red alert all strange friends: new vibe pack, new supply drop, new style, is en route to your feed and potentially your life (if you want) right now. its a topic we havent covered in a minute. had this one cooking in the lab for a while now.
had the idea to periodically release some smaller fine art style prints from the studio in small packs with some stickers ive been printing along the way. did the first one sometime last year, made 40, they sold out, it was a good time. time for chapter 2
now its time for the [second] vibe pack. "second inkjection" - american cryptids print with the suite of theo-aesthetica stickers. some new. some classic. let me show you all about it in this thread. u can look for fun even if u dont want to pick it up
so, first up, the print. i wanted to make an image with some of my favorite, and some of the most essential, some rare, some well known, american cryptids. ive been working on getting this just right for a while now. i think i first started this last year in colorado.
so i have this really awesome printer here where the ink is almost more like paint. ill post a video of the print in a second. when ive done stuff like this, ive usually tried to base the feel and flavor of the image on a traditional printmaking technique, so it carries that vibe
last time i tried to land in kind of an etching or northern euro woodcut space. this time, i based the feel and flavor of this print on some japanese woodblock prints, specifically this image of white foxes carrying ceremonial flames at night by hiroshige, one of my favorites.
not that they look the same, obviously, but i can "go for" any flavor and feel i want so, i have found its useful to base the general timbre off something traditional so, thats what i used. the way the woodblock print utilizes fades and dark tones was perfect for this.
you can see how the print actually looks here and get a feel for the size. its printed on watercolor paper so it has a nice texture, its kind of thick, not to sound pretentious but i would call this a more fine art style print. im really happy with how it turned out.
theres a few older euro altarpieces and things like that from northern europe that have decorative writing around the outside, and its done so that when youre looking at the image the writing functions as a "pure border", but u can read it. the border says what cryptids are in it
we got:
- mothman
- dogman
- loveland frog man
- flatwoods monster
- bigfoot
- jersey devil
- pope lick monster
- skunk ape
- wampus cat
- various aquatic entities
and more. i tried to get the best selection possible
so yeah. could go on about that but really tried to capture a certain vibe and feel here. if ur on patreon you saw me working on this on and off for a while, started sometime last year, even collected visual descriptions and notes of things that should be reflected. good times.
anyway, moving on, the stickers. some people have seen some of these designs before, got some classics around, this first one is new though. theyre all vinyl stickers.
theyre all around three inches, which i have found is the largest i can print them without the effect being "woah, thats really large, what am i going to do with that". with pencil you can see how large:
also includes the holographic st odilo of cluny sticker, which you can see in the tweet below and in different lighting in the tweet above that. shiny. hes the patron saint of souls in purgatory
ive found its almost impossible to get these printed without some slight imperfections like a line or a bump or something so, just saying, but thats kind of the cool part of working with actual materials instead of pixels, imo. they look cool irl.
thats it. the set is $40 flat. that includes shipping unless ur in another country. comes in a small hard envelope to your house. i made 40, if it sells out super quickly ill make some more. thats the tale. thanks for looking at my stuff and hanging out on the internet with me
oh yeah i forgot the best part, i know this is going to push it over the edge for you, theyre signed on the back. hello big museum department. hello art world. hello sothebys ten million dollar opening bids. ten trillion dollar bids minimum by end of year (not financial advice)
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it looks like the AI conversation is going to cement around “are artists are coping or not” but id like to submit a second option: that its worthy of skepticism that my broke friends are beholden to copyright laws that apparently don’t apply to tech people making a lot of money
the AI question really should be: are we doing wild west on copyright laws or not. if we are, okay - then that should apply to everyone. if we’re not - okay, then that should apply to everyone. everyone is basically arguing that now tech companies get to be the exception to them.
if my friends can get cease and desist letters for making fanart about a movie or franchise when money gets involved but a guy can also make a billion dollars feeding that movie and franchise into his image maker and selling access to it, i dont think its out of line to ask: what
one key aspect of postmodernism is that art styles are self-consciously deployed as pastiche. this means theyre just used as surface, for what they represent: they become interchangeable. these almost meaningless academic concepts will increasingly characterize your everyday life
when an entire artistic milieu is used just for what it represents, not what it actually is (this already happened a long time ago), the blowback is that it becomes impossible to genuinely use and engage with those milieus. you can’t decide to not be self aware of this process.
this is, in my opinion, the actual origin of what is called “stuck culture”. to start a “nu-metal” band would be referencing what “nu-metal” is. you and the audience would both know that you’re aware of this. that awareness is the source of the “block” - everything is self aware.
the 'people not having kids' trend: fascinating. people can do whatever. but as a larger trend, clearly something is up. likewise, when i ask the older generation why they all had kids, they don't know. they "just did"
so i looked up why non-human animals might not breed
[...]
one fascination i have with this topic is that it seems to be instinctual, thus the turn to animals. in my parents friend group, they all had kids around the same time. i (probably too much) grilled them about why they all did this and they all gave some version of "we just did"
that's "just what you did". okay. as though compelled by something beyond them. not religious, running the spectrum of affluence, no clear answer. likewise, despite the internet obsession with this, there's no clear answer. internet? maybe. politics? maybe. nothing great, imo.
‘what does the fox sign?’
(meta-animals in children’s literature)
animals seem to have an inherent symbolic content: winged birds have always been related to the spirit, we call someone “a rat” or “a pig”, or as in the intuitive relationship between lions and being a king.
[…]
this is one level of symbolism: what does each animal mean? we can also climb up to a higher question: what do “animals” mean, as a class? how do we perceive and depict “animal”-ness? one case study of this is in an art and literature intersection often overlooked: kid’s books.
conveniently we have two artists we can compare whose careers begin almost exactly fifty years apart: beatrix potter, whose career starts right around 1900 (in art, this would be ‘modern’), and richard scarry, whose career starts right around 1950 (in art, this is ‘contemporary’)
here's a book called richard scarry's busy busy world. i find this book extremely interesting from a pedagogical perspective.
our culture has taken the position of having an extreme aversion to stereotypes. well, that's all this book is: the stereotypes of each country.
[...]
the story in france has people in fancy restaurants. the story in switzerland has goats climbing mountains. the story in mexico has a guy eating beans and buying clay pots. the story in india has a fortune teller. and so on. the entire content is just basic stereotypes.
i don't think you could do this with a major publisher today. it would read as educationally irresponsible, in a sense.
but, this book has allowed me and owen jr. to discuss other countries. he has a conception of holland, and talks about it, because of this book.
what is the nature of the self in christian eschatology?
for those unfamiliar, eschatology is a branch of theology that just means, "how everything ends up". the final state of things. end of the story. how does this all play out? how the pieces land: that's eschatology.
[...]
in the eastern system i'm the most familiar with, buddhism, there's a concept called shunyata. usually translated as emptiness - it means things are empty of inherent existence. like a sweater: you can see the sweater, but if you keep pulling threads off, you never get "it".
the self in buddhism, in my experience, is like this. it's a momentary aggregate of interdependent factors. its like a ball of things that only has provisional existence. it's there, but it's not eternal, like a ball of twine that just happens to be stuck together right now.