Questions meme
Jan. 1st, 2011 04:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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browngirl posted the following meme, which she got from whuffle:
You leave me a comment to this post and I will ask you a question. You put the question I ask and your answer to it up in your own journal with the text of this master post at the top as an explanation. Your responsibility is to then ask a question of anyone who comments on your post. That person is then responsible for putting the question you asked of them and their answer to it into their journal. And the questions keep getting asked and answered, passed member to member through the community. In the end, this should propagate a whole bunch of interesting questions and answers by different members of the community!
Her question to me was, "Tell me about your creative process, and/or what you think of the concept?"
Since I work as a commercial artist, rather than a fine artist, my creative process necessarily has a lot of production boundaries shaping it... and these restrictions, I think, make my job easier. If I started every project knowing that I could use any production medium, with an unlimited palette, I might suffer from a sort of centipede's dilemma :>
To start off with, most of the artwork I generate doesn't require much of what I'd call creativity, so much as craftwork: the customer tells me what elements they want to appear in their printed piece, and I'm familiar enough with the production hardware to make sure that the colors match, the ink coverage doesn't oversaturate the medium, and the details they want to be legible at the finished size, are.
Some creativity is involved, I suppose, in staying within my client's budget while still catching the audience's eye -- one of my recent customers could only afford a single ink color for their to-go menu mailers, but of course they wanted every recipient to flock to their restaurant as if their barbecue was made from soylent green. I picked westerny fonts, lightly printed a wood-grain texture behind their text, and ran the whole thing on a yellowed paper, as much like an old wanted poster as I could manage. The customer seemed pretty happy, and their food's good enough to drum up repeat business as it is. If you're ever near Lewisville, Texas, they can be found here: http://fatcowbbq.com/
Now if I can just get them to call their stuffed jalapeños something other than "Fat Japs"...
Anyway, my process with commercial clients sometimes means I have to find a creative way to convince the customer that what they've asked for will look like crap, and guide them in another direction. That may be my least favorite part of applying my artistic sense to someone else's project.
When I'm working on my own artwork (a rare event, these days), I'll still try to set up my parameters early, on the theory that changing horses midstream is a real pain in the ass. Your bull-dancer project, for example, had its limited palette set up first thing, so I knew right away that I'd have to make some choices about which color to apply where, same as if I was filling in a map and wanted to make each territory distinct from its neighbors. I dug up a lot of samples of Minoan art, so my finished project would not look out of place painted on the side of a vase -- and I had to find several references from Gaiman's "Sandman" to follow also, so I don't wander too far from canon when I'm rendering his Death character. Modeling her after Marina Sirtis, and having enough topless pictures of her available that I may easily follow Minoan custom regarding her outfit, was just serendipity :>
Hope that answers your question, but I will clarify any points you'd like to hear more about.
browngirl posted the following meme, which she got from whuffle:You leave me a comment to this post and I will ask you a question. You put the question I ask and your answer to it up in your own journal with the text of this master post at the top as an explanation. Your responsibility is to then ask a question of anyone who comments on your post. That person is then responsible for putting the question you asked of them and their answer to it into their journal. And the questions keep getting asked and answered, passed member to member through the community. In the end, this should propagate a whole bunch of interesting questions and answers by different members of the community!
Her question to me was, "Tell me about your creative process, and/or what you think of the concept?"
Since I work as a commercial artist, rather than a fine artist, my creative process necessarily has a lot of production boundaries shaping it... and these restrictions, I think, make my job easier. If I started every project knowing that I could use any production medium, with an unlimited palette, I might suffer from a sort of centipede's dilemma :>
To start off with, most of the artwork I generate doesn't require much of what I'd call creativity, so much as craftwork: the customer tells me what elements they want to appear in their printed piece, and I'm familiar enough with the production hardware to make sure that the colors match, the ink coverage doesn't oversaturate the medium, and the details they want to be legible at the finished size, are.
Some creativity is involved, I suppose, in staying within my client's budget while still catching the audience's eye -- one of my recent customers could only afford a single ink color for their to-go menu mailers, but of course they wanted every recipient to flock to their restaurant as if their barbecue was made from soylent green. I picked westerny fonts, lightly printed a wood-grain texture behind their text, and ran the whole thing on a yellowed paper, as much like an old wanted poster as I could manage. The customer seemed pretty happy, and their food's good enough to drum up repeat business as it is. If you're ever near Lewisville, Texas, they can be found here: http://fatcowbbq.com/
Now if I can just get them to call their stuffed jalapeños something other than "Fat Japs"...
Anyway, my process with commercial clients sometimes means I have to find a creative way to convince the customer that what they've asked for will look like crap, and guide them in another direction. That may be my least favorite part of applying my artistic sense to someone else's project.
When I'm working on my own artwork (a rare event, these days), I'll still try to set up my parameters early, on the theory that changing horses midstream is a real pain in the ass. Your bull-dancer project, for example, had its limited palette set up first thing, so I knew right away that I'd have to make some choices about which color to apply where, same as if I was filling in a map and wanted to make each territory distinct from its neighbors. I dug up a lot of samples of Minoan art, so my finished project would not look out of place painted on the side of a vase -- and I had to find several references from Gaiman's "Sandman" to follow also, so I don't wander too far from canon when I'm rendering his Death character. Modeling her after Marina Sirtis, and having enough topless pictures of her available that I may easily follow Minoan custom regarding her outfit, was just serendipity :>
Hope that answers your question, but I will clarify any points you'd like to hear more about.
