Ok so it's a lil different but it's all good

Hey guys, it's me.  This is the latest installment of my thesis project, Optimism vs Pessimism.  A few things have changed since I last gave y'all an update.

On the last post, I said that the words would be really big - like, each letter would take up an 8.5-x-11" piece of paper - but that didn't quite work out.  I wanted the piece to be more interactive, so I made the words into cards roughly 1-2" tall, so the viewer could pick them up.

I also implied that the words would face the same way, and that's changed as well.  In a given pair, one word is written normally on the paper, while the other one is written upside down.  This forced me to make the piece into more of a game.

There are two baskets and a round table.  One basket is labeled "Optimist or Pessimist?" and it's filled with green-pink 3D glasses.  The other basket is labeled "Are you sure?" and it has about thirty paper eye-occluders (paper circle on a stick) in it.  On the table, 64 cards say either bad things or good things, depending on which color lens the viewer is looking through, and a sign above the table reads "Put these cards right side up."  If the viewer is a pessimist, they'll look through the green side and arrange the cards so the bad words are seen.  If they're an optimist, they'll look through the pink side and arrange the cards so the good words are seen.  However, more than one person will look at this at a time, and there's only one set of cards.  If an optimist and a pessimist are looking at the cards simultaneously, they'll disagree on which way the cards go, because the optimist's words look upside down to the pessimist, and vice versa.  They'll inevitably have to realize that they have the option to look through the other eye and therefore see the words from the other person's point of view.  This teaches them that, when they don't understand what someone else is doing, the best thing to do is to try to figure out where they're coming from.

I'm worried because the cards are just words now, and it's gonna be harder to make art out of it.  Unless I can color them or something...

Finally Making Progress

Hey everyone!  It's me, Riley, back again to talk about my thesis.  As the title says, I'm finally making some decent progress on this, though there are a few snags here and there.

For those of you who don't know or just forgot, my thesis is about optimism vs pessimism and the worldwide need for balance between them.  The piece itself is a six-foot-tall list of at least 40 overlapped pairs of words.  In each pair, one word is a good thing, while the other word is a bad thing, and both words are the same length.  For example, good/evil (4 letters), freedom/slavery (7 letters), and so on.  This is so I can effectively overlap them by the letter - for good & evil, the letters would be overlapped like (G/E)(O/V)(O/I)(D/L) so each letter pair can share a piece of 8.5"x11" paper.  Probably copy paper because it's cheap.  The viewer would then don a pair of pink-green 3D glasses and have to choose which lens they want to look through.  If they choose the pink lens, they can only see the good words, because the pink lens cancels out the pink letters.  If they choose the green lens, they can only see the bad words, because the green lens cancels out the green letters.

I'm running into a bit of an issue, though.  I'm doing this with prismacolor markers, and as much as I love the ease with blending the ink, they're not that great once they start drying out.  And I'm not made of money, so I don't wanna have to keep buying new markers to keep a consistent shade.  I was thinking about making this digital, but it would require a lot of printer ink...  Any suggestions?  Should I go digital, or should I just work with a different type of marker?  Acrylic paint, maybe?  

Aight Let's Get This Show On The Road

Hey, everyone!  Riley here. This is the second update on my thesis artwork.

In case you didn't see my first post, my thesis topic is heavily philosophical. It's based on an experience I had, where I created a happy place for personal use and later added things that made it more "realistic" - more like Earth. It got a lot darker than I would have originally intended, after I put crime, discrimination, death, war, and other ideas in the world. When I looked at the world as a whole, I saw the evil I created, and I felt I had rendered this "happy place" no longer happy. But then it came to my attention that, before I added the evil, the world felt out of balance, like there was too much goodness for this to be an actual place. The shadows, I realized, balanced it out. However, after a few months of developing the evil side, devoting my thought process to every little problematic detail, I couldn't take it anymore. It was too negative, too foul, and it was driving me insane. I couldn't just focus on the bad things, but I couldn't just focus on the good things, either. A world without one or the other is only halfway real. In the end, the statement I wanted to make with this artwork was that although it's in our nature as human beings to see the extremes - here, the good and evil side of a make-believe world - it's not necessarily healthy to only see one extreme or the other.

You can see here that I'm using a 3D glasses technique, but in reverse, ish.  Instead of trying to see both at the same time, I'm using the glasses to have the viewer focus on each color individually.  The above photos are just gradient maps, where I tested out the effect and tried to separate the colors.

I'm using 3D glasses because it effectively illustrates my idea. The world has good parts and bad parts, like 3D glasses have a green lens and a pink lens (at least mine do), and even though it might not make sense when you see it through both sides, it's just not complete when you shut one side out. It's unrealistic to ignore the good side of the world, and it's unrealistic to do the same to the bad side. And yet, people always seem to like making a special effort to only see one side or the other.

These sketches are more tests:  I wanted to make sure that there would be enough contrast in each color to differentiate the contents, despite the fine lines.  (Sorry about the photo quality in that last one, btw.  It was the most decent picture I had, taken on a phone camera through a pink 3D glasses lens in a poorly-lit classroom.)

The final artwork isn't going to be words; those are just placeholders for images depicting the concepts. For example, where it says “war” there would be a drawing of a soldier in battle.  Either that, or it IS going to be words, but they'll be prettier than my chicken scratch handwriting.  Maybe a combination.  I guess we'll see!

The piece itself is going to be about human-sized, so maybe around 5'5" to 6'?  Somewhere around there??  I'm making it that big for a few reasons:

1. So lots of people can see it and read it from a distance.  If you're going to stuff yourself full of opinions and go around spouting off about your worldview, I've got to make sure you get a good, long, clear look at what you're choosing... And what you're choosing to ignore.
2. I've also got to make it as big as a human, because people are made of opinions, and if you try to fill a regular house with dollhouse furniture, you're not going to get very far.
3. Honestly there's not really a lot of technical detail in this.  There's two colors, one really simplistic composition (well, actually two, but it's the same composition just reversed and layered over), and it's probably going to be colored pencil or marker.  Like I said, not much detail, so I can afford to make it as big as me.

Oh!  Speaking of colored pencil.  These are the colors I'll be using:

They're prismacolors, so r.i.p. my wallet, but like I said, I'm not sure if it'll be colored pencils or markers.  Does anyone out there know where I can get a bunch of ^^these-color prismas for cheap?  Please let me know if you do.  I'm broke as you know what, so any "I know a guy" comments would be appreciated.

Also, I need a bit of advice for the illustrations.  Should I use images, or should I keep it as words?  I feel like the words get it across more clearly, but images would be more artistic.  Thoughts?

If I choose to keep the words, what should I do with them?  I'd like them to be as clear and legible as possible, but if I'm going to just write words, I need to make it fancy or something.  What sort of fonts should I use?  Script, sans serif, decorative, serif...?

If I choose to do images, how should I imply the composition?  Should I have the colors get lighter towards the center, or should I have the drawings all facing towards the center?

Any comments, opinions, thoughts would be amazing!

The World Is Good AND Bad

Pro tip:  Never accidentally invent a country.  Well, I shouldn't say that - plenty of successful people have invented countries and they seem to be doing fine.  What you really shouldn't do is invent a country based on a philosophical concept.  If you do, it'll be like "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" and that philosophy will follow you until you die.  Trust me.

My name is Riley.  Welcome!  Come on in, get cozy, and stay a while.  I'm currently working on some philosophy, because I was a Bad Noodle and I invented a country.

"Is the world good or bad?"  We've all probably wondered about this, at some point in our lives.  It occurred to me while I was developing the setting for a story, when I had to add the darker details of a fictitious society.  Between black markets and crime patterns, the world I was making up seemed to be more like Earth than a product of my imagination.  Yeah, there were good things, but even so.  I wondered if this world was still relatively good.

For my thesis project for school, I'll be exploring this question, by investigating and illustrating the highest and lowest points of humanity. What I mean by that is, I'm going to illustrate the most deeply human moments I can, shown as opposites.  So far, the total list of moments includes:

• funerals // births
• panic // relaxation
• homophobia // queer pride
• having to beg // being able to provide
• being ignored // being celebrated
• injury // "mom kissed it so it's better"
• creative block // inspiration
• being so sad you scream // being so happy you cry
• living alone // having a friend
• being a soldier // being a veteran
• discrimination // acceptance
• submitting to a bully // standing up to a bully
• slinking back home // standing strong