A Brief Plaintive Bleat

A somewhat more casual approach to paleoart...

Well, the struggle goes on. I'd just as soon go into full-blown collapse mode but I'm staring down the barrel of the end of the semester and I need to get something done for both classes. Here's what I'm doing for Digital Drawing.

The goal is to use this as a basis for a print visually modeled on Japanese brocade prints -- all the ink rendering will be replaced by flat shapes and depth will be indicated by using color and blur.

The Anomalocaris is still in the works but it's pretty clear that I'll need to spend some time staring at fossil photographs and making sketches and as I said, I'm looking at deadlines.

Now I have to go take care of some Swill business.

Damnit.

A Quick Progress Report

Just to start off, tomorrow night I'm going to the reception for the latest issue of the award-winning Milvia Street magazine. They used four or five pieces of mine, depending on whether they published one or both of the hyeanodon drawings. Here they are! I'm pretty sure they gave Bluehive a color page but we shall see.

This one actually turned out to be my first print sale. The missus's dad was staying with us and when he saw the large print of this he wanted to buy it. I'm letting her handle the financial side of things...

This is one of a series of drawings I did for my sister's aborted website. She wanted a retro look so I obliged.

So I decided that since the novel was going awry and it was getting harder and harder for me to do anything but visual art stuff it was high time for a little tough lovin'. The rule is now a thousand pages-I-mean-words a day. Every day. Creatively I'm a sprinter, not a marathon runner, so this kind of rule is hard for me to stick to.

But I've been doing okay so far. I topped 70,000 words this morning -- for you non-writers, that's a respectable length for a novel, one of those big fat bestselling rat-smashers runs about 100,000 words -- and I can see the end from here. I can imagine being done with this draft inside of a month. We'll see, but it's possible.

As for short fiction. My tough guy dinosaur story for David Byron isn't talking to me -- I should have finished the damned thing in one go. Note to self -- knock out the rough draft to a short story in one sitting if at all possible.

But the story I'd planned to give to Milvia Street was three times longer than they'd publish. So I sent it off to Rob and it's going to be in Swill. This suits me fine -- it's one of the best things I've written and I really, really like the idea that Ellen Datlow, editor of horror half of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror will get a chance to read it. It's called Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! and it wasn't until I'd finished the second or third draft that I realized it was a deal with the Devil story. Instead of the usual approach where the point is to come up with a twist on the fulfilled wish (there is one of those but it's not the center of the story) I show how the devil-character, the Tribulator, is destroyed by culture shock. It also features very, very jaundiced views of both of my romantic relationships -- something I didn't know I was doing while I was writing it.

Oh, it is a mean little unit.

Which means the creepy/funny SF bar story I'd written for Swill is now free. I'll do a rewrite this weekend and get it of to Mr. Byron to compensate for the loss of the story I'd promised him before.

So I need to come up with something for Milvia Street and something for Monday Night. One piece is going to be about my first three clear memories -- bedwetting, agnosticism, and a doberman attack. The other? I'm hunting for inspiration.

I'm putting off scheduling a print day for my art until I'm done with the Anomalocaris canadensis piece. Yesterday I spent some time studying Illustrator techniques for handling color rendering. One that looks interesting is to use the gradient tool to lay in rough tones, then convert it to a gradient mesh and refine it. So that's the tack I'm taking. Soon as I get this posted it's gonna be time to pick some colors and start laying down gradients...

Anomalocaris Canadensis 4: Full shapes.

Well, nearly full shapes. I need to figure out an approach for the claws/teeth/creepy pointy things on the front grabbers/jaws/things with creepy pointy things all over them. And as an aside, my earlier statement that the tail fins were hardened? It was moon talk.

Here we go with the next state of Anomalocaris. Time to start studying color techniques for Illustrator...

Oh, and the novel seems to be back on track. I'd guess I'm about four to six weeks away from finishing this draft of volume one! Look out -- jump back!

Anomalocaris canadensis Part Three: Start of Illustrator Shapes

Well, Illustrator is being uncooperative. Note the two shapes in the above sketch that are just hairlines? I can't select the things. Probably have to draw them over again. And I got the direction of the curves wrong in the sketch of the far 'jaw.' And I don't have time to finish the other 'jaw' before I head out to class in about fifteen minutes.

And I'm almost done with the next chapter of the novel -- and I had to send out this weeks submission a few minutes ago.

Nothing like petty frustrations. Think I'll take some time out this evening and really start flagellating myself over my inability to perform up to my self-imposed standards. Thankfully they're impossible so I'll never have to stop beating myself up.

I'm thinking about doing a little hit-whoring as well. Since the Jurassic Fight Club review is the thing that's gotten me the most attention I'm thinking of doing another TV show review just to see what happens. I'd hate to make a habit of it but hey. If it works...

Look at the time. Guess I better go pull my boots on and hop on the bike...

Anomalocaris canadensis Part Two: Revised Sketch

I lost more than twenty percent of my body weight overnight! Ask me how I did it!

So on the advice of Sam Gon III over at The Anomalocaris Homepage (see my links -- I really, really need to figure out how to do links inside a post but I think that might involve HTML and the very thought makes my blood run cold) I've trimmed down old Anomalocaris and while I was at it I changed the attachment of the fins.

I've got a grim feeling that this is going to make it more difficult to render in Illustrator, which likes nice clean seperate shapes. I may have to render them as seperate shapes, then blend them using color. We'll see...

The fins represent a bit of an issue in that they seem to have been stiff but they were not made of/covered in shell. (Sclerotized is the word for this. Thanks for the new word, Sam!) I can't quite get a mental grip on the texture of them. They weren't soft like a squid or a nudibranch, they weren't hard like an arthropod... I wish I knew more about the textures of invertebrates. I should spend an afternoon fondling creeping things.

But the tail was sclerotized (I'm assuming the word comes from sclerotin, which is the hard part of an arthropod's armor as contrasted with chitin which is flexible and forms the joints -- and is also the structural material in mushrooms. I wonder if the taste of seafood-flavored mushrooms like oyster or lobster mushrooms has anything to do with this?) so I can think of it as being something like the tail of a prawn.

Now it's back to the novel.

Anomalocaris canadensis Part One: Sketch

And in this corner, the bastard of the Burgess, sixty centimeters of spineless savagery, Anomalocaris canadensis!

Here's the first entry in my next series of prints. The initial goal is to do one animal from each of the main geological periods with the finished prints showing the animals at roughly life-size. I'm starting with the Cambrian but then I'll be jumping to the Permian for a Lycaenops, a yard-long gorgonopsian.

While I do want to do a dinosaur or two, part of the reason for the project is to show off some animals that don't get the same kind of love the dinosaurs do. I might do a simiosaurian from the Triassic... Heck, maybe I should skip dinosaurs entirely. But I want to do a psitticosaurus and a small maniraptor and... Decisions, decisions.

That said, I know there have been a lot of reconstructions of Anomalocaris done over the years. But hey -- what else in the Cambrian is big enough to make a good art print? Huh? Huh?

So now it's time to take this pup into Illustrator and start rendering it. I just hope I'm able to do all the final color rendering in Illustrator but there's a good chance I'll need to do some finishing work in Photoshop as I did with the Pterygotus buffaloensis drawing...