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Jem and I got another chance to work on the new drawing, and it’s coming along very well. Check out all we’ve added to it since just a few days ago on the 3rd of the month. Jem is doing this new stuff I haven’t seen, and I’m really digging it. My work seems to be almost completely devoid of the squiggle patterns which had dominated some of my previous work. I don’t know what that means, if anything, but it’s kind of scary and cool. Color comes next!
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Like a welcome breath of fresh air, the collaborative drawings with Jem return! Our projects were on hiatus for all of November while I banged out my novel in various coffee shops and restaurants in and around the Circle City, but now that NaNo has passed, it is time to return to these fantastic explosions of color and design. This one was started brand new this evening, and I have to say that I’m really, really friggin’ pleased with how it’s looking already! If you compare this with some of our others, you’ll notice that there are some real interesting changes taking place in the line art. Stuff is showing up that wasn’t present on our earlier stuff. It’s kind of weird, but kind of cool. More will be revealed as we continue, I’m sure.
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This project was gifted to me by a teenage girl whom I don’t even know. I was hanging out with my friends, and she was at a table nearby coloring. She had some colored pencils, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I went over to look. She showed me what she was doing and said, “Here, there’s a web site you can print them out from. You can have this one,” and she gave me one that she had printed out already. I’ve been working on it little by little, just kind of more practice for arranging colors. If you need something for yourself or your kids to goof around with, the web site on the paper says www.geometrip.com, and you can go there and print out stuff like this for fun. It’s kind of a cool blending of math and visual art. There are tons of designs and some of the examples are really gorgeous!
Edit: A friend of mine saw me working on this and said, “That looks like something my wife does. She calls them ‘mandalas,’ and coloring them can be a sort of meditation process.” I thought that was interesting as all get-out, so I looked them up, and, damn, if those things aren’t ever cool! There’s some really great information on mandalas here, if you’re interested.
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Number five in the series of installments, and look how close we are to being finished! I have just a few minutes left to put in on one of them, and then we’ll be done! Per Melissa, I’m thinking on ideas involving circles for the next one. I didn’t own the color black until we were halfway through these, and tonight Jem decided that she was going to add tons of black around the squiggly things. Personally, I think that was brilliant, really made the colors jump off the page!
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Fourth installment by my count on this particular project. Jem came over tonight, and we worked on adding more color to our drawings. They’re coming along a lot faster than we’d thought they would. She wasn’t mad that I’d worked on the one a little bit. I still feel I’m a little behind, but I asked, and she said it was okay if I worked on it just a little more before we get together again. They’re looking pretty good now, but it’s still hard to tell what they’ll look like when they’re completely finished. We’re already starting to try and think of new ideas for the next project, though!
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Today’s blog post is brought to you by the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and the letter “M.”
Here’s another look at the triangle stuff my friend Jem and I are working on. I actually cheated. This is the half that I worked on all by my self for several hours on Sunday. Jem was way ahead of me on her half, and I was feeling like I was holding things up, so I took some time to play catch up. It still sort of looks like I didn’t do much, but there’s more color on the page, so I’ll call it good for now. I kind of like that little purpley squiggle thing, yes I do. Go me and my attempts at color blending.
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Tuesday night, and it’s time for Jem and I to draw! These sessions are becoming something that I really look forward to, and I can’t even explain exactly why that is. Part of it is simply the activity itself. I like drawing these sorts of things, free form designs. Part of it is that I like the way Jem does stuff. She uses tons and tons of color, bright stuff, and that’s pretty much why I started doing these things in the first place. Her designs and the tones she uses in them are very positive.
I’ve also noticed that when we do this I seem to lose track of time. Jem has said the same thing. If anything is going wrong or bothering me, I completely forget about it for two or three or four hours. I can get lost in what we’re doing, which is pretty awesome.
I think, too, that I like the social aspect of it. When I do the sculpture stuff I do it on my own. There’s a lot of just me sitting there in the basement looking at something. It’s very gratifying, and I love the results, but it’s really nice to have someone sitting there going, “Oh, crap…that was the wrong color,” or “Hey…that looks better than I thought it would!”
Tonight we ended like this, with all of the drawing done, and just a bit of the coloring started. See how clever we were? We cut the paper at an angle. Craziness! The idea is that this will be a paired work with both triangles mounted in the same frame. Kind of a different way of doing things, makes you think differently. I was working on the blue part, and it took forever for me to do just that little bit. It turned out okay, though. Slow, but good. Can’t wait to make more progress!
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On Tuesday my friends Andre and Amy came over and joined me for another exhilarating evening of collaborative art. It was fun, because they were new to this particular sort of work that I’ve been doing. It was kind of weird having to explain it and going over some of the same questions I’d had myself the first time I did it:
Q: “What do we draw?”
A: “Anything you like, but more along the lines of shapes and abstract stuff.”
Q: “I tend to draw sort of concrete objects. So…”
A: “Well, don’t! No, really, just kind of do what you want and we’ll see how it works out. There’s not right or wrong thing.”
Q: “When do we switch?”
A: “Whenever.”
Good times, and we came up with some pretty cool stuff!
As a footnote, my extremely sharp Awesome Readers will note that there are two days missing from this entry and the previous one. I failed hugely at getting a picture on Sunday. Quite simply, I was exhausted from the day before, and spent the evening processing pictures from the previous week’s zombie shoot and completely forgot to photograph anything! It just slipped my mind. I was angry on Monday, and sort of blew it off/forgot on purpose, and then decided to get back to it on Tuesday. I don’t know if I’m going to start my count all over again or not, but I’m going to keep shooting. We’ll see. I’m not going to just give it up. I don’t feel that’s the right thing to do, and I don’t think it’s going to make me feel any better at all about missing two days. I made a mistake, but I think I’ll be better served by moving on and continuing the work. Quitting never made me feel all that great in the past. I’m all for doing things differently these days.
Finished artwork! Rock!
My friend Jem and I started on these a few weeks ago. I think we got these done…four weeks? That’s amazing, if I do say so myself. We were both really stoked that we completed them. I just love finishing a project. I’ve said it before, it used to be a hallmark of my creative life that I would start a project and not complete it, but these, THESE ARE DONE! Yet more evidence that I CAN finish something. And Jem can finish something as well, which she has also told me she cannot do. Here is proof that she’s lying. If she tells you otherwise, just pull this up and remind her.
Any rate, these were tons of fun to do, and we immediately started on new ones that night. We got all the line work done for them. She’s going on vacation next week, so no drawing, but we’ll resume in two weeks. Awesome!
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My friend Jem and I finished this one just the other day. I’m stoked! It took us three weeks of one-nighters to get this one done. She took the other one home and is finishing it up this weekend. We’re going to start on some more like this, but maybe change it up a little bit somehow. Not quite sure how, but we’re going to change something about it. These are super fun to do. I love messing with different shapes and colors. She’s really good at blending stuff together, so I’m working on that a little. Anyway, here’s another completed project, and you all know how much I dig completed stuff. It’s a victory over all those things that keep us from achieving what we want with our creativity. It’s way cool.