Abstract 3 animated

It seems I have never posted any of my animations here before, I thought I had. You can see all of them here on my blog.

One of my early Series two comics animated. You can see the original comic here.

Drawingsilence.com

What happened to 'The Chase' by Grant

Hi Grant I've just been going over the archives here and I wondered what happened to The Chase? I would like to see more of it.

Draw

As long as we're sharing animations...

Here's one from 2010:













More of my animations here.

Reign of Blood

Animation of my comic Reign of Blood. Inspired by the Slayer song Raining Blood from the album Reign in Blood. See the original comic here.

Drawingsilence.com

book nina roos ' narrative in abstract drawing

Two Quick Items: Turgeon and Groensteen

Two things I've been meaning to post:

Two weeks ago I posted at The Panelists on a few books from the Quebecois publisher Colosse. One of the books, Jardin Botanique by David Turgeon (Colosse, 2011) is an abstract comic. Here's a page. Read more at the link.

---

Also... French comic theorist Thierry Groensteen's new book came out this month. It's called Bande Dessinée et Narration (PUF, 2011) and includes a brief section concerning abstract comics. He includes a full page reproduction from my "Flying Chief" from the anthology. Here's the Amazon.fr page for the book. You can "look inside" the book and check out the relevant pages (~page 12).

Journey via randomized narrative (selected)

Hey all. I'm heading out to SPX in DC and finished up a project for it. You've seen a few steps along the way, and here are some of my favorite pages. Used a pretty interesting process to put it together (a lot of banging my head against the Flash wall). From the book:

Journey is an experiment in introducing randomization into comics narrative using abstract imagery. The main construct is a collage of several photographs of industrial structure: bridges, subways, skyscrapers and so on. An engine was created to programmatically generate the size of the panels, the size of the structures within, and their location. Out of hundreds of generated images, the ones included here were selected and manually ordered, interspersed with straightforward shots of the larger construct.

tropic anna - in four parts

Abstract Language #2: ottar ormstad’s bokstavteppekatalogen.

ottar ormstad’s bokstavteppekatalogen is a triumph. ormstad’s style is quite traditional and would not be out of place in some of the classic anthologies of concrete poetry like Mary Ellen Solt’s 1968 volume Concrete Poetry: A World View. Working exclusively in the typeface Helvetica Neue 75 Bold, ormstad echoes classical visual poems by Eugen Gomringer, Décio Pignatari and Franz Mon.

Where ormstad builds upon those important early practitioners of visual poetry is with the integration of op art stylistics. ormstad work uses InDesign to breathe fresh life into this clean form. bokstavteppekatalogen’s 24 pages vary from lyrical abstractions to beautifully rippling Op Art canvases that undulate in way reminiscent of Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley. In yet another example of Brion Gysin’s dictum that “literature is 50 years behind art”, Solt’s anthology represented the most comprehensive sampling of international visual poetry at the time but few of the visual poets pushed the composition of poetry towards op art. There are a few minor examples of visual poets engaging directly with the artistic aims of op art, but it is until ormstad’s 2007 bokstavteppekatalogen that a poet works with the form so convincingly.

Charles Olson argued in his 1950 essay “Projective Verse” that the

advantage of the typewriter [is] that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends,

arguing that “for the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had.”

Early visual poets like dom sylvester houedard explored the possibilities of the typewriter as a compositional tool beyond the enforced grid (see his 1972 volume Like Contemplation (PDF)), ormstad further extended that reconnoitering into digital typesetting.

By manipulating the kerning of blocks of text almost unnoticeably and highlighting the slight variations in a non fixed-point typeface, ormstad creates the appearance of movement.
ormstad’s work is difficult to locate, but is worth the effort.