Further Progress

It's almost getting to the point where I can start worrying about the details... Once again, there's that weird Arizona Highways vibe.

What's Been Going On

My blogging has grown sparse partially because my thoughts have been occupied by concerns that make for bad reading. I have been undergoing an intense process of self-evaluation and improvement, and as a result, most blog posts I write are as flat and self-satisfied as so many mud turtles. Complex, sophisticated, highly-evolved, and truly beautiful in their own way, they are exquisitely dull to any but the specialist.

So I don't post them.

And while I was going to break that cycle and post this one? This post I've been working on since five this morning? I can't do it. I love you people too much to encourage you to read that kind of sludge.

But part of it was worth saving!

Of course, there were some moments that made it clear that we were still deep in the heart of Oaf country... I have a particular spot in my heart for the nameless doctor who burst into my room to tell me about the patient to whom she had just attended, a pre-op male-to-female HIV-positive transsexual prostitute.


"He's out there -- she's out there -- shit, I don't know, but, you know, no protection, no condoms, no nothing --" and the doctor's beaded cornrows rattled as she drew her hands apart to indicate great size, "-- with these anal warts like, like..." and she drew her hands apart again, with an expression of delighted horror at the indicated magnitude. She shook her head. "Just would not listen. Some people, you know?"


I grinned and shook my head, and said, "What can you do?" But what the fuck was up with that? Was she just overwhelmed in the moment? Had my physician suggested to her that a good anal-wart story might prove efficacious in the treatment of nausea, sort of like putting out a well-fire with dynamite? Is there some kind of Hippocratic loophole that lets you bitch about patients to other patients if the patient on the receiving end is sort of delirious?


Medicine is a mystery.

Listen, if I can figure out anything interesting to say about the recovery process, I will, but right now? It's too much like discussing anal warts.

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!