Documentation Station

I am standing knee deep in piles and piles of papers , scraps, and index cards with drawings and doodles and notes and jokes. They have been accumulating over the past few years and
I have developed a bad habit of stuffing them in boxes and bags and tucking them away in corners, closets, and shelves. In a sense they all sort of non-exist in the sense that I am not doing anything with the sketches and writings and such, but at the same time are super annoyingly present in our not so huge apartment. So, I have given myself a challenge. My mission: Scan and Shred it all and put the paper strings of things in a clear bag and drop it in the recycling bin outside of our building, thusly freeing myself (and Amanda)of the crazy town filing system I have been employing for far too long. I just hope the little flatbed is up for the task.


The featured drawing in this post was found in a plastic grocery bag amongst a bunch of other random papers, a box of replacement bicycle tubes, some scrabble tiles, A Skip-Bo card, a lidless tube of Cerulean Blue Hue, old medical bills, an action figure of a black hand Luke Skywalker in his Jedi Outfit, and a shiny quarter machine sticker depicting a scuffle between Jasmine and Jafar from Disney's Alladin (it is labled "Jafir and Jasmine" so naturally I have to keep it forever, as one day it will be valuable.)

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It's official, you can "like" Tanked.

shifting my focus.

So, I am back working on Tanked. I have nearly all of my scenes animated in Flash, and I am working in Premiere to piece everything together. After that, I will record sound. But before I get to that, I have been hitting a few snags. I think I kinda lucked out on the first episode as far as technical hang ups, and now I am getting them in spades. I do not really even know what "in spade" means, I even looked it up and got no real answer. I had a similar thing happen when I was asking my google search what it may be that I was doing wrong, and what I needed to do to make it right with this project. You see, I make all these in flash , export them to Quicktime, and then import them in to Premiere(and then back out again as a Quicktime or something You Tubeable.) Each transition came up with some sort of problem.
All of the images I use for Part Two have been either created in Illustrator, or live trace tooled from Photoshop to .Ai. The intent with doing it in this way was so that the final product would have a better picture quality. In doing so I got the "bigger is better" notion as far as file size went and made the Flash document properties to reflect a larger screen size, not realizing that consistency was key when exporting them as Quicktime. I kept getting parts in my videos where bits of images would break up(like the image above). I thought it was just part of the process, and I would just try again and get the same results. When I figured out the sizes had to be the same, I changed the Quicktime settings to my randomly assigned numbers I made up for the Flash documents. The result seemingly worked, as a Quicktime file. However, Premiere is a little bit more sophisticated and wants everything all orderly. Apparently there is some sort of standard for these things, and I am finding out the hard way. 720px by 480px 29.97fps seems simple enough, but applying these parameters to several files that I thought were completed is going to be a bit of a chore, especially on a few with complicated bits of animation.But I have to admit, I do love it.

Though the dawn may be coming soon ......

....unfortunately, portfolio updates to my web page still may be some time. It's not for lack of trying, mind you. I've got all the pieces put together in Dreamweaver, scrolling index bars and all! I have not, however, made payments to my hosting site so there's a bit of a hold as far as additions to my dot com. Soon, I hope, soon.





Ooh dream weaver
I believe you can get me through the night
Ooh dream weaver
I believe we can reach the morning light
Dream weaver
Dream weaver
Dream weaver

....that song get's in my head every freaking time I open the program.

Zeke and Elias Numbers One Through Three

I am very excited to be part of the group show in the form of the “Raconteur”

University of Massachusetts Amherst
September (Sept 7th-Oct 7th).

Participating artists and writers:

Geoffrey Owen Miller Shane Campbell Sara Purnell Mollie Roth Jungah Kim
Jung Eun Park Donna Hunt Chris Bertholf Emily Carr

Lines of the End.

I have reached the inky black line portion of two of the three panels.

It is a good feeling as the deadline draws near. I had quite a lovely time in the studio yesterday. Amanda decided to stay at home to work on her embroidery while I painted, so I cleared off her table and reconfigured my work space to accommodate working on the two panels without having to relocated myself. Amanda has engaged herself in a huge undertaking, hand embroidering a Family-Tree of Bill Cosby.



Featured here is the first version of the patriarch himself. Yes, the first version. She recently did another because as she got in to it and produced more and more likenesses in the lineage she wanted the background color to be different, to reflect a denotation of of relationship based on the degrees of separation. She has the colors of floss wound round plastic pieces tacked to the wall in her studio which creates a lovely gradient.
Yesterday she finished a face made headway on the final portrait during our shared-space studio day. I have a feeling someone will be in Chelsea for awhile tonight with stitching and linking her completed set of images.

Amanda Tillers's Bill Cosby (1.5")
Cosby Tree In Progress



And here, is where I will be. I put two of my tables together in an L-Shape, a strip of glass that I found discarded on a the curb to use for mixing sits between the two paintings which makes it very easy to flow from one to the other. The photo was taken from my computer on the small high table where Amanda sat yesterday and where I will be working on the third panel that is part of this series. It still resides inside my computer as a collection of drawings scanned and positioned in a large Photoshop file waiting to be printed out one page at a time and and taped together to it's
full 2ft by 4ft size and then transferred on to an panel that I had gessoed, what seems like, quite some time.

The two characters featured in this narrative are ones a few people may recognize.
The mulleted man in the purple shirt is Zeke.This particular painting resides in the collection of Ben Pederson, whose videos you should most definitely check out. The bespectacled man in the hat is known as Elias. I am thinking of getting my Etsy account back up to make images available for purchase again.

But not now, I've got things I got to do.

Multi-Tasking

Here's another sketch that I did for the the narrative paintings I am currently working on. Layers of paint are being applied to some of the 2ft by 4ft panels and I am tweaking the arrangements of another using photoshop to re-size and place the pieces within the larger frame. As I mentioned before, I work from home and I continually have to balance myself with the home and studio. Amanda and I spent the greater part of Saturday intensely cleaning the entire apartment. I crawled under tables with a the brush attachment of mt dirt devil in hand, sucking up the dust clumps from the Masonite. I sat on the hardwood floor of the studio section of our apartment and fed page by page of bills and other documents until the motor of the shredder whined and grind. The fish tank got fresh water with a new arrangemnt, and Fishy McFisherson swims with more of a swish to it's tail than before. The challenge is, maintaining. Little bits at a time so as not to get buried under it all again. Little breaks during working to make less work later. I find keeping this little section at the corner of our kitchen counter cleared and the stove top whipped down sets a tone for the overall. Our kitchen is uber small and just a few dishes by size comparison seem daunting, but once it gets going, it goes rather fast. Now, if only we could figure out what to do with all of our shoes, between the two of, we have a lot of shoes.