Critique: Self Portrait with Wavy Hair (behind the scenes)

This is like a “Pop-up Video” but for blogs…

1. Reflection on context
2. Pop-up Critique of previous blog post (bold comments inserted into initial post)

1. Reflection on context
I’ve been trying to figure out why I haven’t posted to this blog, recently. I’m figuring that not only am I working on other blogs, I’ve been forgetting the initial purpose for this blog. This blog is about my artistic process. When my process changed, I just stopped posting. I didn’t feel like what I had was ready for this site. It’s ironic! The whole point is process, dag nabbit!

I have so many ideas for art sometimes; I have a few files in my computer called ideas or with beginnings of drawings, plans. It’s time to reflect and be honest about my process. I can’t avoid sharing something because it’s not done. What is done, anyway?

I’m going to start with what I know. About a year and half ago my art shifted from intricate line drawings of my city-source photos, I moved to photo-manipulation based art (which I call “photography+“). Fewer lines. I’d basically create source photos that I wished to draw one day, but since I “didn’t have the time” were left as collages.

I was using (and have revisited recently) fragment, tinyplanet, union, camera+ apps, and photoshop.

The drawing I have been doing is simple graphic design and line drawings for the flyers for the Los Angeles Word Salon (LAWS, @LAWordSalon) that I host with Mike Gattshall in Echo Park on Sundays.

A BIT OF EXCITING ARTING: I did have a fun time discover new styles and techniques while drawing the cover for a soon to be released The Letters Home album etc.. I can’t share those, yet, though, because…the band has a game plan. All good! It’s the first time I’ve been able to play around with photoshop in a while, and I do love to learn.

Otherwise, as far as excuses go for why I haven’t been drawing more (and I WANT TO!), the main one might be that my flip-screen computer broke. The monitor and keyboard are set-up so that the monitor can flip around and land on the keyboard, creating a tablet. It’s stuck in tablet form – which is how I draw on it – but I also use the keyboard and mouse when I work on digital art…and those bad boys are hidden beneath the monitor, now. I have a plan to fix it. It’s kind of hard to deal with how sick my computer/drawing tool is right now.

ANYWHO- Critique! The following is a blog post from January 2014. My critique is in bold.

2. Pop-up Critique

This animated portrait is simple and calming. I am looking to create subtlety and discovery in my art. [I have definitely moved away from calm in my art. That’s not the purpose. I would now explain this as fluid composition. I’m still interested in subtlety, though I need to figure out the distinction between subtlety and obfuscation.] This was pretty easy to make, too. I used a super small point pen on Photoshop to outline a silhouette, then compiled a stream of photos I had taken at my cousin’s baby shower in Agoura Hills. The water and the swans were insane! I knew I wanted to do something with the images, and why not put them in a self portrait! That’s what I seem to do…though the scene would look cool outside of a window in a drawing of a bookish room. Hmmm maybe I’ll do that. [I played with this idea of using windows in one drawing to reveal a moving scene in the background in Taix and potentially in Las Meninas. Still interested in exploring this!]

Though I’ve only been GIFing for under a month, I can’t imagine not turning all of my digital art into a GIF somehow for my future posts. [I did consider animation in most of my art after this. I peeked with my mini music videos for AJ Froman and Mars de la Mancha. I had to teach myself a lot to get those done. I’m glad I did it! I’ve forgotten how, now, though. I’ll probably find it out quicker, but once I got out of the habit, it became a daunting addition to what I needed to do in order to create art. I’m down to forget the GIF thing while I’m creating, then go back to the layers to see what sort of animation I can create once I’m done. […Unless the point of the art is a specific type of animation….]

Once I learned how to GIF, I started researching “arg gifs” to see what was out there and what people are doing.

Oh the loading!

Here’s some of what I found in my research:

—Buzzfeed’s [defensively titled]: 30 Artists Proving That GIFs are the Next Great Art Form

-I enjoyed the simplicity and saturation of Adam Ferriss and the social/something implications of Clay Rodery though their animation is quick and would make my mum dizzy.

–Erdal Inci has an animation realism that I appreciate, but do not yet bother to approach.

I also checked out the Huffington Post’s defensively titled article: 10 Foolproof Reasons Why GIFS are Indeed Art, in case you’re interested.

I liked the subtle GIFS (I think “subtle” is my key word this month…this year…). There’s something beautiful and unexpected about a slight shift: wind on water, a reflection revealing the movement of the sun, a breath.

For my GIF below, I may have been inspired by the subtly of Tech Noir and/or FASHGIF (though different content).

[I do enjoy these calm, subtle gifs, but I’m a bit riled up these days. I don’t just want pretty and contemplative. I need women with mouths and eyes. The wavy hair gifs below are a bit unsettling to me now: commentary on silent women who just need hair that accents their jawline and an ethereal presence to exist.]

Final GIF

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