tape deck

KMM working

It's been so long and the box of tape has been sitting around just pouting so I finally forced myself to start sketching. Katherine was working so I drew her "computer" face. This one had to get taken down before I finished it so it's in the sketch phase and it was done in 20 minutes or so.

raven

(32"×32") The raven is for a book that's coming out next year called The ARK Project.

Minga in-progress

Minga deserves her own portrait in tape. 

seed

(24"×13") This one's been sitting around my apartment collecting dust, like real flowers in my apartment do, so I finally took some shots of it. Don't know where I got this piece of wood but it seemed like a good canvas for tape.

Update on Friday, March 13, 2009 at 05:38PM by Chris Hosmer

I just sold this piece. I *think* this is the first tape drawing sale!

Hashidate Maru

(12'×9') This is the largest tape mural I've done and it's on the wall at 55 Norfolk. After WWII my Grandfather spent two years on a whaling ship in the Antarctic called the Hashidate Maru. He used to tell me stories about how smart the whales were, how they were so strong they'd burn out the engines of the boats by pulling them for miles. I think this piece is my imagining of that struggle but from the whale's perspective. It feels both violent and serene to me.

Ben

Kenbo

John

Packy

(23"x31") Black and yellow masking tape and paper tape on corrugated cardboard of the average variety. This one is much smaller than the ones on the wall and feels more like how I actually draw. This is one of many tape portraits I am doing to be installed at 55 Norfolk Gallery in Cambridge, MA.

A heart a part

Installed at 55 Norfolk Gallery, Cambridge, MA

(4.5'X5') Overheard in Amsterdam: In-progress composition of a sketch I drew after overhearing a couple arguing about their past love lives. She said, "You know I know", and he said, "I know you know". There was such a symmetry to the moment and it struck me that a heart shape can be as divergent a form as it is a unifying one. It's better if the couple is looking at you, like they know about you too.

I'm also experimenting with a projector for the first time. Not for tracing - the drawings of the faces (and all the tape drawings to date) are painstakingly done freehand - but because I wanted to try drawing a pattern using a grid that I project over the whole thing at the end. That's what the pink tape is for.

Africa 2

(8'x7') It turns out that digitizing 35 hours of video takes 35 hours. So while I load tapes and capture video, one hour at a time, I started drawing out the second Africa piece. This time it's of a group of boys that we encountered on the road to Kigali. They were playing soccer with a ball made of plastic bags that were compressed and tied together. I like this one the best so far because I was pretty sloppy with it. It was a whirlwind just like the trip. 

Ladies

(8'x6') This one looks a lot like a vector drawing except that the lines feel better to me. The lines don't end in a hard square or rounded point and because the tape is ripped it feels more like a stroke from a chisel tip marker. The stylized line weight reminds me of 80's graphic design and the shapes are sort of Russian constructivist, especially the faces.

Birds

(8'x6') The great thing about tape is that I can massage the lines so they're just right. I lay down a line, stand back and look at it and decide if I want to do it again. Certain tapes are more forgiving than others but, generally, putting down long, flowing curves are perfect for this medium. The composition is based on a window display I saw in Paris last spring.

Africa

(8'x7') The first one. I adapted a portrait of a Burundian woman I had from a trip to the area because she had good lines on her face and good folds in her shirt and scarf. It was stream of consciousness and it took all night. Due to popular demand, the eye was removed from the composition. No one liked it but me.

How it all started

I first saw a tape drawing while I was working in the Saturn Studio at GM's Tech Center in Warren, MI. I was the design lead for a 3 person team tasked to develop a Saturn concept vehicle. My two colleagues, a sculptor and an engineer, sat together as we watched a veteran car designer draw a full scale car profile in tape. It was revelatory for me. I never considered drawing this way before. The car designers do it because it's a little bit more controllable than a white board. And it's physical. It requires your whole body.

They also do it because it's a great analog to running your hand along a real car. And it helps the designers and sculptors "negotiate" the 2-D form together before the full scale 3-D clay model gets sculpted. As the design evolves, the tape drawing reflects all the iterations on layer upon layer of vellum.

The first photo above is the pencil sketch of my concept car on vellum. The second photo is the 1/5 scale tape drawing I did as an enlargement of my pencil sketch. It is partially obscured by the clay model we built using the tape drawing. The third photo is the half-finished model next to the tape drawing.