What does a camper want?

In my continuing study of the metaphor for Printmaking Camp (our new game project for learning printmaking at a distance), I come to a "prize" you get when you complete a level. In the metaphor (REO Speedwagon's Find your own way home) you get a song to hear.

What does a printmaker have to offer? Sure, you can print a screen image but that's not hard. I do that every day! Just press PRINT SCREEN and open a graphics program and you PASTE it in. That's dumb. My audience is smarter than that. They need a real reward. But what does a printmaking camper WANT and NEED?

I think the answer is know-how. Maybe we give you a KNOW-HOW card, like those Straight Arrow Injun-uity cards I liked when I was a kid. Give the player a video that shows how to do something real, make something real--like a print, of course, with or without a press.

Aha!

Metaphor Study Ongoing

My metaphor study continues yet another day. From the REO Speedwagon game, Chapter 1, level 7 I patched together an image until I had a complete phrase from the song. Then I searched for something similar from the imaginary Missing Professor's cabinet--a clue as to the connection among audio, video, and printmaking. I found Artist's Books' trailer on YouTube, grabbed a screen shot of three characters from this interesting phase of the professor's life, and presented the image in an Artist's Trading Card. It's one of the cards stolen from the old man in Brazil, or it's one of the cards you get in the box with your Plasteel press.

More on Metaphor

I've been working on the metaphor, REO Speedwagon's "Find your own way home" game. In the metaphor, you're in a car museum. You see an auto mechanic's toolbox. It's locked. One drawer opens with a key you found on the floor. In the drawer you find a wrench. With the wrench you can tighten the hood ornament on a car, which lets you find the car key to start the sports car, which turns on the lights, revealing a coin. Put the coin in the juke box and music plays.

In Printmaking Camp, you open the box of accessories, you find useful things, such as the blankets, test plate, the user's manual, the certificate of authenticity, and the disc. Each item branches to another level, another challenge. In the backstory, you must trace the pathway of the forger and do as he does. You may find Issey being the one to narrate this pathway, solving the puzzle.

Screenplays, comics, and art

6:30 AM, December 14: On the last day of Emeralda Interval, I began a new screenplay titled "Printmaking Camp." It’s a back story for a video game that teaches kids about printmaking. I wrote the opening, establishing scene, focusing on the antagonist, Gregorio Potero-a street kid in Floripa, Brazil. He has a hiding place, and he wants to be an artist. I described his hiding place to open my story. My software exercise was with Final Draft, a screenwriting aid.
The screenplay is also the story for a comic of the same title, a character outline of Gregorio, complete with his picture. This was for my practice session with a drawing program called Manga Studio. I hope to share this program with our granddaughter and her friends as they role-play and create for the real printmaking camp (which I envision will come about later).
This is the fifth day of Interval, the five-day orientation period for Gates Prize Winners, preparing for the 360-day “Year of Living Copiously” I made up about 13 years ago as a way of organizing my work in printmaking teaching, research, practice and service. Tomorrow I begin another year—my fourteenth year as a Gates Prize Winner. Now I head off for breakfast (winners must work a couple hours’ work before breakfast) and for the rest of the day I'll be mixing real, hands-on work making presses and digital work.

New Metaphor

What's a metaphor? I made a joke: If you say, "What's a metaphor?" it sounds like, "What's a meta for?" Like you don't know? Ha ha. I wrote a story one time about a mysterious tribe of natives who lived in Emeralda Region. No one ever saw them as they actually were, as they actually looked. These people had a gift of always looking like something or someone else. This way they kept their freedom to be who they are.

Emeralda Region is the home of the Metaphors, these elusive people. I learned from this story you can take an existing "thing" and turn it into something like an original idea. For example, if I read an article and it is so much like something I'm thinking about writing, I might use it as a metaphor--actually copy it out, change the original words to be my words and by the time I'm finished, you can hardly find a trace of the original. Sounds like plagiarism, but it's more like learning from a master by copying the master's work.

Today I made a picture, as another example, taking a screen shot from a new game I bought (the term is "licensed" since you can never buy a video game). Then over the screen shot I began repainting the image, changing the words to fit our own back story of Emeralda. I replaced the protagonist's image with our grandaughter's, re-wrote her text and changed the list of objects to be those you get when you buy a Mini Halfwood Press.

This exercise is all for the objective of inventing the game that teaches you printmaking.

New Software

New software came in and here is my first try. It is Manga Studio Debut 4, something I hope will help in my endeavor to learn comic book art. I imported a sketch from yesterday's studio session (a device to help me assemble Mini Halfwood Press #54) with a woman's hand, titled, "What she was drawing on the airplane when he interrupted her." That is a referance to the final scene of my screen play, Dusty's Prize.

With the clock ticking, I felt like a little kid doing a drawing test!

My Emeralda

This is what's been on my mind for several months since one of the characters stepped out of my screenplay (Dusty's Prize) and sent me an email. He had an offer, an exchange for a Mini Halfwood Press. Actually, it didn't happen QUITE like that, but close. The offer was for an e-card. On the other hand, it looked to me as though he and his crew could do almost anything if it had to do with Web animation and multimedia.

Could it be Kud (pronounced "could" in my screenplay) might realize my old, long-held dream of a user interface to access my life's work in art and writing for the printmaking world? The metaphor began with artist's stamps, a kind of cinderella collectible postage. If you don't know, cinderella is a classification of non-denominational stamps. That led to finding the Disney stamps website and a general layout, with music, I'm fond of. It was inspiring, something I emulated in today's exercise, above, showing how I would lay out my Printmaking World.

Could Kud do it? I wonder.

Plasteel on My Mind

More time in my studio means less time at my computers. When I do my morning exercises to get skillful with my Wacom, my mind is on the plasteel press molds waiting in my studio--waiting to apply what Tom K told me about my design. All these have to blend, almost seamlessly, on an electronic Artist Trading Card.

Touch Here

The database of 'Zine essays is done! Now, how do we link it to Emeralda? How do we get from electronic Artist Trading Cards to this library of articles written by the artist? I figured for a long time you find a clue in the card--such as an alphanumeric string--and input it into a search engine of some kind.

That engine would then display the article. Then the article itself might contain more links like you see in Wikipedia, and touching on those links would take you to yet another "clue" or, in the case of a learning game, a fact or solution to the learning challenge.

Therefore, I tried an experiment to see if this would jog my imagination, or my memory of what I want to accomplish with a collectible electronic Artist Trading Card. I laid out a grid on a card and began loading it with hyperlinks to selected essays in my 'Zine database. I fit nine "hotspots" over the image, only, of the card.

For my Wacom drawing excercise, I scanned another card and drew a hand "touching" the image on the card. For my Second Life exercise, I uploaded it and stuck it on my wall. Then I took a snapshot of me in SL, admiring my feat.

So there. Do I pass?

Anyone there?

This is an interesting age. We must live between two worlds--one that is dying and one that is being born. I find myself sometimes moving from one to the other in the course of an hour, the hour of my routine exercise. I must check in to two virtual worlds--SpotOne3d and Second Life.

Is anyone there? No. Only me--or, rather, my avatar. Okay. So practice building things for a few minutes, or fine-tune the room I created in Second Life. Upload a picture--any picture will do. Stick it on a wall.

Remember those old days, in the last century, when I taught art, and it was a routine activity to stick art to walls in real rooms (called "studios"). We'd stick them up in hallways, too, in frames.

Now it's supposed to be a new century, and I don't regret leaving those rooms and hallways of the university. But "out here" in the so-called "real world," things are so different. It must be what sci-fi writers try to achieve in words, a different planet.

Now, back to to my real world--around the block to my studio, and work on the Halfwood Presses people have asked me to build for them. With these they will make real prints for the printmaking world, where it is clearly two worlds in one--one that is dying and one that is being born all over.

Script Tease

Cute title for this blog, don'cha think? Just a note about ROUTINE ACTIVITIES. This is a core concept to designing Emeralda. It started when I learned about EXPERT SYSTEMS. These are computer programs that are supplosed to trap the KNOWLEDGE of experts. Think of a plastics engineer, in his or her 70s, about to retire from a big plastics company.

What will they do without them? He routinely solves all kinds of problems, the decades of experience paying off for the company and keeping them at the top. So they hire a KNOWLEDGE ENGINEER to tap his knowledge and organize it so anyone in the company can solve problems after the old expert is gone. It starts with observing the expert's ROUTINE ACTIVITIES, those tried and true BEST METHODS.

In my vanity, I call myself an expert, so when I learned about expert systems, I thought if I could put what I know abotu printmaking skills and theory into a computer database anyone could access, then I'd always be available to students. Trouble is, outside of institutions, no one knows you. There are self-claimed experts all over, but it's to the institutions that most people look for information they can trust.

Buried in the institutional knowledge banks you might find answer to all your questions. The question for me is, HOW? Here's where the knowledge engineer and the USER INTERFACE DESIGNER, working together, come up with a design on a computer screen that makes sense to most people.

My scribbling today, in the image above, is the result of a ROUTINE ACTIVITY. But, to most people, it makes no sense at all because it lacks a designer's touch. Hovering drop-down explanations would help. Who are those guys in the picture, anyway? What's that design in the bottom? What does it mean? What is that script in the background?

If there is a User Interface designer out there, I would sure like to meet them now. Emeralda should be that design, a game-like user interface.

Gamelet

Gamelet. My word of the day. It means "tiny game" as, in software talk, "applet" or small application. A printmaking game might be simply a fun little game involving printmaking knowledge. Groping for the meaning of this, which would consititute a shift away from Emeralda: Learn Printmaking Online, it would instead involve the true game design based on engines like Unreal, made for massively distributed devices like xBox.

But I drifted over to another thought, called "Now or Never" and one of my old favorite Web sites, the Disney stamps--which I found many years ago when I was following a British philatelist's articles on cinderella. Thinking about Alan's offer, too. Is it now or never? My eATC card today probably doesn't make sense, but oh well.

A Conversation

What did that Texas woman mean when she said, "You could pay for Emeralda with those presses!" We were taking an introductory lesson in SpotOn3d--a virtual world like Second Life--when the question of money to develop our game came up. I described the Halfwood Presses.

The conversation was among Janet Fisher, me, and two people in Texas who own SpotOn. It happens these were also artists, and they knew about printmaking, etching presses, etc. I was impressed. This happened months ago, when Janet first bought into SpotOn3d as a more likely virtual world for testing the theory of a blended online learning experience for printmaking students and colleagues.

A conversation last night got me thinking about this again. For one thing, it was to result in another order for a Mini Halfwood Press. This means not only another member of the community of Halfwood owners, but also a few more dollars that will help keep the idea of learning printmaking online alive.

This conversation was special in more ways than that. She is a former student from my halcyon days at the University. She witnessed the changes I was making to the way I taught printmaking. She was a teacher, too, taking leave from her college in Alaska to take some more college classes. When she asked me for my card file of reading notes, I was impressed. I was even more impressed when she returned them with her annotations!

So today for my Wacom, Graphic Novel and card exercise, I revisited my Second Life land and saw it as a card shop--selling electronic Artist Trading Cards (eATC)--and put up the fanned-out version for starters. I tagged today's exercise with the SLURL that would take anyone reading this to the Emeralda City Plaza in Second Life

It was fun.

Emeralda ATC Mystery

I return to the question, "What is an Emeralda ATC?" This is in pursuit of answers to several mysteries at once. (1) Does the "e" in eATC stand for Emeralda or e as in eCard? (2) Is it linked to databases, such as art images, text, and multimedia?

And most importantly, does making an eATC provide for practice and production? Today's exercise, with Wacom and my current, favorite image of the Mini Halfwood Press with the mystery ship, the Emeralda, and a line from my screenplay, Dusty's Prize, is here to document my effort to find the answer to the questions.

Leaving Mind

Somewhere I read a quote: "He left us his mind." It was from a student about Bach's A Well-Tempered Clavier. The meaning is clear: As a teacher as well as composer, Bach devised a way to blend his art with education. In this collection of solos for keyboard, Bach "left us his mind."

Bach described A Well-Tempered Clavier as "a collection of solo keyboard music for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study." In the corners of my mind I think of this while I devise ways to make my art experience useful for printmakers "desirous of learning" and "leave my mind." I am especially interested in doing this for those already skilled in the study of printmaking.

Can one compare oneself to Bach and not be accused of outrageous vanity? That matter aside, if I were to "leave my mind" this is how I would do it:

I would use five skills: image, multimedia, text making, database and spreadsheet. These I would assign to five computer-based applications. I would think of them like keys and notes basic to musical composition and performance. In my morning's routine practice I used several of these "note skills" including checking on my resource, the Wikipedia to review what Bach left us.
To do what Bach did, you would have to put this plan online in today's age of digital reproduction. That is my goal.

Qualifying eATC

I'm learning to draw all over again. When you engage in the arts of the 21st Century, you must qualify by combining all that happened in the past with what is happening in the present. The game Janet and I are working in, Emeralda, requires that you know things about digital arts, and one is How to Draw.

As a professor of 20th Century art I had it all down--drawing from the "natural" way to draw (Nicolaides) to formulaic drawing (perspective) to mechanical drawing (drafting). You name it, I professed to know about it and I could get by in a drawing class either as a teacher or student.

Digital drawing is that and more. In my routine exercises I not only have to manage my software and hardware (Photoshop, Wacom tablet) I also have to connect with my database and storage and retrieval scheme; and all this must fit into Emeralda. I must qualify, in other words, to get into Emeralda and the electronic Artist Trading Card (eATC) is my entry ticket.

This morning I added a video--Dusty Welcomes You--from a 2001 exercise in making DVDs. To qualify to play Emeralda, in the printmaking world, this I had to do.

Ten Things

In the old days art teachers used slide projectors. The students would sit in the dark while the teacher pushed the buttons on the slide projector, showing pre-arranged slides and talking about the images--which were bigger than life. Under these conditions you couldn't tell what was fact and what was fiction. I think that it was fiction, and that's why everyone stayed put. It was also because you weren't allowed to leave the room. That's how art was taught in the old days.

Over the twenty years I taught, I watched thousands of students watching millions of slides this way. When multimedia shows, with fancy programmable slide projectors, fades, dissolves, etc. came in, the art shows began to resemble film. As art teachers, we were sort of walking backward into the future. When video became practical, then we turned around (some of us, anyway) and faced the future.

We -- the students and I -- learned ten things in this period, and to live in the present (which was the future I faced in 1985) I organized these ten things into clusters I call "Islands of Domains of Expertise" and made them the fictional counterparts to curriculum design. Today I made an ATC to show how the two blend together--a slide show depicting the island of Video.

In the game, Emeralda, you move from one island domain to the next--if you are good enough! BTW, you can go to my blogs written on each of the ten islands and see summaries of my essays.

Print Me

Once upon a time I made up a new man and I called him Dusty. It was a joke. However, in my imagination Dusty hung around. He wouldn't go away. Then I found it was helpful to have this other identity sometimes.

Like, when I wanted to make a video of something and I was tired of seeing myself; I put on a bowler hat, mustache and talked with a gravelly voice with a slight southern accent. Later I learned my voice change was actually due to Hashimoto's disease.

No problem controlling the effect (it's a hypothyroid condition) but I lost Dusty's voice. The image is still around so I can use him in my writing (Dusty's Prize: A screenplay) and graphic novels.

The question has come up, "How do you go study with a printmaker today?" and I made this ATC for it. Would you study with a printmaker who dresses up and takes pictures of himself? I think if art teachers tried a few dramatic effects and new technologies, they could go online and teach and that way make up for the loss of direct contact with art students looking for a creative approach to art.

Designing Levels

I played like I was a game designer like Janet, and so my main job is to work on a design document for the game, Emeralda, with a focus on levels. It means things like "entry level" and moving from beginner to advanced, etc.
I tried to imagine myself as a total newbie, and given that Janet and I are studying virtual worlds as a setting for our game (although most virtual worlds are NOT games and were not designed to be games), I had to think of a level design.
What I'd like to do is get one or two people into a virtual world like Second Life or SpotOn3d and just try to have a discussion. It was only a year ago that I was a newbie, really, when it came to getting into a class on virtual worlds put on by the UW here in Seattle. So I know it isn't super simple.
Nevertheless, I put up one of the artist trading card designs I've been doing for earlier blogs and stuck it to my virtual wall in my plot of land in Second Life. Then I created a box and sat down and thought about it. If you want to you can join me there--just go to my Web site and click on the SLURL you see listed on the left side of the screen.

Virtual School

"Are people really using virtual worlds to teach?" That's the question I wanted to answer today, so I Googled and sure enough--loads of "virtual" classrooms are out there. What about art? Again, Googling (this time with online printmaking search term) turned up several pages. One caught my eye and it was WAVA, standing for Washington Virtual Academy. Not a very friendly UI, since they make you give your contact information before you can explore.

But, oh well, I do have a middle-school age granddaughter who might want to take a class via WAVA, so in I went. What I noticed right away is that it is "Powered by K12." In other words, Washington State licensed the software so students all over Washington in public schools can take courses at almost no cost.

By now I had answered the question about teaching in virtual classrooms, so I clicked on ART to see what WAVA offers for art courses. As I suspected, they were art history courses, with some hands-on opportunities to paint and draw, quilt, sculpt, etc.

I am looking for a metaphor to compare Emeralda, so I clicked on a Math lesson. I tried to imagine how a Middle or High School printmaking course can be built using my ideas; instead of a subtraction problem in the guise of a karate lesson, I'd imagine a card. I cut-and-pasted an image from my exercise, and pasted on one of my early card designs. Of course, I had to practice with my Wacom tablet, too--getting ready to turn the textbook for Emeralda into a comic book.

Professor's Bookshelf

Resuscitation. That's the last word I heard when I left my studio last night. Later, as I shut down my office computer, I got a message from an art teacher updating me on her plans to teach. She also answered some of my questions.

Resuscitation. That word was still lingering in my mind this morning. Where'd I learn it? It must have been in either Arthur Koestler's "Creative Process" or Andre Malraux' "Voices of Silence." Is it connected to that art teacher's answers to my questions? And how is this medical term like bringing a bookshelf to life?

By the time I got to our art gallery this morning, I decided to make this into my practice with the Wacom tablet and add to this blog. In my picture you see me contemplating my bookshelf. As a young man, just starting my career as a teacher (like my friend who wrote the message) I had my professor's library at hand.

Today art teachers have a bigger library, thanks to the Web. Yet, I wonder, can my old art professor's library be resuscitated? Can my library be resuscitated for future students, and for my students' students? And, in Emeralda, this game we're making, could the process be challenging or entertaining at the same time as the resuscitation my bookshelf?

Printmaking S&T

S&T stands for "skills and theory," Janet referred to in her blog Making Emeralda, which lead the five objectives of our game-in-the-making, Emeralda. Both skills and theory are prime movers in my own passion for the art. Someone playing our game will find these "bottled" for them, like vintage wine.

Skills and theory are an inseparable complementary pair. In the fine art of printmaking, you can't have one without the other. It's black-and-white, yin-yang. There's also history to learn. When did printmaking start? Why? Where? How? Who started printing? History (or, in Emeralda lexicon, her story) is the bedrock of printmaking theory I am bottling for Emeralda players who want to study printmaking in this the age of digital reproduction.

For beginning printmakers I made a target design with four rings. The bulls-eye and the three outer rings denote the four printing processes. They are relief, stencil, intaglio and planographic (or plano). However, theory tells us these are not separate all the time; we can mix them up; Emeralda is not only about the skills of printmaking. It's about creativity, too, in theory.

Bottled Up

Within hours of bringing a Casio keyboard into our house we were discussing real versus unreal piano teachers. Lynda remembered Ms. Vaughn: "She brought depth to every piece, with history, explanations . . .." Her piano teacher has been dead for a quarter-century. We can only wonder what she'd think of our plastic piano.

All day Lynda was at two keyboards--the Casio and the Dell. On the former she was following an online YouTube video by a piano teacher, and on the latter she was tapping out and printing sheet music.

By the end of the day I thought, "Musicians are smarter than painters. They know how to bottle their art--and teaching their art--so it reaches beyond their space and time." No wonder the printmaking world enchants artists who want to do more than satisfy themselves and their patrons. I figure printmakers and musicians are alike, and the press is the printmaker's instrument--like the keyboard.

Printmakers know how to bottle their images, their multimedia work, their words of wisdom and keep it all accessible with spreadsheets and databases, too. It's Elmer Gates' vision for great world teachers. I'm thinking about gathering in a virtual world and inviting people to BYOB.

Scratch Scratch

That's the sound of me scratching my head, faced with the inventor's challenge of explaining my e-ATC, the electronic equivalent of my version of the Artist Trading Card. From the minute I wake up in the morning, this challenge is facing me. I picture myself facing an imaginary group--students, maybe, or angels. There's an easel in front of me and a marking pen in my hand.

But there are no students. And if there are angels out there, I could sure use them now. In reality, there's only me in my studio; but on my desktop I find my *new* Wacom tablet. I switch it on, fumble around with it awhile until I have made a reasonable page as a graphic novel. Not much time for this. The lecture starts soon!

And here is my page, the missing professor of Emeralda Region, getting ready to explain his EATC.

Flash EATC

Searching for a use for a Flash ecard - He’s searching for a way to replace his old, kludgey, time-and-labor intensive Artist Trading Cards (pictured) with something that can be both virtual (or digital) and also made into real paper cards quickly and cheaply. Text on a flash e-card website helps him out. 475 Words. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. sp091107. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Stamps, stamps, stamps...

Forty years ago I made my first artist's stamps, and today I finished my newest. But is it really an artist stamp, or is it more like a promotional stamp? This one - actually there is a sheet of about fifty - shows the Mini Halfwood Presses I'll make and deliver next year. Click on the stamp.

What's this got to do with Emeralda? You may wonder. It's a chicken-and-egg situation: Emeralda, the way I see it, brought the Mini Halfwood into the world. By playing in my imaginary Emeralda Region, I came up with a beautiful etching press made of wood and steel. I started selling them.

Going deeper into Emeralda, to make it playable for more people, will cost money. Already Janet has invested heavily with sweat equity, her own cash and faith. About investors, Janet and I were chatting with someone in Texas about Emeralda, and how my vision of it involves a real, honest-to-goodness miniature etching press.

Also, selling it has grossed around $40,000. Hearing that, she said:

"You could pay for your game with your little press!"

So, I guess making artist's stamps to sell the Mini Halfwood makes sense if the press gets us deeper into Emeralda. By the way, you can see more of the stamps on the Web page.

Emeralda Works

For me - Emeralda works for me.

Janet started a blog for Emeralda. http://makingemeralda.blogspot.com/

When she invited me to make a companion to her original diary, Making Emeralda, I began with the name. "Emeralda" blends Seattle's market name, Emerald City, also the city in Oz and the name I submitted to a contest in 1993 on "Name the Region."

Putting the "a" to "emerald" (green berylite) was like fantasia, or Georgia, or America. I lost the contest ("Cascadia" was the winner) but I won the name, Emeralda. That old '93 contest was about an economic block for Washington State, Oregon, and British Columbia for mutual benefits. The economic strategy needed a name, and so did I.

I had been looking for a name for my imaginary place, my dream haven for teaching, research, practice and services I built around my native art form - printmaking. Printmaking is ancestor to all the hi-tech media arts and multimedia blends, hybrids, cousins, mixtures, etc.

As for economic strategy, my interest in economics goes back to my college days when I was an art professor. My first office was in the UW School of Business, and that's when I first learned about micro-economics. An artist's haven, my imaginary place, has a kind of micro-economy dating back to my years as a printmaking teacher - the year 1966.