Base14

Last night was SCADanimate [skuh-dan-uh-meyt] or however you pronounce it… and it was awesome! Duck ♥ Teslacoil screened alongside many other wonderful student films. The fun was kicked up a few notches with Jason Maurer’s call to department head Jeremy Mooreshead, who was in Greece as the keynote speaker for the Animasyros 2.0 International Animation Festival & Forum, where it was about 2:30 in the morning. But the real highlight of the evening was the SCADanimate cake created by SCAD Animation alumnus and professional cake designer Ashlee Perkins. I personally was elated to see a sucrose recreation of Duck at center stage. We ate the cake, but unlike the Duck cookies earlier this year, I’m keeping the Duck.

Oh, and if anyone is in Northern California today, Duck ♥ Teslacoil is showing at 1pm at the Galaxy Theatre in Riverbank, CA as part of the California International Animation Festival.

As an artist, I experience every now and then a blissful moment when my craft sees eye to eye with tasks in my daily life. One of my favorite instances is when I find myself suddenly faced with an event or holiday. I whip out the paper and my X-Acto and go to town exploring new card styles. Only in the past few months did I think to start photographing them before shipping them off across the country. As you can see, I’ve spent some time exploring cutouts. (Having already spent years making illustrated cards.)

Recently, I am moving into the 3D realm. After the work I did on Overlooked, I want to make my pieces more interactive with the viewer. The idea is that if the viewer must make a contribution to the piece then he/she will be more personally connected to it. This latest piece (my first attempt at a card of this format) is strong in concept but needs a lot more work to make it functionally strong and visually attractive. But what’s more fun than having room for improvement?

Next for Base14 cards? Well, they might not be made of paper at all.

Ironically, I have ‘overlooked’ writing a post about this recent piece. Despite the fact that I completed it for the end of Spring semester, I still think it merits a post. ‘Overlooked’ was intended to be my final project for Drawing II, but I got a little carried away and it quickly became much more work than the project specifications (or time limit) were designed around. The theme of the piece easily lended itself to a notebook which also fit with the eclectic art mix my brain was begging to create. (The pictures below show a mere sampling of the pages in the notebook.)

I have a personal fascination with the idea of what happens to pennies that are tails side up. In our society, pennies have no perceived value; we feel free to take or leave a penny without thought. This notebook is a study of things that are often overlooked, with an underlying feeling of deep personalization given to each page. I brought in old photographs and materials to reference what is forgotten in time, and I used transparency and layouts that reference the physical process of looking (or overlooking.) By incorporating some interactive elements, my goal is to force the viewer to give personal input to the piece, making it harder to ignore or forget.

Unfortunately, effect is lost without the physical interaction with the materials. A lot of time was put into materials experimentaion. I wanted to explore materials that are often overlooked as art media, and use them in unexpected ways. Some examples are tissue paper and ink (manipulated and heated in different ways to create a range of textures) sandpaper, and a U.S. map that folds out of the book.

I hope everyone had a good Fourth! Here at Base14 we wanted to celebrate the holiday by tossing our hat into the ring of recent political activity. The result is the comic below.

Today’s comic probably took longer to make than any other Base14 comic prior, but the extra effort shows! What also shows is the effect my 2D animation classes are having on my drawing abilities. Compare today’s comic to that of the typical comic from last season. There’s a very noticeable improvement in character aesthetics, line quality and three-dimensional forms.

This comic also marks the first time I’ve used Photoshop CS4 to produce a strip. Already I’m finding a few new time-saving features to be well worth the upgrade:

• Canvas Rotation – Allows me to draw from angle angle I like. For example, I tilted the canvas 15° to draw the birthday cake. From my point of view it was level, but when the canvas was righted again, the cake was tilted. Nice!
• Brush Resize – There’s a new, super slick way to resize brushes on the fly. Now with the brush tool selected, all I need to do is hold down Alt/Option and drag horizontally with my right mouse button. And if that wasn’t handy enough, I can also adjust the hardness of my brush by holding down Alt/Option+Shift and dragging. It’s way faster than the old bracket keys.
• Birds-Eye View - Several tools in Photoshop CS4 now are spring-loaded, meaning if you hold down a shortcut key, you will switch to that tool only as long as the key stays down. Then you switch back to you previous tool. This is how panning has worked with the space bar forever, so Adobe added an extra function when you hold down the “P” key. It switches to a “Birds-Eye View” of the entire document, allowing you to reposition your screen like on the navigation panel. This is very useful when I’m colorizing, and need to jump around to different parts of the document to sample colors.

Certainly Photoshop CS4 will be a boon to drawing Base14 Comics in the future. Now I just have to wait for SCAD to put it on all the lab machines, so I can utilize it on those lovely Cintiqs!

On Wednesday I visited West Lafayette, Indiana to reunite with production artist Eli Glasch, voice actor Shauvon McGill and composer Rick DeSutter to record commentary for the upcoming Duck ♥ Teslacoil DVD release. Since it’s such a short film, it helps to pack the DVD with as many special features as possible. So during this session we recorded several commentary tracks: One was just me, discussing how I conceptualized and developed the story. Second was myself and Eli Glasch, discussing the visual style development and animation process. Third was the whole crew, filling in the remaining gaps and talking about the music, voice acting and long-distance collaboration.

The other highlight of the recording session was the custom-made snacks. Alysha and I took some time the night before to bake and decorate some very special Duck ♥ Teslacoil-themed cookies, which tasted as good as they looked! The idea to make cookies that looked like Duck and Monster was mine, but Alysha was the one who figured out how to pull it off. Take that, Martha Stewart!

Alysha here again, and today I’m showcasing a new, experimental accessories collection from Base14. It features deerskin lace with hand rustication combined with silk ribbon and sterling silver. It is a vintage inspired story of small treasures. My goal was to experiment with the play between the matte and shiny materials. As always, construction and finishing is done by hand. Ordering information available upon request, just send me an email.

Why would you work so hard for something only to destroy it?

As an artist, I enjoy my work the most when I am exploring new things. This piece, “Self Portrait Five,” was my first performance piece. Prior to the performance, the work consisted of a jar with interconnected figures around the base as well as a full value 18×24 portrait. For the performance, I crumpled the portrait as small as it could go, crammed it into the jar and lit it on fire. While it slowly and silently burned, my audience had time to reflect upon the message of the work.

This piece explores human capacity for emotion. The dynamism and color range reflects the diverse feelings that can move through an individual at any one moment. (Often overlapping or even with disparity between internal truth and external indications.) The performance explores the idea of commitment and what happens when a person lets go of something he/she has worked towards.

Even once destroyed, the ashes still remain.