Before And After: The Watcher

That's it; all done. I even fixed a tailpiece that looked like crap. I am burnt, my back is killing me, I'm mean and stinky. But I'm done. I may have to move some of the illustrations around -- gonna want to talk to Rob about that.

Tomorrow I'm gonna work on the novel. I've got a minor bit to add to the first chapter, the second chapter has a fairly painful bit of remembering/rewriting, and then it's gravy.

Now it's time to go terrorize the missus, grandson, and dogs. And maybe have a bit of supper.

Tell you what, though. This issue is gonna be a visual fucking feast. I guarantee.

Before And After: Whispers

Before.

After.

Almost done... Almost done. I once got called in on a TV show proposal that went haywire. (The show wasn't produced, but one of the people who called me in said that I kept the creators from looking like idiots...) Anyway, one of the other people working on it was a Peruvian illustrator, who wrote an email I'll always remember.

You think I am lazy but I am not lazy. I have been working day and night. I have worked my back to the chair!

That's what I've been doing. I've been working my back to the chair.

Before And After: The Tribulator

Before...

... and after. You see why I have to redo these?

There's Some Kind Of Electromagnetic Energy Coming From The End Of The Tunnel

The fish is actually a beetle, two butterflies, and the skull of a skunk. It took a bit of work to make it all come together. This kind of fine-line black-and-white doesn't come off that well on screen -- I like it now but it won't really come to life until it's printed. I'm pleased by the composition, though. You can tell that I've spend a few hours poring over Japanese nature prints.

I've hit the point where I no longer have any idea what to call this stuff. Is it drawing? Collage? Photography?

So here's the last of the illustrations...

... and now I have to go back and redo the first illustrations, which now look like crap next to the more recent ones. Right now I'm thinking that they'll be dead easy and won't require any serious work to fix. I'm wrong, of course, but I'll post a series of before and after images as the day goes on.

Wish me luck.

The Tribulator Knocks Off Work or I Want To Marry Illustrator's Live Trace Function

Here's the initial composition, constructed from scans in Photoshop. The background is too dark and intrusive, and the whole thing has a muddy, unclear quality to it. But that's fine -- this is just a preparatory stage.

So it's been a good day. Got another chapter of the novel out to the Homework Club, and I finished a new illustration for the magazine. It's based on one that was originally intended to be a centerfold -- here it is, if you're interested.

While I was working on the first version of this I got a sense of deja vu. I thought the composition looked familiar. Well, I figured it out. It was from the Lord of the Rings movie, the scene where a moth flutters by Gandalf when he's imprisoned on top of Saruman's tower.

It would have worked as a centerfold, but it turns out that the image needs to be split into two panels. That weakened the image too much -- oh, well. I was still able to salvage the subject matter and use the scans.

Anyway, I've made some interesting discoveries in using Photoshop and Illustrator in conjunction with one another in order to produce line art -- art that is pure black and white, which is easy to reproduce clearly. I thought I'd show off a bit of the process.

There are five elements on seperate layers in the initial Photoshop file. This is the background, scanned from the flank of a lubber grasshopper.

The Tribulator is a scanned damaged butterfly, chosen for the ragged edges of its wings. The spire is the knee joint from the leg of the lubber grasshopper mentioned above. I used a lot of distortion tricks in Photoshop to give the shapes a sense of perspective and depth.

I also use two or three adjustment layers on each of these elements -- Levels, Brightness and Contrast, and in the case of the background, Invert. I try and get the images as close to pure black and white as I can this way.

Again, these are two seperate layers. I duplicated the Tribulator and Spire layers, used Levels adjustment layers to render them in pure white, and added an Outer Glow from the FX menu on the layers panel, then positioned them under their corresponding elements. This gives the Tribulator and Spire a white outline to separate them from each other and the background. I'm big on clarity.

Now I can get ready to start working in Illustrator. First I want to get the background in place -- I was taught to work from far to near when making this kind of image -- to get the most distant elements in a composition rendered before going on to the elements 'closer' to the viewer. So here's the background with the white cut-outs, ready to be traced.

And here's the initial tracing. I went to Illustrator, created a document the same size as my Photoshop document, and then placed the Photoshop file in the Illustrator document and hit the Live Trace button in the control panel. Then I went to Object-Live Trace -- Options and began fiddling around until I got what I liked. This was done all in Lines, no Fill, lightest weight of line.

Since the first background was a bit weak, I turned on the Inverse adjustment layer, saved, and did it again.

Here's what I got. A nice outline of the Tribulator and his Spire.

I put each of these onto its own layer in Illustrator. Here's how those two look together. I thought this was thin, so I did one more layer after adjusting the grays in the Photoshop image -- you'll see how that fit in when you get to the finished version.

And now for the Spire...

For the Spire's Live Trace, I used all Fill and no Line.

The Tribulator was close to black and white in Photoshop --

-- so the Illustrator version looks quite similar. Now it's time to put everything together...

"The Tribulator had cultivated a spire at the center of his territory. Its spiral buttresses and knotted shaft were made of the same subtle matter as he was, and he kept his nest at its apex. When he reached home the Tribulatrix was waiting for him. After being in proximity to the sick human the sight of her was like a flight through spring rain..."

-- from Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! You'll find the rest of the story in the next issue of Swill.

A Nicer Skeleton

A moment's inspiration gave me a clue as to how to improve the skeleton below. That one's an Autotrace of a Photoshop file. I realized that if I manipulated the Autotrace options I could get a solid outline of the skeleton. I did so, then rendered the first trace in a dark color and put it on top of the second, rendered in a light color, then put a midrange rectangle behind both. So now I have something to post if I mess up the finished piece.

That was fast. This is the third of these skeletal drawings I've done so far. I uses Photoshop techniques for the first and it took me a long workday. l did the second one using Live Paint and it took me a couple of hours to get the results I wanted. This one? From the initial Photoshop file (which was a real bear) to the finished Illustrator piece, less then an hour.

I'm in love with Illustrator.

Further Art Developments and The Oaf Begins To Suspect He's Been Sold A Bill of Goods.

There's something vaguely familiar about this and I can't quite put my finger on it. I hope this isn't plagiarism.

So I've got two more pages filled in Swill, five to go. I wound up deciding that I needed some new subject matter to spark me up, so I went to The Bone Room. It was my intention to see if they had any trash or scraps to sell; it turns out they did, and I wound up blowing thirty bucks on fucked-up dead bugs.

Now I'd gone in hoping -- though knowing it was but hope -- that maybe I was the first artist they'd had in for a while asking after that kind of stuff. Well, this is the East Bay, with one of the world's highest concentrations of working artists. Of course they'd figured out how to commodify fucked-up dead bugs.

But they had another surprise for me. I'd brought in one of my presentation portfolios for The Bonelands in case I needed proof that I was an artist. Well, it turns out that they're expanding and that they want to have a small gallery as an adjunct to their store. So I was able to drop off a portfolio with them well in advance of the new space opening... we shall see.

The piece above is the first to come out of the insect scans and it's going to be the centerfold for Swill if it doesn't turn out to be plagiarism (it really seems familiar -- maybe I saw it in a dream). I figured out a very nice trick that gives me a lot more flexibility -- by going back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop I can...

Shit. You know what layers are, right? By keeping the three elements of the composition above on three different layers in the Photoshop file, I was able to toggle layers off and on so as to import each element seperately to be Live Traced onto seperate layers in Illustrator.

I need to figure out how to do real tutorials, with screen grabs and all. I wind up feeling like these little reports don't mean anything to anybody -- I need to beef them up if they're going to provide useful information. Pull out the mike, that kind of shit.

Man.

Anyway, I've been facing a growing realization that I've been ripped off. We've all been ripped off. Sex and drugs were everything we were promised -- both dangerous and unavailable -- but rock and roll...

Lemme put you into my head. Maybe it's just me, maybe this is something a lot of people have experienced. But ever since I was a sprat I have been given this vague half-formed yet tremendously potent feeling that rock music meant something. That on some level, in some way, it had both power and purpose.

Part of this had to do with the time during which I was raised. I was born in 1964, was in San Francisco for the Summer of Love, listened to Sgt. Pepper's every day and saw Yellow Submarine in the theater when it was first released. Rock and roll was inextricably connected with color and pageant.

I think superheroes had something to do with it, too. When someone puts on a costume, they take on an identity and the powers that go with it. It was the image of the other -- and believe me, I was the other -- as a figure of power and respect.

And so grew an illusion, one I have only recently grown aware of. The feeling that there was, as I said, something significant about rock. That there was a golden age, a lost continent, a wild planet of rock, that the bands were agents of this otherworldly realm.

This wasn't by any means a conscious thing. I just would be exposed to rock and part of me would tip back and go, "Woo!"

I wonder how many more choice nuggets of idiocy I have lurking around in my noggin... I am forty-five fucking years old and it is just now dawning on me that rock and roll is a sleazy shitty business, but not in a romanticized way. Rather, in the same slovenly suckfish fashion as any other.

I'm pretty sure they fight crime.

The first Roxy Music album is swell pop. Some of my favorite. Really great stuff, clearly ahead of its time. Et cetera, et cetera. If you haven't been bored shitless listening to people talking about early Roxy Music, then go get some. This one and For Your Pleasure should see you through the night.

But here's part of my problem. See, when I watch people on stage, I don't have more fun if the performers are dressed like silly-assed sons of bitches. It would never dawn on me that putting on a fool suit would be something you did out of showmanship.

Let me put it this way; I can hardly stand to look at these guys. If I had to watch them perform I'd spend the whole time cringing in embarassment for them, so there's no way they show up on stage like that. They only dress that way because they're in the Justice League.

I dunno. It's totally retarded, but it still kind of hit me on some level. Rock is just a business, virtually none of it is of any particular musical interest, most performers are livestock from the neck up and the ears in and the majority of those who aren't fools are exquisitely developed assholes.

It's just another career choice -- listen to the lyrics. Mostly they sing about fuckin', but inbetween they just sing about being rockstars. Fuck a rockstar who sings about being a rockstar. Fuck rockstars, period. Rockstars killed rockers.

I didn't really know I had the illusion but now that it's vanished on me, I want it back.

I want that kingdom in the garage and beneath the sea of green. I want Rocktopia.

Mildly Petulant, No Sign Of Frenzy: And Some Thoughts On The Upcoming Novel

Here's an example of the tailpieces I've been doing for Swill. There are one or two that need to be replaced but they're pretty much done. I think they add something to the sauce.

This is just crazy, isn't it? I've recently the full run of Weirdo magazine -- R. Crumb's long-running Mad-modeled humor anthology and a high point of Western culture, you slaggardly gobnards, I'd start pimping it but I'd get out names like Peter Bagge and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and then wake up in the middle of the night going, "Oh, shit, what about Elinor Norflus? How could I forget about Elinor Norflus?" -- but the qualities that give this one a Wierdo feel are totally the product of an Illustrator algorithm. I had nothing to do with those scratchy little lines -- I just picked them out.

Before I start barging around today's blog post, I've got a confession to make. I've been sucking lately. Doing a lot of work that has not proven to be anything I'd care to show to the public.

I'm going to try something different, something involving self-promotion. I'm going to go to a local store that sells bones and dried insects and stuffed animals and so on and ask them to sell me a bunch of their detritus. I'll bring a presentation folder to leave with them and a portfolio so I can show them my paleo art.

I will ask them if they'd be willing to sell me a bunch of detritus. The broken, the shop-worn, the stray bits and pieces. Trash I can scan in on my new scanner. In fact, now that I think of it I'm going to try and scan in as many different objects and so on as I can. Today I go to get the glass for my scanner.

Because I need to bust out. There's so much that's already been done on the magazine and here I am freezing up. I need to break free of this crap and start cranking out the pages. Bim bam boom. So a fresh and crazy dose of source material should hopefully get me going again. I'll call it a different series and do more of the Rorschach Dreams when they come to me. Right now obeying those rules is producing bad work.

I've also been thinking a lot about volume two of the novel. It's a bit problematic at this stage and here's why.

Right now, what I've got for the second and third volumes of the novel is as follows. Third volume, an outline and a rough draft of the beginning.

For the second volume, the one I need to work on next, I've got a number of scenes written along with the rough draft of the climax. So I know where I'm going and I know roughly what I need to do to get there. This book needs to provide the linkage between what I've done and what I know for sure I'm going to do.

It's all a mess right now. I've decided to try experimenting with conventional, structured outlining techniques I learned in multimedia courses.

I'm going to figure out each plot line, figure out exactly what needs to happen to bring them to their proper stage of ferment by the end of the book, and then look at all those lists together and start weaving them. Put 'em on post-it notes, clear off some wall space and use filing cards and pushpins...

I hope it works.

I hope it works.

A Few Thoughts On Goals, Both Realistic And Otherwise

Got a new technique that's thrilling me no end. The inkblot pieces I've been doing for Swill for the last while didn't respond as well to my use of dithering in Photoshop as the photo/scan-based pieces did. So I tried something I've been reluctant to do, which is use the Live Trace feature in Illustrator. It tends to be a bit of a processing hog, produces great big files. Well, given that I'm doing high-resolution multiple-level Photoshop images at four feet on a side, great big files are not my issue. So I went for it.

If you don't know Live Trace, and why should you, it's a function that takes raster input and renders it as a vector file, one that prints with exceptional clarity at any desired size. I'd mess with the Live Trace settings and get quite varied results, none of them entirely satisfactory. So I tried layering different tracings on top of one another, then I used the Expand command to let me manipulate the tracings, saving some sections while erasing others. I found that I was able to build satisfying results this way. I particularly enjoy the extremely varied visual qualities of the results, which you'll be seeing over the next while. It's fun -- unlike line drawings, the inkblots produce extremely unpredictable results, so it's more a matter of producing a new and separate piece of art than simply processing the original for reproduction. The big color prints based on these should be fun -- I've got some cute tricks in mind.

Been ignoring the blog this week while I threw myself headfirst down the next issue of Swill. 's coming along nicely, but it's more work than previous issue. That's because the number of interior illustrations has been upped twice and I've decided to include tailpiece illustrations as well as the full-page versions. Hell, there's even going to be a centerfold. Rob figured out a very felicitous page configuration and the end result is looking to have the strongest visual identity of any issue so far.

Since ol' Craig and Glendon have posted recently on their goals, I'm gonna do the same as well. Goals have been on my mind lately, as my last post can testify.

Here are the short-term goals creative goals. Finish illustrating Swill. Finish and submit my stories and application for the Viable Paradise writer's workshop. Finish the current line-edits on The Ghost Rockers. Do a pterosaur illustration and have fun with it, for chrissakes.

(As an aside, the feedback I'm getting from the writer's groups has made something clear. What I'm thinking of as a relatively easy and minor part of the work -- just sanding a few parts down, putting on a couple of coats of varnish and some wax -- is really, really important to the reader and I was really smart to decide to wait until this is over to send it to an agent.)

If you've been following the blog, here's a pattern you may have noticed. I produce a lot of work; I do it somewhat sporadically; I have a tendency to announce grand ambitions and more of them sputter in the dust than sail to the stars.

So here's my number one big goal for the near future -- focus on improving my work skills. My big breakthrough in this arena was learning how to induce compulsions -- four years on the fucking novel, two art shows in the past year, these are compulsive activities.

But what I'd like is to learn how to put in the hours on projects that are not compulsions. I may have to settle for learning how to induce more than one compulsive behavior at a time.

Next year I have some specific learning goals. I'm going to take Photography and 3-D construction in the fall, then life drawing and Digital Painting in the spring. The next set of Swillistrations will draw from those -- I want to construct my compositions out of a mix of hand-drawn sketches, photographs and scans, and 3-D models, then use digital painting to rework all those references into a finished composition.

I think the end results will be viable commercial illustration; I will be pimping them as such.

And I'll have the next volume of the novel in the works as soon as I'm done with the current line edits, which should only take a few weeks.

So those are all solid, achievable goals which I can legitimately expect to meet, barring fate. In the longer run? Allowing for pipe dreams?

As a writer, I see myself eventually writing a big fat fantasy series alternating with stand-alone projects. The fantasy series is one that's been evolving since childhood; it may well be illustrated.

But before I get to it, I want to write a few crap novels just to have the experience of working quickly. The number of possible book projects I've got in the works is, I'd guess, somewhere in the low teens. I'd like to get to the point where I can can reliably knock out a novel every year or two. It's not the writing that slows me down; it's the planning and conceptual work, and that should be improvable.

I also want to write screenplays. Got the second draft of one finished, currently (and terribly) titled Morrison Blues. When the whole novel is done, a better draft of this script is the first thing I'm going to do. Yes, Mesozoic fans, it's the Morrison you think it is. But wanting to write screenplays is a very different thing than wanting to work in/with Hollywood.

But of course, this is all just the tip of the iceberg.

Lycaenops: Part Three

I think that if Oscar Wilde were to have a Lycaenops ornatus skeletal diagram on the wall of his study it would be this one. It's all about the mauve.

I did this all in Illustrator. I used the Live Trace feature to convert my pencils into vectors. I really like that function -- it keeps a lot of the initial juice from the pencils and gives you a nice clean editable vector image.

The last time I did this I couldn't figure out how to handle the color in Illustrator; this time I hit the books and found out how to do Live Paint. Worked like a dream; even with the studying it took me a lot less time to achieve the same results. I believe I'm falling in love with Illustrator all over again.

Irritatingly, when I went to double-check the name of the brute on Wikipedia, I found a high-definition photograph of the skeleton that was used as the basis for the diagram from which I worked. (I believe I will keep that awful sentence; perhaps I'll have it stuffed for my collection.) I'd started this project off with some googling for these kinds of images.

Damnit. Wish I'd had that at the start.

Now to whack the color out of the skeleton and print it up and start drawing over it... See you in a while.

Psittacosaurus neimongoleinsis: Part Three

Here's the template that I'm going to bring into Illustrator. It'll take a bit of fussing -- for instance, I've got to dump the highlights on the tail under the crest/mane/quills, and taper the highlights where the neck runs into the shoulder -- but it's ready to go. Time for the next stage to begin.

So What Am I Going To Do With My Other Site?

Here's the evolution of my hand/eye logo. First I started off with a sketch, for which I'm not going to look. I had trouble getting a satisfactory squeezy quality to the eyeball so I had the missus take a photograph of me squeezing one of her exercise balls to use as a reference. (Squeeze the eyeball! Squeeze the eyeball! NNNNGGGGRRRGGGHHH!)

Next I went and painted over it in Photoshop and turned it into a .gif for use on my old site. After a while I found the crudity of the execution disappointing but I still liked the image.

So then I retraced it in Photoshop and used the Illustrator live trace function to turn it into a vector image. It's too big, the colors vary -- at some point I'm going to do it over again as a vector image right from the start.

Still, I'm pleased with it. It works for me both as a writer and an artist. And it also calls back to some important influences -- it's got a little of Hunter S. Thompson's double-thumbed fist Gonzo logo, the Resident's dapper eyeball guys, and I recently realized that the combination of the red hand and the eye was a sort of Sauron/Saruman sandwich. Go figure.

This blog isn't my first website. Here's the first one. It's more focused on being entertaining -- but since I started my blog I've done very little to it. Time constraints, you know?

So I'm wondering what I should do with it. It's more work to post to -- I've got to do all the intertube stuff myself rather than just plug the words and pictures into Blogger. The gallery pages are a nightmare to work on. On the other hand I kinda like it. And I don't want to let go of the rights to seancraven.com.

I'm thinking that I might stick to posting stuff about the arts and my participation in them here on the blog and then using the site for the personal and humorous posts and then just put links up here.

I don't know at this point. I'm really not sure. And while I don't have a counter up there I think it garners some hits from time to time. So this morning I put a link to the blog at the top of the page and for now I'm just gonna let it go while I ponder.

But if you like the blog, go take a peek. Go on. It's got some amusement value. I promise.

Oh, and I saw a prototype for my card -- it's gonna take a few weeks before I get the real thing but the prototype looks pretty damned good. The front and back work out better than I'd hoped and the interior is better than the print I based it on. I'll turn it into a print of its own next time I'm in the lab.

Another Tiny Step: A Business Card

So the idea is that this is folded in half, with the eyeball logo in the front and my contact information in the back. When you unfold it you find this...

It's been adapted from the big print I posted a while ago. The practical nature of vector illustration comes into play here -- all the elements in this are separate objects that I can cut and paste and manipulate to my heart's content and they'll print cleanly at any size. Rock on, Adobe Illustrator.

I've got to say that I have had a few thoughts about whether or not it's really a good idea to have a business card that features, well. Gore.

But if you can't handle a dinosaur fight you probably shouldn't think about working with me. Right?

Right.

I'm done! I'm done!

Well, here's an improved set of colors for this piece...

... and let's try a little blur here and there to beef up the depth. Cheesy, huh? Just have to see how it prints.

Still Further Edmontosaurus/Tyrannosaurus

Well, if I can get a decent color version of this finished by seven-thirty I'll be able to make a print tonight. Wish me luck...

Scattered Thoughts

Here are the first Illustrator shapes for the new dinosaur piece. Gonna have to adjust that jaw line... Oh, no I won't; it's hidden by the blood!

Well, I'm not going to be working on the computer for long this morning. I've been spending too much time in the chair in the last few days and my back is telling me that if I don't go for a walk I'm going to wake up in the wee small hours wishing I'd gotten my prescriptions refilled. (I'm leery of Vicodin -- I don't enjoy the stuff but I have no illusions regarding my ability to abuse substances I don't enjoy, saith the toper.)

So I'm going to head down to one of the Latin markets around San Pablo and University and score the ingredients to make a big batch of chorizo (or langoniza seca, more likely) y papas with frijoles that I can freeze in packages and lunch on for the near future. I'll get back to the new piece in the afternoon.

But I want to make sure I get a post in. I've been very neglectful of the site lately... Here's a few things that have been rattling around the old noggin lately.

BMI is retarded. Has anyone heard any doctor anywhere ever recognize that it's got a fairly serious mathematical flaw? It's based on the square of the height rather than the cube. That's how you get surface area, not volume. So those of us who live far from the center of the bell curve wind up with innaccurate estimates of what we should weigh, especially if we're solid types rather than the traditional etiolated tall person.

My dad and I saw an older woman with her grandson a week or so ago. We were in a hamburger joint and she was showing the kid off to the folks who worked there.

There were two things about her and the kid that freaked me out. First off, I'm a kid and animal person. But when this kid started noticing me and begging for attention I found myself drawing back for low reasons -- something in his face, his manner, made me think of him as a trashy person. He's maybe a year old, for christ's sake, but I immediately filed him with Nascar or Raider's fans. A Bush supporter. Someone who roots for their team. Drives a Hummer. Smacks his wife if she needs it. Big, big Chuck Norris fan.

And interestingly, after we left and I guiltily confessed this to my dad, he admitted that he'd had the exact same reaction.

Does this indicate the existance of a dipshit left-wing judgmentality chromosome? Or was it an accurate perception of an asshole in its larval state?

Anyway, his grandmother had a piece of fruit and she was cutting off sections and feeding them to the kid. But this was no ordinary fruit.

It was a plantain.

For those not in the know, plantain is related to bananas but it's used as a starchy vegetable. And when it's raw it has a texture midway between raw potato and mahogany. More like wood than something you'd eat.

And our little future Nascar fan was gulping the chunks down whole and unchewed, a grin plastered all over his face. He was such a happy kid; why did he seem so unsavory?

My eyesite keeps getting worse and it's making me crazy. I now need four pairs of fucking glasses; distance, reading, computer, and bifocals for class, when I have to go between the teacher and the textbook.

It sucks; I keep finding myself wearing the wrong pair of glasses and not noticing until I start wondering why I feel as though I'm hallucinating. It's messing with my sense of reality -- the bifocals are the worst. On the other hand, my computer glasses can be a treat -- the focus is about a yard from my face so it exaggerates perspective. It's pretty dramatic.

I'd consider the eye surgery but a) I can't afford that shit, b) the results are pretty varied and there are loads of nightmare tales making the rounds, c) I'm probably a bad candidate -- I have so much astigmatism the surface of my eye is shaped like a raspberry, and d) I keep picturing the pie-slice pattern they laser into your eye and imagining hitting a bump in the road on my bike (actually, I've had to give up on my current bike as unrideable, there goes a few hundred bucks down the drain) and having all those triangular flaps seperate, my eyes just flapping open and dolloping the vitreous humor all over my shirt as I run into the back of a parked car.

And let's stop rambling now, shall we? Time to go see if the missus is up and find out if we're doing anything this morning -- yard sales are not out of the question.

Have a happy day and try not to think about your eyeballs just going flurp the next time you hit a bump in the road.

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.

More Digital Drawing Homework

So the assignment was to create a dust jacket for a real or imaginary book, including the copy. I figured that I'd be able to knock it out quickly using a simple graphic approach to the design; instead I got caught up in the copy writing. Click on the image for details...

I Flat-Out Refuse To Make A Pun About Beets

I'm not sure why so many people hate beets. Try making a salad out of julienne cooked beets and raw carrots with sweet red onion dressed in a vinaigrette seasoned with black pepper and fresh mint. Hmmm... the next time I see sour oranges in the store I'll do this and use sour orange juice instead of vinegar.

So yesterday I had my first meeting with a different writer's group. I'll blog about it next time. The rule is that I have to have at least one image with every post and I didn't have anything that would fit that post in particular. So I went grubbing around and found a motherload of old art. You'll be seeing more of it.

Anyway, this was the very first drawing that I ever colored on the computer. I was doing a lot of botanical stuff at this point and I was working a lot with technical pens so computer coloring was a natural. This was a looooong time ago.

I'd dabbled in computer graphics before but found them pretty much useless to me -- I could not work with a mouse at all... A friend at work wanted to show off his new computer so he told me to take a drawing to the copy place and have a scan made and put it on a floppy disc (anyone remember those?) and bring it over and he'd show me how to color it.

He had one of the first Wacom tablets and as soon as I started messing around in Photoshop Two or Three I knew I'd found my medium. Of course at that point I was a warehouse worker pulling down seven-fifty an hour -- but I managed to convince the missus to plonk down the bucks and let me pay her back. She got hooked as well so we split the cost of the machine. Took me a couple of years to pay it off but it was totally worth it.

When I ran across this old drawing (tracing vellum wrinkles just like people do) I decided to scan it in and recolor it. The first file is long gone and was probably at 120 dpi or something else ridiculous like that. Also, the colors came out way, way too dark.

So once I had it scanned in again I opened Photoshop and used a Levels adjustment layer to bring out the blacks and whites of the drawing, then started laying down flat colors in Darken mode in a layer on top of the scan.

I selected the color of the beet by eye and then made a seperate document with a sample of that color which I opened in Illustrator. Illustrator has some color selection functions I really like; it gave me a choice of contrasting colors from which I selected the rest of the palatte, which I tested on the document until I had a combination I liked. Then I closed out of Illustrator and opened the palatte document in Photoshop. (There is a way to transfer palattes from one Adobe program to another and I'm gonna bug my teacher about it next class.)

And there we go -- a beet which is, as my old teacher Maurie Lappe would say, "Fit for the Louvre."

The Wallpaper Assignment

So the assignment was to design wallpaper for a boy's bedroom. I considered doing something along the lines of a train towing a zeppelin whose payload would be a giant salami smoking a cigar but I figured that might not be phallic enough...

And yet from a distance it's almost tasteful...

One of those rudimentary lessons in art that I have to keep learning over and over again is that when you try and take the easy way out it always winds up being more work than you thought it would.

I figured I'd just do a couple of quick scribbles, use the tracing function in Illustrator and slap some color on them. Of course by the time I got done editing the quick scribbles I'd spent so much time on them that I could have just as easily taken my time and done a really nice image.

One thing that I'm finding frustrating is that at the moment I haven't figured out a good method or location for doing pen and pencil work. I use a recliner with small tables on the side when I work on the computer, I do most of my editing in bed with a board and a red pen. I have a place where I can work standing up but I can't stand for extended periods of time and standing is better suited to large work. Maybe if I got a big foam-rubber wedge to balance a drawing board on I could work in my recliner -- but that would mean drawing with a big foam-rubber wedge in my lap. I really do need to solve this problem. Ponder ponder.

I will say that I would have killed for this wallpaper when I was eight.

As an aside, my run of good luck seems to be continuing. Among other things, it looks as if I've sold another story -- details to come when things look solid. And I got an unexpected check in the mail -- been a long time since I've been in a position to make a deposit.

The last few years I've been saying, "The bad luck can't continue indefinitely, something's gotta break sometime." This last week has been one of the most absurd runs of good fortune I've had in my life.

Frankly, it makes me a little nervous. I like it -- but I'm not sure I trust it. Just have to ride it as far as it takes me...