April 25, 2008 [tex|ges]ture Drawing - compressed charcoal, oil pastel on butcher paper (96-inch x 36-inch). While listening to SoundGarden (Boot Camp) and Bjork (Pagan Poetry) and trying to map out my final thesis performance, the drawing disintegrated into another gestural exploration.
Yesterday as I was looking for inspiration, I found an Erhu recording from the subway platform last November. I liked that I could use my rope to "bow" the sound as I applied granular synthesis to it. I used this sample yesterday for my first drawing with the Rope&Pulley. Today, I made a larger drawing. One of the ropes controls the location of the sampling "window" (ie, the area of the sample the granular synthesis engine looks at) and the other controls the output volume. This was a fairly crude demo.
April 4, 2008 [tex|ges]ture - pilot G6 gel pen, graphite stick on drawing paper (54-inch x 12-inch) - 15 minute (appx.) timed drawing, video-recorded.
I did this drawing at home after returning from school on Thursday night. I'm trying to explore the transition point between the ordered, methodical, similar shape drawing and the freer, expressive, gestural drawing.
This is a test video of one of my first large drawings. I purchased a graphite stick at Dick Blick with the intention of making big marks. I really wanted a marker, but they only had blues and violets. I'm not so much into colors yet, so I decided to keep things simple and raw. I've made a conscious effort not to think while making these drawings. I try to allow my hand to guide the drawing and my eyes to observe so that my hand can respond to the feedback it's receiving from my eyes.
This time, I'm making drawings with Jarnal -- an alternative to Windows Journal for the tablet PC. Jarnal saves its files as scalable vector graphics (.svg), so I should be able to using Processing to manipulate them later.
Here is a zoomed out progression of the drawings I made on March 24.
There were three drawings in this set I liked, so I've included them below. There drawings were made in the Windows Journal application on my tablet PC.
One unfortunate thing about the Windows Journal application is that it can only export low-res black and white .tiff files or heavily dithered colored .jpgs. There is no way (other than writing some .NET code using the Microsoft Journal SDK) to extract the vector graphics from a Journal file. I tried to print these images to .pdf, but the .pdf renderer doesn't understand z-order, so the images where practically garbled.
I used to think that drawings like this were just doodles or scribbles; however, having taken the time to focus exclusively on this process, I find that while these drawings are not representational, they are not mere scribbles.
Here is a zoomed out progression of the drawings I made on March 23.
These drawings were made rapidly while I was at my wife's family home for the Easter weekend.
On my flight back from Indiana, I made the following drawings on my tablet.
This is another color drawing machine -- "interactive" this time. You can draw your own quadrilaterals now and turn background blurring on and off (use the 'B' key).
This is one of my first attempts at a color drawing machine. I was trying to play with little polygons of color that gradually change color and produce a mechanized motion.
Sketches of people standing up and holding onto poles in the subway
Sketches of Exercise in Coles Athletic Center
I've been playing around with the code David Nolan sent us for generating Bezier curves in Processing. I wanted some way to move the Bezier curves around in real time, so I combined David's Bezier code along with customized versions of Daniel Shiffman's interactive selection code and his button class into an interactive bezier drawing program.
Initially I had a bit of a bug which was joining the ends of the curves together:
Next steps:
- Animate
- Make the control points and lines disappear except when they're in use
Drawing #1
Straight-up blind contour drawing of a plant in my apartment. I tried to imagine moving my finger along the edge of physical model.
Drawing #2
Tracings... I started off trying to trace the lines on the surface of a jigsaw puzzle -- what I was after was the physical experience of touching the object while drawing it. I found that tracing was the most gratifying way I could find to put my finger on the object I was drawing.
Drawing #3
A line-drawing which also explores contour. This drawing is composed of only three lines and plays with the idea that things have to be drawn first in order to be made. This drawing/object was drawn and made simultaneously.
Non-Drawing #1
There are a bunch of lines in this photograph. Many of them are implied as edges of objects -- the contours these objects present. There is a flow of action in this photograph that proceeds from the upper left to the bottom middle. This is the most literal line here, but at the same time, each vehicle, while following the road is also following its own trajectory -- an invisible line that is not shown here.
Notice how perspective affects the lines on the buildings. Because of the thirteenth floor vantage point from which I took this photo, the vertical lines on the building seem to be on a collision course somewhere below the street. You can even see that they start out thicker at the top of the building and grow thinner as they go down. It's very interesting what our eyes (and camera lenses) do to lines that are in fact parallel (by measurement).