Deep In The River Part One: The Master Plan

So here's how it works today. As mentioned before I've got to catch up on my homework. I also need to have a number of prints ready to go by Tuesday.

I have also, alas, lost touch with the novel. My submission last week was produced while ill and read that way and now I'm not there... I also have a partially completed short story I'm writing for New Voices in Fiction. It might not work -- I'm trying something kind of experimental here in terms of density of story and information. It's a told story rather than a shown story and that's part of the point. I may rewrite it as a full-on shown story but then it would be at least a novella. Or maybe not...

Anyway, here's the plan. I have my first assignment in Digital Printmaking coming up. I want to show the piece to my teacher before showing it to the class; he's having some people do dissections of their piece for the class and I'm interested in finding out if I might do that.

So today I'm going to make the file for my digital print.

But here's the trick. I'm becoming compulsive about this site. I can't keep away from it. So I'm going to harness that compulsion to motivate me through the patch of hard work I've got ahead of me over the next few days.

Today I'm going to post every time I hit a significant step in the development of my image and give explanations as to what I'm doing and why.

When I first started working in this method I initially sketched the composition of the finished piece. Now I prefer to work freely, starting with a clear mental image and then allowing the material and the process to have precedence over my initial conception.

So today's composition is going to be a monster. We start off with the scans, then go on to the assembly of the basic monster, then blending the basic shapes so as to make it look like one body, posing against the background, adding effects such as blur to the finished composition, conversion to bitmap, enlarging the image, then coloring.

Next up: scans.