Have your conversations ever turned into lengthy monologues puncutated by “and then we moved to…”? Does geography class make your heart pound? Have you ever wished you could instantly show, not just tell, about your past? If so, Life Maps are for you.
They are pocket-sized, ready to pull out at a moment’s notice for a journey through your past.

I created my own Life Map for Indesign class.
This is a difficult piece to display electronically, but I’ve done my best!

Here you can see some of the steps of the map unfolding. My hometowns are centered within each panel and appear to seamlessly connect as I move outward from the center. The steps you don’t see include panels with memories from each place lived in… if you want to read those, come find me (I really do keep this handy!) or my parents. They also have a copy.

This is the back cover.

The first published version of Beauty and the Beast was a rendition by Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, published in 1740. The best-known written version was an abridgement of Mme Villeneuve’s work published in 1756 by Mme Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont.

In the last two weeks, I have taken a translated version of the 1756 text, illustrated, and bound it into a 5″x6″ book, pictured above.

Pretend you’ve untied the blue ribbon, and peruse below. Viewing in fullscreen is better!

A journal entry from August 24, 2006:

So many things, God. Every time I hear about writing Bridal songs, I get so excited! I would love to be able to do that. But it doesn’t come naturally to me right now. Maybe it’s not in songwriting that You want me but in art. The other day I suddenly started getting all these images in my mind to go with Scripture. I’d love to do them all. Not necessarily start with the image and think, oh, there’s an apple tree, let’s write the verse under it, but that it would all be Spirit-inspired and that I would not stop at logic association. Father, this is my vision. I want to begin to illustrate Your beautiful words. I want to acquire the skills to be prolific and gifted in imagery. I don’t know, of course, in what context I would do these things. I would love to be in connection with with film and moving pictures as well. I want to work with gifted musicians performing under the influence of the Holy Spirit. I want my heart to be fascinated, and I want to wake up the Bride to feel emotion and love in connection to her Bridegroom, as the finale arrives, now on the horizon.
Right now, Lord, my art feels like “happy accidents,” but I want to be able to go about it more purposefully. I believe that You will show me in these next years where You will equip me to be able to go in this. I love you, Jesus…

This is still my vision, and…. I got a Holy Spirit commission this quarter. 😀
Click below to go to the site that is, to be quite prosaic, my final for Webscripting class.

It’s so hard to know what to say to sum up Design History class. Basically, I was a contented sponge, soaking up all the marvelous clarification from our textbook! I feel so… validated, I guess, by learning about the ideas and movements that define the field I’m entering. Kind of a ‘cloud of witnesses’  thing.

And now, at long last, I can show the single project we worked on all quarter long.
Parameters: Create a book that elucidates the five design periods outlined in the textbook and includes a period-inspired illustration for each. The book should have a creative theme.

So, my book is aimed at late elementary school age, and it is about the alphabet (actually, it’s about typography, but shhhh… they don’t know that yet).

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Design Concepts This handmade conceptual book showcases five graphic interpretations of the Greek deity Eros. Details at the end…
	Now, for the juicy production notes…

I quote my teacher: “the first step in the creative process is to Accept the Situation.”
To this end, nearly all of assignments in Design Concepts involve an element of chance, the outcomes of which are non-negotiable. At the same time, I believe God works out all things, even “chance” things, for good.

I wasn’t thrilled with the theme of Greek deities to begin with, but when I drew Eros out of a hat, I really despaired! Developing an exposé on the pagan god of sexuality is not high on my list of ambitions.

I asked the Holy Spirit what to do, and very quickly received a peace about it. God has truth to communicate on any and every subject, so this particular prompt, too, was totally redeemable.

Step 1: Research.
Wikipedia gave me some very nice leads. I also read The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis, who is not afraid of mythology and actually uses it quite powerfully to communicate Biblical truth. It turns out that the interpretations of Eros through history are plural and multifaceted, which was extremely helpful for…

Step 2: Ideate.
Yes, this means to brainstorm and to keep a record of the ideas in quick sketches. Just to make things interesting, we were required to come up with ONE HUNDRED different ways to represent our deity! That meant 20 each of the five different types:

Pictographic: literal. The deity is personified in logo-like simplicity.
Ideographic: non-literal. The essence of the deity is symbolized in a graphic of logo-like simplicity.
Photographic: a sketch suggesting a possible photographic composition.
Illustrative: the deity communicated in any of the endless illustrative styles that exist.
Typographic: the deity’s name is expressively incorporated into the piece.

It took me almost two weeks, but I did draw one hundred sketches of Eros.  I won’t bore you by showing them (they’re not all are G-rated, either!). I was relieved to have met the requirement, but not much closer to knowing what exactly my book was going to communicate about Eros!

A beautifully logical operation got me moving forward again. I identified five prominent themes among my sketches: attraction, obsession, predatory lust, oneness, and procreation. I sorted the sketches by type and theme, and by process of elimination hit upon my final five, in which each type and each theme was represented once. Perfect.

Step 3: Mood board.
Sound a little spooky? It is, at least in the sense that there are very few rules regarding it. It is an object (board… or otherwise) that encapsulates the feeling the final piece will have. Here is mine:

Let me interpret. I decided that my five themes didn’t work together in any kind of narrative sequence; they were more like snapshots of a mysterious force. This is where the mood of scientific research came in. Who is Eros? We can’t pin him down, but here are some of the things he has a hand in.

I already knew I wanted to use the genuine old paper that I have on hand, so the dated look of the piece was dictated partially by that. I knew, however, that my ideogram in particular was going to look rather modern, so I decided to fuse two periods: the self-importance of the Victorian age combined with the irreverence of Post-Modernity. Incidentally, these are two societies that have some of the strangest views on sexuality. It is only natural that they would need to mount an investigation into the matter!

Step 4: Digital Layout
I worked my five sketched ideas into final comps and determined their order and layout using Indesign.

Step 5: Assembling
To keep up the aged look, I printed each of my designs onto the old paper. I used the inkjet printer I have at home, because I doubt if the printing office at school would have sent those thin and brittle A4s through their professional laser printers. The downside of inkjet prints is that they don’t have the juicy saturation of laser prints. The principle color of my spreads was black, but it came out greyish. There was no impact!

I started thinking of ways to fix this. A second pass through the printer would not have lined up correctly. I mused about some kind of coating agent. Hairspray came to mind first, but I couldn’t find any. Then I decided to try vegetable oil. I painted it onto my black areas, and the result was fantastic! This is not an easy medium, though. I found that the oil spread astonishing distances over several hours. On some pages, the end effect was really good. On others, I had to fight it desperately. In fact, I still can’t predict exactly what the oil will do by tomorrow, when I turn the book in.

The vegetable oil added the textural interest that the book needed. It also gave a layer of meaning that I never planned on, but can easily justify – it’s sensuous, earthy… maybe even a little unclean.

I bought the metallic marbled paper for the covers at a local art store, which was fun. I had nothing in mind, but I knew it was the right paper when I saw it – a little bit cosmic, enigmatic, and worked with my color scheme.

The gold paint was the last of all these after thoughts. It represents the opposite of the oil – divine, refined, glorious… Eros contains a lot of contradictions within himself!

That’s the story. And after all that, I realize I’ve said almost nothing about the content of the book… It’s for you to interpret and explore. I hope you find that the voice of truth speaks through it!

Meet Victor, the Vector Dragonfly.

One of the options for our final project in Illustrator was to do a bug – I loved that idea, especially because it meant being able to visually study God’s creation up close. I started by choosing the photo I wanted to copy, knowing that I would have to really love it in order to stay inspired! Below is the original photo from Wikimedia Commons.

For those interested, I’ll describe the process of converting this photo to vector shapes. I placed the photo in the background of a blank Illustrator document, and started with the body. I used the pen tool to draw the shape of each basic segment, and then with my new friend, Gradient Mesh, I filled in the shapes with more exact color varience. Gradient Mesh creates a grid on a solid shape, and each intersection becomes the origin of a specified color. The colors fade naturally in to each other, leading to a much more realistic vector image. For example, the tall part of the stem is a single shape filled with Gradient Mesh.

Then I started a new layer and used the pencil tool to draw the black stripes, and so on and so forth…
I was able to break down my dragonfly into left-brain, logical layers for the most part. The pupil layer goes on top of the iris layer, which goes on top of the head layer… But the big exception were the wings. They are foreshortened, translucent, irridescent, and in and out of focus – way too many complex variables to even begin to think about them in the same way as I did the body!  So I drew those entirely on the right side of the brain, telling myself to see only shapes and color, saturation and value.

I used some short cuts: the white spots on the dragonfly’s tail come from the Symbol Sprayer, his hairs were created using the Cristallize tool, and some of the wing stripes I generated using the Blend tool. The best secret weapon of all though, was listening to the dramatized Chronicles of Narnia while I worked. It kept my imagination alive, and dulled my sense of the passing hours…

and hours…

and hours…