Joe Rule

Welp, another semester down--two more to go.

We had a little over a month to complete this final project from concept to critique. I was behind on the deadlines right from the start. We were supposed to have storyboards and a pitch at the end of March, but I didn't even have a rough story by then. All I knew is that I wanted to play around with the idea of a subordinate character being rebellious and causing chaos and headache for a dominant character. The primary inspiration/influence for this was Pixar's short Presto. The story went through many iterations. One of my favorites was a witch and her minion. But, eventually I decided to use a toaster as the subordinate character and a young woman as the dominant character. The most fun part of the brainstorming process was to think of ways that a living toaster could cause chaos for a human. The best ones I came up with were for the toaster to plug itself back in when someone has a metal utensil inside, to open the the crumb tray and spit crumbs, to refuse to accept the slices of bread, to burn the toast, to refuse to release the toast and to spit out the slices of toast. My original vision for the project was to have full-body very physically active characters, much like in Presto. As I continued to cut the project down to month-size, I begrudgingly had to let those ideas go and the story turned towards being concentrated on facial expressions. Below are the initial character sketches.

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While the first 5 projects of the semester were only 1 week long, we had 2-3 weeks to complete this one. Unlike other professors, Larson did not expect us to work over spring break. I was grateful for this, but ended up spending my break working on the project anyway because of all the time I was spending on revising other work for Individual Art Review.**

The piece could be interactive or motion based--in other words, a game or an animation. The project had to include text in some form and could be a public service announcement, an interpretation of a poem or speech or an explanation of a personal belief. I knew right away I wanted to do something similar to the film, Fight Club. The film embodies the dark, gritty, grudge visual and emotional aesthetic of the 1990s. I also liked the idea of misleading an audience throughout the piece, then changing the entire meaning with a simple twist at the end. It took some searching to find a poem that explored mental illness from the perspective of the patient. I was shocked at how most of the poems were so 'on the nose' with the subject. The visual metaphors I found in the poem Schizophrenia by Jim Stevens fit my vision for the piece perfectly.

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The next project of the semester involved combining the different techniques we used in the first four projects--generative imagery, vector photo reduction and photo illustration. The focus was to create a meaningful, metaphorical self portrait.

Something that was heavy on my mind at the time was how art school has served to round out my mind. Through grade school and especially high school I focused heavily on left-brain education. The left brain is focused on logic, facts, words and language, math, science and is rooted in reality. If you're anything like I was you're probably wondering, "What else is there?" The school system fails to fully educate people and is based on the false assumption that math and science are the most important subjects. Instead of finding the talents of young people it is fixated on building them into ideal candidates for the workplace. Schools need to focus on educating well-rounded students who know how to think and how to use their brains. This left-brain dominated education only serves to strength half of the brain. Half. The right brain is focused on feeling, creativity, imagination, images, beliefs and is rooted in fantasy. I believe a lot of the juvenile delinquents and young people that struggle with attention deficits are primarily right-brained people. They are told the way their brain functions is wrong. Not only does the world lose a creative innovator and risk taker, but that young person starts their adult life with the assumption that they're dumber than most other people in some way. Wow, that was quite the tangential rant. Back on topic...

*For more on creativity in the school system see this TED talk by Ken Robinson.

Art school and college has served to build up and strengthen my right brain. I spend anywhere from 4 to 18 hours per day creating. I'm learning the nuances of how my mind comes up with ideas. More and more every day I'm learning to consciously recognize the 'quiet voice' in my mind that perceives the world differently and makes strange, new and exciting connections. And, lo and behold, I've discovered that these processes are what fulfill me. I've always been good at math and science, but I've never enjoyed them as much as the creative process. The future is full of uncertainties for me, but I have no doubt that the rest of my life will be spent creating and exploring new ideas.

So, in case it's not already obvious, the idea behind this piece was to juxtapose the right and left brains and explore what the thought processes of the two hemispheres would look like. It also served to represent how I attempt to blend left-brained technique and right-brained creativity in my work.

The base photo was taken by a fellow Electronic Imaging student in front of a white screen in the lighting studio. I used Structure Synth and Cinema 4D to generate and render the abstract shapes. The tendrils wrapping around the arms and the left side of the face are drawn with vectors in Adobe Illustrator. You'll also notice that the right side of the face is digitally painted. The intention with the techniques used for the face was, again, to compare the development of my right and left brain. That part of the image turned out rather weak. If I were to revise it I would try to expand that technique through the rest of the body to make a more interesting and dynamic image.

The next project of the semester involved illustrating using 3D, photography and drawing techniques with emphasis on photo realism. I had a difficult time coming up with an original idea for this piece--or at least one that could be done within a week and in the UP winter weather. My original vision was to create a fantastical environment with giant mushrooms or very small people. Needless to say, mushrooms are pretty scarce in February up here. Looking back, I wish I had stuck with that original idea and used Cinema 4D to fill that gap.

So, I chose the next most difficult thing--to illustrate a lush forest scene when most February days in Marquette look like this. The project was heavily inspired by the work of Phil McDarby. I mentally referenced the ideas behind Fangorn forest in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the planet of Kashyyyk in the Star Wars universe. Fangorn is described as being stifling and old beyond measure--no animals would want to live there. Kashyyyk is the home planet of the Wookies and is covered with trees thousands of feet tall. The Wookies live safely in the tree-tops, but the forest floor is a dark and dangerous place inhabited by nasty creatures. I liked the idea of having a lone character/creature surviving in this strange, dark, dank and, perhaps, unsafe environment. The character of Jolee Bindo in the video game The Knights of the Old Republic came to mind when pondering this character.

Fortunately, we had a bit of a thaw and it was cloudy that weekend--ideal photography weather. I headed to Presque Isle to find some good source material. I found several trees with very interesting root formations and decided to work off of that. The painting process involved removing a lot of snow, arranging pieces of trees and roots in interesting ways and spreading the small amount of moss texture I had throughout the image. The most difficult portion of the image was the background. Getting enough layers of trees, the perfect amount of fog and the proper brightness was essential to give the image depth. I had to construct the ground from textures of moss, lichen and tree bark because I didn't have any photos of bare ground.

The next project of the semester involved using vectors to illustrate in a detailed and/or simple, stylized and meaningful way. I chose to explore the idea of physical gesture and movement becoming line as seen in the Zen practice of caligraphy and in Hokusai's manga drawings. Japanese artists and Zen masters spend their entire lives finding the perfect lines to express the beauty of nature at the most simple level. In the words of Hokusai:

"At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. Consequently when I am eighty I'll have made more progress. At ninety I'll have penetrated the mystery of things. At a hundred I shall have reached something marvellous, but when I am a hundred and ten everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive."

It feels treasonous and trite to use a computer and digital photographs to express the same ideas as artists in the far east do with meditation, study, reed pen and ink. The more I work in digital medium the more I appreciate putting time into something manifested physically. When I put hours of thought and energy into a digital work, it will never be anything more than strings of ones and zeros on a hard drive. The work can be duplicated infinitely. A painting or sculpture can never be duplicated. When I manipulate digital images or video I am connected to the image through a mouse, keyboard or tablet and once again I'm only changing ones and zeros. When drawing, painting or sculpting, I am directly manipulating and putting my energy into the very molecules of pigment, graphite or earth.

So, I chose to represent these ideas with a gradient of saturation and detail, going from fully detailed and defined imagery to simplified black lines. I took photos of myself in various positions and from different angles. This served as a sketching processes to find the exact position I wanted for the project. I also draped a blanket over my shoulders to serve as reference for the kimono.