Of course I'm kind of an idiot sometimes.

Yes, it's another image posted for the sake
of posting an image.

So I used the wrong modifier yesterday. Neither Microcosmic God nor Sandkings (Sturgeon and Martin, respectively) could be described as taking place in microscopic worlds. They were contained environments, yes, and small enough for domestic purposes, but not microscopic.

The Other Art Show.

Floss or die.

So the two most immediate art shows for me are the aforementioned paleo show, which is going to take a million years to put together, and this one, which will have twelve completed images in two or three weeks.

It's based on the work I've done for the last two issues of Swill, pieces composed using scans and photographs of bones and other objects.




I start off by composing in Photoshop, sometimes using a sketch as I did in this case, sometimes by using an image in my head. Frequently the visual possibilities of the material suggest unforeseen directions.



I learned more about light in the three weeks I spent taking and using photographs than I had in twenty years of drawing.

In order to make the images work I had to keep the lighting of the finshed piece clearly in my mind -- if I was going to use an object and reverse it in order to make a gate or a set of claws or what have you, I'd have to shoot the same object from the same angle and reverse the light. Lots of little details like that...



Then I flatten the images and convert them to bitmaps, in some cases at seventy-two ppi, sometimes at one-hundred. These are composited at about seven and a half by ten. The coarse bit-mapping is done in order to make the images clearly reproducible when using a photocopy process. But this is a case of deriving style from necessity...

The bit-mapping of the image helps to make the separate elements inhabit the same visual space; in some cases I've gone in and drawn on top of things and the drawing is indistinguishable from the photographs or scans.

These are then resized to fifteen by twenty inches at two-hundred and forty ppi. This is done as a bitmap to preserve the clean blacks. At this point I convert it to an RGB file, add one white layer for the background, one clean layer for colors, then on top is the bitmapped layer. I select the white areas in that layer and delete it so that the black pixels that define the image at this stage overlay the layer on which the coloring will be done.



Then I use the pencil tool to place flat color onto the color layer, which is on top of the white background layer and the bitmapped image. The result is very much in the style of comics and animation cels -- the color palatte is influenced by old-fashioned four-color comic books.

The images initially published at seventy-two ppi are colored using more experimental methods than the one-hundred ppi images. The simpler works need the additional information that fully-rendered color can give.

Art Failure

I believe I will try and hide my shame behind a Coelophysis entirely rendered in Illustrator...

Well, the missus has her father staying with us right now and when I brought home some of my prints to show him he was taken by the bare tree visible in the Print Lab Ego Boost point.

He offered to buy it; I had no idea how to price it so I let him and the missus work it out. I was told that I had to sign it so I did.

I have some of the ugliest handwriting in the world. People have told me that once you become accustomed to it, it's quite legible. But it is ugly, ugly, ugly. And when I signed the print I used an India ink brush and it was big and I made a spelling error in the man's name, for chrissakes.

So I'm going to print him another copy and sign it again. After I practice. I mean, that's fucking ridiculous, practicing a signature. But I need to. I really do.

I don't want to be the only person in the history of art who can reduce the value of his work by signing it.

Oaf Fiction Now Available.

Here's the front cover to the current issue of Swill...

Right now I have two short stories up on the net. One is a straightforward piece of reminiscence called Montana Seafood. You can find it at...

http://www.mondaynightlit.com/read-craven3.html

The other is the closest thing to straight-up old-school science fiction that I've done. It's partially a tribute to the tradition of bar stories -- specifically, Lord Dunsany's Jorkens stories, the Gavagan's Bar series by L. Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt, and Tales of the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke.

It's also a salute to my favorite SF microscopic worlds, ranging from Fitz-James O'Brian's The Diamond Lens to Theodore Sturgeon's Microcosmic God to George R.R. Martin's Sandkings.

Go to It's The Little Things by Sean Craven at

http://www.swillmagazine.com/

I've got to admit I'd like to give both of these another run through the mill. As the Ramones would say, why is it always this way?

Filter Follies 1

This version's called Bullethole...

You know what's fun? Get yourself an original image -- in this case a scanned inkblot -- and just play with filters, layers, and modes until you come up with an interesting image. Do a save as, then do it again. Repeat until your eyes bleed -- I did ten or so of these one afternoon and I've been using them as elements in other pieces ever since.

Maybe I should get a fresh batch going -- it would give me an excuse to score filters...

And this is a Map Of The World.

The Damned Novel, part Three.

Here's one of the original images that I composited for the scratch draft cover. I'll probably recreate the whole thing in color for the next reader's draft.

Things were getting more and more awkward, more and more cumbersome. What the hell was going on? Characters from myth began showing up and just standing around, blocking the flow.

And whenever I tried outlining it just kept me from being productive. It didn't work. Nothing added up properly -- lots of individual scenes worked and they didn't go anywhere.

So I decided to take a break from writing and printed up what I'd done and passed it out to the writer's group and some pals of mine.

But the manuscript was too cumbersome. I split it in half, had the halves bound separately at the copy shop.

And while neither was an entirely complete story, the two halves each had their own distinct narrative line with a solid start and end. The second volume was weak in the middle but the first actually read like a novel.

I was writing a trilogy. God help me, a fantasy trilogy. Tolkien casts a long shadow.

To Be Continued...

Print Lab Ego Boost

I did this in order to get away from some New-Age types at a picnic. Good people but hard on my nerves. My social skills have improved since then...

So yesterday I had my second round in the print lab at school. This was the first print I did; I was wondering how the moire pattern I saw on the screen was going to look in print. Not bad at all as it turns out.

Anyway, the guy who was running the lab is a mythological figure at school -- when people refer to him he's an Artist -- with a capital A.

Anyway, he was talking to a photographer about the way that photography and the fine arts and digital illustration were all coming together and I was listening, agog. He really had some good things to say -- knows what he's talking about.

And then he glances over at the print of this and says, "So I see you're a photographer too."

"Dude," I said. "It's a pencil drawing."

I really enjoyed the following moment of silence.