Mind Shrines, part one
I have an image heavy post for you this month. It's a slight departure from the digital zine I've been working on but I'm really excited about it so I'm going to share it with you.
About two and a half years ago I started a collaboration with an artist I really admire, his name is Theo Ellsworth (on IG ) and he makes comics, illustrations, zines and cut-outs. Although he lives in Montana we met in person when he had a show at a local Los Angeles gallery called GR2.
With the goal of making a zine we started mailing a bundle of pages between L.A and Missoula and responding to each other's ink drawings. It has been a really nice slow paced project. Every time I got the bundle back and sent it away I would scan the pages to track the progress. It was meant as personal record but I got the bundle a couple of days ago and it occurred to me I could make some shareable progress shots to see how each drawing evolved over time.
I'm going to break this into a couple of posts since I found out doing these GIFs is quite labor intensive. There are some technical notes at the end of the post.
Here are the first 10 pages, covering work between December 2018 and June 2021:
One lesson I learned is that I should have used the same scanner all the time, there were a lot of discrepancies between color and placement I spent a lot of time correcting. That charming wobble between frames wasn't by design, but it was the best I could do by manually aligning the different files as layers in the budget photoshop lookalike program I was using. Making the GIFs was the easy part with the always trusty ezGIF.com (for the technically curious there is a delay of 1.5 seconds between frames, with crossfade of 5 frames).
The evolution of the drawings comes through in a nice way though. I hope you enjoy seeing this process and I'll be posting more pages soon. Thank you!
Federico