The Making of Entomojo

(I apologize. The site went down, and this post was lost. I’m currently trying to rewrite it)

Entomoto

I decided this year to do a write up about an art piece as I was producing it. This is an attempt to bridge my interests in producing visual art with a burgeoning interest in recreational writing. I hope this entry addresses how this work was produced and what creative decisions I made.

The idea for this work came out of a desire to make a new graphic for the home page of my portfolio website. The site currently has a pretty stark minimalist white theme, which is just begging to have a bold image to fill in the void. Homepage graphics are always a daunting task. What is the first thing you want a potential employer to see? How do you make a work that describes you’re artistic tendencies, interests, and talents? How do you make a piece that can serve as a visual mission statement?

I had to evaluate what, if any thing, was my style.

I knew that I wanted it to be rooted in natural science illustration but with a tinge of the fantastic or alien. I like old things in museums. There’s something about the natural history exhibit or the cabinet of curiosities aesthetic that entertains me: The hand written labels, lifeless things in jars or glass cases, strange natural artifacts in artificial environments, the aged sterility, and the orderly arrangement of items. Speaking of orderly, I recently learned what Knolling is. It’s the act, or perhaps the obsession, of meticulously arranging small objects on a surface at 90 degree angles to one another. Look it up, and tell me you don’t find something bizarre appealing about it. There’s something very human about applying order to a collection of tiny things.
Take that entropy.

I wanted to demonstrate an ability to iterate and explore a single idea in repeated ways. This struck me as a useful trait to express, to take an idea and run with it. Sure, you can draw a tree, but can you draw thirty different trees?

Considering all those directions, the idea of a entomological board stuck in my mind. At the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, I once attended an event called Bugfest. Entomological collectors gathered to show off their boxes of pinned specimens. There’s also a vein of this hobby that goes beyond mere collecting and extends into artistic expression.

I first experimented with the composition. I decided that each creature would start as a simplistic geometric form. The shape of adjacent creatures could play off each other. The spherical bug could almost nest into a the one with a concavity.