I went hard on the brushes this week. I suspect this week will be the creative apex of this challenge. I’ve enjoyed pushing things to the limit, but it takes a lot of time and Halloween is looming!
,
worlds hiding
trek
inside pages
Super-graphics look cool, but they are hard! Not only are they big, they have to be right. Then again, the misses create a lot of scrap sheets for extra practice.
,
sparrows
fly without a
passport
I pondered this poem while hiking the arroyo. Getting into nature is one of the best ways to focus on an interesting problem (beyond the mundane distractions of daily life).
,
brain walk your soul
hike
Again, super-graphics are hard! I took ten shots to get something that worked. I got lucky that this sheet had a thin layer of crayon, giving “hike” a beautiful shimmer. This one also introduces my normal handwriting, even if it’s lost in the noise.
,
why does the sun sleep?
I tried a few arrangements with this one, and started testing them all this one sheet. Eventually it became the (non)answer.
,
nomadic
galaxies
herding
wayward
nebulas
I came up with this poem with similar sized words and then flailed for a composition. On one shot, I used an oversized brush to make the pink layer. That was pretty good, but it didn’t hold it’s own. So I scanned and printed a few copies to experiment with a second layer. It was nice to come up with a good solution, but I still had to execute. Writing the blue layer was the most stressful thing I did all week. If I made a mistake, I’d be ruining two attempts at once.
I imagine such exercises will get easier after acclimating to this script (as opposed to creating it an hour before completing the image).
,
he yowled
daddy
stole
snacks
Speaking of ruining a composition on the last word. I messed up the “y” on yowled but was too burnt out from yesterday to try more than a few attempts. November’s project will learning copperplate and writing with a sharp nib—proper cursive is a black hole in my game and there are enough youtube and instagram videos that prove it’s doable for lefties.
,
remote
is your next minute
It‘s nice to just do a simple composition. It helps that I’m now good enough with the brush to easily repeat a word. In this case, I had already completed a decent composition, which erased all the stress. So I just played, trying slightly different arrangements and landing on that script that I learned a few days with “nomadic”.
,
Two weeks into Instagram, it’s a mixed bag. Discovery is awesome. One can feed any interested with an endless supply of images by following hashtags. But the algorithm is capricious (for an addictive slot machine dynamic), creating psychological tension.
There is an implicit pressure to compare oneself against the best. That’s a ridiculous notion. An amateur would be wise to reference the greats, but the flattening effect of social media creates a mirror of self comparison against those who have dedicated their lives to the craft.
So I must constantly remind myself that the goal is to make images that I’m curious to see, not to enter a popularity contest of algorithmic work. Even more fundamentally, the doing is the prize, everything else (even that image) is a bonus.
Cya next week!
,
My daughter joined in for Trek, this time with Procreate. Hopefully she’ll draw more, preferably physical but I’ll be happy however she wants to create.
.