Cul de Sac

 

 
Now they're reading it in Italy.
 

School fun

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I've been taking a few technical classes at a community college here in the Baltimore area. The program I'm following — just a handful of courses — is meant to qualify you as an entry-level drafter in architecture/construction settings. Sooner or later I expect to have a use for this training.

For the most part, it's been quite basic & predictable stuff in these classes. ('Blueprint Reading' — e.g.) But last term I found a fruitful challenge in the course apparently designated this program's crash intro to the brave new world of BIM, and in this final term there've been some surprises in 'Technical Animation.'

'Technical Animation' essentially means an introduction to 3ds Max, which is one of the software packages supplied by industry giant Autodesk in their sponsoring role with the college's CADD department. It's software much better known at present for uses in the entertainment world than in architecture, though. Besides this, our instructor's education is in fine art & graphics and his technical experience mainly in medical illustration. So we're not really much concerned with architectural modeling & rendering, except to the degree we pursue it ourselves. I'd say it's just as well not to be too application-oriented here, however, because this software really is awfully complicated stuff from a novice's point of view. Knowing where to find things in its menus, alone, is a semester's work.

We're at the middle of the term today, it happens, and just getting started on the individual projects that take up the remainder of the course. As the parameters for this original-concept project necessarily have to do with basic software features rather than with any real-world-like design problem, I've figured there's no reason not to have some fun with it. What I have in mind re-uses the product of a 'mesh modeling' lesson from an early session and works it into a whimsical minute-long (or so) animated fancy. We'll have to see how it comes together between now & early May.


That 'mesh modeling' lesson of a few weeks ago leads step by step to the slightly surreal ash tray in the picture here. You perform certain numerically specified transformations on a flat-ish cylindrical virtual object and you end up, Voilà, with this ash tray shape. (Don't think the instructions that get you there are easy to follow, though.) After I had the ash tray, I couldn't resist adding a cigarette. It just seemed to want that.

And now the afterthought of the cigarette is the center of my plan for finishing out the class. Looking at this image I'd made of apparently solid non-existent objects, I began at some point to imagine the cig crawling across the ash tray like an inch worm; and on that, a whole little dream sequence has taken root.

At top, my first trial study for the motion of a cigarette hopping. I'm pretty pleased with the effect. Call to your mind's eye, if you will, the vision of a partly smoked cigarette scooting off an ash tray and hopping around a table (ideally, with little puffs of extra smoke coming off its 'head' with each hop). I call the pleasure in trying to see such an absurdity become 'real' very sufficient reason to keep showing up in class for the next few weeks.

Cul de Sac!!

Dear Reader (er .. meaning all 3 or 4 of you, equally), Richard Thompson himself was gracious enough to pay this blog a visit last night. I assure you, this is a moment of celestial exaltation for my humble blog.

If you click on his name there in the comments, as I quickly did, you'll find that Richard Thompson indeed has a blog. And it's terrific, not surprisingly. But don't take my word for it!

Incidentally, that blog appears on the 2nd page of Google returns if you search "Richard Thompson" today. When I mentioned him here in September, though, having just searched for what material was out there (as I've done on several occasions over some years), there was no blog to find. His inaugural post is dated later that same month.

It would be unseemly, perhaps, for me to praise Thompson's work in a very impassioned way, here, especially since I'm not the book-&-print-collecting, convention-going comics & illustration fanatic that others out there who appreciate his stuff undoubtedly are. But I've long thought him a superb illustrator. I'm really grateful to have more access, now, to what he's doing.

P.S. See particularly the Beethoven's Birthday posts of last month — 1, 2. Hilarious!

Cul de Sac

 
Now a regular weekly feature at WashingtonPost.com! Don't miss it!!

Fisher news

Thoughtful & talented friend Jeff Fisher, whom I've had occasion to mention here a few times before, has been working through a range of web site changes in the past few months, and it seems like a good time to point them out here.

His whimsical site name & brand Cloverfish.com came back this summer, after a couple of years' disuse, and with it a graphically excellent & fittingly whimsical new logo. Jeff's web design work, at present his primary means of income, now has its own presence at this revived address.

JeffreyBrianFisher.com, coordinately, is now exclusively for Jeff's illustration work. This site has undergone some updating & revision — it looks like he's aiming to keep it simpler & more flexible. Layout & typography are a little more spare, a little more direct & functional. Together with these adjustments in look & useability, and of greater significance, Jeff's added a sort of sub-site that he's labeled Concept Art. The work in this functionally distinct section of the site isn't strictly separate from what he's got on display at the main illustration site, but a lot of it is much more sketchy & unrefined, and it's being pursued to a freer, more fanciful, more experimental end. In a way, the idea seems to be to set space apart for giving the creative reins over to a fruitful but until now somewhat repressed, somewhat more adolescent vision than 'paying' work has allowed for. (Ability to sustain, or unleash, this adolescent imaginativity, I think, is a good deal of what we have to credit the prolific & vividly conceived work of celebrity Tolkien illustrators Howe & Lee, for instance, to.) This un-specific concept art of Fisher's looks like a promising thing to me, and I'm watching to see what evolves there.

The other Richard Thompson

Yesterday Whisky P offered qualified praise re: music of one Richard Thompson — the one who turns up front & center when you google Richard Thompson.

Seems like a good occasion for mentioning the Richard Thompson I've long been bonkers over — and there is, I find, finally a page worth linking to. And the occasion's that much more perfect, right here, in following directly on a post referencing George Herriman — whose work's legacy Thompson's surely reflects, on every level, better than any other noteworthy cartoonist active today.

Images d'un monde

Two sites to point out briefly, both rich in images of worlds past, both made in France.

The lesser I came across only a couple of days ago. Sat down at my brother's machine to check email and found open in the browser this intriguing little gallery of caricatures of people smoking, mostly from the 19th century. At left, one of several by Daumier. The page relates to an exhibit at Le musée du Fumeur, Paris. (Like me, my youngest brother occasionally smokes a pipe — he, between us, the more 'serious' & informed smoker.)

That page, with its titles in French, recalled to my mind a far greater collection of art works to be found online, a site I encountered a month or two ago via Google search for material about George Herriman. Not the first time I've done a Herriman search, but it had been a good while since the last time. New to me among the search returns was the visually extravagant Coconino World: dedicated, as the name implies, to Herriman's Krazy Kat — but also to much more than Herriman. Of special interest (to my mind), the 'Coconino Classics' pages, 'une ressource encyclopedique sur l'histoire de la narration graphique,' replete with 19th- & early to mid 20th-century humor illustration both American & European. I've hardly begun to look through all of it, to tell the truth — hence the neglect to mention discovery of it here, before now. Perusing the Herriman archives alone, there, could occupy many hours.

Freaks

Darby Conley is brilliant. This isn't news — just a sentiment I'm overdue in expressing.

It took me a while to start liking Get Fuzzy, to tell the truth. But I've long since come around. I don't mind saying I'm a bit in awe.

Illustration illumination

The handful of people who check in on this blog from time to time may recall my April 17 post pointing out Diane Rehm's show with Richard Preston, about his book The Wild Trees. Glad to be able to report now that the illustrator for that book, Andrew Joslin, into whom WP's comment got me to do a little investigating online, found the post and has added there a comment that gives some insight about his own background and his approach to the drawings. My sincere thanks to Andrew for taking time to connect with us here.

LATER: Andrew's left a further comment and a link to the climbing gear sketch that caught Preston's eye and got him the illustration job. Do take a look at the comments there.

Sighting

The illustrious Pinhead turned up in Baltimore today. He's not so easy for me to enjoy when he gets overtly political, I confess. But surely such a visit's a moment to savor, regardless of what might seem to have occasioned it.

More Hergé

Many thanks (again) to our man of letters up north for the tip, in comments below, on the article "A boy's world: the Tintin century" by Anthony Lane, in this last week's New Yorker. (It happened this week that I had to pick up stuff from a supplier in the near vicinity of a Borders; so didn't have to go out of my way to grab a copy, thankfully.) Won't say much about it, except that it's worth getting hold of if, like me, you can't help enjoying Tintin and its lightly cast boy's ideal of the ever expanding mid-20th-cent. global prospect. Hergé himself is Lane's central subject, in a way, and the problem of reconciling the man's cultural stature with his ambiguous stances with respect to great political & moral conflicts Europe underwent in his lifetime receives due attention. But Hergé's personal story doesn't dominate here to the detriment of the story of his enduring creation, its evolution & significance; he's central for Lane mainly in a structural sense, it might be right to say, in order to get a sketch of the history of a publishing phenomenon.

One little excerpt perhaps should get notice & a quick comment. Lane makes this nice observation toward the end:

If [Tintin] reminds me of anyone, it is Charlie Brown. Both characters are more profoundly understood by their dogs than by any human. Both, indeed, are barely characters at all, being a bundle of unchanging qualities — courage and curiousity in one, hope and defeatedness in the other — allied to the simplest of graphic gestures.

What might be added is that for these similarities, the two comic-strip icons are all the more starkly contrastive, at least for me. Charlie Brown, with all the Peanuts figures (except maybe Snoopy), has always seemed to me to be an adult character written to respond to an adult view of the world, portrayed as a child among children only (though of course with unequalled brilliance in simplicity) as a kind of over-arching conceit of reversal. Tintin, on the other hand, is pure youth literature, responding to a child's view of the world. And it's still entirely in imaginative withdrawal to boyhood, I assure you, that I best enjoy those books.

Thanks are also due here to film & TV buff Christian Hamaker, who pointed out to me well in advance, last year, the PBS airing of recent documentary Tintin and I — which I managed to miss anyway, dammit — and to Dave Rathert, who just last month highlighted in an email some of the wide-ranging material on the web site tied in with the PBS presentation.

(By the way: some time ago, for a friend who hadn't been exposed to Tintin before, I put up three pages containing a favorite sequence from The Calculus Affair. Still have them up, here.)

Tintin day

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Belgian comic-book artist Georges Rémi, better known by his reversed initials, R. G. — as written, in French, Hergé. Hergé gave us the enormously popular & influential (albeit principally so in Europe), exquisitely linear visual storytelling of the adventures of Tintin & Snowy.

There was a Centennial Exhibition ( ! : PDF ) at the Centre Pompidou earlier in the year.

I discovered Tintin as a kid, maybe 10 years old, I'm grateful to say. Managed to collect a majority of the titles while we were in Germany, 1982–85 — but never became a serious enough fan to require the whole corpus on my shelf. The ones I have (even the two in German, my rudimentary knowledge of the language notwithstanding), I can tell you, have been quite, quite thoroughly read over the years — studied, even, in a manner of speaking. They're richly rewarding in many respects.

Incidentally, Spielberg & Peter Jackson are now evidently set to bring Tintin to the big screen — three installments. Let's hope they're good.