watching her grow

If you didn't already know, I was once married and from that marriage I was given a daughter we called Olivia Grace. Thinking about her today brings about a lot of emotions and feelings that are both good and bad. Good about her, bad about me. Olivia lives with her mother in KY and I don't get to see her often. It's a five hour drive (which gets better every time I make it) and school is a five day a week job that makes it a scheduling exercise to come and see her.

Olivia is standing in front of me watching a big screen TV and coloring in a Sesame Street coloring book. I'm sitting on my ex-wife's couch in her home in KY and I will drive back to IL Saturday afternoon. She tells me she wants a cracker and I give her one Ritz cracker and watch her chow down. I've been up since six thirty and the daylight outside is revealing a beautiful day. Little Livy is still in her pajamas (I think they were clothes at one point in the past) and her hair hasn't been cut in her life, so her little blonde (I have no idea how this much blonde can come from two brown-haired parents, but I don't mind a bit) curls are constantly pushed out of her blue eyes by two little hands. For the moment, I let her play on her own.

The house is large and right now empty save for the two of us. Savannah (ex-wife) and I split up just before Christmas of last year and Olivia has lived with her since. It will most likely remain that way for the duration of her young life. When you go from seeing your daughter every day to a couple days each month, it makes each trip very poignant and 'important.' I put it in the little '' things because I actually don't know how to put it into words. I want to teach her and raise her and protect her and love her and all these crazy dad things in such short amount of time that it sometimes weighs on me before I even leave. Is my time with her going to be meaningful enough? My worst fear of showing up and Olivia not recognizing me or even worse shying away from me has yet to be realized. She actually shattered that fear when I got here this time by opening the door and saying, "Daddy" and giving me a big hug.








Moments like that make it all better.

dénouement

I can do this shit all day long. This time it's panoramic shot of a tug of war rope. Now on top of that is laid the pictures of one person pulling the rope. Now I'll take a bunch of shots in such a way that it looks like 3 clones are on a team pulling rope against the other team of clones. Each shot would be different enough in attire and attitude do differentiate between the same person. Does that make any sense? It looks pretty nifty in my head, but the execution of the tug of war rope didn't work out like I needed it to. Valerie actually helped me out for these pictures that I did take, though, thank you very much. :)

i don't mind too much.

Round 97, FIGHT!

I'm still thinking about a series of somethings I can do for photography. I don't really give myself much slack, sometimes. Here I was kicking around with that idea of many shots coming together to form one big one. Instead of a face, though, I went with a framing standard that - when put together - would create a house of people looking out like from a window or opening. I don't know enough people that would actually help me with this, I think, so I bailed on it.

Do you listen to the good one or the bad one more often?

Flying through a brainstorm here, bear with me. This is a picture of a face broken down into six components. Each component is a different picture representing a certain emotion or narrative. There are two additional shots on the "shoulders" of the forehead (I know that sounds odd, lol) and they are the classic angel and demon confidants. Working this through my head is what generated the cover I used for my process book.

Actually sitting down and taking these shots was interesting. First of all, I used a tripod and a backdrop (a blue towel FTW!) and established a posture I couldn't easily lose and tried to move only the component shot I was taking. So one shot of a smile... one shot of a snarl... so on and so on. The interesting part was looking at the results. I don't normally look at myself in such a critical method. It's your face, you know. I look at it to make sure there is nothing in my teeth or to see if I need to shave. Now I'm looking at it like I would any other school work, and the contrast in thinking there is not to be understated. Tsk tsk... what is that freckle there for? I didn't want that there. What about this snaggle tooth? Wtf am I supposed to do with that? lol At one point it just kind of hit me that I was sitting there critiquing my face and hadn't really thought about it. So that was kinda funny.

gotta leave soon

Right about here was where I realized I didn't have a good leg to stand on. I learned that I like drawing storyboards and I also like sketching. Just looking through this book again makes me chuckle at the memories made in class and elsewhere.

how the hell do you make a large rope knot look like yin-yang?

Page 43 holds some more of what was mentioned in the last post. Here you can see Will gearing up and looking vague and sketch-like. Also, that is him in stick figure form rushing out to my car. When I showed him the sketches after I got home, he informed me that my car was actually a turtle. o.O lol My car is a great many things... cheap, gas efficient, armored with a hard shell on top, always wins against the hare. It's pretty much the shit.

The other car shot is just horrible, hahahaha. I'm not even gonna talk about that.

stress creates creativity?

Another idea for the photography stuff. This time, I went all out. I wanted to do a 8-12 picture spread and tell a story. Will, my friend, gets a notice that the Assmbly Hall will be hosting a squirtgun war. He is excited and buys a squirtgun and mods it to have a larger diameter pump so he doesn't have to pump as many times. He then drives down to the Assembly Hall and rushes to the gate. It's closed and the parking lot is empty - no one around. He realizes that I gave him the notice and takes it out of his pocket. The time and date for the notice has clearly been altered and he didn't notice. Fuming, he rushes home to enact his revenge on me.

Yeah, this became another victim to the "not good enough to make my own shit" criteria. I might have been able to pull it off, but it was way beyond the scope of the project and I scrapped for something more colorful.

The trick here was trying to make each picture as concise as possible. How do you show Will is happy when he gets the notice? How do you show an altered notice without drawing too much attention to it? Like a little foreshadowing action. I had the notice posted on the fridge for one concept and then the time was written on it. Next to the fridge is our stove that displays the current time and it matches the notice. Would the viewer recognize that and realize that Will must already be on his way to the squirtgun wars? There were a lot of things to think about and it was fun. Maybe one day when I'm not overwhelmed with 80 billion exercises I can do something like that.

The clouds are hiding the rising sun. Damnit!

I have two older brothers that were in and out of my life while I was growing up. Like me, they are creative and plagued with unreliable love lives. One of the earliest artistic things I remember them doing was taking pictures for school. One of them climbed a house or barn or something and stood on the edge of it with his arms held wide. The sun was aligned behind him and blotted him out and created a shadowy figure instead of man on top of the roof. This is.. uhh... pretty much how I remember that.

rhythmic ceremonial rituals are held here

the Assembly Hall here in Champaign looks amazing. Like a damned UFO has landed and people go there and play basketball. Or whatever, I hear famous people also sing sometimes. I was trying to paint a frame of reference for some pictures I was going to be taking and instead of drawing the Assembly hall, I ended drawing a UFO with little skyscrapers on it. lol Yeah... that was a bad days for artists everywhere.

the sun is breaking behind the clouds.

Yet another idea for the same photography series: hats. Ok, here me out for a second. hats have been worn as a social and cultural symbol since they were invented. Today, a lot of that power that they used to have has faded away. I wanted to go around and take pictures of important people that still wear a hat to convey their position of authority. Then I would take some pictures of everyday people that didn't wear their hats for power, but for individuality. Could you call that self-empowerment, Lori? that might defeat the whole thing. lol Anyway, I also drew a picture of the Popester but that somehow missed the scan train. Probably a holy thing.

it centers on a woman

The final idea for the book cover was to do one for my daughter. I already knew the story, the characters, everything. My ex-wife and I have a book for Olivia right now that we keep a journal type ledger of thoughts for her to see when she's older. It's a really cool idea and I hope she'll enjoy it... there's gonna be some interesting questions, of that I have no doubt! Think of what your parents may have been like when you were a newborn? Am I going to be the same person in 18 years... I don't know, but there are things I want to tell her now that she can't either hear or understand or whatever. This book is like the visual counter part to the other book we have for her.

Elizabeth was on the money with the diapered and dangerous tagline, thank you! She's not all that dangerous, but it's funny and I like it. I ultimately removed the "Priceless" line from the final version and it makes me a little sad. I mean, wanted posters always have the bounty on them, and I wanted to make it clear that this one does not get cashed in.

like any good story

A book cover from scratch was - for me - way too hard. I'm the kind of guy that when I design the book cover, I have to justify it. So the book cover then needs a story underneath it... then the story needs a plot... now the plot wants a protagonist and a climax (who doesn't) and blah blah blah. You see where this is going. Beside learning to control my creative thoughts, I needed to get some inspiration for my story and such. I have learned that inspiration is a powerful tool for the whole creation process. It gives you colors, ideas, form, unity, everything. These first book covers were inspired by my own foolish pride, if the title didn't give it away.

The actual scenes are (checks again) - make that one scene from the top cover - fake. I just wanted a dude walking out on a girl in tears because of his own foolish pride. Then it became the issue of how to communicate these things in a simple and rapid fashion for a book cover. like most things having to due with pride, it didn't pan out.

The bottom left one was going to be the big color printer in the lab that has all those ink cartridges hanging out of it. Each one was going to be a sin or something and the paper was going to be freshly printed on the tray in front of the paper. On it was going to say "Foolish Pride" or something akin to it. I still think it's a decent idea that could work, but I dropped that one, too.

The final cover on the right is one that makes me smile because I have no idea what was going on when I drew it. It's just there. Wtf is "How to Avoid the Law?" lol, I have no idea.