Santa Clarita

So, after moving cross-country, the biking map continues. All the data for New York is in since I doubt I'll do any more biking there in 2012. And so I've started mapping Santa Clarita and maybe other parts of LA.

So far, lots of new thoughts in comparison between the two places. New York is on a grid, Santa Clarita is certainly not. The shapes are much more defined by the natural landscape as well as the incredibly not natural planning on shopping malls and parking lots. Unlike the (relatively) bike and pedestrian friendly City, it's a car dominated world out here, the complete antithesis of the east-coast walking city though there are some lovely dedicated bike paths that wend along (currently dry) aqueducts. People tend to drive their cars to the end of a path, then get out and bike the path out and back. Then more car. I'll see more when I get settled in but at the moment, I seem to be the only person using my bike to get around.

So yeah, here's what we've got after two days. This there is no coast line or rivers to delineate scale, what we've got here is about 30 miles of biking.

The project so far

So since January 1st, I've been tracking every bike trip I take. I started by creating a slightly ridiculously details vector map of New York and every time I go over a path, the line gets thicker and paler (from 80% upwards) but then I quickly hit white in certain places and started adding yellow to differentiate. The project is by no means finished (I'm planning on tracking it for one year, both in New York and in LA starting in the fall) but here's where it stands as of June 15th at about 5:30.

I found that all the detail was being lost in the big map and so I started zooming in, looking at details and I got intrigued by the idea of creating something more akin to an atlas. The zoomed in pages look less like a map and more like vector-based b&w abstractions so I'm playing around with these ideas. Interspersed between these pages will be highly textural illustrations of things I pass while biking that catch my eye (right now I'm attracted to old buildings that have fallen into disuse but still show a glimmer of their former lives). There will also be handwritten stories about things I see and think while moving through the city that will add more organic elements to what I see as very quiet and cold vector lines.

So yeah, still a work in progress, the colors are not final and there will probably be soft little transition swoops between some of these jagged lines but that's where it's going. Not quite sure what the project is about (I no longer want it to be a PSA about urban biking) but I think it has to do with movement through space and time (that's not a sci-fi reference) and stories that come from urban life. Thoughts/feedback would be wonderful!

A new project

The start of something that will run for the next year...

Toile Illustrations

So I'm creating a toile with a fashion designer friend of mine. Basically we're creating detailed scenes that are iconic of Brooklyn that will then get transfered to fabric and made into a clothing line. Here's the first couple...

Evolution of a cover

Oops. Forgot the subtitle. Plus some tweaking of the type...

Redesign

So evidently the author didn't love the apple design and pushed for a wrecking ball image. (Publishing house thought the apple was borderline too agressive but liked it, author thought the smashed apple wasn't agressive enough). So here's where we are now. Something about the text is not perfect for me yet but I have probably been staring at it a bit too much for objectivity anyway.

More covers

So the publishers thought the burned edges were a little confusing so I gave them some more variations. Here are a couple. Still waiting on word if they liked any of them.