Work and Play
This week finds us at studiOmnivorous hands-deep in the middle of projects (again), and bouncing around from work to play to work again. As a result, we’ll keep it short and sweet tonight with a brief look at what’s been going on.
We’ve just finished one of a series of album covers for Robert LaSalle; our take on Roots of Paradise was a nice return to illustration and hand-made elements. Starting from a handdrawn sketch, I inked the piece, scanned it into Photoshop, and added fills, textures of maps, and wacom-drawn curlique shading. (Honestly, I would have liked to include a tutorial, and hope to have one for the albums I’ll be making for Cynic and the Sunrise, Love is not as Blind as Me, and Co-writes, Covers, and Collaborations.)
I thought you’d enjoy hearing the reasoning behind the Roots of Paradise image. I’d done a series of sketches trying to get at the heart of the image I wanted to approach, but after a evening listening to the music on repeat to get a feel for the atmosphere, I went to bed, still unhappy with the direction I was headed. As I told LaSalle:
“[...] I had a dream last night that I couldn’t ignore: I was walking through a field, and there were all of these tomato-style bushes, except instead of tomatos, they were tiny versions of your heads, mouths moving a higher frequency than I could hear. When I grabbed a bush and uprooted it, the bulb that came out was your head, with roots moving in the wind and making noises like windchimes. I carried the plant into a room full of maps of the Indian Ocean, and when I touched the maps, I could feel the paper and the dirt on my fingers from uprooting your head. Then I woke up.”
I’m curious to know how many other designers and artists end up problem-solving in their dreams, however roundaboutly.
In other news, I’ve also started production on Teixiptla, a new communal participation installation soon to open at the Metro Arts Gallery as part of the Local Hispanic Artists exhibit sponsored by the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The exhibit runs from August 19th to October 7th, 2011, and in addition to having the on-site installation response, will also engage visitors (and you!) through the online component launching soon.
I’ll have more detail and images in a separate post soon, but in brief: at the most local scale, Teixiptla seeks to engage the local Hispanic population, as well as continuing a dialogue with greater Nashville, by inviting participants to respond on the surfaces of blocks used to build a structure within the gallery. Post-exhibit, the structure will disassemble and travel to various places across the globe through the mail-art correspondance I do. These global artists will be encouraged to install completed blocks in their cities, distribute blank blocks to their populace, and continue the discussion online through the website. Rather than rely on marketing agencies, politicians, and policy-makers to “identify” our demographic for us, I hope to encourage a proactive involvement by Hispanics from all backgrounds to articulate what it means to be a Contemporary Hispanic in today’s global world.
There’ll be more soon, but tonight, it’s short and sweet. Be active, Nashville, and we’ll talk more soon.