As an animation student, this project was initially a breath of fresh air. Not only was it 90% an illustration, but it was also presented as being easier than frame-by-frame animation cells and hand drawn hell. But then, well, I hadn't realized the sort of pains Animate and Illustrator were going to set upon me.
The creation of the initial image was quite possibly the easiest part of this project. After three doodles in my sketchbook, the first being of a large crow (as my last name means Crow) and the last being my sharpened grip coming out of the grave (I...I'm a rather sickly and dramatic person) they easily melded into the illustration above, and without much tweaking, it was drawn from sketchbook to tablet in under an hour. The sharp fingers of the hand are my resolve, the umbrella a trademark, the feathers symbolic of my last name, and the snake and crunchy grass beneath it representing my home state and general love of reptiles. It's a rather simplistic image, all in all. What wasn't simplistic, however, was the process. For reasons unknown to me, both programs we were supposed to be using to create our projects decided we were to be mortal enemies, and had they decided otherwise I would have had this gif done a week earlier, and not the day before its due date. But alas. Sometimes life revolves around program lags, frozen screens, brush glitches, loading bars, photoshop hacks, and prayer. And sometimes, life is easier hand animated.
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bookstore bops from Zelda Velasquez on Vimeo.
Every Saturday, from 10 am to 6 pm, I work at a used bookstore called Crazy4Bookz. The majority of my clientele consists of new moms, 60+ senior citizens, and lost philosophy students, so it's kind of a ridiculous situation when the vape store next door starts blasting their music over my liminal beats. Even better when they let their most buzzed employee futz with the sign out front.
So for this project, I took a fuzzed out version of Mr. Brightside by the Killers, made a recording of the somewhat terrifying wiring under my desk, doubled it, recorded my hands messing with books, either by turning pages or hastily flipping through them, and finally, I took a sample of the sound of cars passing by. Because my store isn't exactly popular. Most of our books are mystery and romance, and we don't carry any of the current authors, because our stock depends on whatever the community has donated. Which leaves us with an ungodly amount of harlequin romance novels, true crime, children's books galore, and incredibly dated sci-fi. ​Anyway, I think the process wasn't the hard part. Putting everything together wasn't an issue--I like to think I'm quite able when it comes to sound illustration. No, the issue I had was finding time to record the sounds. Namely, timing my recordings with the slow parts of the day. Where I wouldn't have customers muddying up my sound--because I wasn't going for the busy times. I was looking for the slow, crawling, homework inducing times... Liu Bolin is a chinese artist who's most known for being The Invisible Man. In his pieces are mundane areas in which he has been painted to fit the background and, for all intents and purposes, blend in to his surroundings. They are typically talking about his country and the issues of labor, food safety, and political climate--though he has also been known to branch out into other topics and areas, such as climate change, historical landmarks, and art for art's sake. In the Ted Talk, Bolin talks mostly about the process of his art and the topics he's chosen, though doesn't really delve into his own past as an artist. Part of this I think stems on the fact that his talk was being actively translated as he spoke, which was a bit nerve wracking as they didn't include all of his translator's audio in the video and left me distracted: did Bolin pause to allow his translator time to speak, or did he forget he was there and simply spitball? It was hard to tell.
What I can say was that his art definitely was worth the seven minutes of anxiety. I chose Bolin's video because its thumbnail was interesting--initially I though maybe he and his translator were an artist duo--but stayed because his art was just as gripping as his colleague Ai Wei-Wei's. I don't know that I was inspired to do anything similar to his art--I hate makeup being on me, I'd hate paint even more--but I did think his pieces were strong in their delivery of his concepts. Definitely an artist to keep an eye on. |
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