The latest crazy idea - meant to be a way of generating "monstrous" shapes - was to overlap shapes, and see if any of the shapes created had a monstrous look. This possibility was inspired by seeing multiple, overlapping shadows cast by closely-spaced street lamps, and seeing both how a walking person's own shadows overtook themselves, and how the shadows in standing groups of people (or objects) overlap. My subconscious worked away on the idea for a while, and I found myself buying a pack of "hand copy" carbon paper (there is also a "typewriter copy" version) and tracing some of the figures from the daily freebie "news"paper.
I made a rule only to use full bodies, and put the carbon paper in the same position under each page; another rule was "no peeking till it's finished" (ie, when I couldn't wait any longer and was prepared to stop, whatever the results). This is what appeared, from the theatrical and sports pages -
Quite apart from the happy accidents of placement - especially that football in the centre - it has contrast of scale and interesting positions of arms. It's giving me pointers on what to do consciously, if I decide to change the "rules" or start using tracing paper. Another possibility is to cut out the figures and use the pages or the figures as stencils, possibly with tissue paper (several layers?) underneath to use for "colour studies" and seeing what happens when the colours overlap.
The back of the carbon paper has the image in reverse, and looks palpably different -
First time lucky; I'll try it again throughout the week, a different newspaper each time.
brilliant, did you ever find there was no full figure to trace as you say you used the tracing paper in the same place on the page each day.
ReplyDeleteI presume it was not in view as you traced, ie carbon paper was back to back with the newspaper
and carbon paper was initially attached to the paper where you would find your final image of overlapping shapes.