Carbon Paper
Oct. 1st, 2005 12:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frustratedpilotHey.
My father introduced me to carbon paper about thirty years ago. I was in the habit of cutting up magazines for the pictures, and so to minimize the damage, Dad brought some carbon paper back from his job as a VA civil servant and taught me how to trace. It became my artwork of choice for a number of years...and back whenkevissimo and I were in gifted class together doing film projects, his was a live-action Star Wars "tribute" while mine was a automobile race collage animation using magazine-picture traced cars I still have somewhere.
I guess if I really wanted to, I could attempt to remake it using the Flash animation program and other such tools.
I gave up on artwork in college, not because I wasn't interested in art but because there was a kind of disconnect in my life in that vein. What I was doing was to "art" compares to what a rapper "sampler" does in music...attempt to use other's work to relate my own messages, if I had them. I had given up actual tracing midway through high school...I tried to go beyond that and ran into my own incompetance as a visionist. Besides, the world was changing. And it didn't help that my art teacher in high school was a rabid modernist. I turned my attention to writing (prose and drama) and to the computer--and to flying--and it all fell by the wayside. I still doodled on scratchpaper, but I knew I wasn't an "artiste".
I'm thinking back about this phase of my life because of a project I thought up...I've been making my nephew a kind of coloring book, by scanning in clip art from catalogs and magazines of mine and altering them to make them more "crayon-friendly". The finished files are being saved as .gifs so I could either e-mail them to him or print them out when he visits here. One of the things that bugged me about the coloring books I had as a kid, was the fact that sometimes the areas of the artwork that should have been open for color were simply blacked out. Thanks to the graphics software at my disposal, I can correct some of this.
I would have loved to be able to do this when I was a kid. I feel a little kidlike as I work on these pictures. This is a project that is taking me back to an old, familiar neighborhood...just when I feel about as alien as I've ever felt.
FP
My father introduced me to carbon paper about thirty years ago. I was in the habit of cutting up magazines for the pictures, and so to minimize the damage, Dad brought some carbon paper back from his job as a VA civil servant and taught me how to trace. It became my artwork of choice for a number of years...and back when
kevissimo and I were in gifted class together doing film projects, his was a live-action Star Wars "tribute" while mine was a automobile race collage animation using magazine-picture traced cars I still have somewhere.I guess if I really wanted to, I could attempt to remake it using the Flash animation program and other such tools.
I gave up on artwork in college, not because I wasn't interested in art but because there was a kind of disconnect in my life in that vein. What I was doing was to "art" compares to what a rapper "sampler" does in music...attempt to use other's work to relate my own messages, if I had them. I had given up actual tracing midway through high school...I tried to go beyond that and ran into my own incompetance as a visionist. Besides, the world was changing. And it didn't help that my art teacher in high school was a rabid modernist. I turned my attention to writing (prose and drama) and to the computer--and to flying--and it all fell by the wayside. I still doodled on scratchpaper, but I knew I wasn't an "artiste".
I'm thinking back about this phase of my life because of a project I thought up...I've been making my nephew a kind of coloring book, by scanning in clip art from catalogs and magazines of mine and altering them to make them more "crayon-friendly". The finished files are being saved as .gifs so I could either e-mail them to him or print them out when he visits here. One of the things that bugged me about the coloring books I had as a kid, was the fact that sometimes the areas of the artwork that should have been open for color were simply blacked out. Thanks to the graphics software at my disposal, I can correct some of this.
I would have loved to be able to do this when I was a kid. I feel a little kidlike as I work on these pictures. This is a project that is taking me back to an old, familiar neighborhood...just when I feel about as alien as I've ever felt.
FP
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