The glossument book named “The Waves – A Work of Art… Altogether Joyous and Lovely” consists of illustrations based on vocabulary words. This project is inspired by “A Humument” made by Tom Phillip. Digital artists are is used to being able to undo things simply with a command, Air E.N has reflected that this book is different due to the fact that there is no such thing as a button that will undo a mistake. Digital art is able to be kept forever since it is in the computer unless someone purposely deletes it; however, the book is fragile and can be broken since it wears off as time passes or can be destroyed in the wrong environment.
This project was a departure from the artist’s previous work which focused more on representing digital illustration based on a pre-existing concept and design rather than illustrating them through pictures and words simultaneously. The artist has previously explored character design, fashion, and color which was on digital media. Having a physical book to work with helped the artist see mistakes and the option to keep them or correct them which alters what the artist finds acceptable in terms of aesthetics.
The motivation behind these pages is exploring traditional media once more and learning the aspects on how to use the materials before the artist converted to all digital. These mundane objects on all the pages, as well as the rest of the pages in the book, convey a feeling to the viewer and artist of simplicity. This could occur during work when office supplies may have been the only thing available to create art with or it could also bring them back to their childhood. There is a recurring uniformity in the way all the pages look similar, which is blackout poetry accompanied by an illustration.
The process was taping the page with masking tape first, then choosing a vocabulary word that would fit the poem on the page, and lastly, the artist illustrated accordingly. The book ended up becoming somewhat of a picture book with a poem as the images and colors take up the majority of the page. Some of the illustrations reflects the artist’s interest such as the word Valorous representing an interest in game design and concept design. On the last page Omnipotent, it reflects on the artist’s personality of easygoing or silly. And lastly, the book itself is a collection to demonstrate the artist’s skill, style and aesthetic of everything being clean, simple and fleeting.
Blackout poetry is already a technique used as highlighted by Austin Kelon in his video “Steal Like An Artist”. What the artist took away from this video is that William Burroughs got the cut-out technique to rearrange words into a new poem idea from Brion Gysin who did the same thing out of newspapers. The central idea being that there are many artists that get inspired and nothing is truly original. This was motivation for the artist to start something imperfect and to try new things. The artist took the idea of blackout poetry and the reassembling of words to utilized black masking tape in order to black out the unnecessary words on the book. Instead of a sharpie or marker the artist chose black masking tape because it is removable. Then the illustration portion was inspired by the video “Altered Book Pages- December 11, 2013” : which is a video of a person painting a page white before adding illustration. In the glossument that the artist has made, this has a similar effect to whiting out two pages to make a spread using printer paper.
Didactic panels below:
