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!