Work update

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First draft of my card backs. I haven’t finalized the design yet, so I might still make some changes. I’m looking towards removing the mountains behind the two hands and adding geometric elements instead (seems more suitable given the card back references I’ve been looking at on Pinterest. I don’t want the card back to be completely geometric but I think having some geometry works.

Got to start on the mural this month and start assembling the book as well as the process journal. Finally getting into the swing of things proper and there should be tons of output soon!

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First FYP session of the semester. So, here are the things I’ll be looking at to kick off production:

  • Geographic maps, illustrated maps: I could map out the narrative of the book in a pictorial form (I don’t know what this could look like at the moment), I could map the family tree of the twins and a map of the five rivers of Hades. The map of the constellation of Gemini may also be relevant.
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This is the map of the twins’ family tree from Astrid’s giant book of Greek mythological family trees.
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The constellation of Gemini the Twins. I honestly don’t know how this is supposed to look like twins. I’ve never seen a constellation that actually looks like what it says it’s supposed to be.
Kind of a disgusting-looking map, but it might help me visualise my map better.
Kind of a disgusting-looking map, but it might help me visualise my map better.
  • As for visuals, I could look at Victorian broadsheets (Paul), 1930s film noir/detective agency typewriter looks (The Mystery Guild), and the Wiener Werkstätte.

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Note to self: House Of Leaves-style typography
Note to self: House Of Leaves-style typography

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Process update

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I would have uploaded this much earlier, but OSS wasn’t letting me upload images. Here’s my logo development for The Mystery Guild, which I’m going to use to inspire the rest of my book’s look and feel. Right now I’m working on:

  • writing the two narratives of Paul and Pollux
  • experimenting with different page setups and gallery setups (the latter being mostly in my head)
  • first draft of FYP report done

Most of my illustration will be done later once all the text and layouts are finished. I draw a lot faster than I design/write so I feel this is the most prudent way to go. Also, drawing later will let me build on all the personal illustrative experiments I’ve been doing (single-colour in addition to dotwork).

These aren’t related to FYP but all my illustrative experiments are transferable, so I’ve decided to post them here too.

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Text-heavy update

As promised, I’m spending December ironing out my content and approach for FYP, and I’ve narrowed my deliverables down to these three things: a book containing a narrative, the gallery space as an installation relating to the book’s narrative and a process book (thanks for the advice, Beverley!).

At the moment I’ve been focusing on the narrative the most because it’s the centerpiece of what I’m doing. I’m doing a kind of homage to Greek mythology, to House Of Leaves and to all the good literature that has influenced me over the years, while bringing in my illustrations/skills in layout design to complement the content. I haven’t figured out the visual style precisely yet but my aesthetic has been heavily influenced by The Sick Rose and Crucial Interventions. It’s very likely that the book will be hardcover, but I’m not clear on dimensions yet. Here’s the narrative, from one of my brainstorming sessions with B:

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This is the story, which I’m working on now. My ideas are best explained over text to B, because I’ve spent most of the FYP period talking to him about my project. This narrative lets me bring in aspects of the Castor and Pollux myth as well as the larger canon of Greek mythology, and gives me an avenue for illustration (I can draw all the hybrids) and grotesque/freakshow ideas that I researched on earlier in the semester.

Here are my initial thoughts for the setup:

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The idea is that while the reader is following the stories of Paul and Pollux, they’re standing in front of a mirror, which (as mentioned in the screenshot) will reinforce the ideas of duality and madness. I may also want to incorporate mirrored text into the book pages itself so that the environment can add directly to the experience of reading the book. I haven’t decided where to place the process book, but the walls of this space are likely to be covered in my own drawings (perhaps simulated pages from Paul’s drawings of medical hybrids, and drawings of Castor and Pollux/page extracts from the book) so that people who don’t get a chance to read the entire story get to glimpse the whole project just from the space alone.

Please let me know what you think if you’ve got time to drop me a comment, see y’all next semester and I’ll be back soon with more updates! For now, I will be writing and sketching to work out what I’m going to do with the book, space and process book.

Janus deck beginnings

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  1. I secretly want to flip out that the FYP Viscomm criteria was only sent today, and I feel a little sad that I’m the kind of person who feels reassured by documents even after years of declaring that I’m ready to buck a system that still needs guidelines WHO AM I
  2. I’m actually really liking the starts I’ve been making on the Janus deck and getting a little bit into this wayfinding thing.

So what is this Janus deck? A crafted fortune deck meant to use recognizable tropes from Greek mythology for the seemingly directionless or fearful individual (me sometimes) to divine sensible responses from the gods. Janus is symbolic of beginnings, and personally significant to me because of how I kind of needed a new beginning for my project as well. (I will draw more bizarre-looking cards, I promise. I know these two are terribly tame, but they’re very early experiments.)

Here is my to-do list.

  1. Read up in greater detail on Greek mythology (this means another trip to the ADM library), symbolism, divination, etc. to beef up the research basis of my project
  2. Make more cards, with increasingly bizarre imagery, with more Harry Clarke/Beardsley influence. Grotesque readings over the past two months will back up my illustrative style.
  3. Start working on book ideas. Make first, think later. Probably going to try incorporating dioramas and foldouts in my book because I want to draw a lot of things, and I pinned a lot of creative layouts and they’re really inspiring me.

The way I’ve been working is sort of an adhoc make first, conceptualize later thing so I can fulfill my almost neurotic compulsion to feel productive. Making also helps me calm my thyroids (or wherever my FYP anxiety is stored). I’ve been chasing after this lofty idea of The Perfect Most Beautiful FYP Concept Ever and that probably curtailed my desire to do anything, since it didn’t live up to whatever vague castle in the air I had in my head. The more I make the more material I have to choose from, which is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing anyway. More cards tomorrow, more book-related thoughts, and hopefully back to some kind of professional standard of blogging that doesn’t sound so much like a stream of consciousness.

Documentation: The Abandoned House

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I know I’m making a book for FYP, and I knew this way back during the summer when I was deciding what to make for B’s birthday. I decided to kill two birds with one stone and make him a book that I could also use as a personal experiment for a possible FYP outcome.

This project, part birthday present and part FYP experimentation, is called The Abandoned House. It’s a simple empty mansion story in the style of the choose-your-own-adventure Fighting Fantasy series. It incorporates puzzles to solve and codes to break to reach the goal, which is a thumb drive containing an EP of song covers I recorded with a couple of friends for him and a behind-the-scenes video of how the four of us recorded the mini album.

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I even bothered to make album art for the mini album using a candid photo of B which I took before the semester started. I had a lot of fun making this and I wanted to bring the same spirit of fun to my FYP by reflecting on my making/conceptualizing process. I noticed that when I was working on The Abandoned House I paid very close attention to the details of my bookmaking and my narrative and even though I experienced so much frustration making sure the paragraphs of the story were all properly linked, it was a very conscious process with quite a rounded and rich outcome compared to when I tried to lock myself into my old FYP idea last month.

One of the main takeaways I have from this project is the feeling that it may not be such a bad thing to incorporate tech things into my outcome after all. I showed my mother The Abandoned House after I finished binding the pages and cover and she liked the idea of the embedded thumb drive. (I built it the same way I built my Dictionary last semester.) She suggested that I could use QR codes in my FYP to make the experience more interactive and immersive.

I’m an analog girl but I think I should challenge myself and keep up with the evolving pace of mixed media art especially with regard to book design. I’m really horrible at logo and brand design but I feel like all the books I’ve been making lately have an element of my personal touch to them that my branding work lacks. After two years I have learnt that I don’t enjoy brand design.

I was also reading Xiao Yan’s FYP report about her bookmaking/narrative-making process and it reassured me that I’m on the right track. I’m going to post again later today about book design ideas I have for my FYP. There’s a certain look and feel I’m moving towards and it involves gold foil.

Illustration 2.0

I’ve been struggling with my project recently (I think I locked myself too far into The Resurrectionist) and with the idea that my drawings are too pretty to be grotesque. I know that sounds rather self-aggrandizing, but it’s a bit of a problem if your working title is Case Studies of The Grotesque.

I went ahead and drew as I usually do, incorporating all the odd images from the grimoires/pseudo-encyclopedias that I’ve been researching recently. I decided that perhaps my original ideas and themes still hold – it’s just that I need to find a new vessel for them that can grow along with my illustrations.

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This came from all the ero guro I’ve been looking at as well as all the strange plant hybrids in the Voynich manuscript and the Codex Seraphinianus.

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This came from some of the horror game artbooks that I’ve dug out for inspiration on grotesque/body horror/insanity.

It’s hard to say how my project is developing now, but I’m going to have myself a research session in the HSS/ADM library tomorrow (there are some books I need to look for) to beef up on theory.

Dotwork Documentation #1

My experiment with documentation derived from that Facebook video I shared a while back. While I didn’t add in the number of dots or anything fancy, I found it quite interesting to see my own stippling process at 300% of its normal speed. Reminds me a lot of the motion of tattoo guns. I know it’s not very HD (I draw at night) but I’ll probably try again soon and see if I can do something about the quality of the video.