They say that Covid Brain is a real thing. That’s when this pandemic we are in the middle of makes it hard for your brain to plan for the future. It’s trying to cope with the here and now and the future be damned. It’s a survival mechanism. I’ve certainly been feeling some of that for at least the last month or so as I haven’t been able to get any big art projects started. I’ve been getting stuff done but it’s been my small ink drawings and tentacle monsters. I just keep making more of those. I don’t have a plan for them yet though.
I like to make books. Most of my professional work has been something to do with publishing so I know how to make them. It’s been a few years now but back in 2015-2016 (I think) I made a few print on demand books. Turned out there wasn’t any demand for them so I haven’t made any since. I even abandoned one that was about 90% done. It’s tough to get up any enthusiasm for a project that’s meant for others to read when not many people want to read it. But still I want to make some more books if my Covid brain will let me. I think books are cool in general.
I haven’t been writing many ideas down in my bullet point journal in the last month but one idea did come to me this week. One Hundred Words About 50 Drawings. I think I’ve almost done fifty 6×9 inch ink drawings this past month. If not I have at least another thirty of them I drew in times past. My idea is that I could write one hundred word stories about them and put them all into a book. Or maybe more words. We’ll see if I can even muster the enthusiasm to start it.
Another thing on my agenda is to find a place to lay all the 6×9 inch drawings down and look at them. I don’t have a wall to table big enough to put them all on so I might end up using the floor. Sometimes doing that helps me to motivate myself. I put whole lot of my work side by side just to see what I’ve done. Thirty drawings in a pile that I can only view one by one doesn’t always help. Sometimes I need an expanse of them to get some sort of perspective to motivate myself. Maybe tomorrow.
Another idea for a book I had, that came to a screeching halt a few weeks ago, was a book of my photos that I took back in 1996 of various coworkers in the Marvel Bullpen. I figured it would be a nice keepsake for people. I did a little bit of design on the book and even took the time to color correct and clean up all the scans of the negatives of the photos. That took days, But then I stopped. I would have to proof all the photos by printing them out on my inkjet printer. About 35 photos. I just didn’t want to spend the money on the paper and ink. It’ll be a while until I start making money again so it’ll be a while until I get back to this project.
Speaking of photographs I haven’t made anything out of any of my street photos in months. I’m writing this in mid-July and usually by this time I’d have taken three trips to NYC and Bryant Park to take street photos but Covid-19 has kept me away. It has also kept me from making use of my past photos.
What I normally do is pick a dated digital folder that’s filled with my street photos and look through it. I’ll pick out a few photos I might want to work on. Then I crop them, retouch them, color correct them, and post them on Instagram. Or maybe I get a bigger idea for one of the photos and make one of my photocaps out of it. That’s a digitally manipulated photo collage and caption. I haven’t made one of those in months.
I’m not sure why but I haven’t posted any of my past street photos to Instagram at all in at least the last month. I used to post plenty of them. Probably at least once a week but I’d often go on tears and prep and post different ones for days in a row. I’ve barely looked at any of my street photos in weeks and certainly haven’t taken any new ones.
I’ve gotten some of my “Dreams of Things” covers done. I’m approaching having a hundred of them finished and I want to make something out of them. Maybe some sort of book. But I have no idea what kind of book. I guess it would basically be an art book but without some kind of idea or theme, besides the obvious, it’s tough to think of what to do with an art book. How to present the artwork in an interesting way is what I’m wrestling with.
One of the things I’d like to do is to take some nice photos of my art. A few years ago I got a bunch of colored paper, set it up as a background, and took photos of lots of my art. They were art as objects photos. Usually when I photograph my art I looking to get it looking as close to it looks in real life as possible. But with these photos I was trying to make them look more like still lives.
For some of my smaller paintings I’d use a small easel, prop them on it, and then take a photo with a blurred our background. For my “Dreams of Things” covers I’d put down a whole bunch of colored paper on a big drawing board and then drop a cover on top of the paper. I’d artfully arrange the cover and colored paper.
It’ll take a whole day to shoot photos of the art I’ve done so that makes it a big project. At least these days it does. Let’s see if I can get it done.