FIRST STEPS

Here are some more pre-views of the book to come, an image turned up in research and some initial sketches/studies to start working through some visual ideas. At the beginning of a project it's really easy to just spin one's wheels without actually getting anywhere, so I just jumped right in, not censoring myself, just trying to get things moving. Hopefully, when the book is done, we (my collaborators & I) will be surprised by how different the completed objects is from where we started.

This image is the frontispiece from Charles Howard Hinton's The Fourth Dimension, first published in 1904. This scan came from the 1921 reprint.

And the two images below are some relatively quick studies, based on a geometric method of dividing a page space to determine layout. After the initial divisions are drawn in, the coloring follows two rules: 1) There are 6 colors to choose from (white, black, 4 grays in between, 6 colors for the six faces of a cube), and 2) the same color can not be used in 2 sections that share a side.

The first sketch (above) started with the idea of symmetry, but the colors could not be perfectly symmetrical because of the rules of their application.

The second sketch (below) was a purposeful move toward asymmetry, because the first drawing seemed so static.

I think that maybe the next step will be to figure out how to manipulate the geometric schema to work with linear perspective and 3D modeling...