303 Plain Index Cards

#1: I grabbed the pack on a whim in an office depot in St. Louis, I think.

#2: This feels like a place.

#3

#4: plant-like?

#5: i like these nonspecific shapes that look like they're from living things.

#6

#7: Heads up, navel gazing ahead. Still kinda fond of this one though. That feeling of interacting with a system made for someone else.

#8: This popped into my head but I couldn't place where it was from at the time - It's a misremembering of the title of a book, "The Soul of a New Machine."

#9: This and #10 One of the first pairs that go together - they line up vertically.

#10

#11

#12: Staples? The more you repeat the same shape the more meaning gets ascribed to their arrangement and relative differences.

#13: Trying to make the process of drawing something reflect the way in which it'd occur in the world. Started with a crossroads, added a scattering of buildings, and slowly built up the map of the neighborhood.

#14: SPACE LASER

#15

#16: ~~Very Deep Genre Fiction Criticism~~.

#17: tiny fictional worlds

#18: design for an encapsulated support system for partially mind-uploaded humans still operating partially on their original brains.

#19: making aspirations and intentions explicit is nice sometimes.

#20: feels like some kind of place, but probably not one where gravity works like it does here.

#21

#22: observatory.

#23: the only correct response to someone proposing that they've got The One True Way and everybody should do it the same is "extremely dubious"

#24: I started these right around the new year. I'm not one for resolutions as such, but was trying to set a few rough expectations and hopes.

#25: plugged in.

#26: some cephalized floating (balancing?) robots.

#27: deep sea

#28: bounce / vectors / paths of motion

#29

#30: I've found I really like this mode of working with "local spaces" and finding out how they interact - imagining different grids or sets of patterns and working both within them and in the space of the page as a whole. Like different street grids in a city all mashing together.

#31: toothpaste clouds?

#32: epigraph for a pretentious book

#33

#34: ~executive dysfunction!~

#35: I like these sort sof gentle wafting pollen things.

#36: a bit of worldbuilding for a comic which might exist at some point.

#37 passed down knowledge of how to get by.

#38

#39: I'm a total sucker for the "comic panels as rooms" gimmick.

#40

#41: sometimes you just run out of ideas, and that's ok, they'll come again.

#42: waking up.

#43: This next bunch (through 52) turned into a manifesto of sorts.

#44

#45: I like this one a lot.

#46

#47

#48: Everyone is always in such a rush to get to the future.

#49

#50

#51

#52

#53: Lyrics from Cap'n Jazz - Precious

#54

#55

#56: These feel like chapters or sections or something.

#57

#58

#59

#60: This is one of my favorites out of the bunch.

#61

#62: I think around here is when I headed back to San Francisco after the holidays.

#63: speedy satellite.

#64

#65: shapes with shared grammars

#66: components and connections

#67: some kind of ship

#68: i'd like to edit this into something proper at some point.

#69 (nice)

#70: I was sleepy and up too late and had to convince myself to go to bed.

#71: Really happy with the sense of depth and light that came out in this one even though it's pretty minimal.

#72: I think I was listening to Hendrix at the time.

#73: I like these sorts of recognizably similar units with implicit connections.

#74

#75: convex / concave

#76: Lyrics from Janelle Monae.

#77: Putting eyes on something is a quick way to turn something abstract into something your brain wants to tell stories about.

#78

#79: thinkin' about dune.

#80: twist and shout

#81: three nouns

#82

#83: loose sorts of sea life

#84: this feels a really large sort of floating platform

#85: I like trying to find shapes and patterns that look like they contain information or are trying to convey a message, but leave that information itself ambiguous.

#86: Playing around with minimalist comics.

#87: translation between a language made of pictures and one made of words.

#88: the Jordan curve theorem is one of those fun things that's obvious on a common-sense level but incredibly hard to prove. "Inside/outside" seems to be one of the most fundamental tools we use to model the world. Trying to subvert that is one of the things that keeps coming up in these drawings again and again.

#89: as with #88: self-loops & feedback feel important.

#90: more playful ambiguous interiors/exteriors.

#91: describing a container for yourself.

#92: worlds and offshoots

#93: transit / hub

#94: the soft sky pulls away

#95: in the flow

#96: object / subject

#97: send/recv

#98: bridge

#99

#100: dissolving landmasses

#101: This pack was sold as 300 note cards but each of the 3 sub-packs had 101! This is bullshit and I want my money back.

#102: cubist castle

#103: Lyrics from Dan Deacon - True Thrush.

#104: the city's celebrating.

#105: uncertainty can be really scary sometimes, but how else are you going to find anything new, or understand something outside yourself?

#106: it hasn't really gotten any better, but the beginning of 2017 was pretty scary after the election.

#107: you're carrying memories of everyone you've ever met in that head of yours. a little of them lives in you.

#108

#109: I wanna do more faux-history object narrative dealies like this.

#110: other ways

#111

#112: waterfall

#113 tol / smol

#114: i like how these words turned out

#115: shape grammars. might like to try doing something like this as a generative drawing.

#116: "H.R. Giger but friendly instead of scary" is an aesthetic I like a lot.

#117: questions

#118: tiny life, deep sea

#119: hope for something greater than its parts.

#120: Spontaneously self-organizing systems. Words from Andrew Bird - Dark Matter.

#121: Lyrics from Animal Collective - Banshee Beat

#122: More from Banshee Beat. I'm happy with how well trying to match the drawings up with the content and mood of the lines worked out.

#123: a stray meteoroid hit the satellite.

#124

#125: panels

#126: soft machines

#127

#128

#129

#130: should play more with these more explicitly material-feeling shapes.

#131

#132

#133: I was listening to a podcast about the common aspects of improv comedy and alzheimers care.

#134: soft mooshy sorta feel to this one.

#135

#136: I think it must've been late or I was out of ideas, these couple are really loose.

#137: it's hard, i guess.

#138: sometimes they do.

#139: I really liked these weird exploding panels. lyrics: Deerhoof - Cast Off Crown

#140: lyrics: Deerhoof - Cast Off Crown

#141: machines / cities

#142: It's a good attitude

#143

#144: utopian shapes, utopian words

#145: One of my favorites of the lot.

#146: I fuckin love liminal spaces. I think I had the Greg Egan novel Schild's Ladder in mind here.

#147

#148

#149: in the upper atmosphere

#150: we use them all the time

#151: I was listening to Matmos during this one - the album has a lot of synthesizers in it, I think it came out in the repetitive machinery and panels.

#152: The album in question is Supreme Balloon - this is roughly the image that I get in my head around 8 minutes into the title track.

#153: This "different kind of place" fantasy idea keeps cropping up.

#154: sorting and categorizing the world

#155: almost none of the areas in this are actually enclosed spaces, but i like how much they still feel like a coherent whole - it feels solid, like one thing even though the parts are discontiguous.

#156

#157: some kind of gate

#158: an engine

#159: wiggle & shake, thinking about keith haring

#160: wrap / stretch

#161: :(

#162: WHO'S READY FOR FEELINGS

#163: I'm so sorry you can scroll past this if you want you don't have to endure my godawful processing poetry

#164: I'm fine, for the record.

#165: I just had to work through some shit.

#166

#167: I started HRT shortly after this. It's been good.

#168: mountains, clouds, sun & roads

#169: Lyrics from Nana Grizol - The Idea That Everything Could Possibly Ever Be Said

#170: strings / forms

#171: station

#172: it's the title of a Dianogah song

#173

#174: Do you ever hit that perfect creative space where you suddenly find yourself identifying with the thing you're working on, imagining what it would be like to think and behave the way it does?

#175: science fiction feelings

#176: you can either change your model to fit the world, or change the world to fit your model. deciding which is appropriate at any given time is one of the most important and hardest things to learn.

#177: bloop

#178: hey li'l robot whacha thinkin bout?

#179: future industrial

#180: Lyrics from Deerhoof - Matchbook Seeks Maniac. Topical for 2017.

#181

#182

#183

#184: Drawn to All Along The Watchtower. Intended kind of a flame look but it was pointed out to me that upside down it looks like kind of a voluptuous venus type figure.

#185: I'd been reading The Fifth Season and thinking about Big Oppression

#186

#187: three bots

#188: the core

#189

#190: desert / launch

#191: soft city

#192: world and outroads

#193: aromatic / industrial

#194: tundra settlement

#195: I've been messing around with these arrangements of gentle container shapes a lot - imbuing them with content is tough, especially if I want to maintain the internal/external play that's been emerging so far.

#196: ~executive function 2: electric boogaloo~

#197: I like making 'em.

#198: a place

#199: droid out of work

#200: I really like this symbolism. It's high up on the list if I ever get a tattoo. How do you read it?

#201: twist the borders.

#202: Lyrics from Bob Dylan - It's Alright, Ma. Words for growing up here.

#203

#204: macguffins

#205: transhumanism always gets tied to "we're gonna leave our bodies!" - it seems a strange sort of escapist notion. we can change what we are without leaving ourselves.

#206: mollusk-esque (mollesque?)

#207: see also Permutation City by Greg Egan

#208: ya gotta.

#209: Lyrics: TWIABP&IANLATD - Getting Sodas

#210: floating upward

#211: teef

#212: The shapes always get looser and more repetitive when Can is playing.

#213: The name of a Can song.

#214: i/o port

#215: i'm not sure

#216: apartments

#217: they arrived one warm night

#218

#219

#220: robots.txt

#221: billboard

#222: burden (1/2)

#223: burden (2/2)

#224: been on a strange road. learning to deal with unpleasant feelings by letting them in rather than trying not to feel them.

#225: I love how this one turned out.

#226: fiction / reality themes again

#227: Lyrics from Nick Drake - From the Morning

#228: From the Morning again. I love this song. One of the best tiny summations of this strange place we're in I've found so far.

#229

#230

#231: Things getting categorized as People can be fun or at worst misleading. The opposite is dangerous and happens more often than I'm comfortable with.

#232

#233: Is there a difference between being the same as everyone else and being alone?

#234: limits

#235

#236: apartment shapes

#237: more leafy boys

#238

#239: In the underside of the city

#240

#241

#242: a place to begin

#243

#244: a place

#245: little vocalizations

#246: i would read this surrealist horror novel

#247

#248: nexus

#249: "how did you get so tall?"

#250: solar flare / flow

#251

#252: mutual support's a helluva drug.

#253: See Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities - Hidden Cities #5 (Berenice)

#254: a utopian notion

#255

#256: cornerstone

#257: junction / redirection

#258: modal shift

#259: perspective / terrain

#260: wall / factory

#261: looks like an eye

#262: robot heads / floating platforms

#263: break / float

#264: actually pretty bad advice in a lot of situations

#265: i'd like to tell stories about this place

#266: watchtower

#267: thinking about walls between people

#268

#269: joining

#270

#271

#272

#273: limbs, but not quite how you'd expect

#274: the surface

#275: spaaaaaaaace

#276: these are questions

#277: parliament chamber

#278: along the border

#279

#280: tiny story pieces

#281: robot religion (1/2)

#282: robot religion (2/2)

#283: commercial satellite

#284: shape grammar

#285

#286

#287: these strung-blob shapes again. might do a generative version of this.

#288: something unknown is happening, we don't know what

#289

#290

#291: Non Euclidean Binary Space Partitioning

#292: looking at the way i habitually start drawings

#293: modern / residential

#294: architecture / steps / plaza

#295: Lyrics from TWIABP - Fightboat

#296: someting to keep in mind

#297

#298

#299: human shapes

#300: building / sun

#301: objects in intersecting orbits

#302: we can!

#303: A bit of a forced bookend, i guess. Coming to terms with how to put work into depicting things that aren't real or useful in an immediate sense. Fun project, learned a lot.