Where do ideas come from (again)

willow pattern...mount fuji

Sometimes ideas just come, but sometimes you have to rummage about for them. Sometimes I envy people who see a beautiful landscape and paint it because 'wow!', but animation doesn't really work like that....so...I'm looking for a pair of willow-pattern earrings to replace some I lost, and found these worn fragments somewhere in the depths of ebay(?). They were the 'wow!' The story developed from china plates, from the idea that Willow Pattern tells a whole story and represents a whole world with a different culture, time, and geography. Then, as I had failed to plan the story got stuck in scones and cake, (possibly hungry??) So I started thinking about a resolution I had made to try to make art that had some kind of purpose. Not like a teapot, more like a Banksy. All Art as Propaganda. The story developed organically (artspeak for saying I wondered around blundering into ideas and discarding or adapting them on something of a well-informed whim) with ideas about climate change and world destruction. Those came from playing in a samba band associated with Extinction Rebellion, and from living for the past 3 years in the middle of hideous and large-scale roadworks on the M1. This was when the polar bear mugs (not traditional willow pattern) were introduced. The title came last...when I had worked out what the point of it all was...something Id seen on a placard at a demo (There is no) Planet B.
Obviously, I was never cut out to work in an animation house where planning is absolutely vital. But the process, the figuring it out as you go...that's the challenge and the fun part. Although drawing scones is also fun.

Out of the Shed and Down to the Seaside

 

Before and After

Am I being more shed? I am trying to be braver, and certainly to accept more challenges. I had made the film of the book, so why not the book of the film?..of an animation I made years ago, in Flash.
I can draw better now, (I thought) and I enjoyed the working process of making a series of finished images which would last longer than 1/25 of a second.
Actually, the best part of the film was the soundtrack, in particular the voiceovers by Paul (the voice of the shed) Baldwin, Julie McBean and Chris Moreland.

The picture book would not have the benefit of those so obviously, that was the challenge to go for. Having completed the drawings I immediately decided to redo them all in a more stylised way, which would have been impossible in an animation. Not that that would have stopped me trying.
Now that retirement from academia has removed the pressure to "publish"...it's playtime. And inevitably, it's also time to feel cut off from a creative community and flounder around eating too much cake, like Annie the main protagonist of The Sea. The story itself dates from the early 1990s, when I was seduced by the idea of a "wordprocessor" in the house. This led to a few short stories and the beginning of an epic but doomed fictional biography of my Great Aunt. Sometimes it is useful to explore a completely different medium -but mainly for the change of pace and the opportunity that affords for reflecting on how a story can be told... as much as asking WHY it should be told.
Annie took her feelings of cut-off-ness and sorrow and made magic out of them. Annie is definitely More Shed.

Be more Garden?

      

painting, gardening, animating...

I often look at someone else's work and you think "I wish I could draw/ paint/ animate/ like that" Or even garden like that. I think this is normal, and one of the ways you learn. So you try to copy the style. It's derivative and a bit rubbish. So you rework it and rework it and eventually end up with something that looks a bit like the thing you admired and quite a lot like your own work. The trick is not to give up or fly off at a tangent down another interesting-looking pathway before you have assimilated. Exactly what is it about that style/ image/artist that is so good? why? how?

Then, sometimes, the gardening will inform the painting and the animation will inform the gardening and so it goes (especially when the painting studio is in the deranged jungle end of the garden)

But animation isn't really about the image... it's about the movement - not an avenue of trees but a waving of branches enclosing the imaginary walker and a rustling of leaves and a sense of being in a jagged green and grey ocean rolling past your feet. It's hard to study the movement in an animation, to investigate how that tells the story. It's easier to spot when it's bad but when it's well done...you're just there in the garden, feeling the sun on your face and the freshness of the air.