I've been using Serif's Affinity Designer for about six months now, having been forced out of the Adobe ecosystem due to it being financially untenable. While there's still a lot of depth to the program that I have yet to explore, I feel there's some value in documenting what I've found to be its limitations as it pertains to the work that I do, particularly since it seems hard to find solid information on what Designer can't do.
For those unfamiliar with the product, Affinity Designer is a vector illustration app by Serif positioned as an affordable alternative to Adobe's Illustrator. It is available as an app for iPad as well as an app on the desktop. I use a Microsoft Surface so my experiences pertain to the desktop app on Windows. I understand the app / MacOS is the primary focus for Affinity, so certain things (like performance) may be expected to be better there than what I experience on Windows.
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
The End of Design
In Arthur C. Danto's After the End of Art, he describes his assessment of the state of contemporary art: quite simply, art felt like it had come to an end because it had. Danto is clear throughout his work that by 'the end of art' he does not mean that there is no new art being done, or that this art is not good. Rather, he means something more like what many would consider art history - an overarching narrative under which the large body of 'art' proper could be subsumed1. No longer was there a clear Gestalt into which art could be made to fit, in its place were many small movements: spurious excitations of ecstatic creativity that dissipated with rapidity. What Danto saw in the contemporary art world was one that had followed the trajectory of the art narrative as far as it could go until at last it was extinguished. This is what Danto called the post-historical moment, in which there was no longer a pale of history into which art belonged (Danto, 1997). This is the world of postmodern art - an eclectic mish-mash of styles all with separate narratives. It is a world that we are still living in - no new modernist artistic narrative has come along, managed to take hold and command the art world as was the case in the early twentieth century.
Limbic Thinking Extended
Previously I articulated some of my thoughts on a concept I termed limbic thinking wherein I opposed the idea of thought being reducible to language or a language-like thing with the notion of language as merely one type of thinking in a landscape of different kinds of thinking, not all of which can necessarily be translated from one into another1. Here I wish to sketch out some more thoughts and notes on the concept.
Project: Return to 'Return to Sender' Top-Level Image
Previously I posted about the visual development of an image for a small project titled Return to Sender. That post can be found here. Essentially I walked through the various steps I used to make the image (planning, model-making, photography and compositing) and ended with a note that I was somewhat satisfied with the image but considered it not entirely finished. I have since gone back and revised the image, so this post is meant to document those updates.
Project: Return to Sender "Top-Level" Development
Back in Fall of 2017 I started work on Return to Sender1. This was to be a very short comic that I would incorporate into a larger set of comics as part of a personal project. I won't go into the details of that project here (perhaps another post), but instead I simply want to detail the development of what I refer to as the "top-level domain" within the comic.
Some background is perhaps in order though. Return to Sender is an idea for a short story I came up with: a visual narrative of a woman coming upon a lab not intended for her eyes, discovering tanks with brains hooked up to computers and having the startling and unnerving realization that if those brains are simulated people then she too might be simulated, and on and on. To illustrate this I intended to depict four different levels of reality: that of the woman, a lab environment above her, an industrial environment above that, and finally a seemingly alien environment as the top-level domain.
Project: Prototype Illustration Books
Having successfully completed several process/art books for my assessment in spring (here), I decided to follow-up two of those books with more complete ones. One book was a collection of watercolour and ink location sketches, and since my assessment I completed several more sketches that I wanted to add to the set. The other was a collection of my life drawing sketches, but only covered the period of concern for my assessment, and not wanting to leave my earlier life drawings stranded, I felt that incorporating the bulk of them into one book would be desirable.
In addition there were a number of issues with my previous books that I wanted to correct. For one the stitching was poorly done as I was very new to the process, in a rush to get them done at that point, and using a much too fine string (although I didn't know it at the time). The end result was that the books were loosely bound and would unsatisfactorily slide around in the hand. The books felt always on the verge of falling apart. The other problems included slight page alignment errors (front and back printing) and the vertical misalignment of a few pages in the figure drawing book. New books then would correct these errors, bringing forth more complete and less error-filled revisions.
Little did I know what difficulties I would encounter on the way...
Project: Spitmap
Spitmap is the name that I ultimately gave to my end-of-year project at Camberwell College of Arts. The project was my contribution to the "PITCH" collaboration between Old Spitalfields Market and the college which occurred on June 11th-13th of this year. I experienced the project as a series of successive failures and frustrations, so documenting it here may help me to take some lessons away from the project.
Project: Making Sketchbooks
Following on from my completion of process books in May of this year (here), I undertook to make some sketchbooks that I could use with my newfound skills. These I completed in late May and early June to tag along with me as I did some travelling around Europe.
Unlike a "proper" book, there turned out to be a lot of advantages to making my own sketchbooks. I needed a new watercolour sketchbook, and when searching for such a book that is affordable one becomes quite limited in terms of paper selection as well as format. It is also rare to find a sketchbook that will lay flat without resorting to a hideous spiral-ring binding. Combining all that with a hardcover? Apparently out of the question.
Project: Making Process Books
As part of my end-of-year assessment at Camberwell College of Arts back in May of this year, I undertook to make some process books as a means of presenting some of my work. I was dissatisfied with how I had previously collected and presented my work and I determined that a more formal approach was required if the process was to be of much value to me. I started by scanning a series of on-site location sketches that I had undertaken starting in March. As I went over the sketches, I recognized that I could make some notes about the development of my approach and technique and so the book format suggested itself to me as an appropriate fit. While I was at it I decided to make two other process books: one covering the figure drawing sketches I had done earlier in the year, and the other covering the major course project, the development of which was scattered across loose sheets and several sketchbooks.
Feels Like Summer and Late Capitalism
On September 1, 2018, Ivan Dixon and Greg Sharp released the music video for Childish Gambino's (aka Donald Glover) recent track Feels Like Summer. A low-key animation, the video unites numerous figures in the hip-hop community into the stale and familiar setting of lower middle-class suburbia. It's the neighbourhood of Boyz n the Hood, one of elevated bungalows and screen doors, one that manages to always feel like nowhere no matter what happens there. The neighbourhood is in fact modeled after Atlanta rather than Los Angeles, but what's important is that it conveys the everywhere nowhere-ness of suburbia, rather than depicting an actual place. What I find compelling in the video is its relation to the larger cultural moment within the context of late capitalism.
The Revenge of the Hand-Made Object
Far from being an irrelevant product of a bygone era, the hand-made object is set to return to the fold of consumer goods with force, indeed in many ways it already has, and its significance is only growing. While we live in an age of mass reproduction, we are also in a transitional societal phase, and the uniform, endlessly reproduced status quo brought about by mechanisation is giving way to the personalized, the fragmented and the tribalized. The hand-made object responds to the need of the individual in the current age to express an identity; the individual no longer finding any identification within the large and uniform context of public culture. With electric media we find ourselves more and more connected to each other and to our objects, and find that we are forced to demand an accounting of where every item in our lives has come from and where it is going. The hand-made object is a reaction against the dehumanising effects of mechanisation, a mode of operation that now appears terribly outmoded and doomed to obsolescence.
Thoughts On: Gursky at Southbank Centre
On April 8th I took a visit to the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre to check out the Andreas Gursky exhibition that was running from the 25th of January until the 22nd of April. Being generally unfamiliar with Gursky's work but finding some of it of a certain appeal, I entered the exhibition with little in the way of expectations. The exhibition covered some four decades worth of work by Gursky, whose signature style is perhaps his monumental photographs: a distant viewpoint of large structures or crowds of people at massive size, teaming with detail and clarity. Incidentally, that last bit is the first thing I want to talk about.
Thoughts On: Nature Morte at the Guildhall Art Gallery
Saturday morning I hopped over to the Guildhall Art Gallery to take a look at the Nature Morte exhibition. The exhibition is premised on illustrating the genre of still life as it has been reinvigorated by artists of the 21st century. In practice I found there was a mix of traditional and conventional still life paintings alongside the contemporary and more thought-provoking pieces.
The Incredible Non-Informational Art of Daniel Zeller
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| Delusional Encapsulation, Graphite on Paper, 22 x 30", 2014, Daniel Zeller [Source] |
What's Good About All the Stars Video?
Released on February 6, 2018 was the music video for Kendrick Lamar & SZA's All the Stars, directed by Dave Meyers & the little homies. Done as part of an album of music inspired by the film Black Panther, it could be seen as simply a piece of marketing trying to cloak itself in cultural relevance. However, the very existence of Black Panther is culturally relevant and in contrast to essentially all prior Marvel films it has something to achieve besides get people excited for the next film. And the video for All the Stars is absolutely something in its own right.
Thoughts On: Understanding Media
Having read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan I have to admit to finding it both dated and still ahead of its time in many ways. McLuhan asserts that each new media influences and eventually changes the culture, and that these effects are not only not understood, but not even documented.
2017: Year in Review
2017 was very much a year of writing for me, well, of reading and writing. Having been accepted into studying illustration at Camberwell, I put aside working on my portfolio and decided to work more on further developing my ideas. I returned to the manuscript that I had aimed to complete in November and set about finishing it.
To be sure, not all went to plan...
To be sure, not all went to plan...
What do you figure?
This is a coursework motivated post, with the aim of describing and analysing three different approaches to depicting figures/beings of my choosing (from a curated set).
The figure is an endlessly interesting subject for art, and as such has been subjected to seemingly endless treatments. As much as we may take an interest in the world around us, such is the condition of our self-obsession that we must seek to experience this world through the lenses and sensory inputs of other beings, even if those beings are merely figments of our imagination. The presence of the figure makes explicit what otherwise is only implicit: our relation to the external world.
For this post I'm interested in the depictions of figures by Antony Gormley, Christoph Niemann, and Robert Weaver.
The figure is an endlessly interesting subject for art, and as such has been subjected to seemingly endless treatments. As much as we may take an interest in the world around us, such is the condition of our self-obsession that we must seek to experience this world through the lenses and sensory inputs of other beings, even if those beings are merely figments of our imagination. The presence of the figure makes explicit what otherwise is only implicit: our relation to the external world.
For this post I'm interested in the depictions of figures by Antony Gormley, Christoph Niemann, and Robert Weaver.
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