Some folks asked me to post my processes for these ortho things, so here I go…
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So the needs are : Something mysterious escaped from a secret lab facility. Design an ortho that not just gives modelers, bg painters, and board artists an idea of the space but also incite a mystery. What kind of people inhabited the space? What was its history? What were the people working on? How and why is this facility now in shambles?
First I quickly doodled ideas on a sketchbook with the needs in mind. It’s always nice to know where I wanna go before I start. I tried to really take my time with this phase. I did research, I explored a butt load of ideas, I designed inside the box then design outside the box.
Next, I made a rough sketchup model. I tried to be as descriptive as possible and focused on creating a path for the eye. I populated the scene with props even if I felt I could draw the prop freehand. It saved time and energy in the long run. And yea, sure I’m a fan of using sketchup for this type of stuff, but I highly recommend to try it freehand with perspective if this is your very first ortho rodeo. The fundamentals you learn building something from nothing without the aid of a 3D program is hella good for you.
I then draw on top of the model as any times as I need to but I didn’t just trace everything willy nilly. I improvised as I traced. It’s like when you’re jamming in a band and your bass player is holding a great grove. I don’t just play the same exact shit he’s playing, I solo on top of it. I let my soul do a little singing here. I believe having a strong foundation works wonders when exaggerating and generating designs with personality.
Alright, so now I have an awesome line drawing. Time to add value. The eye craves this stuff. Highest value contrast is where the eye wants to go to. This is where I played around with lighting and drama. At this point I’m glad I’ve made it through half the battle.
I then roughed in the local colors with a general palette in mind. Everything is subject to change so do your best to cut everything into different layers. I wanted to wanna give myself the option to quickly alter the hue, value, or saturation of any given layer without stressin’ about re-paints.
Lastly, I used my knowledge of painting to finish the piece. I tried to really hone in on the storytelling and to not noodle around. Every time I thought I was done or satisfied, I checked with both my story notes and my old school notes then checked back with my piece. How can I improve it? How can I get from 80% there to 100%? Can I improve the lighting to emphasize the mystery? Is there a prop that needs to be added to improve the storytelling. Is there a prop I need to remove that detracts from the storytelling?
Illustration for an Editorial Article written by Esme Murdoch for Atmos Magazine: “Universal truths behind the climate crisis can be difficult to face—we’ve known collectively as a global population of the dangers, harms, and consequences of climate change for hundreds of years and for generations of human existence. And yet the urgency to limit the destruction has only increased over the last few decades. But it will take all of us to take responsibility, to heal, and to do the work—together.” You can read the full article here.
Website Rebranding | Groundswell: Community Power (2021)
illustrations I made for Groundswell’s website rebranding : Groundswell is a 501c3 nonprofit that serves local U.S communities by developing solar projects and resilience hubs; helping neighbours share power; reducing energy burdens through efficiency; connecting clean energy supply chains to local economic development; and leading pioneering research to help light the way to affordable energy. Through their work, they are building clean energy futures that reflect the beautiful diversity of the communities they serve.
Aganetha Dyck Bee Comb Sculptures don’t seem intentional, more like ornamental sculptures used to wistfully decorate English gardens that nature had other plans for. Aganetha’s work considers environmental issues, specifically the power of the small and its impact globally. Over the past twenty-two years, she’s collaborated with bees to further her studies on interspecies communication, her research asks questions about the ramifications all living beings would experience should honeybees disappear from earth.
The porcelain figures are placed the bees in enclosures serving as a canvas, the bees are in effect her partners in the creations of the beautiful honeycomb sculptures. The figurines covered in the bee’s honeycombs are meant to show how intertwined our two species existences are, and start a conversation begin about our behaviors towards bees. Leading to questioning the ramifications all living beings would experience should honeybees disappear from earth.
View “Guest Workers,” a short film on her sculptures.
‘What do we want to say and how do we want to say it and to whom?’
• For years we’ve been warning against artists ‘parachuting’ into unfamiliar territory.
• Socially involved Art Workers, like everybody else, have to choose among the tsunami of issues around sustainability that we should be weighing in on, fighting for. But sometimes it feels like we are spread so thin that we will blow away. As a South-Westerner my list is headed by climate change, water, indigenous rights, saving public lands and the heartbreaking fates of the youthful undocumented immigrants of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) whose lives have been put in terrible limbo because they had the courage to risk their futures by speaking out against unfair immigration policies.
• Confronted by this endless list we have to focus, hard as it may be, to choose. We have to ask ourselves ‘What do we want to say and how do we want to say it and to whom?’
• Of course the rest of the endless litany is equally important: racism, poverty, incarceration, guns, #metoo, #timesup, homophobia, police brutality, Middle Eastern wars and Palestinian rights, deadly pollution on land and sea, the toll of fossil fuel extraction, race, gender, class, religion. What did I miss?
• Suzanne Lacy, who is my longtime Social Practice mentor, say she works at the intersection of community, development and visual art; she talks about creating ‘Citizen Artists’. She’s a genius at contextualising non-Art contexts, at choreographing collective expression and bringing unheard voices to the foreground; if not exactly the centre.
• These days Lacy’s planning for a solo show at the San Fransisco Museum and she’s struggling over how to create visual impact in a museum while maintaining authenticity within the community. She says ‘The Art World is where I get to TALK, the Community is where I get to LISTEN.’
• Suzanne has said if she hadn’t been interested in addressing the Art World she would have gone into politics and she credits Allan Kaprow with showing her the advantages of putting LIFE into the GALLERY and putting the GALLERY into LIFE. She talks about not starting with an idea but arriving at the idea as it’s generated by those at the table.
• A recent panel in Santa Fe on Feminism and Intersectionality emphasised ‘Radical Inclusiveness’ and made several points about entering a community that is not our own:
– Take part but don’t take-the-lead. – Curiosity is good but not voyeurism. – Honesty is good, condescension isn’t. – You cant fake empathy.
• Have we educated ourselves about unfamiliar cultures? Listen. Do they want our help? Who are they and who are we? Shouldn’t it be just ‘we’?
• Artists working ‘in’ communities have to work ‘with’ communities and sometimes social success means aesthetic sacrifice.
• We are still a long way from achieving the gender and racial fluidity that we’ve begun to contemplate in recent decades. Black Lives Matter has changed the dialogue and upped-the-ante just as #MeToo and #TimesUp are resurrecting Feminist issues and some real soul-searching about ‘whiteness’.
• There’s no question that we need ‘thicker skins’ in order to really understand racism within our society. I’m always torn between staying safe, focusing on what I know, and venturing into areas where I may not be welcome and my ignorance will be exposed. I’m not entirely sure why the terms Multiculturalism and Identity Politics are so discredited (I know the Right Wing has had a lot to do with it) since they are terms that lead to a consideration of diversity, hybridity, cross-overs and ‘intersectionality’ – the favourite terms these days for working across boundaries, and even across walls.
• In the last few years groups formally perceived as voiceless have stood up and finally been heard. Indigenous people at Standing Rock and in the Idle No More movement, have raised consciousness not only about pipelines, clean water and treaty rights but suddenly the Art World knows something about Indians…which is rare.
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Q: What do we want to SUSTAIN? Certainly not the status quo! Western-so-called-Civilisation? ALL Civilisation? How about the entire planet and everything on it? How do we do that? We as a society are JUST beginning to understand that Social Sustainability is inextricably linked to Ecological Sustainability, which is a basic necessity for survival, and for Public Practice Art. Like Public Practice, sustainability is dependent on empathy and down-sizing, both of which are hard to achieve in a racist, capitalist society based entirely upon unsustainable growth, non-stop-for-profit-expansion and to-Hell with the consequences. Growth of everything from mansions to nuclear arsenals to strip-mines to corporate conglomerates to ever-larger-and-more-expensive-installations and artworks.
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• E.F.Schumacher’s influential 1973 book ‘Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered’ occupies a small but beautiful place in our pantheon. In this country ‘small’ is no longer just ‘beautiful’ its CRUCIAL. It’s not just a matter of tiny houses, urban in-fill, biking, resource conservation, environmental protection, recycling and planned parenthood. It’s a psychological impetus that is needed EVERYWHERE. Downsize or die. Halt or at least ‘slow’ growth until some sort of sustainable justice for both PEOPLE and the PLANET is reached.
• Let’s take a moment, this moment, to salute organic growth. It’s Spring, seeds are sprouting, and a lot of you are just beginning your activist lives.
• When we are talking about ‘inclusivity’, about uniting whole communities, the bigger the scale, the broader the reach the better. Part of downsizing for socially engaged and Eco Artists is conceiving of ones art within a context of unsustainable resources like water and fossil fuels. Building towards the future instead of planning for posterity, spending time in our own communities. We are still searching for our Post-Capitalist self. An alternative to the rugged individualism of manifest destiny. An alternative that allows working people a decent living and human rights, which are, alas, rapidly being downsized.
• I have great faith in small-scale projects that have potential to spread into much larger spheres.
• The strongest Public Practice, like Activism, starts from a specific location, from consciously ‘lived’ experience. But it as to move-on-out from there in a kind of ripple effect. If you don’t know your ‘hood’ you’re likely to idealise or disparage its inhabitants, fail to recognise threats or choose the wrong solutions as the basis of your Art.
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Q: So, where do you live? What’s your centre? How far out do the ripples go? Are you ‘following’ or are you remaining at the centre and holding the reins? Are there other Artists? Community members with whom you may have little in common until you forge alliances over issues that effect everyone? Who do you live with? Dispossessed locals, deracinated newcomers, grumpy landowners, Artists, opioid addicts, rich part-timers, stray dogs, abandoned horses, feral cats, threatened wildlife, too many damn bunnies?
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• For some of us the best way to deal with the onslaught of urgent issues is in trying to strengthen our local community.
• A concentration upon PLACE, which cant be conflated with land, site or landscape, can bring EVERYTHING into focus, including politics.
• I’ve heard from friends coming from generations of deracination, (they are often Jewish, but also Middle Eastern, African & Asian) that it’s often hard to work with rooted communities when one can identify no ‘home’ place of ones own. I insisted in a 1998 book called ‘The Lure of the Local’ that wherever we find ourselves, even for short periods, we have to take responsibility for that place as long as were are there. I talk about ‘senses of place’ (plural)… it’s a much better idea than a sense-of-place, I mean, there isn’t just one. Listening to the stories of long term occupants of the place we live and work is one way of knowing ‘where’ we’ve landed for however short or long a time.
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Q: How can Artists help change the way humans relate to nature and to each other? We share DNA with every form of life on the planet. It’s not too late for humanity to consider the legal right of nature herself. Indigenous people are demanding rights for nature and for themselves, from India to Ecuador to New Zealand where a 400,000 acre National Park taken from the Maori’s has been designated as a ‘person’ not property. Land belongs to itself; what a concept! Nature, which of course include ‘us’ should not be a commodity that we can sell off to the highest bidder. It’s a community we belong to and harm at our own risk.
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• Pollution causes three times a many death as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
• The blip-in-time that is the human race will not be missed but we’ll miss ‘us’ a lot. Everything’s coming-down-the-pipe far faster than we imagined it could. I used to worry about my grandsons and future generations down-the-line. Now I worry about my son, who is in his early 50’s.
• As things race out-of-control and we do nothing as we destroy our environment, run out of water, witness species extinction and climate change and so forth, we should know that similar catastrophes have happened to the planet many times before.
• This era, called the Anthropocene since 2000 is also dubbed the Misanthopocene or Anthromosaic. An era of loneliness and isolation as species go extinct and desertification increases, as the oceans rise and the ground waters sink. The sense of urgency is so overwhelming it can stop us in our tracks and make us hide our heads in the sand – which by the way is another endangered material.
• Sea level around Manhattan is projected to rise 6ft with this century. Huge cities can’t build a wall the way the wealthy do to protect their seaside Summer homes! As we know from East and West Germany, Israel, Palestine and the US/Mexico border – WALLS ARE NOT THE ANSWER.
• It’s coming down to a race between HUMANS and CLIMATE CHANGE to see who can get rid of us first. George Orwell said in his dystopian book, ‘1984′: WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE. WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST.
• Artists can create history and challenge it by telling stories of resilience that give us hope and courage. Some of us advocate destruction of offensive monuments to evil-doers others recommend their removal to museums as artefacts of an unlamented past.
• I retain my admiration for that ultimate in eye-opening Feminist truisms: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL AND (FOR ITS SIGNIFICANT OTHER) THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL. These remain living and dynamic propositions. A brilliant way to translate lived-experience, positive and negative, into political consciousness. They ‘open’ ways to understand ‘others’ experiences. When we know our family histories, and those of our neighbours, and of our lands, ’who’ and ‘where’ we are in a political and historical sense, we are far better equipped to be compassionate and collaborative within a time-and-place we all share.
• Ultimately words and images offer ways to integrate our own imaginings of life into those of a polity.
• The relationship of imagination to reality and action is crucial, especially for Artists and Writers who specialise in acting in the gap between ‘two’, or between art and life. If we lean too far on the imagination side we risk falling off the edge into wishful-thinking, like ‘Visualise World Peace’ then we fall back onto the couch! Lean too far onto the reality side and we risk getting so discouraged that we get stuck in the status-quo.
• We Art Workers have always had to be satisfied with small victories, with raising consciousness rather than raising politics or changing policies. Sometimes we fool ourselves about how successful our projects can be. Yet every one of us has some faith in Art as a way of inspiring, or even jolting, or even just pin-pricking people out of their self-imposed or received stupors. Of adding visual layers to the global debates. I always say that Art Workers can’t change the World but with the right allies little miracles can happen. Well maybe not miracles, but a lot of hard work, catalysing a generation, hanging-in there.
• We need to discuss the failures as often as the successes. These times call for some tough-love and honesty with ourselves and our colleagues because being effective seems more crucial today than at any time I can remember, and i’ve been messing with this for some 60 years. Once again…
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Q: What do we want to say and how do we want to say it? Where do we go from here? A: I hope you haven’t been holding your breathe for answers to all these questions cos-I-ain’t-got’em! But these questions are directed as much at me as they are at you. Personally the temptation to be cynical, nasty and bridge-burning can be overwhelming. But that puts us in the same bag as the opposition. There’s a line between skepticism and cynicism. Somebody said pessimism is a waste of time and optimists are ‘dissed’ as utopian woo-woo, and politically reactionary. It’s true that we need to be down-to-earth but we also need to have something to hope for, something to reach for.
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I hardly ever give a talk without citing Antonio Gramsci:
This piece was inspired by thoughts of rising sea levels, and imagining what some places might look like in a couple decades. I like the idea of using art to help raise awareness of climate change and environment issues.
Process shots and high res files for this piece are available to my patrons on patreon, and a process video is coming soon!
A little PSA. Our rivers have kinda become the scapegoats of our modern lives. Our clean drinkable water is actually super limited, and a lot of what we do indirectly pollutes them- our fueling of capitalist culture, trash management and overall carelessness. Even if we live in the cities, our trash has that ability to flow and fly all the way out to the rivers and to the seas, our cars leak oil and it gets washed into the drains which also makes it to rivers, making the people who live near rivers sick and the fishes in them dead. The drawing of the river I did barely looks like what we normally associate with a river anymore, dammed and flowing with trash. It just really breaks my heart what we have done but don’t realise. Please, let’s be better humans. . Thankyou,@ddaddystar for the crit and inspiration. Comic initiative hosted by @selangor_maritime_gateway.
Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule — 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years by Agnes Denes, located in Ylöjärvi, Finland, 1992-96.
[…] Ms. Denes is no stranger to projects that, on paper, would appear unrealizable. In the mid-1990s, she built a mountain in Finland, Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule creating a virgin forest sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment that will be protected for 400 years. (“Other people move mountains, I build them,” she quipped, taking a shot at artist Francis Alÿs’s famous 2002 performance piece When Faith Moves Mountains,in which 500 Peruvian volunteers used shovels to shift a sand dune over a few inches.) […]
“I do very large projects because there’s no sense doing little things in the corner to teach the world what needs to be done,” […]She listens intently, training her large dark eyes on you like a hawk deciding whether you’d make a good meal. But she doesn’t mind doing all the talking, especially when it concerns her long list of achievements.
“That doesn’t really interest you,” she said with a coy smile after indulging questions about the dunes. “You want to know other things about me. You want to know why I get comparisons to Lenny.” Lenny? “Leonardo da Vinci.” She gets such comparisons largely because of her passion for science.The 11,000 trees on her Finnish mountain, for instance, were not planted haphazardly. Seen from above, they create a dizzying mathematical pattern that Ms. Denes devised using the golden ratio and the spiraling seeds at the centers of sunflowers. […]
