Two New Leaves

Here is a pair of faced leaves that I was working on yesterday - this is part of a satellite project to the large volume, that I’m calling “The Dinky Manuscript”because its very little.  

Its nice to take a break occasionally from the bigger volume, if only because the smaller one is unbound leaves and a bit easier to handle.  

This volume is also on a different paper - I’m using Arches white cover stock for it, which has a deep tooth and a highly absorbent surface which just sucks in the paint.  I think there is an earlier  version of the illustration on the left, with less detail, posted few weeks back.  I’m not sure, but I think both leaves have a bit of work yet to go.

I’m calling this particular script, the one that dominates all the volumes I’m working on right now “caligraphic block”.  Its not very ornamental, mostly I’ve designed it for writing quickly as I don’t want to think too much about what I’m writing.  

This entire project is about automatism - making art, writing things on the fly.  Rather than thinking about what I’m writing or painting, I’m writing or painting about what I’m thinking.  I’m creating musical pieces the same way - just making stuff up as I go along.  No rhyme or reason, and if there is a meaning to it, I’ll have to find it later.

Space

Painting Planets

I spent part of today painting planets in Photoshop  CS6.  It’s a lot of fun to make worlds – the work is very fast, and tossing about atmospheres and coming up with ways to fill the space between planets and suns, and the simple act of creating distant galaxies are all very fulfilling.  One can imagine what it is like for a real planet maker – if its this much fun to make planets digitally, how much greater it must be to make the real thing. 
The above image is part of a suite I’m working on of travel posters for non existent space colonies.  This particular one goes with a small caption:  “Although Janis enjoyed her visit to the Lukas system, there is no blue at all in the Lukas light spectrum – she really misses Blue!”
I’d miss it too. 

I'm learning how to make movies - here is a recent sample.  I made a screen capture of quick drawing from my iPad, made with the Paper app from 53, used Garageband (also on the iPad) to record and quickly edit an improvised guitar piece.  I used iMovie to edit them together, and here is the result:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c0tIxGNRKM&feature=youtu.be

As I was writing the caption I tried to say a bit about the correlation between the music and the drawing - in my mind, instrumental guitar playing has some of the same elements as drawing or painting does.  In visual art, I start with a neutrally colored space, either black, white, or some other color, and into that space I add lines and shapes, building them up layer upon layer.  Sometimes they resolve into an image, sometimes they remain somewhat abstract.
The musical equivalent, in my own esthetic practice, is that when playing the guitar, I create a ground of chords and rhythm over which the more intricate notes of the melody are built up, layer by layer.  Sometimes those notes coalesce into a song, but sometimes they remain in the realm of abstract expression.
In both cases, I am speak a language that doesn't partake of words for the most part.  Even so, there is a vocabulary in use which communicates, but there is no accurate way to translate them through words - it just has to be seen or heard.