Thursday, December 1, 2011

Weekly IP Blog#11


What I did
Sat. 11/26/11: 2.5 hours in the library researching and checking out books.

Sun. 11/27/11: 5.5 hours sketching and drawing out volcanic eruptions.

Tues. 11/29/11: 2 hours researching new printing paper, getting samples from B&Hh Photo Video and talked to representatives about printing options. 1 hour and 25min scanning high quality files of my best sketches. Read about volcanic myths, studied geological images, and digitally painted for about 4 hours.

Weds. 11/30/11:  2 hours studying digital fire and lava effects, practiced digitally painting, and read more about volcanoes. Continued to digitally paint more drafts and printed off work, about 5 hours.

Thurs 12/1/11: Had in class group critique and feed back. About 2 hours writing my blog, and 1 hour and 45min reflecting and thinking of words and phrase that inspired my natural disasters.


What I accomplished/discovered/encountered
I worked hard over the break and this week to get a volcano ready in time  for my December review. I’ve looked at books, online images, read stories, and studied digital effects that inspire me to get the kind of impacting look my volcanic eruption needs. In sketching out compositions in pastel, scanning them, and painting over them digitally, I’ve discovered two styles I’m having based off my process. The first style allows more of my hand drawings to show more, depicting my drawn textures with less obvious digital effects. The second style takes me a lot more time to do because I paint over almost my entire drawing, or sketches that I’ve merged together; to get an interesting digitalized vantage point. I think the digital style is most successful in having the potential in really impacting and immersing an audience to the idea that natural disasters are petrifying yet beautiful. 

I went to the library over the weekend and found 
amazing books, full of great geological images, others with facts and stories of how our earth has been formed, and some with inspiring illustrations and Japanese styles. One book in particular that has been extremely helpful is The Red Volcanoes : face to face with the mountains of fire, with photographs by G. Brad Lewis and Paul-Edouard Bernard de Lajartre ; introduced by John P. Lockwood and Alain Gerente. It’s full of amazing photos of the volcanoes in Hawaii and Reunion, shares great volcanic facts, and even touches on the Hawaiian legends about Pele, the fire Goddesses. I’ve learned that  more active volcanoes are mainly located on the boundaries of the tectonic plates, when in contrast hotspots are not linked with plate 
boundaries; these things are taken into account when photographing lava. The volcanoes that we see in photographs a lot allow people to observe them at a safe distance, and those are called effusive volcanoes. I’ve been reading on the naming of the volcanoes as well, how Kilavea refers to the rising leaves of the ti plants-referencing to the visual of lava fumes. This book really inspired me, I loved the stories and that made me imagine muddy flows and dough like connotations I did not originally relate to lava before. I loved the deep purples and smoky colors in the photos, a lot of the cracks in rocks with lava reminded me of blood veins, and for some reason Lord of the Rings. This book also pushed me to investigate the international volcanologist Jack Lockwood, who has a very interesting website that even offers his services as volcanologist! I had no idea that people could even do that. Another book that visually inspiring me to paint my volcano more digitally was Volcano : a visual guide, by Donovan-O'Meara, Donna. It really made me imagine what being in the ring of fire must feel like, hot and mystical, even though it not didn’t have actual pictures of the location itself-it just made me think of it. This lead me to the overpowering feeling I wanted my volcano to have, yet try to make it bright and seductive. 

Painting rocky textures in both my hand drawings and digital drafts was difficult; very different form the watery and flowy strokes I’ve been working with over the last couple weeks for my hurricane. I had to try it over and over, sketch out and play with just making rock textures more realistic on my own before jumping into drawing out a volcanic scene. My first couple of sketches were kind of cliché, something you would see in a dinosaur book.  I did however like the spiciness I created with the reds, yellows, and oranges I needed in order to make my own lava mess in my drawing pad. Some of weaker sketches and  reminded me of cigarette buds or dirty ash trays, which I thought was odd to connect to hurricanes and nature, but I did manage to correlate them in shadows of my more successful volcano sketches. I also found this great online Volcano Blog, full of awesome art. I particularly found the painting by Joseph Wright very powerful in how serene it was for being a volcano, especially since it was a volcano found in Italy and one he himself did not witness.  
‘Vesuvius from Portici’,  Joseph Wright of Derby 

My digitally painted volcano, style #1 
My digitally painted volcano, style #2 






Also this week I looked into more printing options for my final products. James suggested last week to look up translucent or Mylar ink jet paper at B&H Photo Video. I chatted with an employee and they kept referring me to other kinds of photo paper that only came in 8.5x11, they also told me they do not give out samples or sample packs of the kind of paper I was interested in. This reminded me of the Fuji Flex paper sample I got in the mail a while ago, that looks like Mylar, but I’ve yet to get some to print with. On Wednesday, after looking more paper options with B&H, at Kinkos I explored printing on a type of overhead paper to see what it would look like. I liked the transparency, but my colors got a bit lost and the work overall got darker. The larger print I did 36x42 in black and white, and this time with the higher quality scans the print was not as broken and low quality as my last hurricane large print was. So the higher quality scans that take me a while to do at the GroundWorks are really paying off.

Thursday’s small group critique was very again very helpful and encouraging. I learned that my digital style has the potential in being emissive and impacting if I keep the quality to come through the prints. They look the best on screen, but almost photographic when I printed one of my works on the overhead type paper for the critique. I was also encouraged to post words and phrases I’m reading that are inspiring me to paint my natural disasters digitally, especially the Spanish poems I read about in regards to hurricanes. I think that putting words/phrases next to my work, and rethinking what they mean to me and why, will really help me others understand what it is specifically my work can communicate. Having written down important words and phrase already that provoked my visual motivation, has helped a lot already. We also discussed different printing methods for my project, Im still experimenting with different paper and options to invest in further exploration that might be better than printing on glass.

What I think I should do next
Next week I will be doing more reading and research for both volcanoes and hurricanes, I found more and still have not gotten through it all. I hope to order printing paper samples of translucent printing paper to experiment with; James has offered to help me with that. I also heard oiling thin paper could work so I’m going to try to learn more about that.  I will write on note cards the phrases and words that inspired my large prints, step back and reflect on their meanings and how they can connect to my digital work better.

Work I will have completed for December Review
I hope to have at lest two large digital prints of my best volcano and hurricane so far. I will also have at least 4 different printing samples of how my work could be presented, some will be the practice prints I’ve already done and others will be the new ones I am going to try to get in the next in couple of weeks. I also plan on bring to the review all the samples of paper and glass I’ve gotten mailed to me. The tornado prints I’ve done a while I want to present as well, so I’m hoping to have some time to fix them so that they correlate better with the volcano and hurricane I’ve been working on. I might also provide a list of the words and phrases from my research that have inspired some of my work.