Show and Tell

Yesterday I got to share where I work, and today I'm going to finally share my work. As I've been researching how to promote my blog and optimize my social networking, I've come to realize that my blog thus far shows very little about what I do. So, I'm taking this opportunity to introduce some of my work, and I'll gradually bring more of it in to give you a sense of who I am as an artist.

This first project was my senior thesis and I'm excited that I can use my blog to showcase it, since I'm not quite sure how else to get the public to see it. The parameters for the thesis were that it had to be visual reportage - something based on observation - and something that could potentially have a place in the real world once completed. For my project, I observed real conversations and then transformed the speakers into puppets and re-enacted the scenes in a comic strip-esque layout. The result was very entertaining and, I like to think, successful. The puppets had a lot of character and I was able to control the comedic tone through pacing and "facial" reactions, thus maximizing the humor in the conversations. Here are a few snippets from the book, which included 7 conversations of varying lengths.

These were the endpages of the book, giving the reader a glimpse of what was to come without giving too much away. (Click to see larger version)

This was a conversation I overheard on an airplane. Remember, all of these conversations are real and pretty much verbatim from what I recorded.

This conversation was the most personally compelling because it featured my professor, DB Dowd, who taught the thesis seminar. As students we were often baffled by things he said because of his particular, um, talent to phrase things in ways that made them completely incomprehensible. I also achieved an impeccable likeness with the puppet!

You can see the book in its entirety here, and if you have any ideas or suggestions on how/to whom I might market it, I'd love to hear from you! I hope to expand the collection of conversations and eventually maybe present it as a web comic once I have enough material.