Apartcity

This is from May 1999 (ten years gone...) 

Yes, I expect you to read each and every one of those little panels!

I made the image in Photoshop by painting on separate layers, 

filtering them, trying different opacity settings, then painting some of the details to refine it. 

The image above shows how the layers appear when set to 'normal' opacity. 

In the file, with the first image on the bottom, the second and third layers are both set to 'difference'.

Next, I made a 3-D model based on the flat image, using a grayscale version of the image as a displacement map (the same way terrain is made - determining the geometric positions of the points by the values of light or dark throughout the map), also using the image as a bump map and the color version as a texture map. 

I made a copy of the model and placed it behind and to the left in the scene. 

After rendering the models, I added the sky, the dirt road, the window and the curtain.

Making this piece was an attempt to capture a nightmare I had when I lived in New York City

across from a monster apartment building. It turned out pretty accurate.

At the time I made it, my work was featured in a book called Photoshop Collage Techniques. 

There was talk of another book on filters but every time I showed examples like this to the author as a possible tutorial feature, he said, "Well, I think that's something only you would want to do."

Gary Panter's "Zomoid," 1983

(Posted with Gary's permission)









Originally published (on yellow copy paper) as an 8 1/2" x 5 1/2" four-page mini by Ray Zone, as part of his "Zomoid illustories" series of minis. This version from "Zomoid Illustories," a comic-book collection of the minis, 1989.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Ray Zone, The Comics Journal 102, September 1985:



Though brief, it's one of the earliest and best analyses of what abstract comics can do--or how a work can function on the borderline between comics and gallery art.

I wish I had known of this piece earlier: I would have definitely included it in the anthology. Oh well, this way we know we have good stuff in stock for the (eventual) second volume!

Atension

Here's a new one done with ink and watercolor. I have abstract comics fever...

Vocabulary of emotion--cumulative results (so far)

In the spirit of Alexey's own work (just you wait till you see his piece in the anthology), I combined the responses so far--Alexey's, Mike's, Joumana's and mine:



Here it is without mine (because those big blots tend to overwhelm everything):



And here are mine and Mike's combined (I thought they worked well together, especially "femininity" and "peacefulness"):

Alexey's moodercise

Here's my response:



It's a bit, umm, conceptual. First I just made marks trying to stay unaware of the caption for each panel. Then in photoshop I moved those marks around, erased some, rotated others, switched them from square to square, until they seemed to echo their captions...

I did this because my first, more straightforward, attempt kind of sucked--it just felt overly literal and obvious. I like this one better, though I'm not sure it fully responds to Alexey's brief.

Trajectory Comic

Quelques dessins

Fauves

Hello you Jésus

désolé pour la piètre qualité des scans.

Moodercise

Hey Alexey, here's mine:

Vocabulary of Abstraction -- Results♦

Hey everyone. As promised, below is the result of last week's emotional experiment. Hope that some of you also went through the exercise and will post images below. I'll include them all in the main post, and perhaps combine into something greater.

Note how even though all the images are abstract, we are often using similar visual vocabulary to describe the feeling.

Alexey:


Joumana:


Mike:


Andrei:



Satu:

Syntactic Comics 2

Hello everyone,

Well, these are the pages 6 to 11 of my "syntactic/abstract" comic. You'll see that it becomes more and more involved...

"Pop Abstracts"

These individual pieces weren't necessarily designed to run as a continuity, but I think the comics influence is stylistically obvious.

Leftover

A sorta warm-up piece for my book Reykjavik. I was hoping to use it in the book, but in the end it didn't really fit, so I cut it.

Abstract Comic Doodle

Andrei's post a few weeks back got me really thinking about making abstract comics again.

I haven't really made any abstract comics in a few years, but after reading the post, I was drawn to the idea of having various abstract imagery implying a narrative.

I doodled a little four panel comic during yesterday's faculty meeting that probably is more in line with the third example from the post.

I have an after school comic making club this afternoon and I might just make a few more of these with my new found "character" while the kids draw their stuff.

In loving memory
R.I.P Jermain Peter Scott.

Three men will appear in court today charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of a Mississauga man killed during a fight outside a popular Erin Mills pub two weeks ago.
Two Hamilton men and a Woodbridge man will make their first appearance in a Brampton court later today.
Jermaine Marlon Scott, 29, died from stab wounds during a fight outside of the Fox and Fiddle pub on Dundas St., near Winston Churchill Blvd., in the early hours of March 15.
Peel Regional Police say the father of a 12-year-old boy became embroiled in a fight inside the pub and it spilled outside where it turned deadly.
The victim tried to flee but was chased down and stabbed. He then got into a cab but the driver noticed he was injured and called 9-1-1, police said.
Scott died later at Toronto's Sunnybrook hospital.
Scott was known as "Pete" to his friends because he liked the Peter Parker character from the Spider-Man series.
Based on witnesses, between three to five people were among the attackers, police said at the time.
It was Peel's fourth homicide of the year.

Abstract/Comics 3

Dillem de Koorlo's "Archie":

Brandl: Tornado Romp

A stone lithograph abstract comic. Titled Tornado Romp. 70 x 100 cm. Two colors. 2001. This was one of the first pieces where I was concentrating extremelly hard on my "iconosequentiality" idea --- wherein the overall presence (a la a "normal iconic painting) and the sequentiality (a la a "normal" comic) are both competely equally contributing to the whole. I printed it with a wonderful (and famous) master printer, Urban Stoob, in St. Gallen, Switzereland. Because he enjoys and masters printerly problems, I decided to print in only two colors (and to save money): yellow and grey --- with the stipulation that I did not want anything to become green (as those of you who know from painting or printing, grey and yellow or black and yellow always create green). We mastered it by getting the yellow and grey ink colors excatly correct, and the drawing on the stone correct (some crayon, some painted, yellow revealed, and grey over yellow), so that I got many hue variations of yellow, blue and a blueish grey.

another abstract comics blog in Finland

this one, very recent, from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen:
http://writractics.wordpress.com/

I'll be reeeeally impressed when we find some Estonian abstract comics.

Abstract/Comics 2

Jacksohn Sevellock, "Lavender Varmint":

Have a Cigar! no.3 of 3

It is what it is.

Kirbstract

Extra points for whoever can guess which comic these pages are based on. 

(Andrei isn't allowed to guess because he has all the answers.)

graphic poetry?

I really like Christine Panushka's drawings here:
http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/2009/04/asemic-drawing-from-christine-panushka.html

the last 2 (one of which is to the left) could be seen as abstract comics, with sequential developments from box to box, or as an ambient feeling emanating from the boxes, in no particular order.

I'm inclined to call the second interpretation "graphic poetry" rather than "abstract comics".

comics & computer programming

Swedish researcher Mikael Kindborg is experimenting with visual programming tools, such as ComiKit (a programming system inspired by comics). He's trying to develop ways for children to program toys.

http://www.ida.liu.se/~mikki/index.php?page=Comics

you can download a version of ComiKit freely.

I've had a quick look, but not achieved anything with it yet.

hope this falls somewhere in the realm of a-s-r-c- c-m-cs.

Vocabulary of Abstraction.

Hi everyone. I propose a small collective project that in my experience has always been a rewarding exercise. Given the level of talent collected here, the result may be pretty spectacular.

Below is a picture that you should stretch to 100% and then print out. In each of the boxes, represent the emotion or idea that is labeled either beneath or above the box. You are not allowed to use any recognizable visual vocabulary: words, smiley faces, landscapes, any realistic objects at all. This is a purely abstract prompt. Also, please do not use any complex rendering techniques: clear black ink on paper is highly preferred.

In a week's time, I will post my entry. Please reply to that entry with your own; don't yet post a response because the suspense is worth it. You will be very surprised how people interpret these (if, of course, we get participation). Readers of the blog are more than encouraged to also participate!

Abstract/Comics

Franz Kirby? Jack Kline?

Finnish abstract comics blog

Satu Kaikkonen

has start'd a blog

of her abstract comics

(abstrakteja sarjakuvia)

:

see here

ʘ

:

pieniä huoneita silmälle

:

ʘ

:

Hydical

This comic, which I made in early 2005, is both French AND Finnish. 

Syntactic (?) Comics

Hello again,

well first I prefer to inform all of you that I usually speak french and that my english may be somewhat shaky from time to time.

When I started to be interested in abstract comics, I took them as a way to investigate the intrinsic narrative power of the language of comics and its tools (frames and speech balloons). I tried to see whether it was possible to tell stories with a very reduced "vocabulary", a little bit in the spirit of Georges Perec when he wrote his novel "La Disparition" without using the letter "e", which is the most frequently used in french. The stories I (tried to) tell involved "characters" (for example squares and circles) and were in a way "concrete" stories, the abstract characters could have been replaced by realistic ones in a lot of cases (as seen in my pages in the Anthology). They are therefore quite different from most of the material that has been posted here, where the narrative content is more related to an esthetic progression or feeling, more in the spirit of poetry than that of a short novel. (I know I am simplifying much, but it is just to stress the different approaches.)

Later I decided to try to push idea as far as I could, that is, tell stories ("concrete" ones) using only the syntactic elements of the comics language: speech balloons and frames. (I know that there are comics without frames and/or without speech balloons, and some other medias use frames and/or speech balloons, but anyway I think that these two syntactic elements are used in comics in such a specific way that they belong to its language in an intrinsic way.) What I found interesting is that the same element, say a word balloon, may be used as a character, then as a syntactic object, then again as a character, etc.

It is however true that this kind of stories are not properly abstract, as nothing but syntactic elements are depicted, so we should maybe call them "syntactic comics", or "syntactical comics", but I find in them an interesting experimental playground worth of more investigation. I have put below the first 5 pages (of 22) of my last story of this kind.

Collaboration with Troy

A while ago, our own troylloyd sent me a number of his little paintings (they're about 4" x 6", on black cardstock, and I couldn't even begin to tell you the medium). I scanned them in and arranged them into the following (by the way, this can also function as an illustration for the second abstract comix exercise I posted below):