Having wrapped up the daily challenges of the October and November, I’m slowly playing through old weekly prompts from #Inktober52 along with random 5WP’s that pop in my head.
It will take a few shots to find the right feel for these posts, but at the moment I’ll be posting a five-pack of 5WPs along with a hastily edited old blog draft that needs to be finally pushed into the wild.
Here’s to new-old projects, starting on the last month of the year!
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waffle
water
sugar
flour
egg
My favorite book on bread baking is Tartine Book No. 3. Chad Robertson’s ambition is breathtaking. I am also fond of Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast, which a huge help when starting my sourdough journey.
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buff sprites
train
petal bells
The visual pun to make a dumbbell of words didn’t land perfectly, but it was greatly helped when I flipped “petal” to align with ” buff sprites”. For many attempts I kept “petals bells” oriented towards “train”, but it read as “train bells petal”. On the other hand, the letters clash if “bells” is flipped into alignment with the other three lines.
But I don’t totally mind the orientation weirdness of “petal bell” because it emphasizes the rhyme pun of that pairing.
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modern
cornucopia
just add water
My standard process with super-graphics:
- Sketch a concept with thumbnails.
- Warm up on previously failed sheets.
- Take a bunch of shots on “good” paper.
- Fill in the remaining four words of the 5WP in varying ways until I run out of patience/paper. (The thumbnail sketches never work full size, so I usually flail around for a few sheets before settling on a couple decent solutions.)
- Scan them in.
- A few days later (after the rush of the moment has cooled), I make final selections and complete the edits on the computer.
BTW, I’m fond of this failed sheet which became the background for testing scripts.
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music
casually
diced
my
spleen
Even though I already played with the visual concept of interlaced words on “boss” and “waffle”, there’s always more to explore—along with thymus and spleen, I also considered pancreas and kidneys.
On a serious note, check out Nadia’s beautiful essay about music and healing.
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great
sage
heaven’s
equal
tattoo
My Chinese calligraphy is awful, but this prompt begs for bad Asian brushwork! Unlike my frustrations with an art I’ve never practiced, I had fun going brush-ish with the Pilot Parallel—it felt simultaneously of street-ish and asian-ish.
I don’t have a tattoo, but if forced to pick something, I would adopt the bravado of this Monkey King’s self-granted title…maybe to compensate for the lack of such bravado in real life! Plus a hard recommend for the Journey to the West. It’s truly one of the four classics novels.
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A full week after the official end of the challenges (and three weeks after actually finishing my paper graphs for the prompts) my brain has finally slowed down enough to let me practice without feeling a need to produce another 5WP every morning.
As threatened over the last two months, I’m back to practicing Copperplate, learning to wrangle that flexible pointy nib and trying to avoid gigaton ink blobs after dipping the pen.
It’s a simple meditative morning practice. I listen to a podcast while doing three lines of basic strokes and then fill a page in the sketchbook with whatever words that pop into my brain from that podcast.
There are a couple of enticing project ideas the horizon, so I expect to crank up the machine again, but it’s nice to enjoy the downtime.
Cya next time!
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PS-Social Media Indulgences
In June, I drafted this listicle of lists from various social media posts. I was trying to keep a monthly streak alive, but it never got published!
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Purchases to celebrate a new job:
- (Carlo) Scarpa, Complete Works
- Magic Puzzle, Season 2
- Magic Puzzle, Season 3
- Journey to the West, volume 3 (of 4)
- Sleeping by the Mississippi, Alec Soth
- American Prospects, Joel Sternfeld
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4 covers (book, album, movie, television series)
Honorable Mentions
- Album: Koln Concert (Keith Jarrett), Chicken and Dumplin’s (Bobby Timmons), Alive 2007 (Daft Punk), Giant Steps (John Coltrane)
- Movie: Whisper of the Heart, Collateral
- TV Show: Cowboy Bebop
- Books: Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino), Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges), 40 Days in the Desert (Moebius)
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Three short stories
- “Three Septembers and a January”, Neil Gaiman with Shawn McManus
- “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Jorge Luis Borges
- the passage on the giant bird Peng, Zhuangzi
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When in doubt
- Bullet points are your friend.
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