How Can I Describe It? It's Like Sticking Your Foot Into A George Foreman Grill After Watching Fantasia Backwards On Loop For 9 Hours With No Sound.

Behold - for I am updating. I'm sad to report that last weekend my computer decided to take it's own life, I came back from the place I had been beforehand and there were two empty cartridges on the floor, a smoking shotgun, and as I had so gruesomely predicted, my computer had shot itself in the face. Alas. I'm waiting for a technician to come and resuscitate it like. 

Anyway, that said, I've come up with a new idea for my book, and it's amazing. I'm going to create a book of 100 Legoman suicides. I had to face facts, a book based purely on the colour spectrum of Lego pieces wasn't going to tantalize anyone's cerebrum, but I know that mankind has a built-in morbid curiosity with Death, and everyone loves a bit of Lego. So everyone's a winner, even the goths. 

The idea, as you may well have guessed, was inspired by the books of Bunny Suicides, which I don't particularly like, I thought 'Well, I'm a Graphic Designer, I'm allowed to steal ideas from people, it's the law.' - the main difference between my take on things and the original Bunny Suicides book is that the former is illustrated whereas I'm going to actually photograph Lego men killing themselves in a variety of different ways. Still haven't worked out 100 different ways to despatch them, but I'm sure it'll come to me. Emma showed me a book that was in the possession of Fred -  Graphics Overlord, which was basically a load of little model people in a variety of different setups, ie: a miniature man stepping in a life-sized piece of gum, a guy using a shotgun to blow holes into a Bee, etc. And this, my friends, was why I decided to avoid the Illustration route and go with photography.

Anyway, I've been having a little play around with the ol' camera and whatnot, and here's a selection of some of the Lego Suicides I've been documenting...

Obviously they're not gonna make it into the final book itself, for that I'll use an SLR instead of my frankly inadequate point-and-click. But yeah, should give you an idea of the direction I'm heading in. I want it to be a quirky little coffee table book, and for the actual book design itself, I intend to make a box, to hold 100 loose leaves, on one side I'll have the photo of the Lego man topping himself and on the other I'll have a corresponding suicide note, like "If I can't have the kids, I'd rather jump into a toaster..." and whatnot. Should be fun. 

Well, that's about it from me. Except this:

Now available on t-shirts, mugs, stationary and canvas prints.

Do Not Adjust Your Brain, There's A Fault In Reality

Howdy ho. I just became aware that everyone else in the class seems to be in a mad panic to update their blogs, and I'd hate to feel like I'm missing out on something. Even though I am up to date, here's another delectable taste of wisdom straight from my beautiful brain like. 

Yeah, anyway, after making the Nathan Sawaya book, I wanted to go a different direction so as to not get bogged down with this artist, primarily because it's quite hard to get any decent research on the guy as he lives in New York, I live in Leeds and in between that there's not a whole lot of his work about. So I decided to look up how many colours are used in making Lego parts, I figured there'd be less than 100 but I was mistaken, there's nearly 200. So I looked up all the different colours, their Pantone, CMYK and RGB values and wopped out a bit of a colour chart. It's not in any particular order because it's just a slightly modified contact sheet, but until yesterday my idea was to make a swatch book of Lego colours. 

I say until yesterday because after my awe-inspiring crit with Lorenzo, I've decided to take up the idea of getting 100 people to make 100 lego models in 100 seconds, and take 10 photos of each. Why? Because. I'm hoping Jonny or Dan can bring in a bit of Lego for me to muck about with on this because Lego seems to be less than a commodity in Leeds, you have to know someone who knows someone else who once heard there was Lego in this place, yadda yadda yadda, in order to get some. Anyway. Yeah, that's my plan and I'm sticking to it. So there.

Here's the ol' colour chart:

Turbo

Since my last update I have indeed designed a 32 page book about Nathan Sawaya and his fetish for Lego. I've drawn a bit of inspiration for the design from the Factory Records graphic album I got for christmas, I'd changed the name of the book to 'Nathan Sawaya - Under Construction' so I copied the hazard-stripe design used by Peter Saville in a lot of the Fac work to use as the base for my book design. Pretty nifty eh? You'd think so, but after the feedback I got on monday [which wasn't too bad actually, I scored 14 in the end...] I think maybe a design overhaul is needed.

My layout, I admit, wasn't particularly well thought out, the images I had to use proved to be a pain in the ass when it came to putting them onto a page, and my hazard stripe idea probably wasn't necessary as a page border. But still, you live and learn I guess. Take a look:

Back to the clawing board. Now that I've researched into that tangent of Lego, I wanna pull it back a bit and look into Lego itself, maybe how it's constructed or Technic Lego or something. I feel a bit trapped with it as a topic on a whole, but I'm sure there's a great idea within it waiting to be usurped.

Oh, and another thing. Take a look at this, for I think it be splendid:

Once, my friend haggled over the price of a bag of chips.

The title of my work will be 'Nathan Sawaya: Slick Like Brick', Nathan Sawaya is one of only six artists in the world who are endorsed and supported by Lego to produce purely Lego-based artwork. I spent a lot of time researching his work over christmas and I thought it was a quirky way to work, as he isn't restricted to creating pretty looking Lego models, he even created a working air conditioning unit out of Lego. 

As well as creating a small gallery of his work, I'd like to include a short biography on the guy, why he decided to get into using Lego, statistics like how many bricks he uses per annum or where he manages to get them all from, i'd also love to see some of his development work, initial sketchings or storyboards and the like. Obviously I'll be looking online for a lot of this research but I'd also like to check out the Library for any of his work in there, any magazines or periodicals that feature him or his work. 

An idea I've had between being handed the brief and now is to actually use Lego to create the covers and spine of a book, so that copies could be stuck together to make shapes and whatnot, I dunno, just an idea. I found this online:

Doesn't look too much harder to create than the books we created with Roger. Though, obviously, looks can be deceiving...

I intend to use InDesign to create my layout, with Illustrator and Photoshop as the image-creation tools, i think it'd be a good idea to gather up my images before creating a rough layout by hand, then bringing it into InDesign and finalising it. I'd really like to incorporate some actual Lego pieces into my work somehow, or give my book the feel of the pins on top of the bricks perhaps. I think I'll really have to focus on what I actually need to do to create this book, as I'm not too confident in my bookmaking skills, I know exactly how to create wire/plastic bound books, i've done that loads of times so I really don't want to go down that route, I want to learn something new. 

As far as evaluation is concerned, I'd say my best bet is to hold mini-crits with the guys in our class and get relevant feedback as I go along. Without this I think I'll just stick to my guns and follow my work through to the end regardless of wether it works or not so it's quite important. I intend to post my progress up onto the blog as well, and see if I can gather some feedback online, maybe post it to a Lego forum and see what the geeks think of it as well. 

What Is A Book? Well, it's certainly not Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland.

What is a book? When I think 'book', I think of the Russell Brand autobiography sitting in my bathroom. Why? Because I don't read very often. The last book I attempted to read was Requiem For A Dream by Hubert Selby Jr, and I failed at that. I'm currently attempting to read the Visual Quickstart Guide to Illustrator CS2 by Weinmann Lourekas, and let me tell you, I'm probably about to fail at that too.

A book.

My relationship with books isn't peachy, but that doesn't mean to say I don't think they're wonderful. I just don't have the time/money/patience/license for them. I appreciate that they are probably the most superior way to distribute information, given that they are portable, they don't run on electricity and they can contain swathes of information. Given that the internet has made information not only more accessible [you don't have to que outside a computer to get a copy of something and you don't have to wait for the internet to open] but also, and this is the dealbreaker, free - you'd think that books would plummet in popularity, but this is obviously not the case. And why is that?

Well, I think people like the idea of having something tangiable, something that's there and can be seen, can remind you of things other than the content inside. It's also a good way of recording information, to get the same effect of a computer being totally wiped and losing all your spreadsheets, you'd have to do something like burn down a library. And I'm just not willing to do that.

The digital age has even seen companies try to make electronic replicas of books, e-books for example, and Nintendo recently released a 'game' for the DS which has 100 classic books on it, and you can flick through pages on it's screen. I think that speaks volumes [excuse the terrible pun] about why people still want books, and i feel boosts my argument that people want something tangiable.

I remember sitting in my mate Hollis's house last year, looking up through drunken eyes at his bookcase and thinking "Bloody smartarse." - he had books on Chaos Theory, Nostrodamus, Nietzsche and the like. I mean it made sense, he was a philosophy student. But you wouldn't get the 'look at me, i read, therefore making your less-than-average literary intake give you feelings of mental inadequacy' effect if everything was digital, I wouldn't look through his web browser history and gawp at him musing about Pythagoras, I'd be too drunk.

A book is a record. It's set in stone, you can't delete the words from the page or have them crash on you. Though, you can burn them like the Nazis did, but I like to think you wouldn't do that.

Fat Bwoy On A Diet, Don't Try It

This 100 project is really starting to get to me. Like a research-based form of Leprosy. I'm beginning to really regret choosing Lego as my research topic, having said that I suppose I'm not going to be able to choose to research things that are easy so it's part of the learning curve and whatnot. That aside - what the bloody hell have I been doing? Well, I'll tell you...

When I began this research I was sure I had a massive tub of Lego from when I was a wee bearn in my parents' loft, upon returning to Watford I found out that my Dad had decided to sell it all at a car boot sale. Nice of him. I didn't even get any of the proceeds. So yeah, finding Lego to actually work with proved excruciatingly difficult, but I managed to get my hands on one Lego set when I came back to Leeds, and just for reference, if anyone reading this ever needs to buy Lego, don't go to Leeds. Argos was sold out of all Lego apart from the £80 Star Wars AT-AT set, which I couldn't afford. Besides, I was more interested in getting Lego men than an actual model. All of Leeds' toy shopkeepers reacted with bewilderment when I enquired about Lego, and some of them had been shut down. In the end the only place that stocked it was Boots and they only had one set.

I wanted to focus on the Lego men because I knew they came in all sorts of colours and themes, so I created this video, it's 100 frames long and all that. It's meant to show a history of the Lego man, from 1978 to the present day - I couldn't get my hands on enough Lego men to actually make the photoshoot myself, so I scoured the internet for the relevant ones and pieced it all together, video at the bottom of this post ¬

I did take some photos of the Lego I had, I took quite a few but loads of them came out blurry or with terrible focus because my camera is a point-and-guess, in other words I broke the LCD display so I can't tell what I've got til I go back to the computer. I wanted to borrow a Digital SLR from the photography department but they were closed when I went in, anyway - here's a selection of some of my pics...

I really need to get myself a decent camera, I could've done this project in less time with half the mess if I had my own SLR. Maybe next Christmas... Anyway, I also trawled the depths of the internet [and in the process discovered that there is a huge geek community dedicated to Lego, it's verging on disturbing some of it..] and found loads of interesting images, pictures of things people had made out of Lego [including a technic Lego Uzi..?], some cool artworks people had done and some nice original Lego artwork. Here's some of the bits I thought were decent:

Anyway, back to the ol' grindstone...