08/28/2018

L. Nichols; Risography!; NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium; Attentional Generative Networks; Ignatz Noms

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“Oh crap, I’m drawing myself.”
L. Nichols is interviewed by Martyn Pedler at TCJ:

[Pedler] You talked about about figuring  things out through your art. Did making Flocks change the way you thought about faith, or thought about God?

[Nichols] It was very healing. I printed out the first five chapters, made floppies of them, and had people come and tell me how much it meant to them to read it. It means so much to me to hear that. What making Flocks changed is my faith in other people. It helps me feel more connected to myself and connected to others. I always felt like my uncomfortableness about sharing it would be offset by the good that would come of it. Making this always felt like something I had to do. I needed to do this. It wasn’t easy to write. I feel like I relived so much stuff. I’m really glad that my wife is so supportive, and my in-laws are very supportive. I feel very lucky. I tried to end it on a good note. I’m a bit of a sappy person, just naturally, and I was trying to make it not too sappy. But I feel like I’ve ended up in a great place, and I have so much, and I’m so grateful that I have all that I have – so it’s hard for me to look at my past with too much pain. If I hadn’t have gone through that, I wouldn’t be here. If I changed anything, I wouldn’t be me. Writing the book has helped me embrace my past in some ways. To find new comfort in it, and new confidence in myself and who I’ve become.

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The Vintage Japanese Copy Machine Enjoying an Artistic Renaissance
Atlas Obscura looks at the risograph machine and it’s use in contemporary book-making:

Independent publishing houses like Perfectly Acceptable and TXTbooks are helping turn the grainy likability of Risograph printing into a global aesthetic. The myriad color combinations that are possible (Davis’ favorite being “mint and sunflower, 100 percent,” and Terzis celebrating the mix of “any of the complementary colors, because when you put them together they really vibrate”) makes it seem like the Risograph was destined for artistic flourish all along. But Issue Press founder George Wietor challenges the idea of the Riso’s “look” overshadowing its intended purpose: “The simplicity of the Riso brings a specific kind of arts publishing within reach and allows me to work with ink and paper in a way that I would otherwise have difficulty achieving,” he says, “but I am (only very mildly) concerned about elevating the Riso to something more than it is or, I believe, should be—which is a means of production rather than a specific style.”

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New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium Fall 2018 Events Calendar
Presenters of potential interest to readers of this news-blog include (but are not limited to):

• September 11: Sharad Sharma on Grassroots Comics: By the people, for the people. In the last 20 years World Comics has conducted more than 1,200 comics workshops in the most remote and disturbed areas of the globe and trained over 1,000,000 people in making comics about local issues.
• November 13: Jason Lutes speaks about completing his two-decade-long project Berlin
• December 4: Lala Albert will read from various short and long comics created over the past 4 years, featuring mainly works in sci-fi, erotica and sci-fi erotica genres. She will also discuss the process that went into making some or all of the comics.

Check the website for more info.

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Text to Image
Via Rob Beschizza at Boingboing via AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks by Tao Xu, Pengchuan Zhang, Qiuyuan Huang, Han Zhang, Zhe Gan, Xiaolei Huang, Xiaodong He.

A research team wrote about how they trained a machine-learning AI to generate images from text descriptions. When fed birds as its dataset, it got very good at painting birds…

Try it out here.

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Small Press Expo Announces 2018 Ignatz Award Nominees

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Cement Mixer – 8-28-18 – by Caleb Orecchio