Exoticism
Biopower
Model Minority
Diaspora
Triple Package
Melancholia
THE PROCESS:
Tools of the trade:
-Laptop
-Mouse
-Hanvon Drawing Tablet (or a better one if you can afford it)
-PaintTool SAI
-The Internet (for tutorials and references)
-A lot of time and patience
The most daunting task for each creation is facing a blank slate.
The blankness is an inviting, yet threatening commitment. Indeed, there have been many times where I open a blank canvas, sit there for 15 minutes racking my brain and listening to random waterfall soundtracks on Spotify, only to decide that, "It'll come to me later," after which I would spend the next hour on Facebook and so on.
Eventually sketching DOES happen. Really blobby shapes and scribbles. Truly too terrible to actually post, so here is a cleaner sample of a "final" linework layer (although it is difficult to say if/when something is truly finished):
While some people are masters of keeping everything organized and beautiful on a single layer, I am not one of those fortunate individuals:
Having a ton of layers is a bit of a mess when I am trying to switch between tasks. Still, it is an organizational skill that is key to adding dimensionality. Let me reveal another example of this:
Foreground object + Background Ambiance = A dimensional effect
Indeed, objects are only attributed subjective interpretation, understanding, and meaning when they are received within a context.
Take the first of the above images for example. My friend who first saw the draft for this work asked if the "words" displayed are Japanese. She was mildly surprised when I told her that they are just a bunch of random lines and dashes I put together to resemble some real Asiatic written languages. Such symbols are actually completely illegible. Still, with context of real world symbols and aesthetics, people can and will project meaning/etiology onto otherwise neutral objects.
The second and third images serve as additional examples of this phenomenon. A silhouette is just a flat representation of an object until we consider its history, context and symbolism. Additionally, our perceptions of significant objects are further colored and personalized by individual experiences, learning, environments, etc. Again, context is a huge influence on meaning making. An oriental, female robot presented in a razor commercial does not share the same audiences and receptions as that in a child's television show for example.
Another feature of importance is that of lines, which direct and focus the audiences' visions:
I used many references in learning how to manipulate lines to achieve particular effects and greater depth including the works of Scott McCloud, Nick Sousanis, as well as less formal sources, "Yuumei", and "Sakimichan". Using gridlines effectively is definitely something I am still working on improving. Up until now, I've been comfortable simply creating 2-D portraits of manga-like characters. However, that comfort is a huge limitation on what I have the potential and desire to produce.
The last thing I do for all my projects is to go on some kind of photo editing site (PicMonkey; an easy to use favorite) and play with effects and filters. This is important because no matter how great I think I did with hues, shading, and so on, I know that my eyes have been saturated from staring at the same canvas for hours. Colors that seem vibrant and bright at first turn out to be relatively dull and darker colors reveal themselves to be far less contrasting than I had initially perceived.
Notably, this phenomenon occurs with matters of people and places as well. A personal anecdote that reflects this is when I returned home from a fall vacation in London years ago. Home, which I remembered as lively and comforting, suddenly seemed too quiet and uneventful compared to the busy, pedestrian streets of England. Another example that comes to mind is the common commotion that occurs when my [Chinese] family is dining with [fellow Chinese] family friends, and the bill arrives. The intensity with which hands snatch at the bill, accompanied by ferverous bickering as everyone fights to pay, may appear playful in a hot pot restaurant where such scenes are a daily norm. On the other hand, the same scene may seem downright savage had it occured in a Four Seasons hotel restaurant. It can be seen then, that habituation to sights, sounds, smells, etc. can both heighten and obstruct awareness and understanding depending on how difference is perceived.
“If we have a superpower, it’s the capacity to host a multiplicity of worlds inside us, all of us do. Frames of reference from which to see the same world differently, to make the familiar strange.”
Nick Sousanis, Unflattening (96)