Further Photography Experiments

Hmmm. Now that I'm looking at the two in conjunction, I'm thinking that I prefer the palette in the untouched version on top; in addition, all of the sky's subtlety has been eradicated.

Still, the second version does have an old National Geographic quality that I like...

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.

Hey! Hey! I Forgot To Tell You & An Inadvertant Tutorial

So I needed a paleo-image to put at the top of the post. Rather than give you a crude sketch, I decided to sort throught the dustbin of history. I found a full-color piece -- and found myself compelled to throw a few changes on it. Here was the start of the work, a pencil drawing of what I believe is now known as Gorgosaurus libratus.

Hey, everybody! I forgot to tell you -- the new Art Evolved gallery is up! Go and look at Pterosaurs! There are some swell ones in there -- and you might want to check back on it in a few days. There's still work being posted.

And ol' Glendon Mellow's piece needs to be seen at a larger size. Click here to see it in it's full majesty. The subject matter and handling make me think of Allen St. John's work for Edgar Rice Burrough's fiction. I'll bet it's something to see live.

I had some reference photos I'd taken at the Miocene forest at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens and figured hey, it was close enough for government work. I colored it using hues selected from the photo using the Eyedropper tool. But I've always been a little unsatisfied with it. I wanted it to look like a snapshot of a Gorgosaurus and it looked like what it was -- a colored pencil drawing on top of a photo. And the overall color of it seemed drab and faded.

When I saw it again, it struck me that I could do something about that. I've got ten more years of Photoshop under my belt. Even if I didn't have the file with the layers on it, there were some global adjustments I could do that would make a difference.

The first thing I did was to beef up the color. I could have done that with an adjustment layer -- Hue & Saturation, Lightness & Contrast, Curves, or Levels could have worked alone or in conjuction with one another.

I had a better idea -- first, I went to Image Mode under the Image menu and changed it to LAB color. Then I added a Curves adjustment layer. When you use curves, you can apply them to the different channels of an image -- in RGB, there's an overall channel for the whole image, then seperate channels for red, green, and blue. In CMYK, there's the same thing going on, only the channels are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

LAB color is different. When you use curves in LAB, you have one channel for lightness, and the other two channels control relationships between different colors. Using a cute trick I'd show you if I knew how to make and work with screen captures (which I really need to learn, pronto), I used the curves adjustment layer to punch up the color to get the above result. And by helping the color, I helped the contrast.

Then I added a Brighness & Contrast adjustment layer, using it to increase contrast even more and to darken the overall image slightly.

Next came a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer. I left the hue alone but slightly decreased the saturation.

Finally, I converted the image itself to a Smart Object and added an Unsharp Mask filter. While I'd have been able to do a much better job if I'd been messing with the full file, now the image looks a lot more unified to me, as thought the Gorgosaur is in the same space as the forest. And it took less than ten minutes! Still one problem, though. The teeth look like shit.

So I added a layer, sampled the yellow of the teeth and generated a color a little cooler and darker than that, set the new layer to Multiply mode, and airbrushed some shadows over the teeth. Since I was using Multiply, that brought out the pencil marks underlying the color. That took me half an hour; I couldn't help myself. The compulsive oaf even went and used some Rubber Stamp tool on a few stray pixels you'll never see. But I think the end result is a great improvement.

Heh-heh-heh. I just glanced at the comparison between this image and the one below and was reminded of my greatest strength and weakness as an artist -- I never do nothing the same way twice.

I'll always remember the time I mentioned to the Monday writing group that my next submission was going to be completely different than anything they'd seen from me before -- and the room erupted in laughter.

When they were able to talk again, they explained to me that everything I did was completely different than anthing they'd seen from me before.

Makes it hard to build a brand.

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.

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.

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.

Moonwatch 3

Those eyes just aren't working. I was going to try to duplicate the layer with the creature and hollow out its eye sockets -- and I think I'll just stop there. Photoshop is gross, man.

Well, I'm closing in on it. All I need to do is to get the eyes right and then experiment with tweaking the overall color in a LAB file and I'll call it done.

I took a couple of hours off this afternoon at the behest of the missus. We went to see Star Trek. I thought it was a decent crappy movie, more Star Wars than Star Trek; the the missus and a pal of ours were a lot more enthusiastic. But then they're Star Trek fans. I'll admit my blood ran cold when the Live Long and Prosper sign got flashed and I glanced over and saw them both making the sign at the screen, but then I'm conflicted about my own geekitude.

Moonwatch 2

I am burnt -- been doing this since around six or so this morning. I think I'm gonna call it a day...

The look of this piece is taking me by surprise -- it's both kinda photographic and kinda Max-Ernsty. Getting the colors right is going to be a fun chore -- and as always the piece isn't really going to come to life before I go in and beef up the shadows and highlights by hand.

I'm also going to try some experiments with masked adjustment layers to add depth to the mountains. We'll see how that works...

Inkblot Panorama 5, Plus Some Writing Thoughts

Selections made and a bit of initial color.

Well, last night's writer's group meeting was really good for me. The solutions to two big problems have possibly come to light.

The first had to do with my story God's Tourists. It's already been published in the small press magazine Monday Night but I've been reworking it for reasons explained here. The story is more or less about my relationship with my grandma Jean Bishop. I used a bunch of aliens to help turns my memories into a story -- briefly, they're a bunch of New Age types who wind up making knockoff versions of my Christian Scientist grandma for sale. The end scene is the strongest emotional moment in the story but it has none of the SF components that drive the narrative.

Rob suggested that I might have the statements made by my grandma in the last scene made by one of the knockoff versions of her instead and the idea clicked. I'm going to have to give up some of my favorite moments in the story to make it work -- stuff Allison told me to keep -- but it's the old story. We call it killing your darlings...

Speaking of Allison, reading her work has really lit a fire under my ass. I mentioned in a previous post that I was disappointed by my novel.

It's lacking the guts I intended it to have. The most common and most frustrating criticism I've received about the novel has been that the protagonist's motivation/problems have been unclear.

"Why is he so down on himself?" "Why doesn't he just get laid?" "Why does he do that for those people -- it's not like they did anything for him."

Well, as I've mentioned before the protagonist is a stand-in for me in my twenties. When I was really, really nuts. I tried to address this in the novel by showing my thoughts and emotional stated honestly. It hasn't worked out.

But Allison's work has finally made me realize that the problem is that I need to just lay some of this right out. Her stuff has the kind of emotional intensity that I've been aiming for and missing. And she does it by just saying exactly what she means to say. By unapologetically airing what some might see as dirty laundry.

I've realized that for all my attempts to be honest I've been holding back. I need to spill my guts here if I'm going to write the book I intend to write. It's not going to take all that much in the way of actual words -- it'll probably come out to five or ten pages of manuscript -- but it will make that crucial difference, I hope.

I can't get away with just saying things like, "There were already too many people for me to handle so when the doorbell rang again I went to my room. I was mulling over the fact that no one cared enough to check on poor me when there was a knock on the door."

Plain and simple, that fails to give the emotional impact of deep-rooted social anxiety, the whole tangled knot of misery that lies behind that kind of alienation. It's weak sauce. I need to bring the real thing.

I hope I can pull it off.

Inkblot Panorama 3

Here's a better view of the faces. Of course, this isn't really going to come together until I lay down the color.

So I wound up doing the selections by using an eraser set to airbrush and going around each piece, once against a black background layer, once against a white -- each revealed scraps that didn't show against the other. Since this image was, as I said, 20" x 48" it was quite the little time-consuming process.

Which brings me to the next chore -- going over the whole thing using the rubber stamp tool to eliminate black spots and rings that make it obvious that this was based in inkblots. I debated this -- in the first piece in this series I left them in (there were some other artifacts generated by the process of making inkblots that couldn't be eliminated as well), but in this case I think they'd look too ugly to justify. Oh, well -- labor is part of the process.

The Demon DJ; or Learning To Live With Dysphoric Melodic Mnemonic Syndrome

After further experimentation with layers and modes I was able to get this. Next up is finding a way of taming the darkest areas in the image -- I need to lighten them up enough to show some color.

So I've been sleeping well lately, usually between seven and eight hours a night. This is very unusual for me, especially this time of year. Actually, this time of year I'm usually drowning in the slough of despond and right now I'm feeling pretty good. It's always encouraging to find out that my depression can be lifted by good experiences. It's a drag being unable to perceive pleasure.

One of the things that's been helping the insomnia has been my newly-acquired habit of listening to music right before I go to sleep. To be specific, it's the Paillard Chamber Orchestra's performance of the Pachelbel Canon.

There are those who sneer at the Pachelbel Canon. "Brunch music," they call it. Simple, repetitive, boring... Fair enough. But that's why it's helping me. See, I have what I call a Demon DJ in my head. I always hear music. Always. Been this way since high school -- I learned I could play and record music mentally and since I couldn't afford a Walkman I used this ability quite deliberately to keep myself pumped and motivated when I was working. (Janitor and child care assistant.)

Then I found I couldn't turn it off. A major contribution to my insomnia it the way the Demon DJ is prone to interrupting my slumber with songs like, oh, Ace of Spades by Motorhead or Kerosene by Big Black, or Cop Killer by Body Count. Even worse are the poppy catchy songs, bands like They Might Be Giants or the stuff on the Nuggets collections or Oingo Boingo.

I've actually found myself deliberately avoiding some of my favorite music in the last few years for this reason. It's a drag. And it's difficult to change the tune that the Demon DJ is playing.

Here's something really weird. I sleep on my side. So the nostril on the down side tends to shut while the one on the up side tends to open.

Now I'm going to lay some muddled pseudo-science on you. I'm not sure how absolutely accurate the following information is -- it's cobbled together from a mixture of half-forgotten things that I've read and my personal experiences. If anyone has any criticisms of this I'd be happy to hear them.

As I understand it, at different times of the day the halves of your brain are active to different degrees -- and part of this has to do with which nostril is open. See, usually only one of your nostrils is clear at a time, and it's the one that's opposite the side of your brain that's currently dominant.

I think that there is a feedback mechanism there -- that the nostril doesn't simply open in response to the activity of the brain but that by controlling which nostril is the open one you can affect brain function. This would account for the effectiveness of the meditative techniques associated with breathing, things like pranayama.

I've found that it's easier for me to change the Demon DJ is playing when I roll from my right side to my left.

But it's a lot easier to just listen to pieces of music that soothe and calm me. See, from my perspective music is a tool that can be used to provoke endogenous altered states. By which I mean that you can use it to force your brain to make drugs for you. Punk and metal are crank and chamber music is Qualudes.

Other sonic narcotics include Air on a G-String, Sheep May Safely Graze, and others by Bach, Let's Go Away for a While by the Beach Boys off the Pet Sounds album, the last track on Oxygene by Jean Micheal Jarre, Thursday Afternoon, Discrete Music, and The Shutov Assembly by Brian Eno, etc, etc.

But the combination of structural simplicity and repetition inherent in the composition of the Pachelbell Canon combined with the intricacy of execution on the part of the Paillard Chamber Orchestra makes this specific track the best tranquilizer I've found thus far.

You may be thinking that the term Demon DJ is a little harsh for a cognitive quirk like this one. Let me enlighten you. See, the Demon DJ doesn't just play music. Sometimes he comes up with new music -- and there are a few compositions I've put together based on these hallucinations. (Hallucination is inspiration.)

But these things you kids call mash-ups? My brain was doing that a long time before samplers hit the consumer market. If I focus I can change the instrumentation in the music -- swap piano for guitar, for instance, or change the lyrics of a song. Thing is, is that sometimes the Demon DJ will perform these kinds of manipulations all on his own.

The worst was one time when the Missus had a fondness for a Steve Winwood album -- I think it was Arc of a Diver -- and it had a Jesus-is-swell song on it.

That song stuck in my head for weeks, when suddenly the DJ realized that it had the same scansion and so on as Highway to Hell by AC/DC. So now I was hearing Highway to Hell as sung by Steve Winwood with inspirational backing.

And after weeks of this, the Demon DJ added the finishing touch. Steve Winwood was no longer singing lead. You know who took over?

Bob Dylan.

And this went on for months. I call this function/symptom/rogue sub-personality the Demon DJ because he/it is quite capable of making my head a private hell...

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.

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.

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.

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."