I just finished working on a sideline project for a friend — a little job that, like most little jobs, turned into a huge investment of time. But because I decided to do this right, not just execute it but really bring all my talents to bear on it, I had fun doing it and am proud of the final result.
My pal
Kirsten is a “travel author” who flits about the world to off-the-beaten path places and has the oddest things happen to her, which she then writes about. She rails against this idea of women traveller/writers all being about spas and lavender and falling in love; she prefers the weird, real life of unfamiliar worlds. So, with this in mind, she’s launching “
Writers’ Expeditions” and wanted a section of her website to showcase this.
Like I said, rather than just getting this done, I decided to use my new-found interest in drawing to really customise this mini-site. Kis always gives me barge-loads of copy to incorporate, which is probably appropriate here, giving lots of background when it’s such a big investment for people to make. I figured I could break up all this copy and draw the reader’s eye around the page by including lots of illustrations.
It took me every spare minute to get this finished in time, and of course I never charge enough for these jobs, but I’m really chuffed about how this turned out, even though the page is busy as hell:
Doing this took me right back to my first days of getting a computer and discovering the joy of pulling my drawings into it and getting them to do stuff on-screen. Between the drawing, painting, scanning, and website design, I’m left feeling really charged and compelled to pursue two things:
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I want to treat my work on paper like it’s art. I’ve got my first “gallery showing” next month — a local event that anyone can pay to be in. I’ve attended in the past, and there’s some remarkable, top-notch work by some masterful artists who just happen to have chosen to live up here, then there are some really Gawd-awful, childish messes hanging on display. So we’ll see where I fit into that; my work is certainly not like anything I’ve seen around here.
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I would like to take advantage of these tools for myself. There’s all the web-stuff, like on Kis’s site, and that could be even more interactive. Then there’s a program called Hype that I’ve got and not touched which makes it possible — and easy — to create fully interactive, animated content (like we used to get on DVD-ROMs back in the days before everything was online); best of all, they’re HTML5-compliant, so they’ll work on just about any browser and device with no plug-ins.
What I want to do with these tools is bring stories and ideas and images together in a fun, interactive way. For some reason I can’t explain, I know there’s an energy in my drawings that comes across. It seems to give more to the viewer — and do it more quickly — than the novels did. So this seems like a way to do it all at once and have it be much more accessible, less of an ‘ask’ and more of a ‘give’.
And it’s fun. And it doesn’t take a year-and-a-half to excute each idea!
