I'll be gone for two weeks, I decided to try starting early. Unfortunately, things never seem to go quite how I plan. I was elated that I actually knew where the Reston Whole Foods was; in the same plaza as our Michaels! I then proceeded to get lost in my own home town trying to find said plaza that I've been to hundreds of times before.

I'd seen online that Whole Foods carried ostrich and emu, and other types of eggs, so I went to price things out. MY. GOODNESS! They wanted $30 plus tax for one ostrich egg! I think I can get two for that price on eBay! At any rate, they did have a good price on large duck eggs (4/$3), and they had a small case of about 12-15 quail eggs for $6. So, I'll blow those out tomorrow and see where I go from there. The quail eggs are naturally spotted with dark brown patches, so, depending on the designs, I might have to cast them instead. We'll see. Maybe I can integrate the splotches in the design. As for the ostrich and emu eggs, I'm watching several on eBay to get a sense of the prices.

[On a totally unrelated note: thank goodness for strawberry season!]

Random ideas/ notes to self

* Check out artist who does ceramic scenes in holes in walls- Prof. Henry couldn't remember his name
* Buy various size eggs and make molds to allow reproduction- porcelain?
* Ostrich
* Emu
* Goose
* Turkey
* Chicken
* something smaller?
* Research Faberge and other egg artists -> if craft-like, how to make into more art-like

* Note: EXPLORE IDEAS TO THE FULLEST!!!

* What is my concept?
* Tradition in modern life? (ie. how does the past influence us today? how would traditional media/techniques/symbols be updated to fit nowadays?) ??

Ideas: dye eggs, carve eggs, etch eggs (emu), split egg open and create something inside?