Fifth Card

Not sure how long this series will go on, but I'm certainly done with the "I Made A Thing" gimmick with the titles. The idea behind the tall, narrow slit (with very small off-center break) is from dealing with RAM upgrades, the way the chips have these little gaps between some of the contacts to keep them from being inserted incorrectly or in completely the wrong slot altogether. Had a bit of trouble with the glue on this one. I guess I didn't use enough, which is important when you're working with a smaller surface area than the previous cards (the butchered card worked out but that's because I put extra pressure on it from the thumbprint. Tried that with this one, but ended up nearly creasing the whole thing). 

I Made A Four Thing

After the "happy accident" with the torn tag, I set to work right away on a true and proper fourth entry in this enigmatically growing series. I really like how the perforated edges of these notebook pages look. I also wanted to use a bigger piece and have as little script as possible, almost pure data. The grid of small brown squares is an inkling of sorts into the stylistic direction I want to take future entries in this series, however far ahead that may end up being. 

I Made A (Butchered) Thing

Tried something a bit different with this one, and paid for it. Instead of gluing the graph paper to the card and cutting the notches and holes in that, I got the idea to put the notches on the end of the card without using the grid, giving the impression of an old key. Unfortunately, even with the aid of a ruler, the cuts were not very straight and made all the more obvious without the graph paper. I ended up ripping off the end in frustration, then stewed for a moment before resolving to finish what I started and simply make two cards in one night, writing this one off as apocrypha. The thumbprint, which was there from the start, turned out to be a very silly idea, at least in terms of execution. Years ago, on MTV's Cribs, Kathy Griffin showed off her bathroom, which used a lot of earthtones in its color scheme, including these textured diamonds of dark brown against tan along her walls. She commented that at first it seemed a neat idea, only to realize dark browns plus messy textures (coupled with being a bathroom) gave the almost unavoidable impression of, in her own words, "sponged-on poo." 

The print being a thumb doesn't help things much. 

I Made A Thi(rd Thi)ng

Actually got a watermark for the reverse side on before making the cuts. Not sure what kind of society I'm creating with these symbols (the stylized crown, the blossom, and now dice), but they're either very far ahead of their time, or extremely set in their ways. The dice were a result of complete spontaneity. I had a flashback to going to a casino and seeing these "reward cards" that some of the more elderly patrons would insert into the video poker or slot machines. I don't know exactly what they were for, but I found it funny that they were attached to lanyards or those springy rubber coils. It reminded me of the keys for Jet Skis that attach to your life vest, so they kill the engine if you fall off. 

I Made A(nother) Thing

I don't know if I'll make these kinds of entries (or videos for that matter) for every card I make, but it feels like a good groove to settle into for a while, so here goes nothing. 

This one's got a reverse side. Still not a "watermark" like I'd been planning, but as I'm still using pasted-on bits of graph paper, I guess these don't exactly lend themselves to that style. The "profile" in the upper left is the result of a rubber stamp rubbed along its edge with the brown Sharpie calligraphy pen (then filled in once stamped to help it stand out as it came out very light). I'm not quite sure it works, but it does fit in with the overall concept of the card. 

The story goes that Charles Babbage got the idea for using punch cards for his "difference engines" from train tickets that would have details about passengers punched into little tables printed on the stubs. It's kind of a simple genius, really, given that there really weren't photo IDs back then, and not everyone had the ability to forge tickets. 

I Made A Thing

Tried out one of those Slice blades to make square/rectangular holes in some upcoming punch card-themed works. Not exactly the miracle tool I thought it was; when I first saw this thing, it looked like its point was a needle, and you could hold and use it like a pencil, effectively cutting (or at least scoring) anything you drew. Turns out it is simply a blade, although smaller and made from ceramic. The result of this is that the blade doesn't really bend, it never dulls, and cuts fairly deep but not so deep it gets stuck. Still, it didn't make particularly clean cuts in either the notebook page or the cardstock of the tag. 

End of June

I really hate this mindset I’ve been in these past few weeks where I simply don’t feel like working on anything. I’ve hammered out a few small pieces the last few days, but I spent far too much time on them. There’s no shortage of projects; that’s thankfully never been an issue for me. I don’t think it’s a motivation issue as I like to think that source is equally inexhaustible. I get a satisfactory level of feedback on my work and I’m nothing if not appreciative of it. Lately though, I’ve felt tense and angsty, irritable and drained, and all around deflated. Maybe it’s merely this month, as June and October (for some odd reason) tend to be very hectic months for me, but I don’t like having these “down & draining" periods those months or any other time. It’s easy to break a routine, especially a productive one, and end up with what I’ve heard wrestlers call Ring Rot, essentially falling out of practice and having to start from the bottom all over again.
As I said in my post about Trigger Warnings, I do not suffer from depression. I am depressed at times, but nothing I’d call manic or even debilitating. Then again, I’m not a therapist. Maybe I’ve been unconsciously self-medicating a condition I don’t fully understand.
Maybe my art, my “therapy" as I’ve called it for years, isn’t working anymore.
Maybe I’m realizing that, in the grand scheme of things, I have no idea what I want.
Maybe I simply need to take a break.
I don’t know.
I should get some sleep. I’ve got a big day tomorrow I’m looking forward to, and hopefully things will start to look up after that.

I Made a QR Code That Can Be Scanned

Planarianes

Hadn't distressed paper with tea in some time, so I cut up my cheap watercolor paper again into tall strips. It has a nice texture to work with, and the wide landscape format carries its own special challenge. After applying the green tea and letting it sit for a bit, I got the idea to give it a reddish tint by really diluting the red ink I use and applying it as a thin layer, something that would give the impression of dried blood on parchment. It was also a nice change of pace to have a more earthly color palette instead of the normal stark whites and cool blues I tend to favor. 
I love sumi-e ink and wash paintings as well as traditional Asian calligraphy, both ideas I wanted to visit for this piece. 
This has also become a somewhat impromptu preview of a project I've had on the backburner for far too long. If you saw my "Magic Middle Finger" piece or my Elements Journal video, you saw part of it already. I worried about repeating myself, but these are thematically different enough that I didn't even want to give it a similar name. 

Snowfall

Got the idea for this from a Royksopp video. It was a fan-submitted rendition of their song "The Drug"  that used very simple, almost abstract neon shapes for rather fluid animations. One sequence showed a forest, conveying scale and distance using only parallax scrolling and basic perspective. The idea of a forest got me thinking about D2 for the Dreamcast. It had this really eerie opening cinematic of a man drudging through the snow, bloodstains accompanying his footprints. The red really stood out against the white... and then it turned green. I wanted something to convey that same unsettling feeling. May have honestly gone overboard on the blood. I'd forgotten how much ink my nylon brushes actually absorb ink and ended up overestimating. It's only problematic because while the texture of this watercolor paper (cheap stuff) works for the snow and trees, it doesn't quite work for the blood. Ah, well, it was an exercise to get me back to making art after a fairly slow period I'm still going through. June and October are almost always Hellish months for me for various reasons, and I've simply felt very bogged down and unmotivated to start anything planned or finish anything in the works. I can't let myself fall into that kind of spell, even if I've still been keeping up with my "notebook" quota of a page per day, even if it's a short list in Evernote or something.