More Drinking and Drawing

I'm a bit behind in my documentation. A couple of weeks ago, our assignment in Drinking and Drawing was to draw another work by our chosen artist, but let our own style creep in as well. Here's my version of Franz Marc's "Tower of Blue Horses."

Last week's assignment was to do an original drawing in the artist's style. Here is my "Blue Dog x 3".

This was especially fun because I bought some new pastels. I haven't drawn anything in ages. Stay tuned for self portraits.

Blending and Drawing

Last week's Drinking and Drawing class assignment was to draw a work by another artist. I chose Franz Marc's piece, "Blue Horses". Here is my drawing:

I've also continued my Blender tutorials. I just finished the 301 class. It added more keyboard commands and how to snap to grid. Here's the exercise at the end:

In other news, I added more memory to my computer, and I can now see parts of mesh buildings that were invisible before. There are no more random textures in the water either. Before and after pictures of a mesh building on campus:

Artist Books

I thought that today, I would post some pictures of my artist books. The first one is "Shoes United". The text is a poem by Mike Buil. It's about a man who hits one of his shoes with a newspaper to keep it off the table. Chased across the room, "the shoe gave the signal a shoe gives when in trouble." An army of shoes hears the call and comes to the first shoe's rescue. They covered the man "like ants on a pink picnic popsicle."

The poem itself contains lots of wordplay, so the physical book had to as well. It's printed using the font, Footlight, on Arches paper. The paper is folded in such a way that it opens on three sides, so one reads the beginning, turns the book over and reads back the other way, then turns the book over again to read the ending. It has a shoe lace clasp. Little feet on the covers indicate the direction in which to read.

For illustrations, I photographed my shoes and the author's shoes, and turned them into line drawings in PhotoShop. Then I made polymer plates from the result. Here is a photo of my press when I was printing one color of the illustrations.

The next one is part of a series of postcards from places in literature. This one is a tunnel book, which means that it is made in layers, that when pulled out, form a tunnel. In "Greetings from Innsmouth", the tunnel is the bellows of the camera body that makes up its case. The vintage camera was not rare, and the bellows had crumbled into dust, so don't worry, no cameras were wantonly destroyed to make this book!

"Rags to Riches" was part of the "Valley of the Sunflowers" project. Local artists grew sunflowers in an urban vacant lot, and made paper from the plant fiber. This paper was given to area artists who created something on the theme of sustainability with it, and the resulting work was shown in a local gallery. My project was a letterpress printed accordion book. The covers are original cyanotypes made by laying wild flowers on treated paper.

The text was an old poem that goes in a circle, beginning and ending with the same line, combined with a call to make paper out of sustainable resources such as cotton or kenaf, rather than trees. Before 1830 paper was made primarily out of cotton, and it is generally still supple and white. Fiber from trees is inherently more acidic. For example, a modern newspaper becomes discolored after only a few hours in the sun.

Here is a photo showing the lovely golden color and texture of the sunflower paper. The illustration on the title page is a real letterpress dingbat, cast in lead, and letterpress printed. It is a reference to my paper mill in Second Life.

My imprint is Pyrrhic Press, which has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PyrrhicPress/timeline?ref=page_internal
I also make books as part of a collective, but that would be revealing my secret identity.   :)

Monkey See Monkey Do

Today I worked on the Blender class in a box #203. In this one we covered keyboard commands and learned how to use the camera. We also learned about the edit and object modes. (This isn't an imperial 'we', I'm just picturing myself in a class with other people.) This tutorial felt like I was really doing something because it had a hands on segment in which we imported a monkey onto the screen.

I'm also trying to decide which artist I want to use for my next Drinking and Drawing class. Anselm Kiefer? Ping Qui? Tibetan thangka painting?

Drawing and Dancing

My studies at Medici were interrupted for a time by events in real life. Since I got back in town, I've been trying to catch up. I missed one Drinking and Drawing class. The assignment was to draw a face. I did this one which served double duty because the assignment I missed was to draw an animal.

The subject of course was TL, hero of song and stories in real life. You can tell he's the sort who wears a tweed cap when driving his immaculate '59 Nash Metropolitan. The car has an elaborate number of chrome logos on the back that might have been taken from other cars given the disparity of fonts and sizes, but TL assures me that it was a factory option. The trunk contains 23 bags of Cheddar Jalapeño potato chips, and a 5 gallon drum of vegetable oil, which he uses instead of gasoline. Lays sponsors his F1 races, he explains. He also knows how to use a computer and how to mask text so that the supposed author doesn't see it until after it's published.

Last night's assignment was to do an abstract. Here is mine:

I also went through the 202 book on Blender, and learned more about how the interface works. This included going through the preferences and doing things like making PhotoShop the default editor. The program can work with a 3D mouse as well, which might be fun to play with.

DJ Keli has been doing a trance story-time around midnight on Sundays at KPO. I went to it for the first time, and enjoyed it very much. The story this week was Rapunzel. We discussed rampion, but no one had tried it. Was it really that good? Or was it a comment on exploitation, the child becoming a commodity, traded for a bowl of lettuce?

Blender

Sunday was convocation which officially opened the semester. We started at Bridge Brewing Co.  Rmarie Beedit, our chaplain, gave a blessing, then lit her staff, and led us in a parade around campus and down to the ocean. Tiffany Mosienko ended the march with a dedication to the x, y, z axes.

Monday I began the second Blender class, and downloaded the latest version of the program. The second class was about how the editor works. Not so much how to create something, but rather how to use the symbols that mean open and close, how to resize a window, and how to get back to the 3-D view. Hint: it involves the info button. I say that for future reference because it took me a while to find it, after the toolbar I needed disappeared. I stopped at page 32, also for future reference.

Here is my Drinking and Drawing assignment, which was to draw a plant. I drew an aloe with a charcoal pencil and some sepia ink washes.

That evening, I attended Uni 101, where we talked about participation and how to accomplish goals. In Drinking and Drawing, we critiqued our plant assignment. Next week's homework is to draw a face.

Mesh

One goal for this semester is to learn a computer program that will enable me to create original mesh. I have some mesh tutorials from Black Tulip. Today I finished reading the first one. Each class can be used inworld and attaches like a hud. They are convenient to use and inexpensive. The first one was an intro, defining terms like vertexes, edges, and faces. It also introduced concepts such as how a texture is wrapped around a mesh object, and included some examples to rez, texture, and tint. Here I am on my building platform contemplating mesh.

The process reminds me of the old Latin motto, "Festina Lente," which was used by the printer, Aldus Manutius, as well as by Cosimo I de' Medici. It means make haste slowly. Today I moved forward, even if slowly, and it feels good.

My Jobs

While at Medici I am working as a go-go dancer at KatyPerryOpolis. I enjoy wearing period clothing and so far have been dancing in classic 60s go-go attire. Sometimes this includes my pet snake. Here's a photo of me at work:

I also help out at PetOpolis's pet daycare. Students can bring their pets to school. It's a nice place to take a break and interact with all kinds of animals. Here's a photo:

My Classes

Drinking and Drawing

Here's a photo of my first assignment:

And here is a photo of the class, with Van, Pearl, me and RMarie:

University 101

Part of University 101 is to make a life list beginning with what I want to accomplish while at Medici University. Something I've wanted to do for a long time is to learn a program so that I can make original mesh content in Second Life. Then I would like eventually to rebuild all the machinery at Trilby's Mill.

1. This can be accomplished by going through the tutorials that I already have
2. I will set aside time every day to work through them
3. Once I have an idea what I am doing, I will make at least one piece of machinery in mesh for the Mill. More will follow. This is my goal for this semester.
4. I will document my experiences on this blog and with pictures in my Flickr account which can be found here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/29513513@N07/

My Studio at Medici University

Medici provides studio space, and mine is Camilla 1-2. My background is in book arts and I have a paper mill that includes a printing studio and a bookbinding space. At Medici, I wanted to build a Hammermill to show another way that paper is made to supplement the information at Trilby's Mill. I believe this to be the first hammermill built in Second Life. My other project is a monument to a rectangle of text. I wanted trace the development of the book from scroll to Codex to E reader and in so doing realized that what they all had in common was a rectangle of text. We have changed the packaging and what seems like a revolutionary way yet what we read has remained the same for thousands of years.

Here is a photo of the hammermill:

This installation depicts a working hammer or stamping mill. Its purpose is to pulp plant fiber such as cotton or linen, so that it is fine enough to be made into paper. A hammermill pounds rather than cuts the fibers, which results in a longer fibered, stronger sheet. These fibers are renewable and make lovely paper that does not turn brown like paper made from tree pulp. Water powered stamping mills have been in use since the 12th C. 

See a stamping mill in action at the link below, as well as how paper is made by hand (2:15). When they say stirrers, they are talking about the hammers. The sieve is a paper mold. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lltkdyE1OG0

Here is a photo of the Monument to a Rectangle of Text: 

Ways of packaging text

Scrolls: (a long sheet, rolled) were the predominate book form.

Palm leaf manuscripts: (inscribed leaves, often bound with a string though a hole in the leaf)

Codices: (pages bound on one end) becomes more popular than the scroll.

Accordion books: (basically a folded scroll) 

E-Readers: (text produced electronically on a screen) 

And how should the rectangle of text look? It varies a bit depending on the format but most tend be a vertical rectangle. Palm leaf manuscripts use a horizontal rectangle, probably due to the nature of the material. At the following link you can see how to determine the ideal proportions of the western book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold

For more information on papermaking and book arts in general, visit Trilby's Mill at the following SLURL: 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Mayfair/217/129/24