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As the first Stanford semester winds up, I’ve been working on my sketching and had the time to start experimenting with some projects I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. But before I get into them, I want to mention the excellent talk we had from Patrick Meier at Ushahidi (Swahili for “witness”) this week. Ushahidi is freeware that allows users to input data points on a map via the web or SMS, and is increasingly being used in crisis situations. Regulars to this site will remember I posted several months ago about its effectiveness in helping emergency forces reach victims in Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Patrick’s talk was insightful (telling us about how the Haiti response team essentially comprised of pizza-hungry undergrads at Tufts university on the east coast, who sat and inputted map coordinates, totally voluntarily, during the crisis); honest (I loved his quote about ‘technology only being 10% of the battle – too often are the solutions to these grand problems – journalism, education, literacy, etc – said to be “solved” by mere programs and software alone); and candid – he made it clear the company still had a long way to go, but was buoyed by the positive response they’d received, if slightly bewildered by the inordinate amount of hype and press. He also mentioned Crowdmap, a spin-off of the Ushahidi platform, and again, totally free, that’s more intuitive and less involved on the front-end for users to set up their own map. As an experiment, I’ve started a human trafficking map in the US (I was going to use the one made by Survivors Connect, but it’s down for some reason) which you can check out – and add to – here. Still early days yet, but I want to build a picture of the main areas for trafficking around the 4 most prominent cities in the US for trafficking. For more on what those are and to learn about the project, go to the “trafficking” page above.
And now, back to the art projects…
The first, and most ambitious, is the largest comics “page” I’ve ever worked on – on a 6 x 8 foot piece of wood, whichI’ve cut into panels, primed with gesso and now pencilled the first wide establishing shot of. It’s of London, if you’re wondering where the title for the video comes from. My goal is to ink it later on today with a FAT sumi brush and a lot of Higgins ink. Stay tuned for the result. I’ve also been putting more time into drawing from life and been looking in particular at the assorted gods of linework: Albrecht Durer and Bernie Wrightson. See below for some samples. Check them all out over at my flickr page.
