Art Resources

Here are some links to various Art-related resources that I've found interesting or useful. I will update this list from time to time as I discover new and exciting resources for committing art. Feel free to suggest any links you think would be of interest or utility in the comments below.

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Cool Tools

• Adobe  I like my copy of Photoshop. I'm still getting the hang of InDesign. I'm not in any hurry to upgrade.
• Al.chemy  Cool online tool for making shapes and stuff.
• Art Pad  Paint online.
• Art Rage  We have an older version of this software somewhere around here. Our daughter loved it.
• Artweaver  An affordably-excellent image manipulation and digital painting program.
• Bomomo  Try it!
• Canva  A super easy-to-use online design tool.
• Context-Free Art  Interesting experimental online art tool.
• Creately  Diagram-making.
• Drawisland  Online drawing tool.
• Easel.ly  Create online infographics.
• Fatpaint  Online design, logo-maker and more.
• Flamepainter  Online painting app.
• Flockdraw  Draw online with others.
• Imageforge  Freeware image manipulation.
• Infogr.am  Free online info-graphics maker.
• Inkscape  Free vector graphics program.
• Kleki.com  Online painting-in-your-browser tool.
• Myoats  Online pattern maker and more.
• Queeky  Online Painting app.
• Piktochart  Make your own info-graphics.
• Psykopaint  Online painting.
• Scribbler  Nice little scribble-pad.
• Silk  Online graphics with ambient/Newage music.
• Sketch-n-Paint  Another online painting app.
• Sketchpad  Online doodling.
• Sketchswap  Fun scribble-trading game.
• Sumo  Online digital painting.
• Vectormagic  Convert bitmaps to vectors.
• Viscosity  Nice toy.
• Visual.ly  Image marketplace.
• Wordle  Make your own word-clouds.

Handy Art References

• Artcyclopedia  Online encyclopedia of all things art.
• Artlex  Online Art Dictionary.
• Art Directory  Lots and lots of artist biographies.
• Art List Pro  A Daily Dose of Contemporary Art.
• Art Story  Everything you wanted to know about Movements, theory and more.
• Bibliodyssey  An incredible resource-packed blog.
• Book Arts  All sorts of book-related things, quite interesting.
• Design You Trust  Oh those wacky designers...
• Karen's Whimsy  Online repository of many, many public domain clip-art images. We reviewed them.
• Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
• Lilek's  All sorts of cool stuff. A massive collection of things to gawk at and mock.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art  now this list has a little class.
• MOMA  Yeah. If you have to...
• Neosurrealism  Not sure what it is exactly, but some of the work is pretty interesting...
• Surrealist.com  A pretty extensive collection of all things surreal.
• Surrealism UK  A lively, ongoing group engaged in surreal pursuits.
• Surrealism.org  More surreal stuff.
• Wikiquote for Andre Breton...because he's cool.
• Woodblock  A great, informative site walking you through the process of woodblock printing.

Fonts

• Fonts.com  Google fonts.
• Fount  Handy tool for discovering what that font is that you've just spotted on a site.
• My Fonts  Buy a few fonts.
• What the Font  Another way to find out what font is that?

Something to See

• Dark Classics Art Gallery Blog.
• Library of Congress digital archives.
• Go Surreal  Interesting blog; surrealism as a path to self-discovery.
• One Surrealist A Day  Nifty surreal blog.
• Pictorial Arts  Nifty blog of images.
• RoqlaRue  Cool Gallery.
• Upland Trout  Cool blog.

Artistic Inspirations

• Francisco Goya
• Odilon Redon
• Piranesi

Publications

• Artsjournal

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Last Updated: February 18, 2014

That Is Not Dead Which Can Be Made Into a T-shirt...

So...I was digging through some of the old files of dead projects and such and re-discovered the mini-comic 'Little Wilbur in Lovecraft Land,' from 1988. The original cover-panel looked like this:

On a lark I revised the image slightly, swapped-out the 50cents with a good 'ol IA! and made it green. What do you think?

I kind of like it so I uploaded it to Zazzle and made it into a T-shirt, like this:

Cthulhu T-shirt2 by hereticwerks
More Cthulhu T-Shirts

The 'Little Wilbur' Mini-Comic never did get completed, though several others did, including 'The Sorcerer,' and 'The Book,' and 'Tamarind (Pt.1)'. Maybe I'll use the newly revised image on this blog as a link to all things HPL/Mythosian that I'm working on or posting about. Yeah. A Cthulhudex, of sorts would be a good idea. I wonder what else is lurking around in those old folders and files?

Artweaver: New Version in Beta-Test.

Artweaver is an amazing program for digital painting and more. You can still get the free version or upgrade to the ArtweaverPlus version really cheaply.  This is a very good digital art software package that just keeps on getting better. If you are on a tight budget, or want an alternative to the Big Name software, take a look at this software, give a try and see for yourself. We still use it a lot, and it plays nicely with Photoshop.

Planet Pulp

The Planet Pulp blog is hosting a fictional travel poster show, featuring works much like the above poster for Arrakis (Dune) that was done by artist Clay Sisk (http://www.siskart.com/ ). We highly recommend that you check it out. the link is: http://www.planet-pulp.com/

Enjoy!

Public Domain Clip-Art: Karen's Whimsy

Medieval Castle Clip-Art from Karen's Whimsy

A lot of bloggers make use of Public Domain Clip-Art, and why not? There are a lot of amazingly good things out there, and many of them are ours to use freely and clearly. So in the next few weeks, we'll be taking a look at some of the handiest, most interesting and useful sites that offer Public Domain Clip-Art for your blog, game or as references and fill-in bits for your own artwork or creative endeavors.

Our first stop is Karen's Whimsy.
(http://karenswhimsy.com/)

Karen's Whimsy offers hundreds of very nice clip-art images that span a wide range of subjects from Animals to Pirate Ships, to Medieval Castles, to a section on the very nice Altered Books produced by Karen herself. There are loads and loads of decent images available at this site and Karen has recently launched a new sub-site devoted to U. S. History Images that might also prove very useful to some of you who are working on projects that aren't quite so medieval...

Art Links: Modern/Contemporary Art

Last updated: April 1, 2011

Artforum
A daily aggregation of artistic information that has proven to be of interest on more occasions than not, which is really saying something for this kind of thing...

Bookforum
If you like to read, then you will potentially find much of interest here.

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Designmilk
A nifty-keen source of many, many interesting art-and-design-related thingys. Ooooh shiny--

e-flux
From the e-flux FAQ:

Established in January 1999 in New York, e-flux is an international network which reaches more than 50,000 visual art professionals on a daily basis through its website, e-mail list and special projects. Its news digest – e-flux announcements – distributes information on some of the world's most important contemporary art exhibitions, publications and symposia.

The daily digest is put together in cooperation with nearly a thousand leading international museums, art centers, foundations, galleries, biennials and art journals. Our focused and selective approach to the information we choose to distribute has been rewarded by an exceptionally high degree of attention and responsiveness from our readers.

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Gorgonmilk
One of our favorite artists out there in the RPG-pond.

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Jenny Burrows
You know, the artist from the Historically Hardcore Adventure? Her blog is worth a visit. Go. Now.
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Manifesta Journal
From the Info Page:

Founded in 2003, Manifesta Journal is an international journal focusing on the practices and theories of contemporary curatorship. Manifesta Journal explores and analyzes current developments in curatorial work, in correspondence with the evolution of the Manifesta Biennial over the course of the past decade. The main aim of the journal is to give a stronger voice to an up-and-coming group of (non-) institutional curators, intellectuals, theorists and critics, and to function as a platform for the articulation and discussion of their positions within a pan-European and transcontinental context.


Justified by what is now the “stable” status of the curator, by the diversity within the broader community of professional curators and by the network of curatorial schools, programs and courses in Europe and beyond, Manifesta Journal intends to fulfill an otherwise vacant duty – the establishment of curatorial self-reflection and investigation.

Matt Kappler
The Copywriter behind the Historically Hardcore Adventure. Yes. We DO think that writing is an artform. If you don't consider writing a creative endeavor then go and write out a description of your most recent fart in 25 words or less and get 10 people to give a damn. Good luck.


Museion
This is a museum I want to visit someday...it is in Balzano, Italy. The Collections sound intriguing...

Parkett
From their About Page:

INTRODUCING PARKETT: A SMALL MUSEUM AND A LARGE LIBRARY OF CONTEMPORARY ART


Parkett is published in direct collaboration with important international artists, whose oeuvre is explored in several essays by leading writers and critics. Each artist also creates a special signed and numbered work exclusive to Parkett.

Up to now Parkett has published more than 80 volumes with some 180 monographs and over 1500 in-depth texts making it one of the most comprehensive libraries on contemporary art worldwide. At the same time the collection of all editions, prints, photographs, objects, and other works made by the artists especially for Parkett forms a unique document and small museum of the art of the past quarter of a century.

The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris has called Parkett one of the best art publications and invited the publication to a special exhibition in Paris. Subsequently, exhibitions of Parkett's artists' editions have been held in Cologne (Ludwig Museum), Frankfurt (Portikus), Copenhagen (Louisiana Museum), Tokyo (Hillside Forum), Geneva (Centre d'Art Contemporain), London (Whitechapel Art Gallery), Zurich (Kunsthaus) among other places. For more details about Parkett’s Museum exhibitions please go to the exhibitions page (click menu on top right of the page).

Wooloo
"Where artists find their open calls." A portfolio site that can line you up with opportunities, or so it claims. They have over 13,000 professionals from over 140 countries looking for those same opportunities, so the competition might be a bit tough. Good luck!

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Artistic Inspirations: Francisco Goya

nom, nom, nom...


Saturn Devouring His Son--from The Black Paintings,
Francisco de Goya [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Francisco Goya is an amazing artist, his work remains incredibly moving, poignant and impactful in ways that most other artists only dream of accomplishing. Goya's work transformed from the socially acceptable art-whoredom of doing portraits for wealthy patrons, to breaking the unspoken rules and doing etchings and drawings and even full paintings of peasants, common folk, and un-pretty people. He also had a raging social conscience and was personally appalled by the insanity and excesses of the French who invaded Spain under Napolean. The brutality, venality, and ferocious eruption of meaningless violence and pointless bloodshed outraged him and he produced a series of etchings as an utter and pointed condemnation of such madness. This series, the Disasters of War, took Goya's life-long artistic knife-fight with the forces of superstition, hypocrisy, ignorance and mindless violence to a whole new level and is every bit as important and impactful as Picasso's Guernica, perhaps moreso, as Goya had to contend with idiot kings, vengeful aristocrats and the Inquisition, while Picasso had fascists and Nazis to worry about. Hmmm. Maybe there's something about facing off against tyranny and oppression that empowers artists? An interesting notion to investigate further in light of the intimate connection between art and sorcery in Riskail.

The Disasters of War is all well and good, but you're probably more familiar with Goya's so-called Black Paintings. The image of Saturn up above, devouring his son like a bit of beef jerky, is one of these weird, creepy and quite frankly macabre paintings. First we'll give you three decent links so that you can go take a look at the Black Paintings. A picture being worth a thousand words, this is roughly 14,000 words worth of description that is best handled by actually seeing the paintings for yourself.

They are rather intriguing, at least to art-nerds like us. Truly if there was only one classic painting that we could use to sum-up Zalchis in a nutshell, it would be this one.

Some (3) Links For The Black Paintings

Wikipedia has some amazingly nice versions of the paintings that you can use on your own site or blog, and they manage to go into some decent detail about the Black Paintings without getting all boring and art-schooly on you, so you might even enjoy reading the entry.


Artchive will give you an online Video Tour of the Black Paintings as they were originally arranged within Goya's house. Yes, he had Saturn Devouring His Sun in the dining room. That detail triggered an assoication with Lovecraft's excellent short story Pickman's Model for some reason...


The NYTimes site has an article that claims to reveal the secret of the Black Paintings.

Those are a good start. If you do a search on Goya or The Black Paintings, you'll be digging through pixels and links for hours. So pack a lunch.

The Black Paintings remain one of the most fascinating and mysterious series of paintings to come out of the Nineteenth Century. Goya is regarded by many as being the first modern artist. His work at the age of 72, at the nadir of his lengthy and remarkable career, came to a close with him daubing oil paints on the walls of his two-story house. He painted images dredged up from the deepest pits of his personal despair and gave form to his fears and nightmares in an act of artistic evocation that had to have been incredibly cathartic just to attempt, let alone achieve as masterfully as he did. The Black Paintings are powerful images of terrible things, horrible things, truly dark and troublesome things that Goya reached deep inside himself to capture and imprison on the walls of his house through sheer mastery of his art alone.

What sort of images would an aging and retiring sorcerer paint on the walls of their apartments down along the seedier alleys and behind the less fashionable galleries and intentionally-decrepit salons off of the Misericorde Canal in Riskail? What kind of paintings would a wizard leave on the walls of their soon-to-be tomb as they lie broken, and alone in the deeper chambers of some nameless place well outside the purview of most sane explorers? What type of things would a lich spend their endless days and non-nights depicting within the dark and dismal depths of a long-forgotten series of catacombs deep beneath the blasted surface of what once was an entire world but is now only a misshapen mass of vitrified stone careening erratically through the Magonic Layer of Zalchis?

Cue The Rolling Stones and Paint It Black...

Not all the Black Paintings are all that dark and dreary. Consider this one, for instance:
Francisco de Goya [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

You did see this one in the Video Tour, right?

There is much more to Goya's body of work than just the 14 so-called Black Paintings.

He also did etchings. Lots of etchings.

One set in particular, aside from his magnificent Grotesques, is the Caprichos.
And look; there is an Ass-Clown in the Caprichos! (more than one, actually...)
From Goya's Caprichos series.

The Caprichos were an experiment by Goya in which he scathingly depicted the universal foibles and follies of society. Goya created a visual commentary that held up the hypocrisy and short-comings of society and all its institutions for ridicule and contempt. The Caprichos were in some respects very similar to highly acerbic political cartoons, after a manner, but far more detailed and ego-skewering than most cartoons could ever hope to be. The etchings were caustic, inflammatory, and controversial. Goya lambasted superstition, mocked the established powers and decried the decline of rationality as it degenerated into a stew of ignorance and aimless viciousness. The etchings that comprise the Caprichos series still pack quite a charge even today. The series of etchings was hastily pulled off the market for fear of reprisal from the Inquisition.

Perhaps we'll develop a version of the Caprichos as some sort of revolutionary deck of cards that mocks conventions whilst delivering a memetic payload of artistically inspired sorcerous mayhem for Riskail...

The most famous of all the Caprichos is undoubtedly Plate 43 of 80 which is known as "The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters."

You can see some of Goya's preliminary sketches for this etching at Wikipedia

Hey Piranesi!

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) No, not the wrestler Batista, the Italian artist, engraver and creator of one of the most memorable Megadungeons of all time The Prisons (Carceri d'invenzione).  This amazing work of fantastical underworld designs was issued in 1745 and reissued, with alterations, in 1761. It remains an impressive and highly influential bit of work that has impacted any number of RPG designers, including Professor M. A. R. Barker who was inspired by Piranesi's fantastical etchings in his own design work on the infamous Underworlds of Tekumel.  You can see a complete set of Piranesi's Carceri at the CGFA site.  Another great place to locate Piranesi's images is the New York Public Library.

A Few Good Piranesi Links

• The obligatory Wikipedia page on Piranesi
• Piranesi Bio at Artchive
• Everything Piranesi on the Web
• Piranesi's Art online (Excellent site)
• Artcyclopedia on Piranesi
• Piranesi as a Designer
• You can find some Piranesi-Inspired art-installations at the Rhizome site
•  Aldous Huxley on Piranesi's Prisons  (You can also have a Free copy of Aldous Huxley's Essays)
• Another version of Huxley's Essay on Piranesi's Prisons at the very interesting Savoy site
• Some nice examples of Piranesi Etchings & Engravings
• Piranesi at Archi Tech Gallery
• Piranesi at Factum Arte -- including a nice video/presentation that coincides with an exhibition of numerous sculptural/architectural art-pieces designed by Piranesi (the Griffins are especially cool...)
• Piranesi Posters  -- This site also contains a lot more Piranesi links
• Article on Piranesi's Elevated Designs from the NY Times
• Piranesi at the J. Paul Getty Museum
• 45 Works of Piranesi at the Los Angeles County Art Museum
• Some really nice examples of Piranesi's work
• Piranesi at the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History 
• Detail of Piranesi's Round Tower at Heilbrunn

Piranesi as a Negative Visionary
(With a Quick Detour in Respect to Theodore Gericault & Aldous Huxley)

Piranesi has been referred to as a 'Negative Visionary.' This term might have been first coined by Aldous Huxley who explained his conception of a Negative Visionary in one of the appendices to Heaven and Hell (1956) in a section concerning Théodore Géricault, the Romantic painter who created the famous The Raft of the Medusa which was painted in 1819 and was later used on the cover of the Pogues' Rum, Sodomy & The Lash. Good times.

Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa

Huxley had this to say about Gericault:

"Géricault was a negative visionary; for though his art was almost obsessively true to nature, it was true to a nature that had been magically transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of it, for the worse. 'I start to paint a woman,' he once said, 'but it always ends up as a lion.' More often, indeed, it ended up as something a good deal less amiable than a lion—as a corpse, for example, or a demon. His masterpiece, the prodigious Raft of the Medusa, was painted not from life but from dissolution and decay—from bits of cadavers supplied by medical students, from the emaciated torso and jaundiced face of a friend who was suffering from a disease of the liver. Even the waves on which the raft is floating, even the over-arching sky are corpse colored. It is as though the entire universe had become a dissecting room."

And:

"From the accounts which his friends have left of him it is evident that Géricault habitually saw the world about him as a succession of apocalypses. The prancing horse of his early Officer de Chasseurs was seen one morning on the road to Saint-Cloud, in a dusty glare of summer sunshine, rearing and plunging between the shafts of an omnibus. The personages in the Raft of the Medusa were painted in finished detail, one by one, on the virgin canvas. There was no outline drawing of the whole composition, no gradual building up of an over-all harmony of tones and hues. Each particular revelation—of a body in decay, of a sick man in the ghastly extremity of hepatitis—was fully rendered as it was seen and artistically realized. By a miracle of genius, every successive apocalypse was made to fit, prophetically, into a harmonious composition which existed, when the first of the appalling visions was transferred to canvas, only in the artist's imagination."

Take a look at Gericault's painting above or via one of the handy links.  The original painting is 193.3 inches × 282.3 inches.  That's over 16 feet tall by over 23 feet wide.  The guy painted this thing without drawing any sort of outline first. He just did it.  Wow.

So, according to Huxley's interpretation, a Negative Visionary would be someone whose '...art was almost obsessively true to nature ... true to a nature that had been magically transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of, for the worse.'

Negative Visionary is definitely going into the sorcerous lexicon & repertoire of Riskail. Sorcerer-artists who paint portraits of people who are then transfigured by the artwork, becoming bestial parodies, bizarre abnormalities and/or freakish alternative versions of themselves as depicted and magically deranged by the artist's sorcerous re-interpretation of them.  This is so very Riskail.  Rallu will have to run into one of these sorts of artists early-on in his career as a critic. Definitely.

To get back to Piranesi, here's a quote from the Savoy link mentioned above:

“The most disquietingly obvious fact about all these dungeons is the perfect pointlessness which reigns throughout. Their architecture is colossal and magnificent. One is made to feel that the genius of great artists and the labor of innumerable slaves have gone into the creation of these monuments, every detail of which is completely without a purpose. Yes, without a purpose: for the staircases lead nowhere, the vaults support nothing but their own weight and enclose vast spaces that are never truly rooms, but only ante-rooms, lumber-rooms, vestibules, outhouses. And this magnificence of Cyclopean stone is everywhere made squalid by wooden ladders, by flimsy gangways and cat-walks. And the squalor is for squalor's sake, since all these rickety roads through space are manifestly without destination. Below them, on the floor, stand great machines incapable of doing anything in particular, and from the arches overhead hang ropes that carry nothing except a sickening suggestion of torture. Some of the Prisons are lighted only by narrow windows. Others are half open to the sky, with hints of yet other vaults and walls in the distance. But even where the enclosure is more or less complete, Piranesi always contrives to give the impression that this colossal pointlessness goes on indefinitely, and is co-extensive with the universe. Engaged in no recognizable activity, paying no attention to one another, a few small, faceless figures haunt the shadows. Their insignificant presence merely emphasizes the fact that there is nobody at home.”

Cool. Talk about a "...Huge Ruined Pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses...".  Piranesi designed the ultimate Megadungeon hundreds of years before D&D was even a glimmer in the eye of some guy in Wisconsin.  Huxley's paragraph above could be the blurb on the back of a Megadungeon box-set and it'd sell like hot-cakes.  Just take a look at some more samples of Piranesi's mind-blowing art:

and...

and...

Incredible stuff.  Amazing stuff.  And Piranesi drew all of these by hand. By hand. The sheer amount of detail that he managed to squeeze into each of these images is simply astounding, and humbling. Mapping Piranesi Carceri/Prisons would be an incredible project.  There probably aren't enough Geomorphs in the world to do it justice.  Yet.

Picasso Trove

A trove of hoarded Picasso artworks has recently been revealed in France.  The works are apparently all legitimate original pieces done by Picasso, but there is some skepticism as to how the current owners came to possess these 271 never-seen-before and completely-uncataloged items of incredible historical and artistic value.  You can find out more here, here, here, here and here.  (There's a slideshow here.) This is so very much the kind of thing that I want to have happen in Riskail...

Low Brow Tarot

The Low Brow Tarot Project which has been assembled and organized by Aunia Kahn has been featured at the Hi Fructose site and will be on exhibit from Oct.1 to Oct.31 in Los Angeles, CA.  The Press Release is available here.  It looks amazing.  A full preview of the art is available here.  The Tarot Deck itself is slated to be available sometime in 2011 and t is definitley a collectible Tarot Deck, so it'll probably sell-out real fast.  What a cool project. 

The Press Release is as follows:

PRESS RELEASE
The Lowbrow Tarot Presented by La Luz de Jesus and Guest Curator Aunia Kahn
Opening Reception: October 1, 2010 (8-11 p.m.)

Culver City, CA October 16, 2009 – The Lowbrow Tarot Project will showcase 23 artists who will use their creative and unique styles to take on the tarot 22 Major Arcana and original card back totaling 23 new works of art in the rugged glow of the lowbrow art movement to be displayed in an exhibition at La Luz de Jesus on October 1, 2010.

The group exhibition will feature 23 new and original works by renowned and accomplished artists Carrie Ann Baade, Christopher Ulrich, Edith Lebeau, Cate Rangel, Kris Kuksi, Chris Mars, Christopher Umana, Chris Conn, Brian M. Viveros, Claudia Drake, Heather Watts, Molly Crabapple, David Stoupakis, Laurie Lipton, Patrick “Star 27” Deignan, Chet Zar, Jessica Joslin, Danni Shinya Luo, Jennybird Alcantara, Angie Mason, Scott G. Brooks, Aunia Kahn and Daniel Martin Diaz.

Curator and artist Aunia Kahn developed the project after the completion of her own 78 card Silver Era Tarot deck and believed most artists would enjoy the exploration of divination without the commitment to a larger, overwhelming project. In addition, a hardcover tabletop book and full color tarot card deck of the work will be produced.

La Luz de Jesus is located at 4633 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90232, and will host the show starting October 1, 2010 with a free opening reception with the artists and public from 8pm – 11pm and will run until November 1, 2010; all works for sale will be transacted through the gallery.

Press and Preview Contact, Gallery Director: Matt Kennedy (323)297-0600

Pencil and Paper

There's something viscerally satisfying about working with pencils on paper.  For all the wonderful digital toys and tools, the software and long hours lost to Photoshop, it's nice to get back to something as rudimentary and basic as pencil and paper creation.  Sketching, just sketching things out by hand on a handy pad and visually working out the intricacies of half-remembered dreams, snippets of visions still flitting about within one's skull, right when the coffee just about kicks in...that's a magical process.

I've missed it.

Far more than I had realized.

So, from now on, I'm scheduling some time to focus on just sketching things out, by hand, in the time honored, old fashioned, old school way.  Just like when I was a kid.  All over again.  Like when I did the piece over on the Left based on someone else's careless scribble with a simple No.2 pencil on a sheet of Bristol Board that had gotten discolored along one side  and was going to get tossed-out.

Maybe this will help me get the maps for Riskail worked-out once and for all.  That'd be nice.  Who knew that something so simple and silly could/would/did rekindle a sense of wonder all over again.  This is going to be fun!

The Sketchbook Project

Netherwerks has just signed-up to participate in The Sketchbook Project. It's Like a Concert Tour only with Sketchbooks.  How Cool Is That!



We have chosen 'Dirigibles and Submersibles' for our Theme.

From The Sketchbook Project website:

Thousands of sketchbooks will be exhibited at galleries and museums as they make their way on tour across the country.

After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be barcoded and available for the public to view.

Anyone - from anywhere in the world - can be a part of the project.

Once the sketchbook arrives, we'll be setting aside time just for this project and we'll post a few of the sketches up to the blogs as well. We're very excited about this project. It should be a lot of fun!

Creativity Crisis

Lord of the Green Dragons has a post called "Lessons to be Learned."  It is essentially a link to an article at Newsweek titled The Creativity Crisis which you can find here.

Quote:
"In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods."

Paracosm.  Cool name.  I was always curious why more of my so-called peers and school-mates didn't have their own worlds.  For a while I thought it was just another after-effect of my having been through so many bouts of hellish pneumonia, intense fevers, drowning in my own lungs, even the N.D.E.s which we didn't call that back then.  But deep down, I've always held out hope that other folks likewise had their own invented worlds...I was so happy and relieved when I discovered Tolkein and when Tim introduced me to OD&D in Junior High.  That made a real difference to me.

Quote:
"From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates."

No Shit.  One sympathetic and supportive teacher can really make a big difference.  But even with three supportive teachers on your side, all it takes is one jerk to derail a young person who is vulnerable, incredibly vulnerable during their formative years.  It can be hard enough to fight your way up from a hateful, evil family situation that isn't any of your fault without some sanctimonious self-righteous jerkwad to screw thigns up.

Quote:
"They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world."

There is no contentment for artists.  That is an antithetical value that is flasely projected upon and indoctrinated into young people as though somehow 'Everyone' needs to be content.  Bullshit.  Only sheep need to be uniformly content.  Not artists.  We don't need contentment because we have art, passion and drive--those messy, organic things that scare the conformists, frighten the would-be arbiters of taste and confound the rules-makers trying to tell everyone else what they can't do.  (Good rules are open-ended guidelines that enable and empower, not extensive and arbitrary restrictions on what you can't do.)
 
Read this article.  It might help you understand how screwed-over some of your friends have been up to now and maybe we can do something about not screwing-up the generations coming up now.  That'd be cool.  Kids encouraged to get fully engaged with their imaginations and to run like hell with whatever the Muse hands them.  Can you imagine it?  How many new Tekumels might we finally see then?  What totally new and so-far unnamed and unthought of stuff might become available with just a few kind words, some encouragement and understanding?  If there's a crisis in terms of creativity, it's that there simply isn't enough of it and our current culture is stifling and hampers the free expression of real creativity as monolithic market interests choose to instead peddle corporatized sanitized conformist-script pablum instead.  Reject the mediocre.  Create.  Find that world we all are given early-on and bring it back.  We need it.  Now more than ever.

Surrealist Scribbles

Surrealists engaged in a wide variety of games, both word-based and graphically-based. 

The Exquisite Corpse is one well-known example of a Surrealist Game, and a rather nice online example of this particular game is The Graphically Exquisite Cadavre which can be found here.  You can also find Stefan Poag's fun and freaky Exquisite Corpse Monster Manual here at Lulu. 

You can learn more about the games surrealists play here, and you can find a variety of online games of a surrealist character here as well.

The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism (1938) defines the Exquisite Corpse game as follows:

"Game of folded paper which consists of having several people compose a phrase or drawing collectively, none of the participants having any idea of the nature of the preceding contribution or contributions. The now classical example, which gave its name to the game, is the first sentence obtained in this manner: The exquisite—corpse—shall drink—the young—wine."

Essentially, the Exquisite Corpse game revolves around the process of placing different pieces by different artists into a semblance of a whole, such as folding a piece of paper into thirds or fourths and having a different artist draw, paint or collage their work into a section and then turn it over to another artist until the piece is completed and then unfolded to reveal the combination of styles, techniques and approaches.  Often the results can be quite bizarre, strange or occasionally wonderful.

But I'm interested in another game used by surrealists for inspiration and sparking creativity.  It's an old game that I learned to play back in grade school and it used to be a major part of how I approached drawing for many, many years.  First I would get someone to make a scribble, as involuntary and unconscious as possible, then I would take their scribble and work it into a drawing, like in the case of the example up above on the left.  That piece was developed from someone else's scribble.

I haven't done this in quite a while, years really, but I thought that it might be fun to give it a spin for old time's sake and just to make things a bit more interesting, I'm requesting scribbles from any of the readers of this blog who are interested in participating.  All you need to do is send me a scribble and I'll make a drawing off of it and post the results as they get completed.  (Due to time limitations and other considerations, I will only be doing three of these drawings, drawn from the scribbles available or on-hand in two weeks.  So you have a couple of weeks to send in your scribbles and my wife or daughter will be drafted to make the final selection.) 

What I'm looking for is a clean, simple scribble, preferably in pencil or black ink, on typing paper or something nicer if possible, though torn cereal box cardboard will do just fine.  And try to make your scribble as involuntary as possible.  Just close your eyes and make some sort of a mark without thinking about it. 

I'll be sure to do the Before and After thing (scanning-in the base scribble) as well as give each contributor credit where credit is due and identify each scribble's source/contributor however you specify.  The original drawing made from each scribble will get mailed-out to the originator of the scribble as a thank you.  You can do whatever you want with the thing, I just reserve the right to post the image to my blog and would prefer to make the finished picture available as open content/creative commons mutual attribution, free to use at will. 

Any questions?  Anyone interested?