Kismet Arts Tangent

I’ll be posting these all season. I have always been a fan of making my own cards for christmas. I hope to give you some ideas to make your own christmas illustrations that will fill the living room with laughter. Or at least the polite “heh.”

I’m gearing up for the holidays. Making my cards and my lists as to whose going to receive cards. November is that month for me because I think it’s important to be organized and thoughtful this time of year without getting caught up in it.

Claire’s critique yesterday left everyone with something to think about. Some common ailments included: low contrast, bad paper choice, slightly awkward compositions and abstraction to the point of obscurity. She had little bits of editing advice that she said that we could do on the computer, to push the pieces a little further towards the ideal. This was my edit: the mountains needed more perspective, otherwise it becomes a little too dark and indiscernible as mountains.

Some cool and interesting things around that critique space. I was amazed at everyone’s different approaches. I received a few compliments, but after looking at Scott’s idea-heavy work (which baffled me for some time) I felt some art-envy. Everyone feels that a little bit when they see something that is out of their skill set or attention span or something genius that they wish they thought of first. There was some op-art-esque approaches and some heavy blocky iconic looking stuff where you just looked and looked because the stark contrast of the black and white shapes was just so pleasing, even if you didn’t get the artist’s statement about how time affects water.

What I enjoyed most was seeing the finished pieces of my “pod.” Last week, we presented to each other (in our little 4-5 table groups) our preliminary ideas. There was an overlap in sketches. Everyone had a little figure falling off of something, broken clocks, and brain doodles. But, each person with their own interpretation of the article (I thought it was morbid, but Michael thought it was funny) and ran with the concepts that reflected that and lo and behold we have twenty five illustrative points of view. I love the transformation of a sketch into something real and finished. The sketch almost seems like a premonition of the future.

I had a few sketches that didn’t make it to become something finished, for me. But, I saw the ideas that I thought I couldn’t do in other people’s work beautifully executed and it just goes to show that there is always art in the ideas just like an expert scrabble player finds words in a tile rack you thought had no good plays. It’s encouraging that if you sit and really give a concept thought, there’s a way to make it work and not only work but enchant people.