Haiku Project

      the sky I see

seems full of

magnolia blossoms

           -Natsume Soseki

     For my process I put this project together in reverse order, with the digital editing part happening first and the creating on paper happening second. For the digital part, I started with an image that I wanted to be my background and chose more images with a similar color scheme and subject to layer on top of it and adjusted the transparencies so they would meld together into one image. For the final images, I was inspired by previous exercises that we have done in class. I liked the idea that we practiced of using marker to draw over a printed image, which to me feels like a more interactive way to edit. I used markers with colors that are in the pictures to draw over some lines in the images along with adding designs outside of the frame of the picture. This was another reason why I wanted to do this part non-digitally: I wanted to expand the idea into a space larger than just the standard rectangle, as if the images were becoming three dimensional. Then I glued this part onto pages from a book, which was inspired by another in class exercise. I did the same process of connecting dots from the printed words to create constellation-like designs.

     The inspiration behind my concept was connected to the structure of haikus; they are simplistic, short, and unspecific enough that the emotion derived from them can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways by whoever reads it. Haikus often don't tell a story as much as they suggest an emotion. Because of this, I decided to think of three ideas or places that feel like an emotion to me. Roadtrips, the 80s, and concerts are all rather large and nonspecific things that may not mean anything to others but that, to me, feel like meaningful concepts because of the experiences and memories that I have attached to them. This connects to the haiku I chose because the narrator of the poem is looking at the stars and seeing something else. It feels like an invitation to attach your own meaning to things and be in tune to the emotion that it conveys to you.