And it is inching toward reality...

The wind has been crazy the last couple of days! Trying to get a good shot for the catalog is challenging...

Latest versions...

It was a pretty spring day, so I thought we'd see how that looks...

Progress

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 1)

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 2)

Working on patterns as backgrounds for the banners...

Tisdale's book tells about his experiences serving on the Olympia. I've been mining it (and other period writing) for text to encode on the banners...

Concordance table

"Oh the discrimination of flags and pennant! Some day [...] I will go to the flag locker [...] study them out and write a descriptive poem about them. A flag that means yes at the main truck means no on the after gaff."
L. Tisdale, Three Years Behind the Guns, 205

Abbreviation	Text	1917 Code
BTW	By the way	HAD, HAS, or HAVE (the person indicated) he not...
FUD	Fear, uncertainty, and doubt	Bandit
IRL	In real life	Cistern
OMG	Oh my God	Handspike
SOL	Shit out of luck	At (the time indicated) we were off
TMI	Too much information	Plates (crockery)
WTF	What the F*ck	By steamer

Maybe we're getting some where...

I still think it needs to be clouds of text...

Working...

I started thinking of the composition as one long banner after visiting the Olympia a few weeks ago. My original suggestion for a site wasn't workable, so we are now on a lower deck, near the captain's cabin (and its large guns...)

As I have tried to hone in on a message, I have been increasingly overwhelmed by the range of the codebook. It seems some how not fitting to have a single message...or even a single code. I have been peppering these latest images with Morse.

Here there are texts at various scales and saturations of color...I like the way the gray carries the white of the hull up on the upper decks...

This one is getting a lot of different messages into the mix...I'm not satisfied with the organization of it, and may go back to the units defined by the stanchions of the deck rail.

All our cities

Text messages as signal flags...

Some images of popular text abbreviations rendered as signal flags for the Artship Olympia project...

IMO (in my opinion...)

OMG (oh my God...)

POS (Parents over shoulder...)

TBH (To be honest...)

WTF (What the f*ck)

Another avenue for this is still to use the old signal flag code books to compose a story of some kind. I have begun to try my hand at a pre-colonial form of writing from the Philippines called Baybayin...I think it would be interesting to have a subtext in that script...

Manilla Location flags with Baybayin subtext...