#I tried to go with pics where the chains are fully on display

[ualscout]

Captain’s Log: 16 Triggers II

Communication

24-27/09/18

The 16 prompts continued...

9: Recreate the moment after…………..…

Alright, I’m really not proud of myself for this one. I couldn’t think of anything, so I drew a picture of a shattered window from the inside looking out onto a kid with a baseball bat and a look of shock and terror. This is a universal “oh shit” moment, which I think most people can relate to on some degree even if it isn’t baseball. I used the window to frame the kid and put him at the center of attention, and by using the window as a frame I also added focal layers to the sketch.

(The universal feeling when rolling a nat1, or a critical fail)

After I did it I thought of a ton of different ideas though. Like rolling a nat1 in a Dungeons and Dragons game when everything is on the line. Or closing out of a program/having a program crash and realizing you forgot to save. Or saving and forgetting you just saved so you save again. I dunno, I thought of better stuff but didn’t have enough time to go back and fix it because I just didn’t have time. Let’s just say the kid rolled a nat1 or something?

10: Reconfigure a newspaper

Y’all know Brexit? Yeah? Cool.

Anyways, I’ve always been encouraged to be aware of the world by my high school social studies teacher. I get news updates on my phone and all that. I gotta say, the world is depressing. When you’re constantly getting updates on the next mass shooting or stabbing or acid attack or stupid thing politics did, it’s hard to stay positive, but it’s kinda necessary to be aware and look at it with as little emotion as possible. It kinda feels like a ball and chain anchor.

(Pics of the ball and chain hanging from door)

So I represented that feeling by making a literal ball and chain out of newspaper about Brexit. Then, on the chains, I wrote

“Calling the world from isolation, ‘cause right now that’s the ball where we be chained”

from Humility by Gorillaz, which is about Brexit. The biggest project out of the prototypes, definitely. I did the installation first then documented it in my sketchbook.

11: Apologise for a mistake (visually)

This one was really hard because in order to apologize, you need a mistake. By nature, this needs some kind of narrative behind it that you can’t use words for and ideally want in one panel. Some boring ways of doing this could be helping someone up after tripping, or patching up something that broke, or WAIT.

I thought of something better- someone being stabbed through the heart by someone they love while being hugged by said person. Angst central… why didn’t I think of that earlier…?

Anyways, I did something kinda boring…

I made a confession box. I kept the statement vague. People could accept the apology, deny the apology, apologize for something they did and feel bad for, etc. I did it because I wanted to use the cardboard I brought lol. It ended up getting tossed by someone, so… whoops.

12: Record what another student is doing

Someone was passed out at their desk lol. I hope they’re doing alright. They seemed tired and kept sniffling. I just kinda scanned the classroom and saw them, basically taking the easy way out. Didn’t take a picture of them because that would be kinda creepy.

13: Make a path for others to follow

(How can the thread be red if it’s invisible?)

There’s this superstition about everyone having a red thread tied around their pinky that’s connected to someone else’s pinky and that person is their soulmate. You just need to follow the thread, which is harder than it sounds… I wanted to make an animation or something based off of that. It would follow two ends of the string, winding through the city and terrain, and watch the characters pick up and manage the amounts of red string they find along the way. I’d want this to be a music video, ideally to “Little Talks” by Of Monsters and Men or “One Red Thread” by Blind Pilot. I did some sketches in my book- the characters and everything would be simple marker sketches while the only color is the red thread.

… but I ended up displaying a meme option. One of my favorite emotes is OwO and it looks very demonic when you fill in the eyes with darkness. So I drew the emote normally, then blinking, then opening to darkness to the words “We all have demons, and sometimes they win.” This is 100000% a meme and shouldn’t be taken seriously, despite what my tutor thinks… Anyways, the path to follow was the path to your inner demons.

14: Add something extra

Do you guys have chipotle here? Well, guac is always extra. I don’t like guac personally, but it seems like something that can be put into other food things to disgust people. For instance: an ice-cream cone, a pom pom, a snowball, etc. I didn’t really have any good ideas, just that…

15: Making a drawing without touching a pen

… Okay.

(Fountain pen for flare and sarcasm)

I didn’t touch a pen, I did touch a pencil though. I drew a fountain pen and wrote “no” in pen because it was funny. Sometimes it be like that, chief. I think it’s funny because the pen is so carefully drawn and sketched in a pencil style, then you just have “no” there. Again, I just do things to try and be funny.

16: Make a neglected place loved

The first thing that came to mind was a grave made markless after being out and exposed to the elements for so long. 

(Like this- creepy and generic)

And that got me thinking about how that’s the last thing holding their physical body to the mortal plane. Their body is there, there is likely evidence of their existence, but no one will ever know for sure. The memory of them and the physicality of their body are completely disconnected. Not to mention these graves are so old they’re likely not visited or cared for in the same way recent graves are, they’re not remembered. I wanted to do something to make them remember…

… but then I decided to just make haunted shit. I like the idea of fixing and renovating even if it takes away some of the personality of the house. I think it’s like a reset, like painting the walls in a rental or getting a tattoo. But what if the house didn’t want to be remembered? What if someone wanted it to stay the same…?

Enter the song “O Green World” by Gorillaz. It sounds like a person washing windows in a slasher film. I like the idea of following an unaware protagonist and following the narrative through the windows, like some of the other pieces I did in the past (see Scene Change: No Story Time and prompt #9). I kinda just drew a basic concept, but it would take place in a haunted house and the characters would interact with the different sets inside.

BONUS: ZINE!!!

I swear to God when the tutors were briefing us on the zine I felt my heart beating with anticipation. I wanted SO. BADLY. To do this. Ideas started racing through my head and I felt my hands jitter as ideas raced through my head. A zine is the perfect way to tell a story and boy do I have stories to tell.

I thought through a bunch of ideas, like doing something about Mothman, explaining the story behind Haakon’s banishment, doing something about The Adventure Zone, but I realized I could tell a cohesive story by just making it like a textbook. I took from the prompt first prompt, recreating and object from my past. Again, not my past.

This is the past of Bo Phadez and Sandman. My first long-term DND character met an elemental golem the first session of the game, shoved a handful of ash into its receptacle, and unfittingly named it Sandman. Sandman went through a whole character arc with Bo during the game, with them nearly getting blown up in the pursuit of an infinite power supply. The Game Master threatened killing him multiple times… but he knew I’d make him regret it. Sandman remains my favorite thing to have come out of my misadventures in DnD yet.

Time was short, so I had to act quick. I wrote the lines as if they were part of an SCP file or a textbook. That way, even if the reader didn’t understand the crazy world the story took place in (jumping from a desert planet to a space opera with nukes and guns in a page with characters pulled out of a Russian version of Lord of the Rings. I used a brush pen to make bold and quick lines.

As I drew, I realized I spent less and less time for each page… I just knew how to make the characters look how I wanted. I know pencil was banned, but I used it for putting down lines, and at some point I just stopped and went with the pen. I had a lot of fun considering the different blocking and ways to compose the screen, as well as making the text fit in the frame. I played with colors a bit, making sure to use them to show how Sandman was changing forms and powers without fully doing it. To make full use of the frames, I cut the paper so I could glue the backs of the pages together so I wouldn’t have to deal with creases while I drew.

Honestly, making this zine gave me an epiphany. I want to draw like this for the rest of my life. I love designing the characters and getting to know their designs well enough to do them quickly and expressively. This certainly wasn’t my best work, but it was the quickest one with the best results and the most pride in my work.

I really wanted to pursue this more.

This was the moment I decided I wanted to specialize in animation.

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In conclusion, I think I make art for reactions. I.e. whenever I had trouble thinking of deep connections that I would actually care about I tried to go for comedy or sarcasm. I don’t know why, but maybe it’s because I’m an entertainer at heart. I really enjoyed doing all these miniprojects. It’s like throwing pasta at the wall and seeing what sticks. This kind of format lets me really stretch my thinking style because I didn’t care too much about making sure the end product was perfect- I just wanted good ideas and had fun with it! Some prompts came slower than others, but I always figured something out.

#log entries #part I: diagnostic #trigger: 16 prompts