Chateu de Dada

Welcome to the Chateau de Dada.

Here, have some of the house wine.

Grab a marker and recycle some art.

Or maybe you'd be more interested in a hands on approach?

Cats, like art, are quite useless.



This man doesn't know how ugly he is.

This woman is reenacting an old Japanese wood block print involving an octopus.



You can see video of some art recycling right here, at the Chateau de Dada, an event featuring collaborative collage, creative destruction, video viewing, John Cage on VHS, and delicious cheesecake.

Ink stuff

I have to say, Blogger's NEW AND IMPROVED image upload manger is a piece of shit.

It's made creating this post an incredible  pain in the ass, but for some reason I can't load up the old manager's web page.

I don't know why web designers like to destroy anything simple, quick, and straightforward,  and replace it with clumsiness and complication. Were the masses really clamoring for a slower and more awkward way to upload images?

Anyway...I'm taking a class in Experimental Typography, which is exactly like Typography except I need the credits from the second class to graduate. That's pretty much the main difference: between graduating (HOORAY) and not graduating (damn).

Here are my inked works for my first project, which is to use type to illustrate a figure or object or subject or whatever. I inked them using my new fountain pen, which was a lot of fun but kind of tricky, since I'm still learning how to use it.

This is a goofy goat that I went a bit overboard in illustrating, because other people couldn't tell what the hell it was supposed to be. I thought using the E as a body and the g as a head was absolutely brilliant when I sketched out the concept, but execution made it hard to distinguish from a dog. Or a horse. Or a cow. Really, I didn't settle on it being a goat until I added the extra serif as an ear to the g.

This is the concept of a drink can illustrated two different ways. The can with a B as a pull tab was done first, but it seemed lonely, and I had finally figured out a way to draw a can using the letters of the word, with a bit of thought. The B can wasn't colored in to balance its thick letters against the other can's lighter typeface. B can's a mish mosh of typefaces, but CAN can(?)'s Futura, because I liked the geometric shapes of the letters. They seemed perfect for a cylinder, a circle, and a triangular punch hole.

This is a Franklin Gothic kangaroo. I came up with him after reading an article on Russian constructivism. I think his name is Olaf. It's too bad I can't ink his big A in red.

End of school special

This was for an aborted typography project. Obama looks like he's swallowed a canary.



This is a sketch from last post, colored. It illustrates the idea of families being mostly cobbled together from dead body parts, string and tar.



This is another colored sketch, illustrating the idea that crows don't like to ride the bus, but Sniz from Nickelodeon's Kablam show is pretty much ok with it.




This is an idle sketch from illustration.



This man's fingers are melting due to his cigarette habit.

Sketches from Illustration

These are some pen sketches I did in Illustration and Illustration Style.





And this, which is for 3 Cups of Tea, a book that reads like an early 20th Century adventure novel. It's about a guy who goes climbing in Afghanistan and winds up wanting to build schools for the poor people living there. I don't think this came out too awesome, though the girl looks like a cross between a purple ninja and a Medieval Virgin Mary.

Transgender Day of Remembrance & EcoFest

I made this targeted at people who don't know about the holiday and who aren't really aware of any problem, so I kept it really simple. I didn't intend to make a dichotomy between being trans, and being gay or straight, and I hope it isn't read that way. Queer would have covered things nicely, but it is often taken as a slur and would have been confusing. I also know there are many shades of lavender between the binary of boy/girl, but how to put that across as quickly and easily as possible for people who don't? Nuanced yet simple? Very tricky.



This is for my college's annual environmental festival. This year's theme is to be food and a sustainable New York City. Those donuts were delicious, by the way.

The Jungle Book

This was for my children's book project. I wonder if I made Mowgli look more African than Indian, though giving him dreads made sense to me. I mean, I don't think a kid raised by wolves would have silky straight hair. It would get frizzy and lock up in spots even if he were Chinese.

Some depictions of Mowgli are quite pale. There's a lot of variety in skin color with native Indians, but a pale, European-looking Mowgli is weird to me. I mean, one of the cool things about Mowgli is that he's an Indian boy, not a English dude like Tarzan. He's not foreign to the village near his jungle. And there are lots of children's stories about English kids, not so many about Indian ones.

I originally used red to denote shading on Mowgli's body, but then I decided it was better to use a 6B pencil. Pressing harder on a regular pencil gets you darker, but with a colored pencil it just makes the color more saturated, which doesn't work well for shading. In fact, I went back over Mowgli and added yellow and pale brown (same as the tree) to his skin, after the intial round of red and 6B, to correct my problem with saturated shadows.

The second problem I had with Mowgli is that I inked him after coloring him, and it looked bad. I thickened his outline, then selectively thickened the lines within his body along more raised forms, like his cheeks. I still think his eyes need work.

I used black ink for Bagheera to distinguish his black fur from Mowgli's dark hair and pencil shadows. I think that was a good choice, because otherwise there would be too little contrast.

The two layers of jungle are cyan with green over it, and yellow with green over it. I didn't have access to much variety of green pencil, so I had to mix it on the paper.

Urban Animal Alphabet

I had to design an alphabet for my typography class. I had many ideas, such as a hair alphabet, and a face alphabet, but the professor liked my drawings of animals.

There are a lot of alphabets based on animals, but I tried to base mine not on exotic jungle beasts or zoo animals or farm animals or anything like that, but on the pets and pests we have in New York City. Originally, I used a human as my Z, but my professor insisted I keep my alphabet "consistent".

Sometimes it was tempting to get a bit uncommon, with bats or red-tailed hawks or owls, but I restrained myself. The least urban animals I included were a chipmunk for C and a pet ferret for N. I regret not saving a spot for a roach, but they're not very evocative of any particular letter shape. It was hard enough coming up with a different animal for each letter (though I did include 3 dogs).

The animals are, in order: Rat, pigeon, chipmunk, possum, hornet, dragonfly, squirrel, raccoon, millipede, grasshopper, mantis, mouse, spider, ferret, earthworm, moth, bulldog, house fly, cat, tern, centipede, chihuahua, ant, two-winged thingy, Asian long horned beetle, and spaniel.

Inking this was a bit tricky, because the figures are so small. I usually use a two-tipped marker to do everything, but this time I needed to switch to a micron for the finest details. I used the finer point of my marker for outlines and thickened my micron line for features within each figure's body that could use it, like mouths or tails. I was inspired by the original guy who did Spy Vs. Spy, who I heard created varying line widths using nothing more than an unvarying technical pen.

This is a Xerox of the original, which I have to mount on matte board tomorrow.