Deep In The River Part Three: Initial Selections And Sweet Potato-Related Failure -- I Am Publicly Disgraced

Because of the rough nature of the finished work I was fairly crude in my selections. I worked in Photoshop and used the quick select tool to start out and then refined that with the lasso.

The nice thing about doing everything on the scanner this way is tht the lighting is identical in all images and is neutral in respect to the direction of the light -- you can rotate these, duplicate them and switch them around and the lighting will always be consistent.

Of course you lose the mood and drama you can get with staged or natural lighting.



I'm going to have to look for some more suggestive bones for the body of the creature. There's a sense in many projects, especially when you're trying something that's new to you, when you realize that you aren't going to be able to pull it off.

That's where I'm at now.




You see, I had a shape in my mind for the body, something smooth and sleek and whale-shaped.

So I decided to scan in a sweet potato.

I am... I mean, there are times...

What I saw in my head was a skull-headed whale-shaped zombie with a slime-coated tadpole quality swimming along a cliff formed by a vast section of bone, both glowing blue-green...

And when I saw the result of what I had done, as I struggled to bring my vision to life by crafting the oh god please don't make me say it the sweet potato into the body of a skull-headed whale I truly understood how it feels to suck.

Lord, lord, lord, they should put me in box and push crackers through a hole in the side. I am as a child, wandering clueless.

So now I have absolutely no idea as to how I should proceed after this absolute failure of craft and vision. I should be made to work in a cannery and gut frogs until I drop in agony and they slide me into a rendering vat. Jesus Christ I am the lamest fucker ever to soil God's earth with my tainted shadow. Someone needs to chop into my skull with a mattock for thinking I was permitted to foul paper and bandwidth with the seepings of my half-rotted soul. Just wind up and give it to me and feed my body to the hogs.

A sweet potato.

A sweet potato... What was I thinking?