TreePower

Finally  - actually quite quickly - finished the illustration for the book, although covers/ endpapers are still to be discussed tomorrow. Now that (see last post) was a good challenge and a good deal has been learned. It's useful to work in a different way sometimes, to have different constraints. They can be arbitrary (a film exactly 60 seconds long, a story without words or dialogue, a limited palette) but again, some artbitrary rules are more useful than others. When I was at artschool, systems painting was still going on - and paintings made to a decision process governed by chance (e.g. throw of a die). But I think agency is important. I make art, films, illustrations for trees, because I have something to communicate - a message, a sense, a celebration maybe even an inspiration. Without agency we cannot communicate.

The tree (in the book) is female. The other main characters are also female - which can make for a confusion of pronouns - but is an important element of the story. We (the author and I) did not discuss gender stereotypes or why and in what possible sense could an artificial christmas tree be regarded as female...because we are old friends and it felt like we didn't have to. So the story can become one about empowering girls - not to do anything in particular, but just to be free of the pink-disney princess-or-maybe-its-OK-to-be-sporty stereotype. And to say not "a girl can do anything a boy can do" but yes, a girl can do anything a child can do, including dream. I tried not to give the girlchild a pink anorak, I did. But that was what she wanted to wear. Cerise pink, to clash with her red and purple hat. A character you can believe in has to have the space to make her own decisions in your narrative...which is why you need to push those arbitrary limitations - in your animation as in your life!
UPDATE: New improved girlchild, with more hair and generally looking less like Elmer Fudd. Avoiding gender stereotypes is quite tricky when you have so little detail to play with AND when faced with the audiences default assumption that people are male...

Treeness

Once there was a tree. This isn't it...this is the other tree. Lending a hand.

Not quite how I imagined it, I thought it would be more wild and splodgy/ scratchy/ dynamic...oh Lord, maybe its really boring.
Apparently, I have found a style and am now stuck with it. Ever have one of those moments when you look at someone else's work and think "I wish I could have drawn/ painted/ animated that."? In that style...And you could copy it. But no...as Anna (the Tree story's author) said - you start to write the character and you think you want them to do this or that or develop in this way or that...but then they just decide to do something different. Apparently the same is true of drawings. I wanted wild and crazy lines, but they wanted to be quite neat and detailed, thank you. Bloody kids!

Persistence of Vision

Having undertaken to illustrate a children's picture story (that's a separate category from picture book, who knew?), I thought it would be so much easier to make a simple series of 30 images instead of 1500 per minute. How much more time I would be able to spend on each, making it perfect. How intricate and endlessly fascinating each image could be, like the best of those I remembered from childhood. Those which allowed you not only to enter the image, but wander around examining flowers, delicate grasses and textures...and imagine the backstory; look deeper and invent more stories. The liberating ability to include random extras, red herrings and decorative details.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
In fact, I have wildly underestimated the demands of a different discipline; I am struggling not to assume that each illustration must be exactly the same size and shape, filling the "screen" , even though some of them are detailed close-ups and some distant views. The shift from landscape to portrait orientation is easier so far - possibly because coming from painting into animation I found the transition from portrait to landscape was quite hard in the first place.

I failed to anticipate the scariness of trying to draw something well enough to withstand that lengthy scrutiny instead of hurtling past at 25 images per second. Weirdly, this means I am sketching on paper and scanning the sketch in a desperate attempt to get the process going...Not only all of this, but more importantly I have also underestimated the power of persistence of vision. Every image I see in my mind is a "scene" - an animation, and I can't read "the tree was about as tall as a person" without seeing the tree grow upwards, a person peer around the branches and then wave at the reader. Trying to build that sense of movement, of energy...trying to develop the dramatic pace that will match that of the original story...without using animation? Will I be able to complete this project without having accidentally created the e-version, the flickbook, and the interactive animated ebook first??
Watch this space.

Animation Pig-out!

still from Mr Madila. Rory Waudby-Tolley 2016

...at the ASFF festival. It runs over the weekend so I can actually go, although I still wish schedulers would consider the possibility that someone might want to watch (eg) ALL 6 of the animation sessions - rather than a random selection or a broad overview - and not schedule them back-to-back on opposite sides of York!! However, manged to do all 6, one family friendly (but the not the one I really wanted to see) and a couple of randomly selected experimental/ artists selections. ... 60 films over the weekend. Plus, caught a samba band, some art galleries and a couple of specialist shops, with time left over to walk the walls. Hoorah!
This year again a major theme seems to be autobiographical and "illustratory" - adaptations of existing stories which have a narrator reading the story. Some of these have no "events" , more an exploration of feelings or relationships, which makes the animation a challenge but also renders the images incomprehensible without the sound. Is this a good thing? The sound and vision should be integrated and complimentary...or a bad thing? I remember being taught back in artschool days that if a (static image) cartoon wasn't funny without the caption, then it wasn't funny...which I suppose should also work for sad/ mysterious/ challenging/ mindbogglingly thought-provoking...etc
For myself I like the challenge of working without dialogue or narrators, (as opposed to the hideous technical challenge of lipsynching).
So I saw some great imagery, some interesting stories, (and some horrors)... but my favourite in the festival was Mr Madila...or the Colour of Nothing. It had great pace, propelled along by a well-considered dialogue which ranged from the profound to the ridiculous with a natural rhythm. The drawings were energetic and expressive; the humour made it popular with the audience but it was more than jokey - after I stopped laughing I went away thinking about it...about why it was so affecting and about what the colour, and the importance, of nothing might be.
check out the trailer...
https://vimeo.com/131544900

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.