Friday, January 9, 2009

Experiments with drawing





















This is very curious. I have the contents of Seth's hard drive, and lately I have been going through it and trying to open files. Some of them are stored in formats that don't open easily, though today I figured out how to open these, which I had never seen before. They are from 2001, and were in a file that Seth had titled "Cicada illos". I am pretty sure they were never published, though it is clear that they are a story. There are six of them in all.
My guess is that these pictures were done entirely with photoshop, or some other CAD program. As I think back--he was living here in San Diego at the time--it seems to me that one time he bought a mouse-pencil (or whatever the device is called), and was trying to learn to do drawing directly onto the screen, or rather onto a special pad that transferred the image to the computer. As you can see from these drawings, it was not entirely successful, though the one on the top has that definite Seth sensibility.
The lines in all these drawings seem like what would happen if you were trying to make pictures using a string for lines. You either get straight lines or lines that have curves; none of them is both curved and angled, the way drawing lines can be. They also are rigidly one width, which Seth did not like. In fact, it was just about this same time (2001) that he rejected rapidograph pens with their sameness of width in favor of felt tip pens which could vary the weight of the line.
An interesting experiment, but one that seemed to go no further than this.

1 comment:

j_ay said...

I guess drawing directly on computer is an acquired taste. I’ve only tried it briefly, and just can’t get around the concept on making a pen movement and having to look up at a screen to see the results.
I still don’t even like using Photoshop to do colouring.
I’d guess, with time and practice, the ability to easily ‘erase’ (delete) mistakes can be nice, but I think this is a thing I’ll stay ‘old fashioned’ about.

Some professionals like the new techniques but probably don’t like the lack of being able to sell original art.

Wacom drawing tablet is the most popular name I’ve seen cited, and their new Cintiq may be interesting: you draw directly on the screen.

Thanks for the new Seth images, always a treat!