Thank you very much, Illustration Friday.  Happy!

One of my colleagues loaned me a very nice pinhole camera. It’s reliable and has given me the chance to work examine exposure times with a particular aperture. Here’s the first round of results. I’m still figuring this out, which is a lot of fun.

The Camera

My Studio

In the backyard

Sitting with my daughter sketching

Sitting alone sketching

Self Portrait

Working

Godzilla in the Garden

Godzilla in the Garden

Godzilla in the Garden – if you look at the picture below, you can see he moved his hand from high to low…

The Monster Rebellion (click for larger)

More soon.

Ô Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre!
Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons!

Oh Death, old Captain, time to make our trip!
This country bores us, Death! Let’s get away!

~Voyaging, Charles Baudelaire

The Land of the Dead is completely surrounded by the Dead Sea. There is no escape that way. Once past the choppy waters of the dead fishermen, there is nothing but miles and miles of doldrums in every direction.  And, even if were possible to get past that infinite length to the far distant shores, one would only find the Land of the Dead.  Because, the  Dead Sea only reaches the shores of the  Land of the Dead.  The two call upon themselves,  recursively, like two mirrors facing each other. The mirrors  extend into infinity, but only take the viewer to one place.  In this case, it’s a dead place.

And yet, every so often, someone still tries to escape. There are other things in the dead sea besides doldrums and lost treasure, as this fellow is about to find out. Watch my movie above to see…

I’m happy to say that I think  the original  looks BETTER than the digital version – I ended up cutting the giant jellyfish out with an exact-o and mounting it mat board. This now lives with my friends Julie and Dave.

See below.

(NOTE: I did this in a hurry -  I see the mistakes but firmly believe, sometimes, one has to just have to fly one’s  Jolly Roger).

I traveled very light this time – I only had my backpack, which contained a toothbrush, camera, laptop, iPod, cables, notebook and pens, fiber, soap, coffee, socks, a plastic mermaid and a few other necessities. It worked out!

I didn’t get to see much of Boston, besides the inside of the Copley Mall Compound.  I did bump into this gal on my way out. I’m not sure if this was a gallery or library, but I was taken with this statue. So, I took her. Picture. I thought it might come in handy. She reminded me of another swell Boston painter gal.

Happy Illustration Friday. Here’s to getting un-worn. New. Whatever.

We’re giving away 5 free student tickets to  the first 5 students or faculty who include #aeaedu in a Tweet. Hurry!

I did. And so did a lot of other people, and I figured I missed the boat.  Then:

BINGO! I went to gray, rainy Boston on Monday. It was, as before, a really good conference. Friendly, like-minded people, excellent food and a sense that we are all working toward a common cause.  And I’ll never pass up the chance to talk with Mr. Zeldman while he’s trying to use the bathroom.

The “standardistas” emphasized:

• Web sites do not need to look the same in all browsers.
• Having a “content strategy” is important, because content is king.
• Design with CSS in the browser and not Photoshop
• Use a Grid
• Flash, particularly sIFR, can solve typographic issues
• User testing is vital

This is standard issue stuff (pun intended), and was highly emphasized at last year’s conference. And the one before that.

Which made me wonder – what’s actually NEW? The web is moving quickly. A lot has happened since the last conference I attended (last August).  Why aren’t we, as designers,  talking about it?

We have jQuery, which is so easy to use, it feels like cheating. It handily repairs shortcomings of IE6 issues, allows us to easily implement AJAX and JSON solutions and gives us ways to enhance our designs with expedient virtuosity previously unthinkable  for most front-end designers.

And, what about Chrome? How does bing.com enter into the SEO conversation? How is touch computing affecting web design and mobile devices? How does Flash fit into our conversation, aside from solving typographic issues and video streaming? And Flex?  It does some pretty amazing stuff. What the hell is the W3 actually doing? And, let’s talk about HTML5.

Another observation – every other person I talked with had something to do with Higher Education. Is there a curriculum for Web Standards?  I think it’s time to expand the discussions at Standards based conferences -  the world knows that we strive to keep content separate from formatting and behavior. As a teacher, I see things shift in 5 to 6 month cycles – each new class entering my room knows more than the one that just left. Our conferences should keep up, too.

I’m really glad I got to go – the design portions of the conference were inspiring, as always.  And it’s refreshing to get out of the office (hospital)  and be with other designers, to inspire each other and connect with a community.

So, as I sit here in this empty, quiet airport during the middle of the night, I wonder…what’s next?

I could never live in a house in a bottle on the water – I get sea sick. Although if it keeps raining in Baltimore, may have to do this before we all wash away.

We spent the day at the American Visionary Art Museum learning about pinhole photography and camera obscura. The workshop was co-lead by Guillaume Pallat and Chris Peregoy, who were both generous with their experience and satisfyingly different in their approaches.

Our hosts, Chris and Guillaume

From Wikipedia: A pinhole camera is a very simple camera with no lens and a single very small aperture. Simply explained, it is a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. Cameras using small apertures, and the human eye in bright light both act like a pinhole camera.

We spent the morning working in the studio constructing various cameras.  A pinhole camera can be made from just about anything – an oatmeal container, cigar box, old cans, paper bags, refrigerators – even books.  Here’s the birthday  girl working with Guillaume to transform an old  denim covered  pencil box into a camera (she’ll tell you how it worked on on her blog).

The book cameras  actually work really well.  Here, Ms. Felice is creating a chamber in the center of a book. The pages then get glued together, and the inside has to be painted with a matte black finish to prevent any light reflection inside the camera.

A finished book camera.

Someone made a camera from a cooler:

A small cardboard film box, which worked really well because the inside is already black:

Chis made a camera from a manky old soccer ball:

The Suitcase Camera

Suitcases make great cameras. Who knew?

Step one:  drill the crap out of it.

Step two:  paint the inside black.

Step three: Create an aperture from four razor blades.

Step four: Take a picture.

Coco, Chris and I sat outside AVAM and talked for about 13 minutes – that’s how long it took to get the exposure. Guillaume guessed that the  suitcase would be light tight once closed.  We should have taped the seam, though, as there was “light leak” which you can see in the photo below.  Lesson learned. Tape everything.

The Tea Can Camera

My favorite is this Twinnings tea can, which was my first camera.  Step one was to make it dark (not shiny).

I used  a piece of pie tin for the aperture. Soda cans work well, too.

I placed my camera in the garden wall at AVAM.

We stood  still for 5 minutes, while other art viewers wandered casually in and out of our photo. Here’s the wonderful ghostly result -  a portrait of my 11 year old daughter and me on her birthday:

This was an amazing workshop and a wonderful day. Thanks to Dawn for finding it, Felice at AVAM for being so cool to Coco and I and to Chris & Guillaume for sharing so many ideas with us.

Happy birthday, Coco! I love you.

Paper, photocopies, window screening, paint, staples

My friend Neil produced this image tonight while we were discussing art. I made this in college, for a class. It was lost during one of my many moves.  I can’t believe he had a picture!

Thank you, Neil. You rock like no one else.

I started this last winter, before my crazy class schedule began. This isn’t really finished yet.  I had bigger plans (more dead guys, for one thing)  but I want to start the next one, and I’ve decided to let this be an introduction to what I’m doing in my barn.

Below is a study I did last night, before I finished making the dead Daddy-O’s.  I decided to make Frida be black and white like the citizens of her town. I like how this picture turned out.

I have always loved paper-mâché, and I rediscovered while helping my daughter with a school project. I got the idea for this from a drawing I did in someone’s sketchbook for the sketchbook swap:

I am interested in seeing what happens when I try and make real world models of my drawings. When I was a kid I mixed flour and water (and maybe glue). Now, I’m using glue and water and the Baltimore City Paper.

More to come – there’s a lot going on in the Land of the Dead.