My next experiment has been to try to create some 3D pen drawings based on the oil paintings of the VR drawings based on my memory of the photographs of the ‘can’t live without’ objects. This may not lead anywhere, but is all part of the journey nonetheless.
I have never ‘drawn’ with plastic before and after my first try I conclude that it is hard. I thought drawing in virtual reality was tough and fresh but this was even tougher. There is no ‘undo’ function. There is no time to pause. It is fiddly.
My new tool.
I’d describe the experience as a bizarre blend of drawing in virtual reality (there were many similarities: drawing in three-dimensions, an inability to easily change tone, drawing in a continuous line) and icing a cake (the flow just keeps flowing and if you hesitate a big panicky blob is the result). It isn’t like drawing with a pen. It isn’t like painting. It isn’t like sculpting. It isn’t like much else I have ever done before. Again, I am rendered infantile by trying to do something I thought I was skilled at as a new activity. I felt cack-handed for want of a better term.
Is it a pair of glasses or someone doing a forward roll?
The reaction that came to my head while doing this is: I feel like a spider. I don’t think I have ever felt like a spider before.
Fancy a cuppa? Not in this.
The two web-like constructions I created are interesting, bizarre, chaotic and delicate. I quite like them. I like the feel of them. They are spidery. They don’t remotely resemble the original objects. Does that matter too much? They don’t resemble the oil paintings (I haven’t yet mastered how to use more than one colour filament). They resemble the VR drawings more than they do the paintings or the originals. They are odd, miniature, malleable, permanent creations of something that has morphed quite a lot since the original idea. They stand alone. They wobble in the wind.