Circus Freaks 1.0

Working on a few pieces for the next Space 242 show, having to do with circus freaks. Here's the start on my bearded lady. Always wanted to do one that looks like the Venus de Milo (esp the Illustrator 10 one). I'm thinking of a strong man and maybe a tom thumb or pinhead piece to be mounted on either side of her, each dude oggling her.



And because my scanner is always in either the studio or at the house, usually the place I am not, I've begun using the world's cheapest scanner. I hold the thumbnail sketch up to my MacBook's camera and snap a shot of it with PhotoBooth. There are 2 reasons I would recommend this.

#1 No excuses: If I don't have the scanner, and it takes an extra 15 minutes for me to get to the scanner, that's 15 minutes lost, period. And then there's the potential for distractions in between. Oh, while I'm on the way I'll grab a coffee at the shop, then while I was there I ran into Bubba, and he wanted to go do something, so I went with him, and that's why I never got started on my thing. F that. This goes for any tool, esp one that is expensive or difficult to use. Find something that works, make something that works, or do without. Just get on with it while you're feeling it. Half the tools I use I've made by hand, or modded inexpensively. Expensiver does not mean better.

#2 Quick and dirty: don't get bogged down in scanning a beautiful, high-res, suitable-for-framing pencil sketch. In the space of 30 seconds, I've gotten the raw essence of my idea onto my (digital) workspace. Worried about warping? Square it up using the Free Transform tool in Photoshop. That takes another 30 seconds. Because the PhotoBooth image is automatically low resolution, everything you need to do with it is fast.