yet another craft project update
crescentwench of MythDemeanor! and I have been diligently working on a crafty trade for the last month or so--Sandy is designing and sewing a skirt/jacket dress ensemble for me to wear at Convergence 13, and in return, I've promised her a full head installation of synthetic dreadlocks in shades of red. I believe it's a pretty decent deal for the both of us, as I haven't the drafting and tailoring abilities that she has, and she can take advantage of my four years or so of experience doing synthetic hair.
I won't reveal what my dress looks like until after the event, but I will share the print I rendered in Adobe Illustrator CS2 for it. Sandy has the ability to do photo emulsion screen printing and we've elected to stencil some of my artwork onto the fabric of the dress. I tried to design something that was descriptive of the Victorian theme of the event as well as my somewhat-unrelated personal interests, but yet not comprised of too many cliche motifs. Cheese is good to a point, overly cliche--not so much.
I'm glad I forced myself to do this print in Illustrator. I've had no instruction in the program and generally do most of my design work in Photoshop or InDesign, so it felt productive to ameliorate my Illustrator chops a bit.
Here's a tiny JPEG of the design. The PDF I exported for Sandy yesterday was 11x17 and 300 dpi. As it's vector art, I can stretch or squish this to any size we need for the screens. Sandy tells me that it looks great overlapped multiple times.
The image is designed to be repeated on fabric if needs be, but can also stand alone. The motif of the bat-winged woman is a live traced rendering of one of my favorite pieces of antique pornography from the turn of the century. I used a most fantastic gear brush for Illustrator (supplied here) to create the three floating cogs. The larger circles are rings of binary (they both spell out "beautiful machine" in English) and their typeface is a newspaper font from the late 1800s. The additional script is called Jane Austen, and I believe is her handwriting.
I also have a feeling that a variation of this will end up on the next Axis of Evil poster. Hee.
I'm very satisfied with the way this piece looks, though it's really not exactly what I initially plotted. I have the ability to conceptualize and execute, but there's always that issue of getting from Point A to Point B in the middle. :)
Thank you.