Aron Wiesenfeld is a lauded artist who has had solo exhibitions all over the world, to great renown. And now he’s going… Well, smaller, for a new collection made entirely on Post-it notes. The art is collected in Playtime: The Post-It Note Drawings, which is on Kickstarter now.
“It’s such a disposable ‘medium’ that it really takes the pressure off,” Wisenfeld told Comic Book Club of the project over email. “If you mess up, what’s the worst that can happen? I feel it allows me to try things I wouldn’t ordinarily, or explore ideas that might seem less significant at first glance.”
The new book includes 100 (or so) pages of drawings, as well as writings and poems, and is collected in a 120-page deluxe hardcover. To find out more about “why Post-its???” read on.
Comic Book Club: I’ll start with the simple one that might actually be very complicated: why post-it notes?
Aron Wiesenfeld: It’s such a disposable “medium” that it really takes the pressure off. If you mess up, what’s the worst that can happen? I feel it allows me to try things I wouldn’t ordinarily, or explore ideas that might seem less significant at first glance. I imagine it’s kind of the way a novelist feels about writing short stories. It’s also very difficult to draw so small, especially if you are trying to incorporate the elements of a painting, such as mood, atmosphere, time of day, weather conditions, character, story, etc. It forces you to state things in a very simple way, which I think is a good thing.
You’ve worked on extremely large canvases, in comic book panel borders, and everything in between. But these are essentially full-bleed ink drawings in a confined square. How does that change how you approach the composition?
When drawing so small, you can see the entire composition at a glance. That was something Neal Adams taught me about starting off by making small thumbnails for comics pages – since you can take in the entire composition in your field of vision, it’s much easier to identify problems, and working at that size is very intuitive.
Speaking on “bleed” post-its are… Not necessarily conducive to ink, and tend to bleed through the paper, as far as I’ve experienced. How do you tackle that aspect of things?
I personally haven’t noticed that. When the drawing is finished, if there are pencil marks that need to be erased, that has to be done very carefully since the paper is so thin. I use pigment liner pens, and the lines can be erased away if I’m too aggressive with the erasing. Everything about working on post-it notes has to be done carefully.
Since you do have a background in comics, has there been any thought or temptation to make sequential art from the post-its?
Not directly, but drawing them has brought up a lot of themes and stories that I want to develop further.
As you’re collecting them, how are you physically collecting them? How have you kept track of your post-its, and transferred them to book format?
I made a batch of about 15 of them, and sold them on my website. They were well received, so I kept making them. Plus I was having fun. Several people mentioned that they would like to see a collected book of them. Fortunately I always made high resolution scans before sending them out.
Aron Wisenfeld’s Playtime is on Kickstarter now.
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