Idiots' Box

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June 16, 2007

Hot off the Stovetop!

Spent the wee hours of today (last night?) (it's weird how the start of the day actually starts in the middle of the night, isn't it? It would be a lot easier if 12am were sometime around sunrise, so that when you're "up past midnight" it's really saying something...) trying to put together something a little flashier for the home page of Idiots'Books. Matthew pointed out that though it is spare and full of white space (something we're both quite fond of), it has a representative example of his writing but no indication of the fact that we are a writing/illustrating team. Early in the evening (say, around 11) he suggested I draw something, like him typing and me drawing or something. I immediately nixed that idea, in part because the whole idea of me illustrating the way that I get to illustrate for Idiots'Books is that I don't just draw the obvious, the representational. And, also in part because I can't do a convincing drawing of myself. Apparently, I have no idea what I actually look like.

There was also the issue that just having an image of me drawing and him writing didn't really show that we were collaborating.

So, we thought and thought. At one point, this was the idea:

(sketch compliments of matthew). "That's pretty basic. And not all that interesting," we thought. I think, now, in retrospect, we couldn't have been more right.

I then suggested that we take the writing side, and add a word, say, like "cat", and then on the drawing side, have an image, but not necessarily a cat, but related to a cat in some weird way.

I couldn't come up with anything good, so I put down a table. There is really no convincing way that I can relate a cat to a table other than putting it on top of or underneath it. But, you get the idea. In fact, at one point while we were brainstorming, I actually suggested that the connection could be that the cat eats the table. Clearly I was depending on Matthew for a genius solution. Matthew liked the general idea, but hated the cat and the table, which, in retrospect was, again, completely in the right.

Then he suggested that it's really the space in between the writing and the illustration where something unique happens - that space where the reader has to determine his own narrative, to reconcile the often divergent storytelling that's going on (and in this case, that would be inventively connecting the cat and the table in your head somehow).

So, I added the thought bubble. Please notice how well drawn it is, compared to the rest of it.

At this point (around 12:30) we realized that "cat" was way too literal. We might still be able to work with the table. Then we thought, okay, how about a more vague word - one that captures an idea. So I said, "Well, how about "colonialism" and then I draw a ship on the other side, and then the thought bubble has people massacreing(sp?) the natives" (this was fresh on my mind after the mural at Bookplate, I guess. Never one to avoid using old ideas again and again...).
"Well, um, except that's what colonialism actually is".

Hmph. I got in a huff over his being quite right, and we went back to thinking.

"Plus, that's so heavy-handed. Colonialism? Come on. It has to be something more basic."

True. We thought and thought and thought some more. Then we decided that we were making it too complicated.

"Perhaps we're making this too complicated," said Matthew. (Perhaps this was us giving up in frustration.)

And then, somehow, it changed from pages of a book to frying pans. People always ask us what's with the frying pan logo. I'm not sure where it came from originally, but dammit, I like it. I like its versatility. And I like that we're up here cooking things up. So, I spent the next three hours drawing, waiting to dry, scanning, patching together in Photoshop, laying out in GoLive for web, and posting. Go have a look over at Idiots'Books. I don't think it's half bad.

And that gives you an idea of how we work together. We talk ideas to death (literally) and then from the ashes something almost completely different springs, full-formed, and we say, "Why the hell didn't we think of that before?"

Posted by ribbu at June 16, 2007 01:58 AM

Comments

Posted by: ming at June 18, 2007 01:21 PM

Posted by: nifer at June 19, 2007 11:46 AM