Sunday, July 10, 2011

From the Archives: Portfolio 2001 Front Cover

In 2001, I took all of my current artwork and created my portfolio for the year.  Sadly, this and most of the digital pieces from that portfolio were lost to the Hunger of the Zip Disks.  I finally figured out that the zip disk scramble must have happened around the last quarter of 2001 or at some time in 2002 because I made this portfolio to show at Dragoncon in August of 2001. 

I was very lucky recently to discover I still had a physical copy of this portfolio.  I was able to scan several images from it.  After scanning, I had to touch it up a bit due to dust and scratches, but the most of the image integrity is still intact.  It is a bit dark, but so was the original Photoshop file.  Those are my hands in the background.  If I remember correctly, everything else was created in Photoshop.  The Moon image/card in the center is from my business card at the time, but here it is inverted from its original values.  I wanted to create an artificial space that would give a feeling of Mystery and Magick in its artificiality.  I hoped to add to that by confronting the viewer with something that is at first glance seems mostly normal, but upon closer inspection is challenging to understand. 

There is always such a strange relationship between my business cards and my portfolios.  They trade off themes very readily and sometimes dominate each other.  My two favorite portfolios so far have taken their themes from my preexisting business cards.   This portfolio and my current one both followed themes that I had used on the business cards prior to making the portfolio.  I don't currently have a copy of my business card from this time frame but I will find it and post.  :-)  My current card is here.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

2 comments:

Zombie Ad said...

At least you survived the horrors of the digital hunger. A gutting experience.

Campbell3555 said...

Zombie Ad - Thanks for commenting!

A lesson harshly learned. Archive often and variably! LOL. I'm just glad I had so many physical copies of most everything. I did lose a lot of art though...at the time it was like someone had told me my favorite dog had died. I'm a bit of archivist where my artwork is concerned and this hit me where it hurts.

Evolution though is all about finding the better method anyway. :-) Now just ten years later, everything I was carting around on three or four zip disks fits in something not even a third the size of the palm of my hand. I'm sure in another ten years, we may not even need flashdrives or such. Memory will just be "in the air". Perhaps like Drivers Licenses everyone will have a universal hard drive with crazy amounts of memory to access. Or we'll just start upgrading our heads and storing everything there...nothing to carry then. :-P Mutate Now!

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