I’ve been neck deep in the design process for my regalia. I leave in 3 days and I know I cant get all the stitching done by then. But there will be many times on my journey towards the dance when I will be sitting somewhere quite in the evening. Stitching will be a grounding things to do with my hands.

If it doesn’t get done, that’s okay. But I want to give it my best shot. There will be other dances.

Today’s offering is a collection of notebook pages and design attempts from my quiet work these last few evenings. n

Notebook

My notebook is a little bigger than my scanner, but I think that’s okay. Nothing on the margins is as important as sharing an idea of the process as a whole.

I’ve never actually pasted pictured into my sketchbook before. Until earlier this year it was almost exclusively a “sketch” book. It was a place I went to practice drawings. But in the last couple of months it has started to become a place I can go to “think” through the world.

I might eventually do a post on sketchbooks as a place to think and to work but today please enjoy me Experimenting with glue sticks and pen. My biggest takeaway is I need to print the pictures even smaller than I think If I want to get a lot on a page and still have space to draw.

This page is more picture than drawing. But I like it anyway.

It’s strange making a notebook page and knowing I’m going to share it widely. Almost every page in my sketchbook has been shared with someone so the observer effect is not as strong as it might be otherwise, but I felt it here as I labeled things I normally would not.

But I don’t think that desire to make my thought process a little bit more legible is bad. In fact I think I figured out things about the landscape because I labeled it and “showed my working” that I might not otherwise have.

I think the overall design settled pretty fast. There are things I want to represent and limited number of ways to represent them with the materials and shapes available to me. I need to keep it simple. Especially considering the yoke of the shirt is not very large and its my first quilted regalia.

This page is more focused on the hospital. I found out doing this how important the roof section is. In real life its not that different in color from the hospital wall, but it just doesn’t look right with out it.

The little grey houses on the colored version in the top right are actually pieces from a black and white photo of the camp.

This version of the hositpal looks more like a house than a hospital but I think the glowing and or wooden doors and windows are key to making it feel really grounded. I also like my silly attempt at capturing the subtle pattern on the fabric.

Putting it Together

Its become my practice to do the major design work over photos of the object I am modifying.

This one is probably quite far from the final design, but it is the one that emerged directly from my notebook work.

I think the final will differ significantly from this, but there is something about the naturalness of this particular design attempt that I keep coming back to.

Also this was the moment I really realized how crazy the new scanner my grandfather bought me last Christmas is. I cant believe the fidelity with which it captured they crayon. The printer scanner’s name is Wendall after Wendall Barry.

More tomorrow,

Weaver

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