Just Do It

Thistle Pot Print by Angie Lewin -
shamelessly reproduced from instagram

So, I was looking for inspiration among lino prints, via online communities, instagram, local art galleries and all, looking for ideas about texture and about how to divide an image into just black and white in the most interesting way. Looking at how to adapt this to in - computer drawing. And thinking about some illustrations (still images) I had just agreed to undertake as an experiment, and how I could use the same style.. Then I had a Jean-Paul Sartre moment, and realised that instead of remembering the work I used to make in lino/ collograph, what I needed to be doing was -duh - making new lino prints. Onto actual paper. Cue online shopping for lino and - hopefully - some serious mess. Computers are so clean.

Let Joy be Unconfined...

unlikely fish-person-hero: protagonists don't have to be heroes?
...

... Finally finished the latest animated short! An attempt to use only black and white  and to use texture without getting horribly visually confused. I made this for a particular film festival, with a theme, and have duly sent it off. & will be sending it further afield...But really of course I made it to see what would happen, to wrestle with the temptation to cut corners or suddenly use red and teal blue, and - as with most narrative work - to find out what would happen to the protagonist in the end.

Characters

a protagonist. child who doesn't have a name, or a gender...
but does have a motivation. and a fishtail.

What did we learn this week? Mostly, that no matter how interesting the story is, and how experimental you are trying to be, you still need a "main character"...someone who will mediate between the world of the narrative and the "real world" or what passes for it in the life of the animator. And even when you are trying to avoid anything that smells like a narrator. So I have just remade quite a chunk of movie to unbalance it in favour of a protagonist instead of two-sides-to-a-story.
Which makes the idea I have just started working on, of a one-minute animated Shakespeare play REALLY challenging - the complexity of the plot and the different scenes with different parallel stories and therefore parallel protagonists; do I leave out the subplot? The funny bit with the dog? Even the marvellous Reduced Shakespeare company needed two minutes for Hamlet.
On the plus side, the Viola/Cesario/Sebastian situation will be an interesting place to examine some of those issues of depicting gender in cartoons...