Project Point of View is over and it’s been fun. To show how much fun I’ve been, let me show you my whole final work and progress. Click in, scroll down, do what ya need to do.

The theme I’ve chosen is concept number 3, The Journey of the Pen, with ME. The reason I chose this theme is not only it’s complete but also how thought-out the composition is. A hypothetical transition from the past to the future, categorized in 3 periods of time, two for each. This transition shows how the PEN has accompanied me over the years, and how I hope it continues to do so.

A traditional pen is hard to be replaced as long as handwriting is still cool. A traditional pen, sure, leaves the mistake on, but we are able learn from these mistakes as long as it stays appeared to remind us. IT shows our process of thinking, proving our humane improvement. Okay, I sounded like a person who denies technological advancement, but these pen still has its value until the day Apple pencil doesn’t need to be recharged.

Let’s start walking through my final work, shall we? So the first journey from the past of the PEN with ME, is being through my childhood.

A PEN from the point of view of A CHILD is PENCIL YOU CAN’T ERASED

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I won’t represent myself to everybody’s childhood, so I’ll just show my own version with my first meeting with the pen. After I learnt how to hold a pencil as a child, I love to doodle in the papers with my bad handwriting and my juvenile drawings. When I first picked up a pen, I was excited and drew so much stuff with it. My curiosity was shown in my naive strokes. I was shocked by the fact that how pen marks can’t be erased. If I make a mistake, it will be there forever. Thus I was very careful with the pen till the day I discover correction tape. However, I find correction tape ruins the papers so I started use strikethrough. Since, I have no fear while using a pen. (But we still can use our pens till secondary school years.)

A PEN from the point of view of STUDENT is ARSENALS.

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I got my inspiration from a popular manga called “Assassination Classroom”, which stated no matter what our ultimate targets or dreams are, we shall always have our “second knife (weapon)” ready. Even though I wrote “manga artist/filmmaker” countless in my essays, I was living under the hood of a rather strict-about-academics family. I’ve never regretted striving for good academic results as they’ve lead me far enough till now. University is the furthest a good report card can take us to, but I’ll never forget the hellish war we’ve been through in the examination halls. (I said it in the critique session, I’ll say it again. Our real soldiers fight in more hellish war and training, and they fight harder.) The pen is our only offense in exams, and we should never walk into the halls without extra ammunition (extra refills as shown in the illustrations.) Initially, I was going to insert textbook formulae into the white monster on the right, but then I decided, leave it to simplicity and imagination.

A PEN from the point of view of ME is MIND PROJECTOR

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Most of the time, my brainstorming only starts when my pen (especially my ARTLINE fine tip pen, as illustrated.) touches my visual journal. That’s how all my project started since the last semester. Not only it’s my motivator to my procrastination, it also made me take a look about what popped in my mind before revising. For instance, this gruesome composition popped in my head and my pen visualized it. Perhaps this is the best way to show how mind is projected through the pen, in terms of my style.

A PEN from the point of view of MY FACE is A FACE MASSAGER

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In present times, as ADM student like every other ADMers, I have tons of assignments to brainstorm, and my mind is not a firecracker that can pops idea every minute it burns. Therefore, there’s definitely times when my mind is as blank as a paper. What does it do whenever I can’t think anything? A face massager, of course, as it pokes every acupuncture points I can assume in hopes to boost creativity. Whoever learnt science here is going to confirm, it won’t work. Poking my skull through layers of meat definitely describes my current state as a learner.

A PEN from the point of view of MY FUTURE is A TEETORUM

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Why a teetorum? Pronouncing makes me giggle too. I doubt that I pronounced it correctly. Teetorum is the given name of a spinning dice. I chose spinning dice as it is a fate decider/diviner that resembles a pen with its stick-like figure. Thus I combined the two together and formed the one in the illustration. As I am unsure of where my future go because things don’t go 100% with plans. But that doesn’t mean I can’t control my fate of where’s my career heading. I believed not only the pen helps me determining my future, but also gives me the authority to do so. Many of my fellow dreamers might holding different version of pens, but I’m sure our ambition about fate will likely be the same.

A PEN from the point of view of FUTURE ME is A BELL JAR.

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The future is like a ball of unwove thread. Knowing myself the best, I believed my future will need a fortress of solitude under the possible pressure of my future jobs. Thus my own version of terrarium is formed. Even in my present days, I find my time-to-time fan art ink illustration meditating and relaxing. The pen shields me from all mental disturbance ever since and I hope it will do so in the future. And what’s not a better way than placing the pen as best inanimate buddy in the last panel to wrap this all up?

I decided to go with diluted acrylic because it greatly resembles the effect of water colors and acrylic is the most abundant art material I have. Diluted acrylics to me is like a pen to my childhood. Why? Acrylics can be corrected in its oily state but once a mistake is made in its dilute form, a saturated form is needed but it will then destroy the effect I intended. Fortunately, they all worked out like a charm. This is probably the first I resisted the urge of fully covering an illustration with colors because I found there is an effect of dragging attention to those blank space by not coloring them. The work also trained me well in using brush pen as the main inking tool.

Overall, my fellow classmates like my use of the thick and thin ink strokes. Even though I’ve used the character style of Adam Lurkam and the attempted imitation of Jacqueline Bissett’s strokes, the viewers in the critiques agreed that the work projected my personal attributes. Moreover, it does succeed the children illustration look I wanted. I am satisfied with the outcome and the traditional medium I’ve challenged.

I have to mention everyone else in my class did a splendid job in their work as well. I am going to miss the times we get to spend in such eye-opening critique sessions. Looking forward as usual to everybody’s zine works!

Thanks for reading!

Yes, the current progress I’m gonna show is my concepts. Through the brainstorming of the point of views, I found I’m easily restricted by the 18 points I brought up. Well, it’s the easiest to start from, which soon enough caused me some trouble.

types of pen

Selecting a suitable pen for each compositions.

Concept 1

First concept I thought up is based on the professions. After rereading my POVs in the previous presentation, I found some of them could not easily visualized with illustrations, especially from the subject RED. The PEN is rather visual to express as I compared it as other objects. Therefore I’ve filtered the 18 points into 8, not only because they can be visualized but also because that they are from my daily observations, comprehensions, and imaginations.

I listed out the following subjects and their POVs towards a pen that would likely to be in the final project.

  • A PEN from the point of view of CHILD is PENCIL YOU CAN’T ERASED
  • A PEN from the point of view of CALLIGRAPHER is MUSIC INSTRUMENT
  • A PEN from the point of view of WRITER is PAINTBRUSH
  • A PEN from the point of view of DRUMMER is DRUMSTICK
  • A PEN from the point of view of PENTURNERS is ART
  • A PEN from the point of view of LAWYER is GUN
  • A PEN from the point of view of STUDENT is ARSENALS.
  • A PEN from the point of view of ME is MIND PROJECTOR

Reason to select a PEN: A pen to me is ambiguous as it shows what I think. Either an image, a story, an answer, or a plan can’t be confirmed until the tip glides through the paper.

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Material contain spoilers. (If you can read it ;P)

I’ve paired them up in order to see if there’s any comparisons or contrasts shown, in such that

  • Children vs Students (They’re stages of growth everyone must’ve been through.)
  • Calligraphers vs Writers (They create things beautiful to the eye and the mind respectively.)
  • Drummers vs Penturners (One uses it not for its original purpose, the other made it as an art.)
  • Lawyer vs Me (This pairing make no sense, at all.)

The problem with concept ONE is it lacks a convincing theme, and it’s difficult to think of something to tie them together. Based on past experiences, it’s better not to push too much into a concept that can’t work or only work reluctantly. Therefore, I had to brainstorm another concept.

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Spoilers alert!

Concept 2

Perhaps I can direct the project into a narrative or transitional? This is what I thought. Ms. Joy suggested building my concept on current affairs, using pens a metaphoric medium. However, due to my lack of sensitivity on the mentioned theme, a self-exploring theme might be a more suitable theme that I am able to handle.

Focusing on stages of growth in the first concept, I based this concept on the object: CHILD, STUDENT, and ME. Thus, the new concept: EVOLUTION OF ME (Maybe) is formed. Why the bracketed maybe? This is because my current stage stop on ME, it’s only half way there. (NOT in terms of biological life-time.) The next half has to be hypothetical, hypothetical about what comes after ME?

I wrote ARTIST first under the obvious reasons. The word ARTIST is generic, it can be painter, designer, musicians, calligraphers, performing actors, and so on. Meanwhile, feeling the previous statement for ARTIST isn’t suitable, I came up with a new statement:

A PEN from the point of view of ARTIST is A SWISS ARMY KNIFE.

Then, I added WRITER in a generic term. It’s an alternate term for creator, any ideas: a film, a piece of music, literature, installations, or biopics, they all started with writing. Therefore, this stage of our creative career is the stage when we are creating our legacies, or masterpiece. The fun part is, this stage can coexist with the ARTIST stage.

What follows is TEACHER, an educator. Not only we’re leaving something behind, we have to leave our skills, ideas and wisdom, things that are hard to be inherited completely. What can we do about it? We teach, we pass it to the next generation. Thus:

A PEN from the point of view of TEACHER is STICK & CARROT and A WAY TO PASS DOWN OUR WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.

However, even in such concept, there are some composition created aren’t consistent with the whole project. Some of composition created left me uncertain as I felt they did not do the statement justice. The uncertainty worries me, so I created another concept on the same transitional theme.

Concept 3: The Journey of pen WITH me.

A theme with a hypothetical transition for the future, this future is more realistic, and less philosophical. (Am I philosophical for the previous theme……?? HAHA) Parted with three time periods: past, present, and future, this theme focused more on myself personally instead of the generic profession. (Which kinda opposed to what I said in past posts.)

New components are added such as new object: MY FACE and FUTURE ME. With the new objects, new statement are formed:

A PEN from the point of view of MY FACE is A FACE MASSAGER

A PEN from the point of view of MY FUTURE-SELF is A TEETORUM

A PEN from the point of view of FUTURE ME is A BELL JAR.

The concept was said to be more curated, but the theme is still young and there’s a lot to think in terms of presentation and compositions.

I try to be secretive for my statement explanation as not only I try not to spoil everything in case the statements are selected, and also I wanted to let the illustrations speaks for themselves.

 

EXECUTION

For style, I’ll be referring to the artists/illustrators I’ve found for the previous presentation. I’ve experiment with the styles and with the tools I find interesting, a brush pen. I’ve would wanted to try different types of pens for the work too just to emphasize my works.

art style attempts

Art Style Attempts

The project will be a combinations of various artists’ styles that can be seen in first glance. I’d love to try an illustration with

  • Jacqueline Bissett strokes for the main character.
  • Adam Lurkam’s style for the main character designs, and Mia Nilsson‘s for the supporting ones.
  • Chrissy Lau and Rohan Eason styles with detailed background illustration.
  • Maguma’s or Alexandra Ball’s 2 dimensional compositing.
  • Andy Gellenberg’s solid coloring if required.

They either can be done with wet mediums or digital post production. Perhaps it’d be like the decision of my previous project, regarding mediums attributes.

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After the group consultation, some composition attempts, and the execution trials, I was advised to not adding too much complicated components in the works to make my main characters stand out more. Simplicity is the best brilliancy I supposed. We’ve also decided that computer scanned watercolor medium can be used to avoid any technical issues.

Next week, the project will be completed, so I have to keep it spoiler-free, but please look forward to my selected concept.

Thanks for reading!

It’s difficult to talk about a residence in a deeply manner without staying more than a day. In my case, however, a total of 4 hours after three visits is what I get. I can’t complain about the 2 hours of traveling which required switching between 3 transportation lines as this kampong is the subject I chose, and I have to find the theme out of it.

So I think the third trip kinda proofs that ideas will come to you by itself. I kept getting something new in every trip. When I try to investigate some aspect of the kampong, the kampong put me down at some point and came up with another point for me to make. Long story short, the idea for the video is born.

The whole video format is inspired by video essayists on Youtube who narrate their subjects and sometimes interact with what they edited. So, it’s my first self-narrating video, please pardon my tones and accent.

When a type place became rare, people are ensured to make a big deal about it. This is my answer to what I try to contribute for the kampong’s overdone status. This video focus mainly on one random interviewee, and usually the representative, Auntie Sun is the one who do the explaining. When a random villager has the same issue with their as what the representative said, this issue can be proven kampongwide. (Auntie Sun told the same zoom-in-to-a-grandma-house story on my second kampong trip.)

I hope that it came out sort of like a public announcement, not to leave them alone, but respect them as a residency of Singapore. They don’t mind their kampong is famous, but worried that their peaceful life style is affected for the rest of their retirement.