More Book Progress
(Pen and Pencil on Paper)
Finally working on the actual design for the next book. I’m not tooling this one, which will save me a significant amount of time. Tooling something this complex would take me months, and I have other pieces to be working on. Here’s what a tooled piece looks like:
(Vegetable Tan Leather, Dye)
That book took me three months to tool and it’s half the size of the current project. Someday I’ll make a twisty dragon tooled book….
Maybe.
Book Progress
I haven’t decided yet if I’ll count working on leather as part of my 365. Right now I’ve almost finished the test version of the new book (it still needs its tie) and I'm starting the layout for the final design.
(Red Leather Book; Pencil on Paper)
The original drawing was for a book without the front flap and it wasn’t drawn to size, so I have to redesign it. The original drawing is below.
(Ink on Paper; drawn after a trip to the ER for a malfunctioning gallbladder and still high as a holy kite on Dilaudid)
I once told a friend that every dragon I draw just looks like a dog, so now that I have a dog, I make all my dragons look like him.
Fun With Scissors (#4ish)
(Digital; drawn on my phone)
Scissors are an excellent all-purpose tool that can keep the home safe and organized.
Sometimes I Ruin Shit...
…and no one dies so it’s fine.
If you’re under the assumption you’re getting through this reality without fucking up, you’re in for serious hurt. As an obsessive Type A monster-person, I am always in a state of serious hurt.
(Gouache Over Ink on Paper)
Also a lesson in cropping. Because I want to burn it slightly less when it’s cropped.
Small-Scale Test Run
(Pencil on paper)
Drawing patterns for book designs is a lot like drawing architectural plans…
…aside from the fact that buildings don’t fold. It sure would be neat if they did.*
(Videogames and websites are the best representations of folding architectural spaces and, not surprisingly, the best storytelling media we have.)
I like books a lot, but I only bind them for myself and only when I need a new journal. Thus: I am not spectacularly good at binding. I’m okay with that. Because I always try new things without mastering the old things, I have to do small versions of the new things to make sure I’m not about to burn through 100s of dollars worth of leather.
* fairly certain this was a sentence that came up during brainstorming for CONTROL over at Remedy, and when Danielewski wrote House of Leaves, and when the labyrinth section of Silent Hill 2 was designed and ad infinitum….
Color and Play
There are two facets to learning how to work with color:
Studying color theory (I recommend James Gurney's book Color and Light).
Playing with color with no planned content.
Doing the first will help you learn how to really see the colors around you. Like most perception, how we understand color is affected by how we think about it and what we expect to encounter.
The best way to eradicate any bias is through gaining information (in this case reading color theory explained by an expert) and shifting from an anticipatory engagement with the world to a perceptual engagement. Our simple little human brains really like pattern sorting and anticipation of future patterns (this is why people become gambling addicts and why dopamine plays such a massive role in this type of addiction. For more info, I recommend checking out the Radiolab episode about stochasticity, available here.). It takes practice to see what is rather than anticipate what might be.
Playing with color is easy: just make a big ole field of color and see how it works out. I like to do this on journal pages and then write on them or find a splotch and turn it into something. This is just play. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not doing anything fancy. It’s just fun. And it lets me figure out how different color combos work together.
I also really like digital work for color play. Digital is nice because you don’t have to pay for all the fancy paints; you have infinite colors on hand. I do most of my playful drawing on my phone because it’s always around (it has a stylus). I do almost all of my serious illustration style work using a Wacom and Corel Painter.
Distant City
(Digital; drawn on my phone)
I don't know if I dream about architecture because I studied architecture or if I studied architecture because I was always dreaming about architecture.
Much like my waking life, my dreams are dominated by landscapes and built environments while humans make brief and often unimpressive cameos.
And yet I hate drawing architecture.
I don’t know why I'm like this.
