As they approached the fourth floor, Bryson took the Fandom Princess and Harold down past the various classrooms and students all the way to the end of the corridor. There, he approached a large statue of a huge frog.

“Should try going in there,” he said quietly.

The Princess raised an eyebrow, confused as she looked up at the tall stone statue. “I’m not sure how to get in, Bryson.”

Bryson smiled slyly. “He might.”

He pointed at Harold, who looked from Bryson to the statue, then back to Bryson. He shrugged his little frog shoulders, and then croaked.

Suddenly, the stone statue in front of them moved; it hopped like a frog to the right, introducing a passageway behind where it had once stood. The Princess stared at amazement. She smirked at Bryson and leaned over giving his hair a rustle with her hand. “Clever boy,” she said.

Bryson grinned and motioned for her to enter. “I’ll stay here. I don’t want to see the mushy stuff that goes on in there.”

The Princess laughed and walked in, Harold croaking happily in her hand. The passageway led to a small room, in the center of it being a pot with a clear, liquid substance moving inside. Both Harold and the Princess looked in the pot and studied the substance.

“What do you suppose it is?” Harold asked.

“I don’t know,” the Princess replied. She pressed her lips in thought, and with her other hand reached down to touch the clear substance.

Before her hand could reach the liquid, it started to glow and swirl in a rainbow circle.

“To the one that croaks, state your need,” an ominous voice said throughout the room.

The Princess looked down at Harold, who gulped. “I seek a maiden of pure heart to kiss me, to love me so that I may be human again, and we can live happily ever after.”

The liquid in the pot swirled faster. “And so it shall be done,” the voice said.

Suddenly, the rainbow substance began to grow tall and swirl until it became a mountain inside the pot. The Princess took a step back and watched in amazement as it moved magically for a moment. In the next moment, it stopped, and went crashing back down into the black cauldron.

What remained was a fair maiden. She was dressed in a light green frock, with dark brown ringlets that framed her oval face. She landed right in front of the Princess and Harold, and smiled down at the little frog. Out she put her hand. The Princess, overcome with joy, held out Harold and he happily hopped from her hand to the maiden’s hand.

And well, I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next.

Alright, moving right along to another one of this week’s assignments, called For the Remix. This assignment was special and something that was really new to the course, from my understanding, so firstly, thanks for trusting us with this. The details about the project can be found here, but basically us ds106 students needed to take pictures from Johnathan Worth’s website that he had taken of author Cory Doctorow, and remix it!

Now, I’ll be honest, this assignment overwhelmed me. I think the concept is cool, but I think it’s because I’m not used to, in this society, being given permission to alter someone’s work. So, I guess I felt a little weary. I didn’t want to touch Mr. Worth’s photographs because I thought they were excellent! And then there was the pressure of making these new pictures better than they already were and I was literally just like AHHHH! So, I purposefully put it off for a little. When I finally came around to downloading the pictures, the weariness was slowly slipping away. Slowly. It wasn’t until I actually compiled some art pieces using the photos that I felt more comfortable, although this is still a weird concept to me.

Anyway, after I downloaded the pictures, I made sure to go to Cory Doctorow’s website where I took a look at some of his books and titles. One thing I saw was that there were a bunch of futuristic themes and cartoon-like aspect to the novels. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Mylo Xyloto, the new comic book series that Coldplay just put out that tells the visual story of their album of the same name. The theme of the future and people watching you and overcoming obstacles.

I decided to experiment a little with the futuristic side of it, but not in the sense of everything is shiny and new, but what if it was dark and big-brother like? Or color was a thing? Or the design of things didn’t really make sense? I played with a lot of these questions, and finally came up with two different takes. Both of my pieces are collages because I love them so much and I think you can convey a lot with a collage. I created both by playing around in Pixlr.

The first collage I did was simple. I took four pictures from the site, two of Cory’s face up close but in different color tones, and then the other two were of a space where I assume he works or draws some of his inspiration. I made the background black to keep the dark theme going, but made the pictures of the space lighter with a bit of color on only one of the edges. I liked the idea of keeping it simple, and I thought positioning the two almost identical picture diagonal from each other gave off a different kind of feel than if they were viewed apart of side-by-side. I don’t know though. What do you think?

The second collage I created for funsies might be my favorite, but it’s a bit busier. I used a few more pictures that were on the website, and chose a different layout for the collage. After playing around in pixlr, I found a sort of layout that enabled the moving of some parts of the collage to be moved, cut away, disorganized kind of like an unknown future sort of deal. The dark theme stayed, as did the splash of color.

Well, those were my best attempts at the assignment that scared the crap out of me! I really do like the idea of Mr. Doctorow releasing his books as creative commons, and I thought it made sense for us to do an assignment where we got to explore what that means to people who want to experiment with creating art from the books and ideas that he had. He’s definitely a cool cat.