Today I was looking at a call, and doodled an idea or two for it. Initially something akin to my current archetypes… a set of four “possibilities” for hybridity… the more interesting one is the second-of-four: two-parallel lines with a gap, which is something new… alluding to a barrier… is the barrier real or imaginary? The series of four works well. It tells a story. Like a movie storyboard. Not sure they are in the right order. Or are they in the right order. Does the order need to be a a logical progression, or should it be more random? More chaos, more realistic to a social dynamic? The last one, forth-of-four, is an exaggeration of an earlier archetype… again, that allusion of a barrier, but also hybridity, as the two protagonists mix and merge (or not). Perhaps I should take a break from m and explore this further by making more works in s.

The colors are good. Purple framing the system. Green and blue protagonists. That dark area of hybridity… the third space.

The second doodle is more of a dispersion diagram… together-but-apart… too derivative? I like the concept of juxtaposition of dispersion and separation and yet togetherness.

Not entirely convinced that these ideas can be pushed forward for the call… do they sufficiently answer the question? But, but doing them, I’ve thrown up a couple of interesting things — specifically the second-of-four and forth-of-four — for further investigation under my research.

Of import is the process I used to get these doodles from analogue into digital.

Normally, I doodle in ink or paper, take a photograph (with my ever-to-hand iPhone), then (ab)use the image in my research blog pretty much as is. No post. No filters. Nada.

Today, a slight variation to the process. I’m doodling on paper with Whitelines, then using the Whitelines Link App which takes an image of the page, works out where the corners are, adjusts the image accordingly, strips out the background “whitelines on gray”, and puts the resulting image in my camera roll for subsequent (ab)use.

I’m pretty impressed with how well this works. I’ve tried using other image capture and recognize-the-paper-corners-and-adjust software, and its always been a bit hit-and-miss. Plus, when using paper with gridlines (or dots, or lines, or whatever), they seem almost impossible to remove. The “whitelines” system seems to work far better. I made a test of some color fields and it does a remarkably good job of removing the background grid… it works far better with saturated colors (which ironically means its better with my cheap Måla pens from Ikea than the Faber Castell PITT artist pens).

I do wonder whether the result is a bit too clinical. Too clean. When photographing my sketchbook the pages are never perfect… there’s a hue due to the age of the paper — I bought a stockpile of them years ago and they’re most defiantly not archive paper — and there’s no optical adjustment. With the whitelines app the grayish background is stripped and replaced by white, optical corrections undertaken. Too white. Too pure. Maybe I should add a “dirty” background to give them a bit of a lived in feel?

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