Matthew Tjokro's blog

Week 9: The Conclusion

I spent the weekend before this week finalizing a lot of scenery ideas for the book. The beginning forest scenery spoke out to me and was relatively easier to illustrate. The foliage has always been so comforting for me, and has held me through the most uncertain of times. I also loved the reflection scenes, particularly because of the symbolism the scene carries.

Week 8: Stars, Vernon, and more Stars

I’m not going to lie, I’ve had a very strange week 8. On Tuesday, our class met with Santiago again and visited the Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences Geology building. We stopped by a classroom that had a responsive, projection-mapped sandbox to denote different contour lines and elevations. We then continued down the hall and entered the exhibit portion of the building, where the department had many different kinds of rocks and meteorites.

Week 7 Blog Entry

This week, Alexia focused on hammering out the rest of our story and the other subtleties that go into telling the kind of story we want to share. To support our theme of grief tying back into the death of stars, I began doing basic research into the different kinds of star deaths. Smaller stars can burn for as long as the universe has currently been alive, regular sized suns (like ours) can burn for millions of years, and larger stars can only shine for a few million years.

(2/14-2/16) Week 6: Drafting Cont.

On Thursday, Alexia and I dedicated several hours to refining the story and aesthetic of our book. We  established the key elements of the storyboard and made decisions regarding some of the pages and written content. The story will follow a little boy and a cowboy as they venture into the wilderness and explore the complexities of the stars and grief. We are also in the process of resolving plot gaps and concluding the story to start illustration and editing.

(2/7-2/9) Week 5: The Boy, Hox Zodiac, and Stars

We started this week off with our guest speaker, Mariam Razi, who discussed her career as an artist, designer, and game maker. Mariam is part of the Hox Zodiac group, and she showed us her Illustrator file where she created the unique Hox typeface used in the majority of the project’s material. Additionally, Mariam also discussed the Feminist Climate Change movement and its  importance on viewing climate change from beyond the binary, and in Iran, beyond the border.

Week 4 (1/31 & 2/2): Magnetism, Concept Maps, and Comets

On Tuesday, January 31st, Dr. Walter Gekelman, who gave us a tour of the large plasma device, came into class to discuss the nature of magnetism. He started off by explaining different equations used to determine the forces of magnetism and how they affect everything. Admittedly, he lost the entire class while explaining the concepts behind the equations, but started defining some more key concepts. 

Year of the Rabbit, Mycelium, and Plasma

On Tuesday we celebrated the Year of the Rabbit (which was actually the weekend before). Students brought in food for the new year and we celebrated the single rabbit in the room. Victoria then introduced us to a project she had been working on with a few of her colleagues, Hox Zodiac. Hox is a set of genes with specifically coded information. However, we are now able to alter the Hox gene, we can create mutant creatures with interspecies qualities.

Week 2: Bread, Corn, and Microscopy

This week we covered a large variety of topics in class. On Tuesday, one of the first topics we covered was something (generally) all of us have consumed: bread. Other students and I brought many different types of bread to class and we all laid them out on a table. Most of it was store bought, but a few others actually made theirs. I have never made bread before and can’t imagine what it’s like to make it.

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