Evolution of a pin design

First I wanted it to be 1.25″ tall, and a cut-out shape:

Goddess_pin3 - wht BG

But this would snag on clothes, and bend. So I came up with this:

Goddess_pin4_whiteBG

But it looks like a bottle opener. Plus the Chinese pin-making company emailed me back that a cut-out like this would have to be at least 2″ long. So instead of cut-out details I designed for 1.5″ hard enamel:

Goddess_pin5 goldblack

Goddess_pin5 goldbrown

But then I thought to make the details shiny metal, and the main area color, with a thicker outline that would make the pin more stable:

Goddess_pin5 blackgoldGoddess_pin5 browngoldGoddess_pin5 redgold

But then I thought, why not make the details another color, with gold outlines:

Goddess_pin5 blackbrownGoddess_pin5 brownblack

But then I thought, hey why not put a sun in there, since the Great Mother gives birth to the Sun:

MotherSun2

Then I made a bunch of different Sun designs, finally settling on this one:

Sun symmetric

Et voila:

MotherSun_Pin

Except the sun shape needed just a little bit of softening, so I exported it as a PNG, re-imported it to Moho (where I’ve been doing all this designing), and auto-traced it. Et voila:

MotherSun_Pin3 - Frame 0

And that’s what I hope to have made in China, until I change my mind again.

ONE DAY LATER: I changed my mind again. Now She’s a little stouter and has crescent instead of full moons. I made so many slight modifications to the shape I started to go crazy trying to decide, because each had its strengths and weaknesses. Eventually I had to just commit to one, so here’s what I just ordered 200 pins of:

MotherSun_Pin5_1

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Seder-Masochism Progress Report

My two goals for 2017 were to bicycle 5,000 miles, and to finish Seder-Masochism. I have 30 miles to go on the first goal, slowed down by mysterious health problems (for which I’m about to undergo a series of invasive tests). But the second goal keeps getting farther away.

I have all the pieces made, and they’re pretty good. The musical numbers are entertaining, and the “Our Father” scenes, based on recordings of my own father shortly before his death in 2012, worked remarkably well.

Scene of Our Father
Our Father

But the overall story isn’t holding together. In fact, it’s hard to tell what the overall story is. I set out to retell “The Passover Story,” but what is that? It’s Exodus. But it’s also more than Exodus, and far less. I tried structuring the film around the Passover Seder, and the result is incoherent. Perhaps because as a story, the Passover Seder is itself incoherent, its popularity and persistence due to early indoctrination and strict rules rather than narrative quality.

So now I’m looking for the story again, at this rather late stage. The narrative quality of the Book of Exodus itself is dubious, but it does contain at least one strong story: the going out, the leaving, the separation, the exit, the Exodus itself. I thought a lot about the meaning of Exodus a few years ago when I animated Death of the Firstborn Egyptians (the solo clip of which has become rather popular, at over a million views on YouTube alone).

Even as the mythological Hebrews exited mythological Egypt, the mythological Firstborn Egyptians exited Life, led by the profound power of Death – who is the Abrahamic God Himself, according to many Haggadot. According to the ancient Egyptian conception of Death and the afterlife, this was not necessarily a tragedy; in fact it would have meant something entirely different to the mythological Egyptians than it does to us. Still an Exodus, but from another point of view.

And that’s where I’m returning to seek my story. To Abrahamics, the Exodus is the story of going forth from the “narrow place,” from cruel slavery to freedom. But what were they exiting, really? According to them it was slavery, oppression, and, worst of all, the worship of false idols. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” commands Yahweh in Exodus 20. How does this story look from the point of view of “other gods”? Specifically, goddesses?

Patriarchy celebrates Exodus as a triumph of civilization. But these days I question the value of civilization, since it’s (we’re) killing the planet and perhaps our souls and minds as well. The popular myth, amongst anxious environmentalists like myself, is that Once Upon a Time humans lived in harmony with nature, gathering and hunting, attuned to the natural world through animism and reverence for the Great Mother. There followed a Great Fall: Agriculture, and its attendant sins of property, hierarchy, and slavery. With the plow we were expelled from the Garden, and things have gotten worse ever since. Genesis in a nutshell.

Exodus is a different angle. This time the Great Mother isn’t a nurturing Garden, but a suffocating oppressor. Man isn’t expelled; he escapes. All those (formerly) animistic spirits are now ridiculous and evil idols. The sacred snake becomes the demonic serpent. Nature and fertility become disgusting things to be controlled. Yeast – spores of Life in the very air – is loathed and mastered through the fetishized Unleavened Bread. This loathing and mastering continues today, as we continually kill Life in the soil with fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. (My 4,970 miles of cycling mostly took place in Central Illinois, the heart of the agri-desert, where yesterday I rode past tanks of ammonia being dragged through denuded fields.)

What does Exodus look like from the point of view of the Goddess? She was in Egypt as Hathor, Hekket, Wadjet, Nut, Maat, Isis, and others portrayed already in Moses Goes Down. She was elsewhere in Mesopotamia as Ishtar, Astarte, the “Queen of Heaven” and other mis-named or un-named “idols.” She was in Europe. She was everywhere – all humans conceived the divine as female, long before the invention of the male God.

The Golden Calf (Return of the Goddess) from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

Watching Man walk out on Her, going forth from revering Nature to enslaving and killing it – would she even want Him back?

So I’m currently trying to articulate the Exodus from the Goddesses’ point of view. I hope it works. I’ve put a lot of effort into Seder-Masochism so far, I’d hate for it to be a BIG FAILURE WITH NO COHERENT STORY. Then again, I may end up with a coherent story that is despised. If my current storytelling angle succeeds, even more people will hate it, especially men. But that I could live with. Releasing a weak, incoherent film would be harder.

But this late in the game, that may be its fate – it’s up to the Goddess.

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Inktober 2016, October 19-22

I noticed some artist and animator friends were posting drawings with the hashtag #inktober. This is the sort of thing I never do. But it had been years since I’d respectfully drawn with ink on paper, and I kind of missed it. So I ordered myself some different brush pens, and the day they arrived I sat down and drew these:

"Flight"
“Flight”

No warm-ups, no practice, just bam, out they came.

It’s been more than a decade since I’ve drawn in this style, with ink on paper. I’ve avoided it due to burn-out from drawing daily comic strips. Advice to you kids: turning something you enjoy into a daily job is a great way to make you hate it. I quit my last daily comic, The Hots, in 2003 (before that I did another mainstream daily, Fluff, and before that was my self-syndicated weekly Nina’s Adventures, the entire archive of which you may download here.) I guess 12 years is enough time to recover from style burn-out, at least a little.

“Inktober” has a list of “daily prompts” and I decided to just follow them:

"Squeeze"
“Squeeze”

 

Squeeze_BW
“Squeeze” processed in GIMP to function as a black and white illustration. This is from the same photo I took with my cel phone. No scanner needed, apparently. Welcome to the future!
"Big." I'm really liking that Uni Mitsubishi brush pen, more than the nylon hair brush pens I used to use professionally. It'll wear out fast because it's a compressed felt tip, but it sure is clean and easy to use.
“Big.” I’m really liking that Uni Mitsubishi brush pen, more than the nylon hair brush pens I used to use professionally. It’ll wear out fast because it’s a compressed felt tip, but it sure is clean and easy to use.
"Big" cleaned up. in GIMP, sans scanner.
“Big” cleaned up. in GIMP, sans scanner.
"Little"
“Little”
"Little" cleaned up in GIMP, from that same cell phone photo.
“Little” cleaned up in GIMP, from that same cell phone photo above.
I actually did 2 versions of "Little." The one I posted before was outlined with the double ended Uni Mitsubishi felt brush pen. This one was with the Pentel Pocket brush. Never thought I'd choose a felt over nylon hair brush, but there you go.
I actually did 2 versions of “Little.” The one I posted before was outlined with the double ended Uni Mitsubishi felt brush pen. This one was with the nylon hair Pentel Pocket brush. I have less patience for messiness now, I guess.

Honestly I’m enjoying this so much right now I’d kind of like to take on an illu$tration gig while I’m still fresh. Too much of that and I might burn out again, but right now it would be fun.

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