Further explorations in printing Brunetti-style characters. Looking into how to vary dress, hair, emotion, movement.

Ook bij de laatste strandtent van Terschelling graag allemaal een mondkapje op terwijl u wacht op een tafeltje.

My new favorite pen case, found at the second hand store. Turns out it is a medical case for people with diabetes. Three zippered compartments, great size.

New book arrivals: Post digital print by Alessandro Ludovico, Modes of criticism #5: Design systems, Offline Matters by Jess Henderson, This Human by dr. Melis Senova.

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” – CarlJung. Some of the books above seem related to this.

Continuing on last weeks note taking theme, Maggie Appleton has a great visual summary on Building a second brain, a course by Fortelabs.

“Being present in Life is to be emergent in the moment, not scripted. A lot of work depends upon people running their day by consciously pre-planned tasks in linear succession: It’s no wonder most all self-help methods with aspirations for commercial success are the same.” @socialwealth

I’m looking at how people use their journals, bullet or otherwise. An important aspect for me is that in my creative journal, the work can be undirected, free flowing. Anything goes. A place for process over results.

On personal knowledge management through the centuries. If note taking systems are your thing, then be sure to browse the the Taking Note blog archive. On the size of thoughts: “most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product.”

Initial experiments with Brunetti style characters in Lego-printing.

I listen to pretty heavy and hectic music. Still took me almost a year to crack Mirror in Darkness by Serpent Column. Managed to listen to the whole thing in one sitting this week and it finally clicked. Just in time for the new release!

On the other side of the spectrum: 3+ hours of chill with Namlook and Hawtin, 3+ hours of Klaus Schulze

Going to start listening to John Vervaeke on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Via Futurethinkers. Added the youtube videos as podcast-able audio to my huffduffer (temporarily!)

Got lucky at the second hand store, found The Collected Sandman Covers as illustrated by Dave McKean for very cheap. McKean was a big influence on my own early (digital) image-making work. Great drawings, too (in Dutch).

Roamresearch and Obsidian are just two of the latest examples of note taking and note organizing applications that focus on atomic and networked notes. I’m tinkering with Obsidian because it does its thing on top of a local folder of markdown text files. (Before that: nvAlt)

One often referenced example from before computers is the Zettelkasten created by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. He built up a collection of 90,000 handwritten A6-sized notes using a self invented numbering and linking system.

Here is a video recording of a presentation that details the structure and inner workings of Luhmanns Zettelkasten In German.

The book How to take smart notes by Sönke Ahrens is a good manual for applying this way of personal knowledge management (PKM) to your own work. Or check out this video to get an idea.

Harold Jarche has an online workshop Personal Knowledge Mastery that is a very gentle and thorough introduction to finding your own approach in this kind of working, and more importantly: thinking.

The real treasure trove with many historic PKM examples is the Taking Note blog. No new posts there since 2018 but with an extensive archive of posts going back to 2007. All kinds of goodies like how a 18th century poet did version control to (of course) common place books or medieval notepads.

In his Cartooning syllabus, Ivan Brunetti presents a simple formula for drawing a cartoon character that anyone can easily learn to draw and adapt to make their own.

It’s a very clean, graphic approach which I figured should translate well to our custom Lego-printing process. Initial results look promising!

For a single printing, the room for expression is in position of eye, nose, limbs and clothing style. The cap, the hair and the mouth in the top two prints are from a second printing (you can see the overlapping ink). Need to take care of clear registration points for consistently positioning the paper between prints.

The vocabulary of shapes in Lego seem to lend themselves well for this. For example, the collars shape in the bottom left one is already a useful clothing variation.

Abstract ink brush strokes turned into figures, landscapes or other abstractions.