Process Book: Spring 2011

PROCESS BOOKHEIDI SPROUSESPRING 2011

1 - 2 - 3 - GO!

Taylor interacting with the ancient fish of the Devonian...We used my touchscreen laptop so that when you tapped the screen ripples would either startle or entice the fish swimming in the “ocean” below.

I was surprised when I learned that this year’s char-rette was “rogue.” It seems like a strange time to pick a word that has been so recently associated with a very outspoken political movement. It is almost asking for people to do projects related to Sarah Palin or the Tea Party. For my whole life I’ve given the word “rogue” a negative association, but from the very beginning of this project this has been flipped by the people around me. I was hearing people say things like, “Martin Luther King Jr. is rogue. Jesus is rogue,” none of which are things that I agree with based upon the actual definition of this word. No matter how many times and where I looked this word up it only had one definition: scalawag, thief, dishonest, scoundrel. No where could I find a positive interpretation of this idea, not even from the usually loose Visual Thesau-rus. My professors and classmates should have been us-ing a word like “maverick” or “nonconformist,” I thought. Am I missing something?

After much thought, I realized that “rogue” was more than a word. Rogue embodies a certain spirit if you will...the idea of “going rogue” stands for more than what the dictionary had lead me to believe. It can be mischie-vous and playful or serious. Really, it could be anything. I could even “go rogue” by doing something completely un-rogue. The possibilities with a theme like this are end-less.

a definition from the Visual Thesaurus, even in “free as-sociation mode” these are the only words that it shows to be related to “rogue”

“WORDLE” CLOUDI decided to look up “rogue” in various dictionaries

and in the thesaurus, as well as looking up antonyms, syn-onyms, and quotes containing the word. I then plugged all of that information into Wordle (www.wordle.net) and it organized the data into a word cloud by how many times each word appeared. This visual representation helped me sort out all the information and helped me to make some interesting connections.

A “rogue” mindmap that our 252 class came up with

FIRST IDEASThese are a couple of early ideas that my group and

I had for the Rogue Charrette. We decided to go in a dif-ferent direction because we were concerned about the very short time line. The final idea we ended up deciding on was also too ambitious as well for a one-week dead-line, which is something to keep in mind for the future. I do really like these concepts, however, and will shelf them for later.

WHAT’S MORE ROGUE THAN A FISH?

While reading a book for my “Age of Dinosaurs” class I had a revelation. We were studying how limbs evolved and how the first vertebrate stepped onto land. The first fish-creature to step foot on to dry land was pretty “rogue” if you ask me. It wanted to avoid predators and have an endless food supply. It was an amusing idea that both my group mates and I enjoyed. I had also seen an interesting project called OASIS involving a touch-screen display that could be looked into like an aquari-um. I decided to take this as my inspiration as we moved forward with the project.

We decided to do turn my touchscreen laptop into a similar device for people to interact with. We would do the animating and programming in Adobe Flash. The different parts of the fish and other objects in the scenes would be made out of cut paper and then reassembled in Flash to make animating easy and to give a natural look. All the backgrounds will be done on watercolor paper.

Photos from the OASIS project

Pederpes says, “Embrace your inner fish!”

CREATURES OF THE DEVONIAN...

The idea of a “rogue fish” seemed pretty funny, espe-cially after we got online and looked up some of the first fish to step on land. I can totally imagine some sea critter seeing all of the delicious bugs on the beach and want-ing to nab some of them. Or a tricky fish that can jump out of harms way when a predator comes near. Some of

these creatures looked rather silly and inefficient, but they were the first step into what would become us millions of years down the line.

It was really fun to reasearch this world and create some of the rather strange creatures from it. I could have made this project 5× more extensive, but for the sake of time we decided on just creating some generic fish, a “main” fish, a predator, and some basic background features.

INSIDE FLASHI was the main animator/coder in this project, while

Katie the sound portion and Taylor did the artwork. It turned out to be a lot more work than I had initially envi-sioned (as usual) but I managed to get a working proto-type of the project running in only one week with minimal ActionScript experience. I definitely learned a lot about the ActionScript language from this project that I can ap-ply to future works.

The basic flash workspace I used for this project

animating the “predator” fish

animating the third scene

There was a lot of coding involved in this project to make it interactive. I certainly know a lot more about Actionscript now!

Here you can see some of the many timeline layers that I used for this project

CUTOUT CREATURESEarly on we decided that we wanted a paper cut-

out style with watercolor backgrounds. Cutting out the individual body parts made it easy to animate them later and gave it a very polished look without having to draw everything. Taylor was in charge of creating the cut-out fish and backgrounds, while Katie did the thought bubbles.

THE HEROThe hero of this story (who we called “main fish”) is

the first fish to evolve to step onto land. This fish is actu-ally a part of one of the schools of generic fish, but it has slightly different fins and brighter colors to signify its indi-viduality. We showed that this fish is “rogue” by making it more outgoing than the rest. Instead of running away from your finger when the screen is tapped this adventur-ous fish actually follows to investigate.

BACKGROUNDSWe did watercolor washes for the backgrounds,

along with some cut-outs of rocks and a plant. The great thing about this set-up is that since all of the elements of the background are separate they can be moved around to create an endless variety of seascapes.

ASSEMBLYOnce we had the individual pieces it was easy to

assemble and animate them in Flash. With the “predator” fish we had one body piece, one head, one fin, and one side of the tail. I then duplicated the fins and the tail and put the pieces together to create the final animated fish using motion tweening.

The crab cut-outs (shown left) were not actually used in the final piece, but it shows how the assembly works with a more complicated creature.

THE SETUPWe set up the project by a water fountain on the

second floor, because it was slightly out of the way and seemed to fit with our water theme. The project was meant to be a relaxing break from the rest of the hectic charrette. Unfortunately, our nice music that we com-posed could not be heard because of some rogue proj-ect that was simply a pair of speakers blasting profane rap music. We had claimed our spot much earlier in the day and were already set up when the other people ar-rived and even when we asked if they could move to the other side at least they would not. I guess that is rogue of them...? I still think that, for a project that was cranked out in only one week it quite beautiful. A few days more refinement could have made it more successful but I enjoyed the experiment so much that I’ll probably do more flash animations in the same style. Overall, I’m re-

ally happy with how it turned out and am very thankful to my group members Taylor and Katie for helping me pull this off.

It was really fun to watch people stumble upon the project. It was even more enjoyable to watch them touch the screen only to realize that the fish followed your finger and interacted with you. There were some techni-cal difficulties that we somewhat managed to sort out by the end of the Charrette. After watching people look at the project I found out that people don’t necessarily want to spend a long time interacting with something, they’d rather move on after a few taps on the screen. For our project at least, it seemed as though since they didn’t watch the whole thing the “Rogue” part of our project where the fish comes onto land was often missed. This is something that I’ll have to keep in mind with future inter-active works. It was a great learning experience.

LETTERFORM COMBI-NATIONS

I liked this project because is was quick and easy way to experiment without getting too invested in any one itteration. Happy accidents were prevolent, especially once I got out of Illustrator and started to layer letters us-ing transparency.

INSPIRATIONThese are some images that I looked back on when I

wasn’t sure where to go next. Some of these are from the AIGA archives, others are from logo design sites, and the rest are from a class presentation.

TYPOGRAPHY REFERENCE

These are the parts of the various typography hand-outs that I thought were the most interesting/useful. I’m putting these here for future reference.

EARLY ITERATIONSThese are some of the earlier letterform combina-

tions that I was working with. In the beginning I was mostly working on snapping together the edges of letters in the Rockwell typeface.

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hdNEW PROCESS

At some point I realized that just working in Illustrator wasn’t turning up anything that I found particularly inter-esting so I decided to print out several different typefaces onto transparencies and experiment with overlaying the letters.

PERSONALITYWith these two experimentations I decided that I

wanted to imbue a kind of personality into each of these letter combinations. The top one looks like a person wearing a sleeping cap who is holding something. It seems kind of shy. The bottom combination reminds me of a Japanese “haniwa” statue. Haniwa were put next to graves in ancient Japan. These guardians always seem very charming, like they’re asking for some sort of pass-word in order for you to speak to the diseased.

Japanese “haniwa” statues

BODONI J + TThis particular experiment stood out to me because

of the natural way that the Bodoni j and t seemed to flow into one another. When combined they look like a special “A.”

I finalized this expermient by smoothing out some of the rough edges, which you can see on the next page.

ROCKWELL B + WThis one was a happy accident. The negative space

formed something that looked like two arrows or two trees. I deleted a couple of overhanging edges to get the final piece.

EXPRESSIVE TYPOGRAPHY

For whatever reason, I found this project more dif-ficult than others I have done. It was hard to know where to begin with such an open-ended assignment. I think I was too worried about what others would think for some reason. Either way, once I loosened up I was able to be a lot more creative and made better work.

INITIAL IDEASI started out by drawing letters and seeing what

shapes/objects came to mind. Initially I wanted to make some odd letter-shaped stuffed creatures, but I could never quite figure out what word to use and I’d rather do a bunch of experiments than one idea that would take a long time and might not be that successful.

some sketches of some type creatures It turns out that lowercase cursive “L” looks like a fish

I thought about making type out of cladograms (evolution diagrams) Some type creature sewing patterns

FRECKLESThis was one of my first ideas. I wanted to play

“connect-the-dots” with freckles to spell out the words “Lemon Juice.” When I was a kid people told me that if you put lemon juice on freckles they would disappear, so I thought it would be a fun idea. It ended up looking like I had carved the words out with a razor blade...which was cool, but not quite what I was going for.

OK!I have a series of abstract photos of light reflecting in

water that I’ve been wanting to use for something. I went through each photo and found patterns in the light that looked like letters. On the image to the left you can see the word “OK.” Once you see it you can’t unsee it. ;P

EXAGGERATED POETRY

E.E. is a poet that I admire for the interesting way he organizes his words. I decided to go through a few of his poems and exaggerate them.

N.E.S.W.This is another thing that I remember from when I was

a kid. “Never eat soggy worms” was the phrase we used in Elementary school to remember north, south, east, and west. This was mostly an experiment with printing on differ-ent types of paper.

</THINGS>This photo is from a series where I went around

campus and put the HTML brackets around various chalk drawings. This is probably one of my favorite experiments so far. I did have more from this series, but the SD card literally broke in half...after that incident I bought an ex-ternal hard drive to back stuff up on. ;P

LEGEND OF “I”I had a great idea for a flash game based on typog-

raphy called “The Legend of “i” about a word who had to find his true meaning. I knew that I didn’t have enough time to make a whole game, but I did make some sketches and create a run sequence for Prince i. I hope to work on this idea more in the future.

STRAW DRAWINGSIn high school we had to make watercolor trees using

straws to blow on paint. I remembered that technique (which I thought was silly at the time) and was finally able to do something useful with it. I made a ton of these, but I’ve picked some of my favorites to include in this book.

some interesting abstract experiments

I decided that I didn’t like the word “organic” for this experiment...it seemed to obvious

The branches coming off of the letters reminded me of snail or slug eye stalks,I always liked slugs...I used to have a pet slug named “Jack”

This is my favorite experiment out of the series.

I liked using the word “foreign” because the type reminded me of bacteria or some mysterious creature from the sea...Like an alien invader.

ROUTINE ANIMATION On a whim I decided to do a stop-motion animation, just because I always enjoy those. I never realized how many striped socks I had until this exercise...

SCHOOL OF ART LECTURE SERIES POST-ER PROJECT

At first I did not like the thought of doing another SOA poster like in 251, however this project provided some more information to work with that made it less ambigu-ous. At first I had a hard time fleshing out my ideas, but

once I decided to go with my instincts I ended up mak-ing a lot better of a product. I think with this assignment I finally got out of my design rut and was able to reallly enjoy making something again. This was probably my favorite project that we’ve done so far.

TEAR OFF POSTERMy first idea was to make a rip-off day calendar type

poster, which then turned into a rip-up-the-poster-untill-it’s-gone idea. The aesthetics were inspired by pixel art. I decided to go in a different direction because it seemed like after a while I was having a hard time pushing it any farther. I ended up getting out of the computer and go-ing for something more fun.

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john jenningsoctober 6, 2011www.art.illinois.edu/people/jayjay

A+A room 1097:00 pm

www.art.utk.eduThe University of Tennessee

sponsored by VADSCO and the School of Art

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VERSION 1In this version everything is arranged in

strips...when you think about this logistically it doesn’t really make sense because after the earlier months are torn off the latter months are just hanging there and could get ripped off too easily because of no support by the other columns.

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VERSION 2This one is a lot more interesting be-

cause as the months go by it gets torn upwards, kind of a nice visual. In the end though I felt like I couldn’t keep going with this one, so I decided try a completely dif-ferent style.

MY STYLEI finally realized that I should just go with my personal

style for once. I had been denying myself the whole semester for some reason, maybe I just wasn’t confident that I would be taken seriously. But I found that not using suppressing my cute/cartoony/crafty style wasn’t very productive, and it’s a lot more fun to do the things that you like. I think my goal from now on is to make my style be taken seriously. People respond to cute and bright things, may as well take advantage of it!

RABBITSI’ve always liked rabbits as an animal. They are sleek,

graceful, fuzzy, and cute all at the same time. They also hold a lot of meaning. They can stand for fertility, spring, rebirth, and agility. 2011 is also the year of the rabbit, so it matched up pretty well. Rabbits make people happy. I wanted to entice people to come to the lectures, and going up and petting a fuzzy rabbit seemed like a good way to do it.

RABBIT TYPEI did several versions of the type for the rabbit in pen-

cil and then scanned it into Illustrator and vectorized it. This final one was my favorite.

PRINTING ON FABRICI learned in class how to print onto fabric with an ink-

jet printer. This is VERY useful! I used it for both the rabbit and the lecture information.

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visiting artists/designers:john jennings • october 6, 2011 www.art.illinois.edu/people/jayjay

mckenzie wark • november 3, 2011www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty.aspx?id=1718

willie cole • september 15, 2011www.williecole.com

sanford wurmfeld • august 25, 2011www.sanfordwurmfeld.com

hideki kimura • january 16-20, 2012russel orlando • march 8, 2012www.russorlando.com

A+A room 1097:00 pm



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MOCK-UPSI made a scaled down version of the poster in Illustra-

tor so that I could change the layout without actually making the thing. The faux fur is pretty difficult to work with, so I didn’t want to waste time by making multiple versions that aren’t all successful. Not to mention that it helps me to see step-by-step changes.






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This is the “final” version






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COLORI think the poster is complete and successful already,

but I wanted to experiment with color a bit.

Imagine the colored lines being thin strips of ribbon sewn/glued onto the fur.






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LANDSCAPEI also tried experimenting with scale and

orientation of the poster. I think that this would probably work, but I personally prefer the taller version.






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SCHEMEI actually have all of the materials to create this one,

but since it is exactly the same except for the color I think that the idea is pretty clear. I also think that faux fur is a more pleasing texture than studded fleece fabric.

EXPERIMENTS IN TAPE-LAND

I got this idea from an printing accident when I was feeding the paper through to print the rabbit for the faux fur paper. I noticed that the ink actually stayed on the tape I was using to keep the edges of the fabric from fraying in the printer. The idea behind these is that people have to pull off the tape to see the information under-

neath. I didn’t go as far as I could have with this idea in this particular project, but I will definitely save this method for later since the texture is really nice. The images I used are naturalists’s drawings that are in the public domain. I found a great archive of these which I will certainly be using in future work.

thanks for reading~!

Documents

Process Book: Spring 2011