For my typography class, we’re using a simple, modular program called Fonstruct to make typesfaces without getting supes complicated right away. I’ve been messing around with the program since we and have started maybe ten different faces so far; only published three, but somehow my most recent named “Arlen Rage” one has made it to the site’s “Top Picks”! So I figured that was important enough to blog about.
Hahaha, I actually did not intend for it to be named this way; Fonstruct makes you input something as a title when you start a new font and our favorite antihero ended up coming to mind, for whatever reason. Maybe because I was intending a sharp, handwritten script face from the beginning, but mostly because I’ve gone through all my personal defaults with my private test fonts (classics such as ‘pfft’, ‘doot’, and ‘wtf’).
There is even things like ‘doot bold’–which will probably be my next project, once I have the motivation to fix every one of the seventy glyphs that got botched up somewhere in the saving process, arghhhh.
Two new thangs, from my typography class:
Poster design based on the Turkish phrase: “ne var, ne yok?” which means, literally: “what is, what isn’t” (akin to how we would use “what’s up?” in greeting).
Poster design using the Persian typeface, i.e. Farsi, and trying to make allusions to snow.
I just finished taking an epic illustration history midterm. My mind has been absolutely bombarded with beautiful illustrations for the past few days, so hey, let’s braindump them here!
N C Wyeth is one of my absolute favorite illustrators–historic, contemporary, or otherwise.
I have an actual newsprint print of the last image–the article that they were made for is totally fascinating, from both a historical interest and a modern-day mindset on the description of drug use and how its affects on someone’s life have not really changed at all, given a century of change between now and then.
William Bradley is one of my favorite poster artists of the time, up there with Mucha and Cheret and Penfield and all those other cool cats. Shame it is so hard to find his work, though.
Girls used to drool over J C Leyendecker’s men in his Arrow advertisements–I still melt for them today.
Edwin Abbey; a slightly more fine arts approach to illustration, but still wonderful, nonetheless.
Herbert Paus (Minneapolis native!) influenced a whole realm of pulp cover illustration. For more, there is a huge collection of his covers over here.
And there are plenty of others, but there you go. The world of illustration is full of so much beauty; there is no way I could possibly account for all of it!
The Northwestern University Library has a huge (300+ image) online catalog of American World War II posters and WHY WASN’T I MADE AWARE OF THIS EARLIER
One of my biggest inspirations and interests has been in poster art, namely Constructivist art from the early Soviet period. But looking here, it’s interesting to see the connections between these posters and others. While each retains some level of style specific to the home country, there is still a great deal of similarity between these and those of, say, Lenin- and early Stalin-era propaganda.
This thing has been making its way around the interwebs, but I just sat down and actually watched the video today and
oh
my
god.
This freaks the ever-loving shit out of me.
As Warren Ellis sez: “charming robot pet, future sex toy for the mentally doomed, or simply the pulsing fodder for tonight’s nightmares?”
“Funktionide” is a kinetic-sculptural-somewhat-commerical artwork by Dutch sorry, German! designer Stefan Ulrich. Set within a futuristic vision, Ulrich imagines a world where humans have lost connection with each other to the point that they turn to these quivering masses of dough for “emotional satisfaction”. Which sounds very Freudian.
A lot of the general public (and even a lot of scientists!) politely dismiss Freudian theory these days as incorrect or, more poetically, as “a load of bollocks”. The guy actually had several brilliant ideas outside of the sexually-loaded theories that everyone is familiar and/or biased against now, such as the underlying structure of the subconscious and how things like defense mechanisms and the phenomenon known as “the uncanny” fit into it all.
I really really really briefly touched on the latter subject in a short, somewhat unfinished paper I wrote about Warren Ellis and the posthuman:
“First defined in 1906 by Ernst Jentsch, the uncanny ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate’ … . Freud expands upon this definition by adding a more relative branch: ‘the uncanny’ is a sensation of revulsion, despite its familiarity. Cognitive dissonance is often created by the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. What exactly attracts and repels us about something uncanny usually only surfaces on the subconscious level–whether it be a slight flaw in the expression of a robotic face or a clammy look to a prosthetic limb, there is awareness and unawareness, repulsion and attraction.”
And I realize the dread I feel boiling up in me as I watch that …thing sliver up the side of the bed about a minute into the film is a perfect example of the uncanny.
What I do like about Funktionide is the understanding of the transhumanist ideal Ulrich has. In this piece, he is not attempting to hide, mask, or otherwise avoid “the uncanny” like, say, 3D animators must do (and occasionally fail at doing). He has accepted and embraced the feeling of the uncanny as a natural “full human” response to the object and wishes to help us examine this negative reaction.
Jamais Cascio has suggested in this essay that things like Funktionide could be eventually accepted as “alive” and “real” by humans, given more exposure to boundary-blurring elements like prosthetic enhancements and extreme body modification. Soon, this squishy slug thing will appear more and more “acceptable”; the uncanny valley will rise and begin again–in reverse. The idea of what is “alive” and “human” will eventually morph into something completely different from the concept of a human that we understand today. And then the whole uncanny will begin anew with entirely different standards, ones that are impossible to imagine today.
But for now, I guess I still have a long way to go, because Funktionide is going to haunt my dreams for weeks.
Funktionide re-found via Ellis’s blog, incidentally.
A couple of updates; got some illustrations to shaaaare.
An illustration based around the Charles Lindbergh kidnapping back in the 1930s. One of the most fascinating things that I discovered during my research was how Lindbergh constantly went to the mob or the underground whenever he found something new (rather than, y’know, the police or something obvious like that)–despite the fact that the mafia did absolutely fuckall for his case.
I am also probably going to get crap from my professor for including a smoking guy in the front, despite the fact that it’s completely period and I consciously edited out several other cigars already. But you can’t get away with illustrating anyone smoking anything these days, bah!
(This image is actually supposed to be a little more saturated in color, but I am so done with this right now and way too lazy to fix it.)
An illustration from a couple of weeks ago that I forgot to post here, for whatever reason!
For the subject of “bad neighbors”; in which the city and the sea do not get along with each other. I also discovered/remembered how to make custom gradients again, and it totally made my week.
More to come. I’m hoping that a couple of acrylic pieces I’m working on for next week actually turn out okay. But since one of them involves drawing a picture of my cat, it can’t be too hard, right right?
One of these days I’ll actually get around to updating the portfoilo website with these things, I promise!
I’ve been trying to get various post-to-Twitter plugins to work with this WordPress blog and so far, for whatever reason, none of them are working. I’ve tried like five now and… yeah. No beans. I don’t know if it’s just me messing them all up or what, but until I manage to make one work, y’all will have to deal with me and my copy-pasta posting from here to Twitter, hrr.
So anyway, on the topic of mental illness, here’s something I have been meaning to blog about but totally keep forgetting to do!
Darryl Cunningham makes beautiul comics about his experience of working in a psychiatric ward. They are more text than imagery, but the off-kilter, iconic, graphic nature of every panel still wholly relates to the uncomfortable reality of a variety of mental illnesses. It’s an incredibly empathetic view of diseases like schizophrenia, bipolar depression, and even dementia.
His newest one, called “Suicide“, is particularly poignant.
His imagery and comic sense has not only gotten through the past few episodes, but also more experimental. The tale, regarding the (in)frequency of suicide in psychiatric wards, describes one of the two suicides Cunningham witnessed using nothing but words put to silent images of the hospital’s surroundings. None of the expected references to the noose or even an image of the woman’s body. It’s a sensitive treatment of the subject, one that I particularly appreciate. There is no violence in his drawings; only a strange calm and a constant sense of unease.
Being that the way people with mental illness view and assemble their world has always been something I’ve tried to work through and understand with my characters and their stories, it’s fabulous that Cunningham has made these comics and, furthermore, shared them with all of us to read for free. Not only do they hit that subject right on the head, they are an invaluable first-hand experience of this world that I am so very interested in learning about whatever I can find.
On a different level, I’m even more concerned with helping make the ignorant aware of the real cause and effect of mental disease. Like Megan Fox. She’d benefit from reading these comics–if, whoops, she actually read comics like she brags she does. Alas.
