PC Chicken for Breast Cancer Stakes

I suppose you're wondering what this is all about. Well, it's a fundraiser for breast cancer. Here's the scoop, and you won't get a lot of this without the background story.

I should not have spent the morning doing this. Rob will kill me for not working on Swill, and I will kill me for not working on the novel or my grammar homework. But if I didn't get this out of my head, I was going to keep waking myself up with the giggles from thinking about it.

See, this is going out onto a child-friendly site. So the question is -- how many of these can Peter post before he loses his nerve in the face of their basic horribleness?

So what I'm doing here is playing PC chicken for breast cancer stakes. My mother actually would be proud of me; I got it from her.

This was fun and easy and I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't do more along these lines...

And just for the record. My mom didn't just have a deeply sick sense of humor; she died of cancer. So did my grandfather. And so on and so forth. I've got a big fat lump in my neck that's probably a cyst.

Cancer is everywhere, all the time, for everybody. Honestly, if I have to explain to you why unavoidable tragedy is hilarious, you really should steer clear of my stuff.

RAHR!!

Apatosaurus Louisae 10

There we go. Now the background has a little something going on, and it sets the figure off properly. That's it. This time I'm really done.

I swear.

Apatosaurus louisae 9

Okay, I lied. I needed to fiddle with it some more -- the background was simultaneously oversaturated and boring. It failed to support the figure. But now I'm done. Really. I swear.

Now I'll go take a shower, and wait to play bass.

Apatosaurus louisae 8

Now that's more like it! I'm calling her done. Now I won't have to suffer paleo-guilt the way I did when I blew my Anomalocaris!

And I've got to say. How on earth do people who work in traditional media cope with the issues involving these kinds of fine-tuning? It would drive me mad.

Now I need to work on the Pretensionist manifesto. You heard me; I've finally decided to start my own fucking movement.

Apatosaurus louisae 7

I finally got a few minutes (well, a couple of hours) to finish this off. I did a modified photographic background; it sucked, so I stuck with the simple gradient.

It's entirely possible that I'll wind up feeling unsatisfied with this, but for now? It'll do.

Newsflash -- I'm not satisfied with the color. It looks washed-out to me. I'll spend some time on adjustments soon. Maybe.

Apatosaurus louisae 6

The initial stages of color...

Finally!

Apatosaurus loiusae 5

Here's the digitally inked version. Now for some color.

Apatasourus louisae 3

Tomorrow I'll 'ink' this in Illustrator, then take it over to Photoshop for coloring. It came out better than I expected; the color's gonna help a lot.

That's it for today; now I'm off to go up to Telegraph and hang with my buddy Aubrey for a while.

Apatosaurus louisae 2

Next up: the finished pencil drawing.

Setting up this stereo was a good idea; Zappa, Louis Jordan, Brian Eno, Roger Miller, and Jimmy Cliff have helped keep me on track.

But.

The CD player is definitely screwed up. But I think there's another unit in the shed I could use instead. I'll check it out tomorrow.

Wish I knew where my tapes were. Remember tapes?

Apatosaurus louisae 1

Time to liveblog another piece of art. Stay tuned for periodic updates over the afternoon. Of course I haven't put the drool in yet. You think I'm kidding? There will be drool.

So I got a late start today. It's a Sunday, and I played music until late last night. I also spent some time this morning setting up my (seemingly defective) yard sale stereo. The CD player makes these little hiccupy pauses from time to time; maybe if I level it things will improve.

But I knew I had to at least get started on this. I may or may not finish it today; I've got to call it quits by four-thirty. But I've at least got a start.

So I figured I'd do something nice and simple to compensate for my atrophied draftsmanship. Here's the head of an Apatosaurus louisae, drawn from a photograph of CM 11162 that I found in Glut's Dinosaurs: The Encyclopedia. I know we don't get to call it Brontosaurus anymore, but this is still my first sauropod.

Now to firm up the details.

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.

In Which The Cold Nose Of Mystery Is Thrust Against My Flank

It was really hard to get this image to read clearly -- after I scanned the chicken skin it took me hours in Photoshop to clean things up. But I am saving the skin texture to use in some of my work...

So the missus has this dog, Amanda. She's an Australian Shepherd and a getaway dog -- she knows there's a wide world out there filled with garbage and cat food and other tasty treats. (Like this, for example -- it's a story, not an image, I promise. My mystery-writing buddy said a) it is actually a pretty good mystery story and b) it made him gag.)

We've been having trouble with the gate lately and yesterday the missus used her feminine wiles to get the next-door neighbor to help her fix the latch. (Why not me? Because the missus still hasn't made the connection between my years of experience as a janitorial and maintenance man and my ability to handle small household repairs. For reasons involving our delicate balance of power I am reluctant to enlighten her.)

Anyway. During the repair there was a moment of inattention and Amanda cut loose and headed out in search of something repulsive to eat. When I noticed I went out and looked for about twenty minutes before giving up.

And of course half an hour after that she was cavorting on the front porch. Watching her cavort is like watching me dance. It just ain't right -- it's like the passage of an evil star through the heavens. A bad omen.

Which is exactly what it was. Amanda wound up puking all over the kitchen floor, and once again it was hard to figure out what it was she'd been eating. Some kind of raw meat but I couldn't quite figure out what it was. My best bet is stewing hen.

If you touch the skin of a supermarket chicken it's soft and gelatinous. But if you get a cock or a stewing hen that's been out in the world running around and grubbing for bugs everything about the animal is different than you get from a store-bought chicken. The bones are harder, the meat more flavorful. And the skin has a texture that's tough and rubbery.

I found a patch of skin with that texture in the puke and while I was picking it up with a paper towel it sort of flopped over and there were some markings on it. I think they must have been a tattoo. So on a whim I took it up to the studio and scanned it in to see if I could pull out a readable image. As soon as the scan was done the skin went into the compost -- let's just say you don't want me to describe the way it smelled.

What I got was the picture at the top of the post. That and a dose of the weebs and the sound of ol' Bob Dylan's voice running through the back of my head --

Something's happening and you don't know what it is,
do you, Mr. Jones?

Another Tiny Step: A Business Card

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

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

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

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

Right.

Blogcessive Compulsive: Two Thousand Hits!

Edmontosaurus annectens. This is both one of my first computer illustrations and one of my first dinosaur illustrations, done some time in the early nineties. It was a scanned pen-and-ink drawing rendered in an early version of Painter.

This one was a pencil drawing modified with both Painter and Photoshop. The background is an ink blot with a gradient replacing the grayscale. It was done right after I finished my vocational rehab, in the late nineties, 1998 or so. Hey, was that time? Whatever it was, it just flew by.

Some time after I finished this I saw Gregory Paul's skeletal diagram for the same animal I realized my version was drastically distorted. I went back and looked at the photograph I had worked from and found that it had been taken at a slight angle which really messed up the proportions.

No, wait a minute. This isn't an Edmontosaurus. This is a Lurdusaurus. Yeah, that's it. I did it this way on purpose. It's a Lurdusaurus. (Hey, anyone ever seen a skeletal diagram for Lurdusaurus? So how do you know I'm lying?)

Well, I had a swell day today. I went out for a hike with my dad and while we had to cut it short -- poor bastard was recovering from a bug and wound up getting tuckered but pronto -- we saw a pair of golden eagles and a bobcat. One of the best wild cat sightings I've had so far. (Speaking of cats, my music buddy Paul claims that he'll be able to get me some face time with a liger. Further details as they come.) I missed out on signing up for my statistics class so I'm taking digital photography next semester -- with any luck this means I'll be able to post photos from our hikes within the next couple of months. And then we had Chinese food for lunch instead of our usual burgers. The old man had beef stew over noodles and I had lamb and eggplant and we split a green onion cake. Ma Joong and Chiao Tai (see Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee novels -- guess I'll have to report on them at some point) used to have those for breakfast all the time. Mmmmmm. Greasy, gooey, crisp, and savory with scallions. The Chinese grilled cheese sandwich. My lamb and eggplant was in a sweet and sour garlic sauce that was muy tastey and the Da gave me all the chunks and sheets of gristle that enriched the broth of his stew. "I don't know where you came from," he said as he forked over the goods, "but here you are."

What can I say? Connective tissue rocks.

And then I come home and look at the old website. And, of course, I check out the numbers.

Man. Two thousand hits. Dag. How the hell did that happen? (Let's be serious. For weeks now I've been waiting for the hits to mount and I knew it was gonna happen... well, a few days from now. I sure wasn't expecting it today.) I guess all that internet networking stuff really works.

Well, just for the hell of it I'm gonna take a little ego trip. This site is intended to be a tool to help me become a working writer and artist -- I mean, I'm working like a son of a bitch but I want to get paid. So I guess I mean a professional writer and artist.

So what kind of progress has occured since I started the blog?

I've made two professional fiction sales and I'll be appearing in a book alongside one of my current favorite writers.

I've placed a print in a fancy rich-person gallery show.

And that print is just part of a completed series. I've got the art printed and ready to roll for a whole solo show.

I've had a short story used as the subject of a report at the Columbia School of Writing.

I've had another of my favorite writers praise my art and design for Swill magazine, which has also been studied at the University of Columbia.

And he recommended it to the editor of one of the big Year's Best anthologies -- which means she's gonna be seeing some of my fiction at least once a year for a while.

This year I had fiction in two magazines and art in two magazines. Next year it looks like I'll have fiction in at least three, maybe four magazines, a story published in a book, and art in two magazines.

I've had editors asking me for fiction, rather than me asking editors for rejection slips.

I've finished a functional draft of the first volume of the novel. (And I've heard back from my first reader outside the writer's group and the word is that it needs to be tighter at the start and the end but otherwise it's a solid read.) I'm so ready to start rolling on the rest of it.

And then there are the tiny stories I've placed at Thaumatrope.

Not bad, oafboy. Not bad at all. Yeah, I'm feeling proud of myself. Right now I am not the guy who sucks. It feels pretty good.

And I've got to say that I'm really appreciating the long-distance oddly attenuated quasi-friendships I've developed over the intertubes. I wish all of you...

(Glendon Mellow, Traumador, Brian Switek, lunchboxxx, the guy [I assume] who hates theropods, the Brainiacs, especially Rory Harper and Morgan J. Locke, Zachary Miller, Rob [who isn't really an internet pal since I met him in real life and from time to time he shows up in my living room to be sniffed by the doggerals] and all kinds of folks who I'd remember if I wasn't drinking right now -- and a special salute to Megan. If you don't like the fact that I'm writing, blame Megan. She encouraged me with both words and $$$... never feed a stray cat. Unless you want them to take up residence in the neighborhood. And I know that tomorrow I'll look at this list and realize that the one dearest to my heart does not appear on it. Unless you count the missus -- I'm gonna post about her in the near future. Look, you've gotten some idea as to how weird and defective I am. She's the one who took me in, glob bless her.) 

...lived around here so we could get to know each other well enough to get on each other's nerves, or at least have a beverage or two and a few laughs. If you want the laughs, I'll take the beverage and you can laugh at me.

Next time around I promise you a more interesting post. I think it's time to get back to working on my Anomalocaris piece... which is going to be a lot more work that I thought -- but the results should be interesting.

From The Valley Of Lost Projects: The Ghosts Of T-Shirts Past

An earlier version of this had the burst in the background positioned so that it looked as if the Protoceratops was farting.

Dizzy Toilet Devil Logo Black and Glow. On the back – “We Had To/Destroy The Song/In Order To/Save It.” Spattery – do by hand with brush, import, turn to Illustrator file. In corona around toilet devil – “oddcore, power folk, lunchabilly, rhythm & booze, drunk rock, children’s music for underdone adults.” Underneath, Dizzy Toilet Devils.

Well, it's true!

These designs were done for a friend of a friend who worked at a T-shirt company up in Canada. I was told that they'd been accepted and there was money on the way and then my pal climbed on board the crazy wagon and vanished from my life. I still wonder if any of these were actually used.

And here are a few more thoughts from the files...

The eye-in-hand motif, green shirt and iris, brick-red hand, blue eye outline and shadow.

Swill. Black shirt, bright red lettering, glow in the dark outline.

SAFETY LEADS THE WAY – chipper Helvetica on the left hand of the chest against white, maybe a ringer T – with a gory spatter of blood. Dried or fresh? Dried. Make it look like a stain. Figure out the perfect corporate douche design, the shirt you get as a prize at work.

(I actually had this one once -- got it as a prize for making a safety poster. I took it home, tore the sleeves off and spattered it with blood-colored acrylics left over from the poster and then wore it proudly for years. I remember once a pal took me to play pool after work at an old-guy bar and it took me a while to realize that I might be getting the odd looks because I was wearing that shirt, a lab coat, and a pair of pants with a skull motif. That's the kind of style you can only get accidentally...)

IF IT SWARMS – EXTERMINATE, the two words to be separated by a square graphic of a crowd scene, preferably a Republican national convention. Glow in the dark on black.

EAT MEAT – MURDER’S NEAT! The two words to be separated by a picture of a man holding a pistol to a cow’s head as the cow weeps and says, “Please, oh God, you could just walk away and it would be like nothing ever happened.”

Hey, I'd wear 'em.

And a special tip o' the oaf to Traumador, who gave me the idea when he expressed interest in a shirt based on my previous post. Maybe someday, little guy. Maybe someday.

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...

A Brief Plaintive Bleat

A somewhat more casual approach to paleoart...

Well, the struggle goes on. I'd just as soon go into full-blown collapse mode but I'm staring down the barrel of the end of the semester and I need to get something done for both classes. Here's what I'm doing for Digital Drawing.

The goal is to use this as a basis for a print visually modeled on Japanese brocade prints -- all the ink rendering will be replaced by flat shapes and depth will be indicated by using color and blur.

The Anomalocaris is still in the works but it's pretty clear that I'll need to spend some time staring at fossil photographs and making sketches and as I said, I'm looking at deadlines.

Now I have to go take care of some Swill business.

Damnit.

Blogcessive Compulsive: The Thousandth Hit

Well, this is interesting. I'm writing this on my portable workstation (Don't know if I've mentioned this but I can't spend a lot of time standing up or sitting down so I've had to put together workstations that let me lay down. Right now I'm in bed with the little dog peacefully napping at my feet.) and I'm on Safari on this machine rather than Firefox and everything is different -- including the images, which in this mode are just big-ass chunks of HTML.

Anyway, let the pigeons fly! Let the bells ring out! Today Renaissance Oaf tops a thousand hits. Thank you, Brian Switek, Glendon Mellow (whose attitude in the face of controversy makes his last name descriptive), Zach Miller, and the mysterious figure behind Why I Hate Theropods. Didn't know anything about that last individual until I looked at my statistics and found that he/she/or whatever is polite (I'm guessing it's a guy because there is a girlfriend mentioned on the site but I come from the SF Bay Area and have found that presumption in these matters is extremely unwise) had posted a link to my site that a lot of people clicked on. I also have received a lot of hits from the post I made on the Jurassic Fight Club page on History Channel's site -- and I regret that so few of them read the post where I apologize for the flippant attitude with which I began my critique.

Reviewing Jurassic Fight Club got me a whole lot of attention, more than anything else I've done. It was Brian Switek's idea... I have mixed feelings about that. I adore attention, of course, but this blog is about my writing and art and my attempts to find a way of making a living from them. On the other hand, getting attention furthers that goal. Part of me thinks that I should cold-bloodedly get into the review/criticism thing but part of me is repulsed by calculated attempts to garner more hits. Why, my site should grow and flourish purely on the basis of my artistic ability!

Right.

So when I went into my hit counter and wandered among the statistics I noticed something interesting.

Lemme tell you a little story to put things into perspective.

I once had a pal of mine at work refer to me as the salt of the Earth. I said, "That's not it. Everybody loves salt. I'm more like blue cheese." She cracked up and agreed with me.

Blue cheese is an acquired taste. And not everybody acquires it.

So most people hit on my site and back off instantly. But what's weird is the percentage of folks who stay here for a while. According to the counters, at last estimate more than fifteen percent of the folks who click on this site stay for more than an hour. The number of pages accessed has always exceeded the number of initial viewings -- when people actually do look at the site they tend to look around for a while.

Interesting.

And people are downloading my images! What the fuck? I shouldn't be surprised that some of my fully rendered dinosaur stuff gets some interest but most of the assignments from my Digital Drawing class have been downloaded.

It's homework, people!

And every time I post a comment on another site a few people follow it back here... and some of them wind up poring through the archives.

So. Should I do more reviews? Should I deliberately troll for hits? Maybe so.

And it's interesting that most of my internet interactions are focused on paleontology rather than fine arts or fiction. It's my own damned fault. But it's also nice to be getting a positive result from folks in the science world.

A couple of months, sixty-five posts, a whole lot of images...

I can hardly wait to see what it's like in a year or so.

Thanks for reading. I hope I can keep y'all entertained.

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...