David Chelsea's Blog, page 50

Isometric Exercises

Theater flyer, 1984

That hexagonal envelope in my recent post about letters to Amy got me to digging out other images I've done over the years in isometric projection. Wikipedia defines it as "a method for visually representing three-dimensional objects in two dimensions in technical and engineering drawings. It is an axonometric projection in which the three coordinate axes appear equally foreshortened and the angles between any two of them are 120 degrees".

Cube in Isometric Perspective

The cube illustration should make it clear. All three visible sides of the cube are equally foreshortened and the near corner where they meet exactly overlaps the opposite corner. Because the cube is viewed as if from an infinite distance, all parallel lines remain parallel throughout the picture and do not converge on a vanishing point.

Chinese Print

Isometric projection has a long history. Far Eastern art used a parallel line system approximating isometric until perspective was introduced from the West. Isometric has been popular in engineering and architectural drawing because measurements along each of the three major axes are at the same scale. More recently, isometric images turn up frequently in video games and online graphics. My new book Extreme Perspective! includes a chapter explaining how to draw isometrics as well as related parallel drawing systems.

Image from The Sims

(Sometimes the term "isometric" is applied in error. Rand McNally's Isometric Map of Manhattan is actually another kind of architectural drawing known as a plan oblique, or axonometric. The telltale difference is that the city streets meet at right angles and form rectangular blocks, not the rhomboidal ones you would see in a true isometric).

Not Isometric: The Map With The Buildings

I learned about isometric as part of studying perspective, and I use it on occasions when perspective is not required. I like the simple construction (no vanishing points) as well as its godlike point of view. This flyer for the theater company Bad Neighbors is an early example.

Frame from Extreme Perspective!

Isometric is a natural for comics- the insistent diagonal lines automatically tie the design of a page together, and because there is no perspective distortion at the edges, a single scene can be extended across multiple panels. It is a particular godsend in 24 Hour Comics where time is of the essence. The yard sale story with Mugg is a sequence from my second 24 Hour Comic, which is collected in the book 24 Hour Comic All-Stars. The all-isometric story Now Open The Box from 2008 is viewable on the Top Shelf website.

Frame from Extreme Perspective!

I have also used isometric for illustration assignments, such as this Modern Love piece for the New York Times (another yard sale!). The Mathemakitty illustration for Cricket Magazine was set up in CGI, and even though ease of construction was not a factor (I could have set my virtual camera up anywhere and simply traced the rendering) I chose to take an angle that resulted in an isometric view because it seemed "mathematical". By the way, I am proud of the extra care I took in this piece- in addition to details called for in the text, like "isosceles ears" and "triangle nose," I added a few mathematical touches of my own, like an Escher-style cat tessellation for the wallpaper, a Fibonacci spiraled tail, a Moebius strip of yarn, and a bell around the cat's neck with the silhouette of a bell curve.

Opening page from 24 Hour Comic

Page from Now Open The Box

Illustration for New York Times, 2005

"Mathematikitty" Illustration from Cricket Magazine

Mathematikitty detail

"Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same"

Writer-director Madeleine Olnek's film was just screened at Sundance, and got this positive review in Variety. You can view the trailer for it here. However, years before it was a film, "Co-Dependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same" was a play performed at WOW Cafe in New York (and the same actress, Susan Ziegler, played the lead role). Coincidentally, I was just looking through a box of old drawings in search of something else and found the poster I drew for the theatrical version in 1992.

Letters To Amy

I'm one step closer to that comprehensive collection of decorated envelopes I have been vaguely planning- the other day my friend Amy Schoppert dropped by from Tacoma with a paper sack full of envelopes she saved from the years we sent each other snail letters (Amy is Amy Schoppert now; when I went to school with her she was Amy King, but for most of the years we corresponded she was Amy Lear. It's complicated.). I'm in the process of scanning them all, but here are a few favorites.

Most of the envelopes in this collection fall into categories I already described in the post about letters to my friend Geoff Seaman: pictures of lovers and friends like the above image of Amy with her baby daughter, self portraits like this red/blue anagyph of me in the shower, and celebrities like Susan Sarandon (seen here in Atlantic City).

Others in the batch stretch the limits of what the post office will deliver, like this hexagonal envelope showing the kitchen of my New York apartment in isometric projection.

Among my favorites is this one from 1985 which riffs on the stamp.

A few images from my wild youth are so explicit that I wonder how they got through the mail. I won't be posting the other side of THIS envelope.

Hawaiian Sketchbook

Screw Pine Fruit

Did you miss me? I was on vacation with my family in Hawaii last week, visiting my mother, who just got a degree in Linguistics from Hawaii Pacific University. I didn't bring along any work, but I did take a sketchbook:

Palm Trees

Chinese Hat Island (with face drawn by Ben).

Hotel Balcony With Pigeons

Anapest: The Christmas Story

Santa saves Christmas!

Here is the latest installment in my very irregularly appearing series Anapest, finished just in time for the season. Happy Holidays!

Sketching With Copic

Frame from Snow Angel

The first issue of the new print version of Dark Horse Presents won't appear until next April, but readers who would like an advance look at my contribution, a comics story about a superhero named Snow Angel, can check out this book. University of Oregon arts professor and Copic Marker product rep Kenneth O'Connell has put together Sketching With Copic, a nifty collection of art drawn with Copic materials. My own story qualifies because I used a combination of watercolor and Copic airbrush to achieve a lushly colored effect. You can preview the entire book online here, or purchase a copy here.

More Keyhole Previews

More preview frames from The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes, a comic which will appear next year in Dark Horse Presents. This story is a memoir which freely mixes fact and fiction, or maybe just fiction and fiction.

Minty Green Houses

I'm working on a project which is hush-hush for now, but I hope to be able to tell you about it soon. In the meantime, here is a post about one of my odder side projects, an effort to to photograph all of the Minty Green Houses Of Portland before they are painted over. Minty green has been my favorite house color for a long time, but I only started taking pictures this summer, posting the images to my Facebook page at a rate of about one a day.

When I started out, I had thought this particular green, which I regard as the quintessential Portland house color, was losing ground to more muted Martha Stewartish shades of sage and jade, but there are still plenty to be found. Almost any drive down a Portland side street will turn up a couple of examples, and I can usually fill a week's quota in an hour or so. I just passed the one hundred mark and I've decided to quit for a while, if only to give my Facebook friends a break- I have had a lot of positive comments, but some people express bafflement at my interest, and there have been a few comments along the lines of "You have WAY too much time on your hands".

I have posted large versions of ten of my favorite houses to Flickr, starting here. My preference is for frontal views without cars or trees in the way, and while some houses appear to be recently painted, minty green is such a currently unfashionable color that many are in a picturesque state of dilapidation, clearly in need of a paint job that is unlikely to be another shade of minty green.

Work In Progress: The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes

Preview frames from "The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes" a new version of my 24 Hour comic from April 2009, which will be published next year in Dark Horse Presents.

By the way, if anyone's curious, the winning bid on the auction for my Wonder Woman painting: :US $117.50

Wonder Woman Day Update

Wonder Woman Day V is tomorrow, but my contribution is already up for auction on Ebay, and racking up the big numbers- high bid as I write this is $62.11. Meanwhile, I am one of the artists quoted in an article on the "Good News" website Tonic.com about the event by John R. Platt .