feather2pixels

To begin designing the set of Down A Little Dirt Road, I popped my head in the CMA Library.   From the visual perceptive, the particular theme from the script that gets me most hot and bothered is earthquakes, and I found several technical books filled with engineering imagery that had me licking my chops.  Even just two minutes with these books make me kind of sorry that I can’t magically change my job from teaching this kind of stuff to teaching how to make art out of this kind of stuff.  But everything is okay–did you know that as an engineering teacher here, I am allowed to borrow an unlimited number of books for an unlimited period of time?  That  gave me a great idea for a way to make easy money over the summer.

But right now I need to start making this set.  I decided that a healthy variety of technical figures from the fields of geology and structural engineering would be an interesting starting point for look of this world.

I compiled 30 pages of images into one humongous project in Photoshop, where I was able to experiment with sizing, juxtaposition, and layering (click to enlarge):

A peek at part of the compiled image project.

The result was a continuous image roughly 5 x 3 feet in area.   That’s 15 square feet of great ideas!  I have plans to use this image to produce three large silkscreens for stenciling.  Looking ahead, if I get my way I think I kind of prefer to pretty much screen print the shit out of the entire set.

My plan to post every day of this week was about as successful as Glenn McCoy’s plan to be an acceptable member of the media.  Keep your internet goals as vague as possible to avoid letdown, I guess.  On the other hand, there are many gratifying things in this life.  One of the most gratifying things about screen printing is its ability to translate almost any image, almost always for the better.  This encourages the hoarding element of human nature.  Forgotten texts and found trash treasures take on a new life printed through a polyester screen.

I’m way in to the idea of discovering great things in the world and then finding a way to make them work squeezed through a screen.   I’ve been working on a body-themed poster for one C.W.’s harebrained schemes.  After a lot of getting nowhere on the design, I finally turned to America’s favorite last resort.  The library.  For unknown reasons, the Maritime Academy library stocked a 1973 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and I unleashed the awesome scanning power of my Canon LIDE 80 upon it.  Now dozens of striking technical drawings from a bygone era are mine. All mine!  I cannot lose.