Draconaei’s Blog

This project – diagrammed in an earlier post – evolved over two different projects in my Borrowing Light class.  I’ll summarize both in this post.

The first followed the diagram of the last post.  In summary, I broke open a series of glow sticks, and drained the glowing liquid into a hollow glass imitation of a compact fluorescent light bulb.  I suspended the bulb with clear fishing line, and slowly leaked glow liquid from the bulb via a syringe down to a pyrex pie plate.  An early time and late time photograph of the setup are below (as well as a link to a stop-motion video.)

[watch the video here]

The glass is easily recognizable as a light bulb, and the light dripping from within has some interesting symbolism: the depletion of energy that often goes unseen, but is highlighted by the path of light contained in a liquid.  Unfortunately there were quality issues with the documentation here, such as the doorknob and visible floor/wall corners in the photograph.  The next evolution addressed this quality issue, replaced the pyrex pie plate with a circular glass dish (cut by a glassblower so it doesn’t scream “cooking ware”) and addressed the requirement of a “screen.”

The screen is made of white museum board with a series of randomly placed holes of varying sizes.  Light em

inating from the glow liquid in the bowl above passes through the holes and creates colored spots of light on the ground.  The rest of the light is reflected off of the white surface, creating a gradient of color.

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Catching the dripping glow liquid is a clear glass bowl full of water placed on top of the museum board screen.  The glow liquid and water do not mix, so the glow liquid congeals into separate clumps that move throughout the water, eventually settling on the bottom.  The water also splashes with each drop of glow liquid, causing a slight rippling effect in the emitted light.

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Dripping glow stick liquid, while interesting, is a bit too abstract for me I think.  Documentation of the second project is below – again an early time photograph, a late time photograph, and a link to a stop-motion video.  Let me know what you think.  =)

[watch the second video here]

Yet again I’ve had the good fortune of a tattoo design request!  How I love the satisfaction that comes from creating something beautiful and sharing it with others.  This story begins with the doodle on the left.

Rotated 90 degrees, this symbol contains the letters J, F, and O, three letters my friend’s name.  Initially used as a form of signature, he discovered that turning the form on its side somewhat resembled a winged stick figure.  He was fascinated with its tattoo potential, but had no luck graphically translating the idea; here my process begins.

I spun the design in two separate directions.  The first, seen on the left: a unique symbol that somewhat resembles an ancient script, the meaning of which would remain cryptic except to my friend.  He began his request with the intention of ending with a personal symbol along these lines.

The second design, seen on the right: a winged creature maintaining the general shape of the doodle, but given a breath of life (and some artistic liberty.)  His original tattoo fascination was sparked by the doodle’s semblance to a winged stick figure, so this direction also seemed appropriate.

After an exchange of emails, he favored the second direction.  The “shaded” style seemed a bit too basic to me, so I made an effort to add detail and speak a graphic language that better matched the dragon’s general form.  After many iterations, I settled on a broken geometry with implied lines to help to bring out the sharp but feather-like quality of the wings and the sharp quality of the tail, and triangular-like cutouts that bring a serpentine belly to mind.  To keep with the initial simplicity of the original doodle, I kept the design to a basic black-and-white format.  See the final chosen design here:

He plans to get inked quite soon, and I look forward to seeing and posting photographs once he does!

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