And A Little Tree, As Well

Of course, now that I've put the composition together for a test peek, I find out that I do, in fact, need to render in the little tree at the base of the mid-range rock. It is the wee details that make the difference in the end, god damn it.

Not bad, though. I like it -- it's less doomed than most of my art.

And once again, I'm reminded as to why I almost always  use inkblots for my very unrealistic skies -- the right choice adds a fat slab of energy to the composition.

Swill Has Rocks and Dirt

In the finished piece, vegetation will cover the parts where the distant and mid-range rocks overlap, so they'll look more discrete.

And I had to break the back-to-front rule. In order to figure out the colors for the mid-range rock, I needed to know the colors of the nearest earth-tones in the image, and those would be in the patch of dirt in the lower right-hand corner.

Of course, I got up at four-thirty and started working. Almost time for my counseling appointment... All winter long I told myself that when I was ready to start work, it would not be a matter of willpower, it would be a matter of yielding to compulsion.

Self, you're starting to figure things out. Now it's time for moss and pitcher plants, and whatever that phallic thing is.

Swill Six Cover Progresses

So, what's going on now? I've got a solid composition based on photographs, a scanned chrysalis, and a scanned inkblot. I'm taking each element -- each 'object' that's basically one color -- and rendering it using three flat tones, light, shadow, and middle tone.

Once this has been done, each color will be brought into Illustrator and autotraced. The end result will be simpler, more elegant, and more 'printerly' than this. It will also be reproducible at any given size. Assuming I don't wind up breaking Illustrator with my ridiculous demands. I've done it before.

The end goal is something that's further away from collage/montage and closer to a 'real' print. We shall see...

The Swill Progresses

"Start from the back and work forward," a wise man once told me, and that's how I tend to work. So here's the sky...

I was originally intending to make the central figure dark and warm, with strong earth tones. However, once I started messing around with the sky, I'm thinking that faded, dusty purples that have less color intensity than this blue would give a nice sense of sweep and distance. Time to experiment...

Swill Underway

So. Two weeks ago, I told my counselor that it was time for me to start putting an effort into getting out of my depression -- that there was starting to be a discretionary element in the mix.

Last week, I started cleaning my studio, and now it's cleaner than it's been in five or six years. My back is fucking killing me, but that is the price we pay for compulsive behavior, is it not?

And then both yesterday and today, I WOKE up shortly before seven, started work, and worked all day long unless specifically engaged with another person. I'm not quite hypomanic, but I'm definitely at the point where a ten or twelve hour workday seems like a delightful idea.

So today I was able to finish the rough design of the next cover for Swill. I've got a few days of rendering ahead of me -- hopefully, this is just a rough indication of what's to come. The finished product will look much less like a photographic composition.

Ahhh.... I'm functioning!