This project, like most of its type, started late at night in a seedy bar on the internet. I was talking to my good friend shoofle about how I wanted to write more. To this end, I decided that each day I would trawl Flickr's Interestingness Page looking for interesting images that would start me writing.
She liked this idea a lot, and this got her thinking that she would like to draw more. We both agreed that writing and drawing every day would improve our skills. But then shoofle had an idea! What if she drew a picture that was inspired by my story!
I instantly liked the idea, and we both were thinking along the same lines. Art, to us, is like output from a person, who acts as the function. The input is everything we see, hear, feel, and otherwise consume. We then run that input through the chaos machines that we call our brains, drawing on a lifetime's experiences, thoughts, and feelings, and output something completely different. So what if we used someone else's art as our input and translated it across two mediums and two minds?
Well, that's what we've got now. Every day, I tried to write a short story based on an image I found and shoofle drew a picture based on the story I wrote (although we both ended up procrastinating and not completing a full month's work over a month's time. Life got in the way.). I did not show shoofle the picture I chose, as I thought it would be interesting to compare the results with the inspiration. It is also important to note that shoofle's drawings are not illustrations meant to enhance the story in any way. They are meant to stand on their own as separate works. I also decided to include my source images to reveal as much of the creative process as possible. This way, we see a pleasing continuity: one person's image, to my written story, to shoofle's drawing, ending up with two new pieces of art that are inexorably linked, yet genuinely unique.
On The Other Side of the Mirror, then, is like a convoluted game of art telephone, each person and medium adding and dropping details arbitrarily, running their functions and producing what we both think is a pretty neat set of work, all summed up!
All the images, stories, and drawings are listed below in chronological order. We hope you enjoy our little creation and that we can inspire something interesting in you, too! I'd personally like to thank shoofle who, besides being a totally sweet person, kept me motivated and helped me make something I'm proud of, not to mention made a bunch of really cool drawings with such a limited inspiration set. Thanks, shoofle and awesome job! It's been a great month!