Weekly IP Blog#10

What I did

Sun. 11/13/11: 4 hours reading, 2.5 hours drawing

Read about Greek, Roman, Mayan, Dominican Republic, African, and witchcraft stories, Gods, and historical legends in relation to hurricanes. Drew hurricanes based on these stories and descriptions of storms/Deities. 

Mon. 11/14/11: 2 hours, 45min

Read more articles and stories about hurricanes, how witchcraft and the religious descriptions of hurricanes and their positive power in bringing change can refer to “The Eye of God”. Found more cultural characteristics of hurricanes being parallel to storm Gods and Goddesses. Drew smaller compositions of hurricanes.

Tue. 11/15/11: 5 hours

Researched more on hurricanes, found great poetry and storybooks about hurricanes at the library. Drew more hurricanes, started working digitally and exploring the new digital effects. Scanned my work and continue reading scientific and weather descriptions of hurricanes. Watched clips about hurricanes and storm surges.

Weds. 11/16/11: 4 hours

Digitally painted hurricanes based off my sketches. Printed my best draft and work, continued reading poems in Spanish describing hurricanes.   

Thurs. 11/17/11: 1.5 hours blogging/reflecting, 3 hours rescanning and editing work, 3 hours in small group critique. 

What I accomplished/discovered/encountered

I was really busy this week, hurricanes was my craze! I had a lot of fun finally getting more reading and research done in regards to hurricanes. One huge thing I learned overall about reading so many different accounts, meanings, poems, and stories about hurricanes is that Americans have the tendency, out of all other cultures, to look at hurricanes so negatively. Japan, Latin America, and even Africa described hurricanes in terms of strength and positives change in beautiful ways. I especially enjoyed the European relations of storms to magic and witchcraft, how winds and the intensity of storms signified an invisible person’s power or hierarchy. These readings really helped me get inspired to envision windy mists, boiling foam, and coils of storms.

Another thing I really enjoyed reading about this week was the Mayan and Latin American material about hurricanes. The word we use today, “hurricane”, derives from the Mayan word “Hurakan” which is the name of the Mayan storm God. To prevent hurricanes, the Mayans would sacrifice every year a young women and warrior to lead her to Hurakan’s underwater kingdom. Hurakan’s power as a God also related to the powers of the Greek God Aeolus, but I found Hurakan’s snake form and spiritually much more impacting. When I revisted the Art and Architecture library Tuesday, I found this amazing book called the “Wind of Change & the Transformation of Nineteen-Century Cuba”, written by Louis A. Perez Jr. It’s getting really frustrating finding mostly books in the libraries that are just about the math and scientific descriptions of hurricanes, so this book was a great find. It has amazing cultural connotations and meanings for hurricanes, and best of all poems are in Spanish! I absolutely loved the new descriptions I was reading about in the poems, how Fidel Castro inspired people to be like a hurricane in fighting, how a hurricane was related to a bull, or how women can be described like a hurricane in having great hips and being good at dancing. The Spanish language has more description words/adjectives than the English language, so the variations in how hurricanes were being descried in these Spanish poems was amazing and more much relatable to me. New words that were being used in these poems for hurricanes were whimsical, playful, brashness, and cynicism. This really inspired me to draw a lot more this week.

I also got this great book “Weather Whys” by Yeager, Paul. I just recently got it, but so far the poems about storms are calm and talk about needed changes in nature. Having actual books really does help, and the other digital books I had been reading that were much more scientific with images tired me out more. I like carrying books around and taking a good break away from my laptop. I did also however learn more about the National oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US and how they help regulate hurricane tracking and public safety. The fallowing clip was really informational and visually helpful in understanding how dirty a storm surge can be. http://oceantoday.noaa.gov/hurricanestormsurge/welcome.html

Sketching more this week based on new reading material was a lot more enjoyable and refreshing. I think I kept having the tendency of drawing faster but more abstract because of a lot of the things I was reading that were were more magical and less tangible. Wind and messy mists with foamy clouds is what I kept in mind, but I tired to keep my work recognizable for a hurricane and did this more successfully digitally. I discovered that what people and stories most identified hurricanes with was indeed the “eye” or the spiral the drives it, therefore I tried to incorporate that form in my work.

Thursday’s small group critique was more assuring and again very helpful this week. I printed a 36”x36” black and white version of one of the digitally painted hurricanes I created. I got fed back that my digital painting was a lot better in being identified as a hurricane, a storm with interesting intensity. A critique I had was that I needed to incorporate the digital work and hand drawn work a bit better. We talked about me fine tuning one or two of my works that I’ve sketched/digitally painted the best. A huge thing that’s affecting my work was not having high quality scans of my drawing to work with, it was something I honestly had not considered. James told me to play with the DPI and scanner settings to improve my printing quality. We also discussed cheaper printing tests I can do so that people could get a better idea of what I want my prints to look like, I can try to print colored versions of my work on inkjet Mylar and glue it on a used big piece of glass. I’m just worried about cost still, the black and white print was $12 dollars, but a colored print in that size was going to be around $80 dollars so ordering inkjet Mylar or any large sized paper is not going to be cheap for me to experiment with. 

I rescanned my best drawings at the Dudestadt Center and took a very long time doing so after my small group critique. I played with the settings and got really good scans that made my files super big so I had issues getting them on my laptop. I’m just hoping that they can be manageable on Photoshop with the effects I created because those files were big on there own already. I learned a lot about scanner settings and the people at the Dude were really nice.

What I think I should do next

For next week I want to fine-tune some of my best versions, integrating my hand drawn and digitally style better. I will also continue reading about hurricanes and stories; I’ve put some more books on reserve at the library and should be getting them soon. I will also be looking into more ways I can test print my work, see how much inkjet Mylar or other paper will cost me. I’m also tempted to work on my volcanic eruption natural disaster. I want to work on that a bit and switch gears but I’ll see what else I need to push to make my hurricane more successful.