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Show moreThis is a postcard for a lecture and film screening I organized on campus last fall. The lecture was by NASA engineer Matt Melis, who spoke on the Columbia accident investigation; the film, screened by the CWRU Film Society, was "Ascent: Commemorating Shuttle," which he produced. (It can be found on YouTube; highly recommended for space and/or photography enthusiasts.) My initial idea for the postcard was in art nouveau style, with an ornate frame featuring text about the event and mission badges. Ultimately I wound up scrapping that, because I had trouble capturing the way it had looked in my head, and because the text began to seem like too much of a distraction. I kept the flat colors and heavy outlines, which made it look more like a stained glass window. This struck me as appropriate, because launch vehicles always exist on a mythical scale. As the shuttle program fades into history, it joins that pantheon, loses its immediacy, and becomes more abstracted in our collective understanding, like a historical figure turned religious icon. I also wanted to show the shuttle frozen in time in a kind of repose, nestled into the clouds - a real contrast with the violence of a launch, but the kind of visual that suggests itself when you watch from a distance - which the edgeless panel is well-suited for. I want the viewer across the room to look at it on a bulletin board (long after the event it advertised is over) and feel themselves press "pause." I hope it worked on you. ------------------------------------------------ Size: 4"x9"
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Show moreOnce a week, I teach an electronics class for high school girls at Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights. I couldn't find a basic electronics textbook I really liked, so I started drawing a comic book for them. This is one of the pages from that comic, which serves as a reference for the resistor color code. I find that the needs of technical communication "expressing a concept in multiple ways, showing how ideas relate to and build on each other, getting your point across whether the reader skims or ruminates" are perfectly suited to the words-and-pictures alchemy of comics. This page uses a combination of techniques I've learned from both engineering drafting and comic illustration, echoing engineering drawings in ligne claire style and making use, naturally, of color coding. And when I pass it out to my students, it's stapled like an old school `zine. Size: 9" by 12" Method: Pencil and ink on Bristol board, colored and lettered in Photoshop. This entry won second place in the CWRU category.
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