learning the ropes

April 25, 2008 [tex|ges]ture Drawing – compressed charcoal, oil pastel on butcher paper (96-inch x 36-inch). While listening to SoundGarden (“Boot Camp”) and Bjork (“Pagan Poetry”) and trying to map out my final thesis performance, the drawing disintegrated into another gestural exploration.

Yesterday as I was looking for inspiration, I found an Erhu recording from the subway platform last November. I liked that I could use my rope to “bow” the sound as I applied granular synthesis to it. I used this sample yesterday for my first drawing with the Rope&Pulley. Today, I made a larger drawing. One of the ropes controls the location of the sampling “window” (ie, the area of the sample the granular synthesis engine looks at) and the other controls the output volume. This was a fairly crude demo.

April 4, 2008 [tex|ges]ture – pilot G6 gel pen, graphite stick on drawing paper (54-inch x 12-inch) – 15 minute (appx.) timed drawing, video-recorded.

I did this drawing at home after returning from school on Thursday night. I’m trying to explore the transition point between the ordered, methodical, similar shape drawing and the freer, expressive, gestural drawing.

This is a test video of one of my first large drawings. I purchased a graphite stick at Dick Blick with the intention of making big marks. I really wanted a marker, but they only had blues and violets. I’m not so much into colors yet, so I decided to keep things simple and raw. I’ve made a conscious effort not to think while making these drawings. I try to allow my hand to guide the drawing and my eyes to observe so that my hand can respond to the feedback it’s receiving from my eyes.

This time, I’m making drawings with Jarnal — an alternative to Windows Journal for the tablet PC. Jarnal saves its files as scalable vector graphics (.svg), so I should be able to using Processing to manipulate them later.

Here is a zoomed out progression of the drawings I made on March 24.

There were three drawings in this set I liked, so I’ve included them below. There drawings were made in the Windows Journal application on my tablet PC.

One unfortunate thing about the Windows Journal application is that it can only export low-res black and white .tiff files or heavily dithered colored .jpgs. There is no way (other than writing some .NET code using the Microsoft Journal SDK) to extract the vector graphics from a Journal file. I tried to print these images to .pdf, but the .pdf renderer doesn’t understand z-order, so the images where practically garbled.

I used to think that drawings like this were just doodles or scribbles; however, having taken the time to focus exclusively on this process, I find that while these drawings are not representational, they are not mere scribbles.

Here is a zoomed out progression of the drawings I made on March 23.

These drawings were made rapidly while I was at my wife’s family home for the Easter weekend.

On my flight back from Indiana, I made the following drawings on my tablet.

This is another color drawing machine — “interactive” this time. You can draw your own quadrilaterals now and turn background blurring on and off (use the ‘B’ key).