The Stone 3

And there we go. This will do. I have to remember to be patient and put it through a few states before I call it quits, print different versions and compare, and so on. This is a printmaking process!

Although the visual qualities of this approach seem closer to painting in some ways. Starting off with a gray background really threw me at first -- it took me a while to realize that while in conventional drawing, I'd ground this kind of image with clearly defined areas of solid black, in this case it was the white highlights that nailed the image to the eye. Very, very different for me, and I've still got a lot to learn. But I think I managed to get a decent composition here.

The Stone 2

Writing today sucked, but the art compensated. Here's the basic image I started out with, compiled from three different photos. The goal is to create something simplified, more painterly, and more coherent in appearance. It needs to be reproducible through laser printing in black-and-white. So here we go...

And there it is -- the first Swillistration for issue six. I am not satisfied, but I am pleased, and I think the technique worth exploring. I start with a neutral gray background, and then render up and down in tone, developing the image simultaneously as highlights and shadows. Next art? A turtle. Plesiobaena antiqua, to be precise.

Progress!

Thank you, Warren!

So. Yesterday, after my bold talk I wasn't able to take the photos I needed to take to advance on the Swillistrations. I walked downtown, and ran into an old family friend. Honestly, aside from my dad? He's known me the longest. We were very close when I was a small child, and I still think of our times together with fondness.

Well, I mentioned an interest in photography, and he drove me to a camera store, where they stocked a remote for my camera at an affordable price. Doesn't that seem like fate? Like magic?

Of course, I got home and wasn't able to make the remote work. But in my attempts, I found out how to set the camera so the shutter clicks ten seconds after I press it. So I am now officially at work on the next series of prints, currently entitled Fifteen Views of the Downtown Area.

Plus, my CD player is here, and it took me less than ten minutes to get it unpacked, located, and functioning -- and in the process I solved a long-standing mystery. When playing music, we use a laptop running Reason for our drum tracks. We've found that different drum sounds need to have the jack positioned very specifically if they are going to come out of the speakers. And we have been bitching about this for literally years now.

Turns out we were running a stereo signal into a mono track on the mixing board. Haw! Haw! Haw!

(Insider humor is always the best.)

But today? I work on a print, and I've got tunes to play while I'm working. And I get to feel good about it.

This could be worse. This could be a lot worse.

Moonwatch 4

Getting the eyes right really helped. Before it seemed as if the creature was watching the viewer and is just seemed wrong. Now it's watching the moon and the helpless expression on its face works properly.

I also changed this from a RGB file to a LAB file, then used a Curves adjustment layer to mess with the color of the whole piece at the same time. In the initial version I worked hard to give a sense that the scene was being viewed in a particular light; the end result was a bit muddy. This made the colors brighter and helped define the shapes, which also increased the sense of depth. I need to spend more time messing with LAB and other modes...

I see a couple of cliff faces in this.

In a comment on the last Moonwatch post, Peter Bond asked how I created the images. Well, if I haven't gone into this before, here's the deal.

This print is part of a series called Rorschach Dreams. (Here's the first image in the series; here's the second.) Like the earlier Bonelands series, it's intended to provide me with images of creatures and landscapes for use in my novel-in-progress. But instead of starting with preconcieved images and then executing them by compositing photographs and scans of physical objects, which was my technique for the Bonelands, I'm using inkblots.

I start off by going through a stack of blots I've created over the years until I find an image that looks like some kind of concrete object to me. I first started using inkblots about twenty years ago when a design teacher suggested I do this as a source of visual inspiration. I used to trace blots in pen and ink or paint over them using whiteout and ink. Once I started in on Photoshop I realized that I could manipulate the blots seamlessly.

I kind of assume that if I ever have to take a real Rorschach test they'll lock my ass up but pronto. Maybe that should be my tattoo -- "Born To Scare Shrinks."

And in this image I saw a creature -- the eyes and mouth jumped out at me and then I saw the rest of its outline.

Then I scan the blots, cut out the images in Photoshop, and composite them in a seperate file. By using the blots I'm able to get all kinds of crazy detail that I'd never come up with on my own.


Once I've got a finished grayscale image, I color it by using a combination of Gradient Maps and overlays using a variety of blending modes. Gradient Maps take grayscale images and turn them into color images modeled after gradients -- white being one end of the gradient, black the other. The gradients I used here were pretty involved, using four or five different colors carefully modulated to produce the effects that I wanted. Finally, each element is treated using anywhere from one to five different adjustment layers to get the hues and tonalities just right.

As I mentioned above, in this particular image I finished off by converting it to a flattened image in LAB mode, a type of file used by photographers to achieve fine adjustments to the overall color relationships in an image. It's the first time I've used it on my own work; I suspect it's gonna be something I do a lot in the future.


Hmm. If this kind of thing is of interest to people maybe I should figure out how to do screen captures and so on so as to be able to do a real step-by-step tutorial.

The Gualala Show

Here's the piece as it appeared in the show. Ain't nothing like the real thing, though. You see this full size and it makes you want to sacrifice a goat to it. A thousand bucks and it's yours.

I know, I know. I've been ignoring the blog the last week or so. Sorry about that. I've been going through it a bit -- not the kind of mood where the missus cries and worries that I might be arrested, just the kind where I'm pissy and useless. It happens some times.

Part of that has been my nervousness and doubts about participating in this art show up at Gualala. It's my very first outing into one of these things and while I'm not sure where the Gualala Art Center fits into the academy's hierarchy it's definitely a couple of notches up from a pizza place or a realtor's office. What I'm saying is real artists, real art, real display space.

It had me nervous, especially given my stated opinions on the fine art world.

Also, I was part of the group responsible for the food and had no idea what was expected of me and what I could count on from other people. That had me nervous as well.

Then there's the old social anxiety. I'm trying to tackle this one and so was looking forward to using the event as a therapeutic tool as much as anything else -- but I was going to be dealing with a bunch of people I don't know.

And I was spending a ton of money in preparation for this and I really doubt that I'm going to sell my piece and even if I do I'll just be making a couple of hundred bucks and what the hell is going on, oh christ the earth is spiraling into the sun...

... and so on. It is my way.

And here I am standing next to it. It really happened! Really! The observant will notice that since the print is three by four feet and I'm around six-three, that means that my legs are two feet long. Which disturbs me on some level.

The good news was that my family rallied around me. My sister Charity, bless her heart, rented a wonderful, luxurious house for us up in Gualala. My dad Verle came along, and his wife Lisa (we're too close in age to make me feel comfortable calling her my step-mom, same as with me and the missus's daughters) and of course the young ladies Ava and Una.

I can't tell you how much this helped. Being around them socially puts me into a familiar and functional mindset and their pride and support really made me feel good.

So I contacted the other food people, made a shitload of sandwiches (artisanal ham, aged Gouda, and pickle with mustard, sopprasetta, hot coppa, and a nice nasty provolone with vinaigrette, fresh mozzarella with heirloom tomatoes and basil, dressed with a lot of sweet balsamic vinaigrette to make up for the weak out-of-season tomatoes), threw a fistful of Jack Vance novels (perfect for insomnia reading) into my knapsack, and kissed the missus goodbye for the weekend.

Since Lisa was taking the pictures we have no record of her, but here's the rest of my family. From left to right, Ava, Charity, Una, and Verle. You'll have to excuse the expression on my dad's face -- he was overcome by his love for the sea.

The preparations for the show went well -- the people getting the food ready to roll worked well and neatly together and the overall contributions were enough to provide an impressive spread.

By keeping busy I was able to keep my jitters under control. The beauty of the area helped a lot -- nothing like trees to calm me down. And that's how I handled the show. I'd go inside, cruise around, gulp some beer, talk to anyone who made eye contact, then after the conversation I'd go out and walk around, check in with the family, breathe deeply, and return to the fray.

That's how you do it when you're a grownup, right?

It was nice -- not my idea of a good time but not painful.

As for the show itself, it looked good. Really good. It struck me that arranging a collection of extremely diverse art like that is the same kind of exercise of taste as putting together a good mix tape, and in this case the results were very pleasing -- exhilarating jumps and bumps with no jarring transitions.

It's funny. I'm so used to thinking about this stuff from the creative perspective that it was kind of a numb shock to see people looking at it as, well. Art. It left me with a sense of vague dreamlike unreality.

There were all kinds of crazy visual details at the beach. I've got to take photography next semester -- and I think I might try and tease Lisa into taking her photography a bit more seriously. Honestly, throw a little Photoshop on this and you've got a great print right here.

That night we went back to the house. A little wine mixed nicely with my back pills and a hot tub to render me more physically comfortable than I'd been in some time.

And the company was great. Honestly, if you were to record three or four hours of my family hanging out you'd be able to put together a solid forty-two minute show for Comedy Central. They're smart, funny people with a combination of edge and heart that just makes me feel good. I'm so grateful to spend time with them.

Then two things happened the next day that gave me a bit of a slow-burn realization. We were checking out some nifty dinosaur sculptures at a nursery-cum-giftshop, and when I complimented them to the woman running the place I mentioned that I'd done some paleo art. She asked for websites, talked to me about her own background -- a nice little conversation that left me feeling as though I were on the inside.

And then after our delightful excursion to the beach (full of top-notch crabby kid drama; the ladies can sulk like nobody's business when they throw themselves into it, so the inevitable happy ending makes for a good story arc) we went to fetch the cooler I'd borrowed from Dad and Lisa from the art center. While we were there, I asked Lisa to take a picture of me next to the print for the blog.

And when I was looking at the picture on the camera's monitor it hit me. The thing that had been hanging over me the whole time, the reason I had put myself out with no real expectation of selling the work and no real profit even if it did sell.

There I was, in a real gallery, standing next to something I'd done myself. There was my work next to the work of my instructors and TAs and the ringer students, the real artists. And it belonged there. And I belonged there.

It was kind of like a graduation, a bar mitzvah, a wedding. Or like the first check I ever got for my writing. I was different.

I've been faking it out of a combination of intellectual knowledge and bravado. Now I feel like an artist. Doesn't matter if I ever achieve any success. I now know that my work is at that level. I have that. It can't be taken away from me.

It feels good.

A Brief Bout Of Sanity

What do you see in this inkblot? I see a river with a landscape reflected in it. Over the next few days I'll be using various Photoshop tricks to pull that image out and color it.

A Conversation:

The Oaf: Well, I was thinking about the plans I had for the semester when I realized that I was bug-fuck insane.

The Missus: ... uh ... YOU'RE ALWAYS BUG-FUCK INSANE!

The Oaf: Yeah, but figuring it out before I screw up my entire life is a brand-new phenomenon.

The Missus: Heh, heh, heh.

The Oaf: I realized that adding a major creative project to my schedule is just another self-sabotage technique.

The Missus: Well, when the creative impulse hits, you gotta run with it.

The Oaf: True enough.

So the CAPTCHA novel is going back into the compost pile to age and swap juices with the other ideas waiting their turn for execution. Yeah, I'm going nuts waiting to get back to work on The Ghost Rockers (I've found the agent I want to sent it to first so I'm shifting impatiently from one foot to the other -- it's like I've gotta pee.) but I need to channel that energy into my art projects. For the curious, I'll post the unedited totally raw first chapter in the comments.

We've almost got the stories together for the next issue of Swill. It's gonna be a good one -- our first professional writer, one of my two best pieces of fiction so far, some great noir and gritty lit -- and I need to get cracking on the illustrations.

Since the illustrations for the last two issues have been turned into prints, I'm flipping the process this time -- I'm executing them as prints first, then turning them into black-and-white illustrations. You keep hearing me say that good coloring works when you change it to black-and-white? Time to put my money where my mouth is.

And I need to get moving on my Anomalocaris, and then on to the next one in that series. And so on. And so forth.

I just need to keep myself on track. Focus, oafboy, focus.

How The Oaf Saved Giftmas

Meeaaarrry Giftmas!

Gather 'round, my children, as the oaf patronizes you from the third person. He is feeling mightily pleased with himself and is moved to share the reason as to why he is smugger than Halliburton on this moist midwinter morning.

Now may I suggest you read no further unless you can embrace the pure and true spirit of Giftmas. Any petty denominationalism may be parked just outside the door. It is the middle of the fucking winter and people need a little something to convince them that life is not a waste of time.

That would be a present.

A good present. There are presents where the best part of it is ripping off the wrapping or seeing someone's face when they open up the package. These presents suck.

A good present proves its worth over the course of years. It's something you use or run across periodically and it pleases both in itself and in the way it calls to mind a time, a place, and a person. A really good present is a physical expression of healthy love and an enhancement to life.

Well, the oaf ain't that cool. But this year he was able to let the healing rains of Giftmas fall on the parched plains of entrenched adulthood and the results will be visible for years to come.

See, what the oaf's family has done since the entre of the kids has been to get presents for the girls and then each adult would pick a secret Santa victim by drawing a slip of paper with their name from a hat. Trades and hustles were allowed; the oaf would typically insist on providing a present for his brother-in-law and then buy an art book he wanted but could not justify purchasing for himself.

This year the holiday was not planned; it occured, suddenly and shockingly. The oaf recalls a cracking noise like hot water poured into a cold glass accompanied by an odor of brimstone; he could be mistaken. But there was no time to organize Giftmas and alas!

Dismay and confusion, accompanied by a faint thin grayish feeling of impending decrepitude, a horrid sense of the essential disregard in which existence holds us, a taste in the mouth as subtle and pervasive as celery in a stew that spoke softly and insistently of the bleakness and thanklessness of life.

This was not helped when the oaf and an unnamed boon companion vanished for half an hour and returned visibly intoxicated with their volumes turned all the way up and the channel turned to weird.

There was an assembly of toys for the girls, suicide tools called Moon Shoes that required the use of many elastic bands. ("Those look like they were invented by a bone doctor," quoth the brother-in-law, and all nodded sagely as they hooked the elastic bands onto the hooks molded into the plastic tubes and the flat piece the child would have attached to their bodies with industrial-grade Velcro, tm.)

The sense of energy, of joy in one another's company that had been the hallmark of the morning had faded.

It was then that the oaf pulled out the fruits of his semester's labors. A portfolio, an art transportation tube spilled forth their contents onto the now pristine dining room table.

"Buffet rules," the oaf said. "Take all you want but frame all you take."

And then there commenced a period of basking in admiration, generous and open-hearted negotiations over particular prints, a brief kerfuffle over the participation of the children, signing was done, the phrase, "Of course you can have two; you can have as many as you really want," was repeated, and people felt as if they had gotten a fucking present. They glowed, they smiled, they were excited and involved and everyone was really, really into it.

And the oaf has every intention of feeling pleased with himself for quite some time.

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...

Roy Lichtenstein Vs. The Beyonder!

This image and character are copyright Marvel Comics and it serves them right. Art by Al Milgrom, Steve Leialoha, and Christie Scheele, words by Jim Shooter.

Like it or not, appropriation seems like the dominant modality in the arts these days. I kinda hate it. I'm fine with the idea of people using my material but if I'm gonna art, I wanna art my way.

That said, I'm in school. My last assignment for my printmaking class was to produce an image that critiques, whether positively or negatively, another artist. Look, if I really admire someone I'm not going to be able to do their thing. That's why I admire them, right?

So I was pissing and moaning to mi amigo Pablo last night and he said, "What about the guy who does that Micheal Jackson shit? Or that horrible dude who does comic book panels?"

I will admit I'd considered Jeff Koons. I've got an image in my mind of his Ciccolina portrait laid over a picture of his stainless steel bunny, their eyes superimposed.

But Lichtenstein. Fuck, I hate him. Well, hate isn't the right word. But it makes me angry to think that a no-talent jerkoff like that has such a prominent position in art history. It makes no fucking sense.

I'll acknowledge that it takes a good deal of technical skill to do what he did. But anyone who can do detail painting on custom vans has that much technical skill. Fuck a bunch of technical skill. The man's work is utterly dead and soulless. When I went online to research his shit, I went in with a negative opinion and I came out thinking that I had no idea of how bad he really was.

So when I went to look at the copy of Secret Wars II number three that I keep in the glove box of the car (that, along with a collection of twelve hundred anecdotes, keeps me from going nuts when waiting for the missus) I was amazed to find a panel that seemed to be making fun of my opinion of Mr. Lichtenstein. I had to run with it.

What's funny is that the production of this piece wound up being a real pain in the ass. A lot more work than you'd imagine. Just scan it in and add some colors and...

And try and make the blacks black and the whites white when you're scanning in a comic book that's more than twenty years old, with the old-school shitty printing they had back then. Take out all the benday dots and then build them all over again in Illustrator. It wasn't hard but it was sure as shit laborious.

My, my, my. Tomorrow I get back to the Tyrannosaur/Edmontosaur piece.

Damnit.

The Horror! The Horror!

Well, after spending the early morning with the missus I decided to turn my attentions to preparing for the next print day. First I made a folder for the files I was going to bring in, then I started to drag and drop. And I was only able to find a couple of the Bonelands pieces that hadn't been colored and printed. I went through all the files; I had only the three above prints unfinished.

So I went mad. I worked until they were all done. Not an impossible task given how far along they already were but still. And now I'm almost done. All I have to do is print the last batch of these and the show's ready. Then I print the big canvas piece and I'm set.

Mostly.

Anyway, I'm kind of amazed that this is happening within a few days of the novel's finish. I'm starting to feel as though I've got my shit together for the first time in my life.

Let's see if it goes anywhere...

More plot tomorrow.

Further Upward Steps

There comes a certain point in one's life when one begins to wonder if Lovecraft's fiction isn't really all about a fear of genitals. At this point one can flee the field or one can confront The Great Old Ones face-to-face, as it were.

In addition to Lovecraft this was influenced by Escher and the unspeakable six-ought Rapidograph point. The original was about twenty inches across as I recall.

Care for another cigar, Dr. Freud?

This is a Cthonian, out of Brian Lumley's Cement Surroundings and The Burrowers Beneath. Honestly, I should be ashamed of myself.

Well, there have been a couple of notable events in the last couple of days. I'm gonna be in my first gallery show! It's going to be at the Gualala Arts Center from March 14 to April 6. It's a group show of large prints coming out of Berkeley Community College. If you're a constant reader you may recognize the image they chose -- here it is. Gonna drop a fortune and print it up at three by four feet on canvas. It's interesting -- a lot of the participants in the show are instructors here at school.

Man, Gualala. They got rich folks there. I hear you can get superpowers if enough rich folks see your art. I'm trying to figure out how to make my work appealing to rich folks and I'm currently torn between pheromones from apes in oestrus and some of the musk from behind Alan Greenspan's ears. Decisions, decisions.

And I am now convinced that I'm gonna be in a book. Here's the home page. And here's the author page. Look at that! My name on the same page as Joe R. Lansdale's. Dang. And the title has been changed to Ligature Marks, which I think is a real improvement. Now I need to put a link to my blog from my original site.

This all seems so weird. After being a self-identified loser for my whole damned life all of a sudden things like this are happening. It makes me nervous -- but I think I can live with a little nervousness.

But Is It Art? Part Two: Ego, Identity, And The Big Question

Here's a thought for the future -- the next time I'm looking around for a project, why not do linoleum cuts, scan them in and enlarge them to show the paper texture and the way the ink goes down in high-contrast detail? Treat the image to bring out the physical qualities of linoleum cuts. Get into some good paper. And work small, blow up large to enhance the contrast. Possibly mount the linoleum cut in some relationship to the print -- perhaps on an expanded border.

(As an aside, I decided to see what happens with this approach so I'm scanning this in at high resolution to try experimenting. Right now the scanner's running and the motor grinds away and every so often I hear a series of taps. They are great -- the rhythm has a jazzy quality, a lot of weird syncopation but it all hits the rhythm. It sounds so organic -- there must be some component of randomness to whatever's making the noise. I should record it, put it on a loop.)

(This post was inspired by my initial on-line encounter with Glendon Mellow and by a conversation in my Digital Drawing class.)

Is it art? This is a question that gets asked a lot. I've asked it myself. It leads inevitably to the big question -- what is art? Here's my opinion.

Art is what you can get away with.

Or to put it another way, art is a word whose strictest definition is totally negotiable.

But if you want to know whether something is fine art or commercial art or illustration there is a clear definition -- and that is determined by the nature of your participation in the marketplace. If your art is a commodity used to enhance printed works you're an illustrator. If your art is used in advertising you're a commercial artist. If your work is displayed in galleries and museums and if your clientele consists of museums and private collectors you're a fine artist.

Like it or not artists seek validation and they have to eat.

Because of this art is almost always associated with the marketplace. Art that isn't -- truly private art created for its own sake -- is almost never technically proficient. This runs against the romantic image of the self-propelled artist whose inborn genius dominates his life.

Tough shit. If art never enters the marketplace then we, the audience, never see it. The idea of art for art's sake is true in that many of us are compelled to create and many choose not to market their work -- but there are very few Henry Dargers around whose creations enter the public mind through discovery following death.

If a living artist wants to make his work known -- especially if he wants to be able to devote himself to his work rather than give it the dregs of his time and energy -- he has to be willing to go to the market. And like it or not, all markets for art are two-cylinder engines, one cylinder being trends, the other novelty.

But the market shapes the artist. As I take my first steps toward being a working artist I'm already finding that out. My creative process is already being shaped to a degree by the needs of the marketplace.

One thing that I find fascinating about the relationship between fine arts (which are frequently not particularly fine -- the word's intent no longer suits its meaning) and commercial art is that the world of fine arts perceives itself to be degraded by proximity to commercial art while commercial art looks to fine art for inspiration. As a result the world of fine arts has to look for areas of novelty and outrage to try and keep ahead of their imitators in the commercial art world. Since commercial artists are frequently art students and fine artists are frequently teachers this little Red Queen's race gives any fine arts trend no more than a few years before its influence hits the commercial arts. Sometimes less.

Okay, I'm an outsider to the fine arts, someone who tries to understand the fine arts while being in many ways ignorant of and alienated from them. But to me this seems to be one of the two reasons why the fine arts keep running off the rails.

The other reason stems from a stance that is one of the root appeals of fine art -- the feeling that someone is in on something good that a lot of people don't know about and don't appreciate. I'm not going to denigrate the pleasure but it isn't healthy for the actual work.

(A related aside. There is also a close link between fine arts and the academic world. The academic world seems actively hostile to one who would be a practitioner of the arts. This is because in the classroom there is a strong bias for work that needs to be explained and against work that is self-contained and self-explanatory unless it can be placed in a cultural context -- which needs to be explained. There is also a strong desire to make the critic or observer of the arts a more important figure than the artist. As a result the aspects of art which call to the creator and demand devotion are frequently regarded as essentially meaningless if not actually degraded. These attitudes are to a lesser degree a component of the fine arts world as well.)

As an outsider I see many of the excesses of fine art to be examples of outrage tolerated by an establishment whose authority is partially based on a perceived ability to see significance where lesser minds are unimpressed. Let me give you two examples.

When I was going to school at Santa Rosa Community College there was a show of drawings at the campus gallery. It was gorgeous, with works ranging from exquisitely observed pen-and-ink works to a huge abstract in color. Figures, landscapes, shapes and patterns -- it really gave you a feeling for the sheer possibilities of working with marks on paper.

But one of my teachers was very, very much a maven of the fine arts. He took me to see two drawings. They were by the same artist and each consisted of a few scratchy, shaky lines drawn perpendicular to one another so as to form a very loose grid.

"Just look at the composition," he said. "These are the best works in the show. By far."

Now to my mind they failed the 'chimp could do it' test. I've got a decent eye for composition (admittedly, much of it came from this teacher) and I could not see anything attractive or interesting about these pieces at all. Period.

What if he was right? This really really bugged me -- if these actually were the best works in the show and they were totally lost on me what did that say about me as an artist? As a person? I asked Maurice Lapp, a really good painter and teacher who was a bit of a mentor to me in those days, what he thought.

"The man is an ass," Maury explained.

Still, there is that lingering doubt.

Years go by and I find myself reading a magazine on the arts. There was a fascinating article about a company whose business was restoring art. Not paintings, drawings, or conventional sculpture, though.

The Sweet & Low example I gave above was not a sarcastic mocking of fine art. It was one of the pieces this company had to reconstruct after someone gave the pile of Sweet & Low a good kick. (This I could understand.) Working from photos they were able to reconstruct the appearance of the pile -- but as I recall there was some doubt about the integrity of the reconstruction due to the inability to duplicate the hidden layers of the work.

Another example involved a sculpture from the Netherlands who took an eighty-pound wad of butter and jammed it in an upper corner of his studio. A Spanish collector visited him and saw the butter wad.

"I must have it," he said.

But when it was transported to his place in Spain guess what. The butter melted and he called in the art restorers. After much effort they found that due to the way cattle were fed in the Netherlands their butter melted at a higher temperature than that of Spanish cattle. In the end, the collector was forced to refrigerate the room with the reconstructed butter sculpture.

Maybe if I saw that butter sculpture I'd understand. I doubt that I would if I saw the Sweet & Low. Sometimes that there Emperor really is naked.

Trying to introduce myself to a world that sees significance in such things is terrifying. What could they possibly see in my work?

Won't know til I try.

One thing that's been really damaging a previously-invulnerable sense of disdain for the fine arts is the reaction in both myself and others to my prints. I went in assuming that when you printed something larger it was bigger and that was it.

It's not true. When you present something in the context of fine art it does change it -- and this is where I have to admit that fine art isn't just a marketplace. My prints have a power to them that my illustrations never had -- even when they are the same image. If they were displayed in a gallery setting that power would be further enhanced.

So I'm forced to consider the possibility that I know a lot less about this than I thought I did. That many artists whose work I've judged on the basis of reproductions may carry a weight I won't be able to recognize without seeing the actual pieces. Maybe Jackson Pollack paintings are stunning when seen live. Maybe Gauguin's colors just don't print well.

Look, I am a straight-up gutterboy. I am far more comfortable having a fight bounce off me in a ghetto liquor store than standing in front of a canvas in a gallery. But the human need to feel a sense of understanding has allowed me to be judgmental about things I really don't know about and I'm becoming very aware of this.

As a result I'm having to let go of a lot of firmly held judgments. This is one of the reasons I'm so intimidated by my Digital Drawing class. The teacher is strongly affiliated with the fine arts and right now my opinions on the subject are in flux...

All I can do is roll with it and try and grow a little.

If you look at the image above you'll notice smudges, stray lines, all kinds of minor but correctable flaws. I thought about fixing them in Photoshop but then it struck me that I hadn't fixed them in the original print. This isn't a rough print out of a run; this is the only print I did from this cut. I put the baren down, slowly peeled the thick soft fibrous paper free and turned it over and looked at it. I decided it was a complete failure and I put it away and never looked at it again.

The biggest obstacle I face as an artist is the difficulty I have in showing respect for myself or my work. Physically my pieces are creased, smudged, in some cases stepped on. This is part of a larger pattern. I try and work hard on my art and writing but I flat-out fail to do the kind of hardcore driven labor for myself that I have always given to employers and managers. Why should I have so much trouble thinking of myself as an artist when it's what I do?

Am I an artist? Is this art?

The only way I can answer this question is to take the work to the marketplace...

A Revelation In The Early Morning.

The digital drawing assignment mentioned below involved doing a set of color exercises. When I was done I liked most of them but three were just not strong enough for me to want to print them. Here they are. This one makes me think of either Shaggy from the Scooby Doo cartoons or artificial fruit flavoring.

So I was up in the middle of the night as usual and I was hit by an inspiration as I examined my most recent work for my digital drawing class. I liked it. I was thinking about printing it. I wanted to see these compositions at a large size -- and that's the benefit of Illustrator. I designed eight of these compositions on a letter-sized space and I can print them at any size I want.

But the idea of turning out a series of eight prints based on the work of a few days seemed a little odd to me. If I was going to try and market these as prints... Hmmm. My intuition told me that I just wasn't working hard enough to make these worthwhile art pieces.

The process of generating a print digitally, then printing it digitally seems too easy. What would make the print seem as though it were a real artifact, not something just rolling out of a machine as a standardized unit of production?

These, on the other hand, are unremittingly drab and were clearly done to get the monochrome composition out of the way fast. Next!

And then it dawned on me. Someone in class had printed onto mylar, then mounted the transparency on a piece of textured paper. I thought about Ruth Leaf's prints and how much attention she paid to the paper, to texture -- to the print not simply as image but also as object.

Perhaps this is one of the key differences between the artist and the illustrator. I am going to explore the idea that making the digital print is only one step in the production of an art piece. I want to find ways of using constructive techniques to create artworks using my images rather than simply printing them.

I'm going to start talking to the people in the print lab about printing on paper other than that provided in the lab. This will involve treating the paper with an emulsion that will accept the ink. For now I want to print on some nice Japanese print paper with plenty of foreign objects and irregularities, nose around and see what else is out there.

The assignment here was to depict an emotional state using color. Could anything be more obvious? More clumsy? More maudlin? The van-art gradients aren't helping.

But that's just the start of a possible avenue of exploration. I could decoupage my work onto plywood or chipboard. I could create multilayered shadow boxes. I want to learn about papermaking and bookbinding. I need to find out more, think more about what can be done, physically, with printed images.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

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...

Two More Views From The Bonelands

These were the two pieces I enlarged and colored this morning so as to have enough material to justify a trip to the print lab. This one is a bit of a challenge so far as balancing the richness of color needed with enough tonal variation to read properly. I had to print it twice -- it was too dark the first time.




For this one I used one of my favorite recent tricks -- use a banal but functional color combination, then use a hue and brightness adjustment level to manipulate the colors until they strike me.

Tomorrow? Cubes until you could plotz.

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.

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.

Pterygotus buffaloensis

This is Pterygotus buffaloensis. They found parts of one this year that suggest the specimen in question was about nine feet long. That's too damn big for an arthropod -- and that's just the biggest fossil they've found. God only knows what the real monsters were like. I regret the fact that long after I completed this I found a photograph of the fossilized claws of one specimen look much cooler than the ones I drew -- they were just coated with nice grabby spikes. And thanks to my crappy file management I don't have a version I can correct. Ah me and oh my.

Well, I had my first session in the print lab at school last Wednesday morning and this was the first large-scale print of my work. The print is twenty inches by a bit over twenty-one inches and I've got to say that seeing it was a real moment for me.

The image was rendered using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. After making the initial sketch I drew the shapes and laid down a basic field of color in Illustrator, then rendered them fully in Photoshop.

This is a bit of a dry run for one of the art shows that I'm developing -- or rather, now that I've gotten a tiny bit of information on art shows, two shows.

Both shows are going to be based on the idea of producing life-size images of extinct animals for display in a gallery environment. The first show will feature orthogonal images -- either side or back views -- of animals that are small enough to be shown in full on a print that I can fit into my storage drawer in the lab. The sizes of these prints will vary in order to accomodate the size of the animal in a pleasant composition. Right now I'm planning on doing the rendering entirely in Illustrator -- I want to own that program the way I own Photoshop.

The next show will feature parts of larger animals that I'll fit into a standard size, probably somewhere around two by three feet. Again, they'll be rendered at life size. We might see the feet of a big theropod or sauropod, the head of a hadrosaur, a section of a Dimetrodon's sail, etc, etc.

Of course this isn't the first thing I'm going to be working on so far as art shows go -- further information tomorrow.