Unnamed Unicorn Project

January 12, 2015

Now that I’ve cleared the decks of last year’s projects, I’m ready to get started on the next big thing. I don’t have a name for it yet, so for the moment, it’s just “Unnamed Unicorn Project”.

This will be a third series of abstract images and word. In contrast to Cantrip and Loveletter from last year and 2013’s Wish You Were Here, which were image and poem working in tandem, UUP will be illustrated prose poems that describe what I call the “o wow” moment, instances of jaw dropping beauty and wonder, of existential revelation, or unparalleled happiness that are so amazing that they defy easy description even to those who are closest.

So maybe it’s not a quick read.

While I work on the writing of these pieces, I have been testing the waters of how I want to illustrate them. I have been looking longingly at working with older processes. For an experiment, I began playing around with creating negatives on acrylic sheets and cyanotype printing. You are probably familiar with this process; cyanotypes are one of the oldest ways of producing images and are now usually done by kids and called sun prints. Unfortunately, none of the images I made came out well and I fell back on digital technology to get a similar look. I’ll return to more experiments in toned printing, but for now, I have three initial studies. It’s a sure bet that these images will evolve radically over the course of the project, but…