Just some quick photos from the other day when I was making the dye/paint/juice.

 I couldn't take my time in snapping good photos while working but I was able to get a picture while making the green color. The foam which is formed at the top from all the fibers in the vegetables is where the color is best. Unfortunately it's hard to keep the foam in that condition, if I did a similar piece in the future I would try to use the juice as soon as I made it. I had them for a night and by the next day they had settled and the bright foamy parts were about gone.

Ideas for Ecology project

My first Idea involved an excerpt from the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, because how close to tree hugging can ya get. I thought about utilizing a friend of mines knack at photographing action figures in real life like situations out in nature but instead of action figures I would make beans with arms and legs. If you are familiar with Thoreau you know he loved his beans and what the meant to him.

My second idea which I'm pretty set on at this point is inspired by Andy Goldsworthy. I knew I wanted to go into nature and use that to make a piece somehow but then I thought how could I make it a bit different from his work. Well I enjoy painting but I didn't want to slap acrylic or oil paint on trees because that defeats the purpose of the piece. Rather I got my solution from work, I work at Earthfare in the Juice Bar/Bakery section and I realized how potent the color in certain vegetable juices were. So I'm able to get a solid red color from beets, vivid orange from carrots and with a mix of kale, spinach, and possibly spirulina, I'll be able to have a bright green. I may also utilize some tumeric to make a yellow but I'm not sure yet. My main problem I will have to get around is what I use as a canvas, hopefully certain trees will have light enough bark so you can notice the dye. One of the bakers had a good idea in that I use some flour to actually make a dye-paste so it's easier to manipulate and more noticeable on certain objects like a rock per say.

I intend to post the process shots before presentation and hopefully if I can get away with it at work images of the actual juicing.
  

1. Did you feel like the drawing had a life of its own? Or was that influenced more by the title and my discussion afterwards.

2. Did you find yourself needing to pull out some image of what was being drawn? Regardless of the fact that it is a nonobjective doodle. 

3. Does the doodle have a sense of motion or growth without the animation? Or is it reliant upon that media to give it life?

     The process for drawing and filming the stop animation was relatively easy once I could work out the nuances in switching between drawing and filming the individual frames. The part that was a bit more tedious was after that when I loaded the raw footage into iMovie where I had to analyze and slow down over 65 clips to get a fluid progression. Once that was done those files were condensed and saved as one larger movie clip which I was able to pull into it's own project and it was there that I experimented with how fast the image would develop or revert. It was at this stage that I realized I could of gone further with the drawing instead of relying on a loop that could carry enough weight. Luckily the timing worked out and the drawing had an organic quality that almost made it seem like it was growing or breathing. It was then that I limited it down to repeating itself four times for impact. 

I felt the class did a good job all around when it came to executing this project even with varying levels of proficiency at video editing let alone filming in general. We had viewed works by Kara Walker and William Kentridge so I feel like we felt compelled to try and take on a meatier message in all our works, some may have been more successful at conveying their message. However it gives us all a chance to dig down and try and find a voice for why we make art. When it comes to how our class is operating I find the times we take to open the floor to discuss our concerns or ideas on our works.

I decided to go with a stop motion medium for this project because I figured I could utilize it the best with a simpler medium like ink on paper. The small clip is entitled Four Deep Breaths, or four normal breaths if you time it well, this title came after the initial drawing when I was messing around with the speeds and debating how many times I would show the doodle deconstructing over again. The doodle is mostly nonobjective and the style of doodling I usually do within most times of the day specifically of course when I have a pen or pencil in my hand and a second to spare to daydreaming. 

The doodles I end up drawing tend to always have an organic growth outward that looks like it grew off itself. Something that was somewhat hard to show unless captured and utilized in this fashion. I wish there could of been more time given because I stopped adding to the drawing during the recording phase because I was worried I'd get to much. Retrospectively I could of fit some more details in and push the doodle further and possibly add color to it, which was one of my original intentions.

The doodles themselves are sometimes self-generated patterns I've accumulated over time through observation of real world motif work and can also sometimes be influenced by more sporadic and spontaneous work by artists like Kandinsky or some of Max Weber's abstract work. I will show examples of their work at the end of the powerpoint part of the presentation. 

Legos

At first I was going to glue certain pieces together and maybe create a 3D playable version of Tetris, however with Legos you are unable to fully rotate them around like you can with the different pieces of Tetris. Then I had the idea that maybe I could make a 'sculpture' of sorts and then take it apart in pieces and super glue those chunks together so the viewer was left with only a few large chunks that they could assemble. That idea somewhat made me sad since the point of Legos is their near infinite possibilities in what you could build. So I decided to separate out the primary colors and shades of black so viewers still had a 'limited' palate but still the freedom to build what they want. Hopefully everyone enjoys and doesn't feel limited and together we can make a pretty cool random inspired Lego art piece.

                  Here was a test run a friend and I did, taking turns adding parts to see how it would go. I hope with a full class something big and interesting can be generated.