the Stereoscope

I spent the second half of the workweek in New York in an attempt to round up documents, authentications and seals for my dual citizenship application to Italy. I always find that a trip to the city, while physically and often emotionally draining, always gives me a creative charge. I generally come home to the District tired from the sensory overload and the long slog down I-95, but with a head full of  inspiration and motivation.

As it turns out, the perfect activity for this particular state of being might just be painting. Even though I have several design projects on the burner that I’m excited about, I had no energy or patience to stare at a computer screen and was too tired to focus on them anyway. But, with my first project for Get Your Paint On due the next day, I did have just enough focus to start loosely sketching out a plan for the painting and being a little tired allowed me to just clear my mind and get going.

The week’s assignment asked us to draw inspiration from the geometric quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. I mapped out my pattern of triangles (naturally) on my panel and started mixing up some colors.  I’m working in gouache, and having never worked with before, I had a hard time deciding if I should treat it as I would watercolor by planning my white space carefully ahead of time, or should I treat it as I would acrylics by layering from dark to light. It seems like it’s somewhere in between – I think?

I didn’t have much of a plan going in, just knew that I wanted to use a strict geometric pattern to explore various shades of color.  In the photo on the right, I have started blocking out areas of color, and still was unsure as to whether this would be a monochromatic composition or if I would add a second color.  The image on the left shows my composition after adding in some yellow ochre, and frankly is where I should have stopped working. Soon after this, I added fields of black and grey. I also stopped paying attention to the why as I added new colors and eventually my composition became dark, muddied and static. Oh well.  Next time. I like the direction in which I was going, so I might take another crack at it.  I am also not sure that I would use an artist panel as my substrate, or will at least explore other brands as I found the Ampersand board to be a bit slick and the texture way too prominent. I also found that the gouache lifted very easily when reworked, which definitely contributed to the muddiness of my colors. Because I was just getting started with this medium, I opted for a cheap student set from Reeves – since I like the potential results of gouache, it’s probably worth t to upgrade to some tubes of Acryla.

For the final project in my Type Studio class I was tasked with designing a typeface. In two weeks. Never mind that a typeface can take months or years to design. Never mind that I lack the focus and obsessive tendencies usually found in a quality type designer. Naturally, I procrastinated by resisting inspiration and otherwise avoiding putting pencil to grid paper.

But sometimes inspiration can be unexpected – and delicious. Over a weekend trip to Brooklyn I made my usual visit to Peter Pan Donuts on Manhattan Ave. Peter Pan’s is a place of many charms; among them are the best.donuts.evar. and that it has evidently not undergone significant renovation since opening in the 60’s. The waitresses still wear uniforms, the countertops are gold-flecked formica, and the place is covered in vintage, hand-painted signage. They were busy that morning, giving me plenty of time to take in the many species of letterforms while waiting for my egg cream and kruller.

The lettering on which I chose to base my typeface, which I’ve dubbed “Peter Pan,”  was a bit thick and gloppy in places, and was a little too…of the period (would pair well with an Oompa Loompa musical interlude). I knew I wanted to make something nostalgic but modern, whimsical but not too feminine. Perhaps because I associate Peter Pan Donuts with my own childhood, I also wanted the letters to be wide in proportion-as if they had been designed using an old handwriting tablet. My solution was to create a leggy, stick-like slab-serif (a style I tend to think of as masculine, and a bit of a throwback) to which I added the whiskers for just a bit of sweetness.

Without a program like Fontlab, I had to produce this in Illustrator – so it is not an altogether working typeface…yet. It obviously still needs some refinement, and the letterspacing is a bit wonky but, considering that a typeface can take several months to make, this isn’t a bad start. I quite like it.