Sunday, January 26, 2014

Get Outta Your Head

He was tired of always being in his head. 
Surrounded by the echo of self doubt and hindsight. 
He had enough!...and so he decided today was the day and told himself 
"GET OUTTA YOUR HEAD" 
and meant it. 

on a side note...my blog template went away. now its been stripped down to the basics. im taking it as a sign to keep things simple. 

Sunday, January 05, 2014

black & white





My favorite part about illustrating a piece is always getting to color it at the end. It's like being transported to 6 year old me with a coloring book and a big ol' boxset of 120 crayolas....with every hue of the rainbow with fanciful names such as Mango Tango, Razzmatazz, and Purple Mountains Magesty! pure heaven. 

But sometimes when a kid has 120 options, they get a little overwhelmed and don't know where or how to begin. So I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and bring it back to the basics. I wanted to see what a kid would create if all they had was a single black sharpie. 

So far...its been actually kind of liberating as it lets me focus on a different aspect of me...Its allowing me to focus on the beauty of fonts and focus on shapes and silhouettes...here's looking forward to where this marker takes me.

subtleties and safety pins



Her

I got the chance to see Her by Spike Jonze and it was eerie just how relateable the story was. It was filled with a beautiful hollowness that amplified the simultaneous wish/fear for connection. The movie made me deconstruct how we communicate as a society today with evolving social media and made me redefine what i consider a relationship/friendship. As a result, it made me wonder about the substance of all the likes, follows, and retweets out there in the world and if they really do connect us people. Ultimately though, the movie made me realize not to doubt the quality of the connection but instead embrace and celebrate that a connection was being made when needed.

There were so many layers to this film that i loved and still think about days after....but the one thing that consumed me while watching it was something small. I just couldn't stop staring at it. It was the safety pin that held Her perfectly in place in his pocket so she could see the world with him. It was such a subtle detail that made Theodore's and Samantha's relationship real to me. I could imagine him struggling to find a solution, perhaps placing a box of tictacs or tissues in his pocket to prop her up, or perhaps unsuccessfully pinning her crookedly into place a few times before figuring out the perfect height for her to share the world with him. All these things played out in my head and made him real to me versus just being a wonderfully written character being played by an actor. The safety pin  made me obsess about the subtleties that authors, illustrators, animators, and actors capture that transforms a fictional character into being real.