This is one of those ideas that evolved out of just being frustrated with what I was trying to do. When that didn’t work I was just like FINE then this is what it’s going to be and I let it grow from there. It gave it permission to be what it was and a place I can start from when I don’t have any other ideas…lol…
The IDK Project, quite literally branded itself from the number of times people would ask me what I was drawing and my answer was, “I Don’t Know”…lol. Forever and a day I was convinced I wanted to be a comicbook artist, and part of me still as that ambition, to work on illustrating stories and figure out illustrative ways to entertain people.
I’d always have a sketchbook with me and doodle, draw, and design page after page without any real direction. Just drawing. Sometimes you get artists block with that page staring back at you and with all the options in the world just don’t know where to start.
One of the precepts of comicbooks is that everything takes place in a panel, those panels represent a fixed point in time, and the white space between panels is an unknown amount of time. Kinda obvious but trippy right?
When the whole page got to be too much I started framing it out in to smaller ones and challenged myself to just fill one box, with anything, then move on to another when it felt done. That sense of time started to take over and it became an interesting exercise to fill boxes and let the narrative develop.
Scott McCloud published a series of books that just blew my mind and changed the way I looked at comic creation. He also developed this experimental webcomic that was non-linear which, after being used to left to right, top to bottom reading had you scrolling in a browser and following panel to panel and weaving the narrative however you read. His ‘Infinite Canvas‘ idea was another one that just expanded my way of thinking.
I’ll mention something else that blew my mind when I cam across it was Neil Gaiman’s Vampire Sestina. I’d never heard of a sestina before when I came across it in a book I had and just the sheer cleverness of making one work still has me wanting to do one…lol…
But back to my main topic…
The idea that comics didn’t have to be ‘that thing’ interested me. The fact we are used to a format because it’s convenient doesn’t make it the only way. The pages took on a new life. The frames, instead of being containers of ‘something’ became containers of everything, and as a result nothing, and were the focus.
A page was just a smaller frame and if, in my mind, I zoomed in and out or expanded the size of the page then the number of frames also increased.
And, what if, we aren’t just bound by X and Y, but also orientation, so the pages started rotating while I worked on them to change the flow and energy and to change the perspective of the overall piece. It becomes an entirely new piece depending on which way you orient it.
This may all be a bit much, but it’s been enough to give me an idea to latch on to and keep developing. At it’s core the idea is one thing, but when I start developing the language and vocabulary of it it evolves into unique iterations.
Anyway, the above images show some of the experiments with it. Drawing, printmaking, painting, animating. It’s a slight obsession that keeps feeding my creativity…lol…