Anagrams

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After our perplexing experience registering for baby things last week, my husband and I sat around creating anagrams out of the names of items on the stores "must-have" baby stuff list, because we're cool like that. The list of Stuff You Must Buy Or Your Baby Will Be Totally Deprived, by the way, is a real load of crap. I remember my little brother sleeping in a dresser drawer when we visited family, so I'm pretty sure we don't need three different "sleep systems" for our baby!

Anyway, this is my "interactivity" entry because it was a collaboration. If anything, my brilliant husband did most of the work, because I only came up with like two anagrams and he thought of about a billion. My favorite is the one at the top, because I'm fairly certain we will indeed need to learn to speak Blork in order to communicate with our baby girl.

Family

This is a sketch for a painting I'd like to do. It takes me about two weeks to finish an illustration of this size with acrylic, so I just created the sketch this week. I think the composition is almost there, although I want to play with the framing and the white space on the left, and I'm mostly happy with the characters. Some of the positions of the characters will be tweaked.

The footprints in the snow (on the left) are there to make it clear that they're a family and they came from the same house.

Girl/boy/neutral

This drawing is another response to the experience of registering for baby gear last week. My husband and I were taken aback by manufacturers' labeling of nearly every product in the store as "girl," "boy," or "neutral." We expected some of that but were a little disturbed by the magnitude of it. Color as a marker of gender identity is so weird and so widespread in the U.S. (is it elsewhere in the world?). Even my mother waited until I told her the sex of the baby to buy decorations for the baby shower she's throwing me. And today when my husband and I found out that we are having a girl (!!!smiles!!!), the staff at the doctor's office immediately marked my file with a pink symbol.

Ink made from flower petals

For the last month I've marveled at the beauty and number of flowers in my Minneapolis neighborhood. I've never seen so many flowers in all my life! I've lived in the same spot for a few years, and I think there really are more flowers this spring and early summer. But it's possible that I'm noticing them more because this is such a happy time in my life. I imagine telling our baby, grown up someday, "When I was pregnant with you, we lived in Minneapolis and there were so many flowers that spring!"

To satisfy my desire to document this amazing flower display, I made ink out of flower petals this week. I've been wanting to photograph and illustrate some of this fabulous flora for a while now, and painting them with petal-ink is the sweetest way I can think of to allow content to inspire form -- or, as one of this week's prompts puts it, to let the medium support the idea.

I used watercolor brushes and a bamboo dip pen to do this naive little painting. It was a lot like painting with watercolor -- something I enjoy but am definitely not spectacular at.

I'm including a few process photos (below), showing the flowers and leaves after I chopped them up. I boiled the materials, mixed with rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol), and set in the sun to reduce. The third photo below shows the final red ink. The only problem I had was with the green color; it's virtually impossible to make green ink from green plant materials. I think you have to make blue and yellow, and mix them. And I couldn't live with the yellow-brown in my little painting, so I super-saturated the leaves in Photoshop. I decided that it's my journal, and I can cheat if I want. :)

recto/verso

I thought making a thaumatrope to include in my visual journal would be a neat way to address this week's recto/verso prompt. It also uses some superimposing, like we were working with last week. I'd never successfully made a thaumatrope, and I don't know if this one is particularly successful either, but what can I say? That's part of exploring, I guess.

I used a bird-in-egg metaphor to speak to my journal theme. One side of the thaumatrope is the egg, and the other is the baby bird:
































And here's a video of it in action, for what it's worth. I slowed it way the hecks down but it's still really hard to see... if you look closely you can see the bird inside the egg, but it becomes so faint as the thaumatrope gets faster.

Little girls

This week, responding to prompts related to field effect and open/closed forms, I did this black and white illustration of little girls on a playground. In addition to having children and babies on the brain right now, I'm inspired by some related things going on my life -- things like buying a house surrounded by countryside, in a small town full of beautiful parks and playgrounds for kids.

I originally sketched this composition with graphite and then rendered it Illustrator, going for a chalk-on-asphalt look.

Sleeping on it

This article helped me understand the concept of random stimulation better. I'm a firm believer in sleeping on things, which is related to the random stimulation approach to processing our questions, problems, and the things that happen in our lives.

I'm completely serious when I say that "sleeping on it" has been one of my foremost creative tools in art school! I've really found that my brain is capable of amazing creativity if I just give it some time to do its thang, so I always try to begin a project early -- even with something as simple as a word list -- in order to give my brain something to chew over for a night or two. But because art school is crazy and sometimes we just don't have eight hours to wait, sometimes instead of sleeping on it, I'll just give it a few hours -- or I'll "shower on it" or "walk the dog on it." Even that short amount of time can help. So many times, I've felt that I overcame a creative stumbling block while washing my hair or something -- when just minutes before I was stumped or feeling uninspired.

Since my theme for this visual journal is my pregnancy, I tried to plumb my subconscious for any hint as to the sex of my baby, which is due in November. It probably sounds cliched and silly. But it's hard not to speculate. It's not because I'm dying to paint the nursery pink or buy a bunch of dumb gender-specific onesies or whatever, but rather it's that it's hard not to want some sign of who this creature is. At five months, there's little to be known -- in a couple of weeks we can find out the sex from the doctor, and we can find out things like, you know, does our baby have a heart defect or something horrible like that? Not a lot else can be known, and much of what can be found out is bad news. So you can see why expectant parents focus on the question of XX or XY!

For a couple of nights, I reflected about my question before turning in for the night. If I'm honest, I'll say that I don't remember having any dreams on the subject or even noticing any new or significant thoughts about it in the following days. But my own intuition on the subject just seems to get stronger and more certain, so I created a journal entry about my own hunch.

Normally I believe that what we call "women's intuition" is really not intuition so much as the result of lifelong training in interpersonal communication, noticing and interpreting others' verbal and nonverbal cues, socializing, and reading between the lines. But I came across this study from the U of Arizona that suggests that pregnant woman's hunches about the sex of their unborn babies are surprisingly accurate. You can read it here, but the gist of it is that 70% of women in the study who said that they had a hunch accurately predicted the sex of their baby. They didn't have any medical info or test results that could have clued them in.

I've had a strong feeling from the beginning about the sex of this baby, and it isn't based on a preference or anything. In a few weeks I'll find out if I was right. ...if I'm wrong, my husband and I are going to have to start thinking of some more names!

The journal entry above, "Mother Knows Best," is oil pastel, dry pastel, acrylic, and digital. It's a belly!

Intuitive colors

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My little color sketch of a fetus in the womb is based on and mimics a beautiful one by Davinci, who did many sketchbook explorations of fetuses.

I arrived at this palette before choosing the subject. The soft prettiness and fleshiness of these colors seemed right for a color study of a baby before it is born. And I chose this palette after exploring color with some watercolor washes (below). As you can see, I started out feeling drawn to the soft greens, but ended up realizing that the fleshy pinks and reds were actually what felt right, although I did not yet know that I would be doing a color study of a fetus. I would say that this palette is not one that I would normally choose for my work, because I tend toward the bright, saturated jewel tones often seen in children's book illustration -- so it was fun to find myself drawn to this palette through a more instinctual approach.

Exploring embedding!

The journal prompt on embedding and superimposing has been the most rewarding for me so far. (I also created entries in response to the prompts on random stimulation and color exploration, and those posts are forthcoming.) The image above is an example of how I began this entry, using forms cut from black paper, and momentarily I'll explain what I did and how it worked out.

But first I want to mention that this week I really thought a lot about the process and purpose of making exploratory journal entries. As I mentioned in response to some helpful feedback I received on the Bb discussion board, it is really hard for me, as an illustrator, to set aside my results-driven approach to making work. When I'm making images, two questions are always in my mind: what will this will be used for? and who are my clients/audience? But I realize that these questions do not serve the same purposes in making a journal, so I really tried this week to create journal entries that are purposefully incomplete -- in process -- exploratory.

To create an entry that considers the possibilities of embedding* and superimposing, I cut out about ten forms from black paper. Some of the forms are ones associated with my journal theme -- my pregnancy -- and a few were more intuitive, freehand, and abstract. The uterus (above) is the most literal one. Below is the full set of original forms, without any superimposing.



















Then I spent some time exploring how the forms could be layered and superimposed to create new forms with different meanings (or, if not "meanings," then at least different feelings -- very subjective, I know). I really couldn't have predicted how interesting and satisfying I was going to find this process, but it was weirdly liberating to just piece these forms together with no real plan -- just finding my way with what felt right and, importantly, not worrying about making something beautiful or finished. Below are some of my favorite results from this process.


















From the original simple forms that might invoke ideas of body parts, babies, and simple plant forms, I ended up finding references to science (at atom?), water animals, and cell clusters. I also found an unexpected decorative element in the form of some (roughly) bisymmetrical ornamental shapes and borders, as well as decorative forms created by the white space caught within repeated forms.

* Incidentally, "embedding" is also a pregnancy word!

Title page, map, and gathering

Welcome to my visual journal for the Space of Possibility class! This journal will document the second trimester of my pregnancy, a time when I am feeling very reflective and inspired -- the perfect time to make a visual journal. Above is my "title page," an illustration I made this week using acrylic, cut paper, and digital media. I often work with this combination of media in my illustration work (more here!), so I chose to publish my journal online to accommodate the digital element of my work. You can click each image to see a bit larger.

Below is documentation of the "mind mapping" activity we've been asked to try out. It does sort of get the ideas flowing, and mine is suggestive of a tool that I use practically every day as an illustrator: word lists. A word-based approach to brainstorming really works for me, I've found. This mind map actually begins on the right-hand side of the page, ending on the left page with a list of miscellaneous ideas that didn't happen to fit into the other parts of my word web.













The "gathering" feature of this assignment is the one that I struggled with the most. I knew I didn't have many tangible things that represent my pregnancy, so I simply started with what I do have -- ultrasound photos:














And then I decided to create a visual list of the variety of objects that have played a special role in my life over the last four and a half months. I decided to do this as a way of "gathering" these elements into one space. They include many things that don't lend themselves to being pasted onto illustration board, like chocolate soy milk and my mother-in-law's rocking chair. This visual list was done with ink and Photoshop.














Until next time!