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.

A Quick Progress Report

Just to start off, tomorrow night I'm going to the reception for the latest issue of the award-winning Milvia Street magazine. They used four or five pieces of mine, depending on whether they published one or both of the hyeanodon drawings. Here they are! I'm pretty sure they gave Bluehive a color page but we shall see.

This one actually turned out to be my first print sale. The missus's dad was staying with us and when he saw the large print of this he wanted to buy it. I'm letting her handle the financial side of things...

This is one of a series of drawings I did for my sister's aborted website. She wanted a retro look so I obliged.

So I decided that since the novel was going awry and it was getting harder and harder for me to do anything but visual art stuff it was high time for a little tough lovin'. The rule is now a thousand pages-I-mean-words a day. Every day. Creatively I'm a sprinter, not a marathon runner, so this kind of rule is hard for me to stick to.

But I've been doing okay so far. I topped 70,000 words this morning -- for you non-writers, that's a respectable length for a novel, one of those big fat bestselling rat-smashers runs about 100,000 words -- and I can see the end from here. I can imagine being done with this draft inside of a month. We'll see, but it's possible.

As for short fiction. My tough guy dinosaur story for David Byron isn't talking to me -- I should have finished the damned thing in one go. Note to self -- knock out the rough draft to a short story in one sitting if at all possible.

But the story I'd planned to give to Milvia Street was three times longer than they'd publish. So I sent it off to Rob and it's going to be in Swill. This suits me fine -- it's one of the best things I've written and I really, really like the idea that Ellen Datlow, editor of horror half of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror will get a chance to read it. It's called Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! and it wasn't until I'd finished the second or third draft that I realized it was a deal with the Devil story. Instead of the usual approach where the point is to come up with a twist on the fulfilled wish (there is one of those but it's not the center of the story) I show how the devil-character, the Tribulator, is destroyed by culture shock. It also features very, very jaundiced views of both of my romantic relationships -- something I didn't know I was doing while I was writing it.

Oh, it is a mean little unit.

Which means the creepy/funny SF bar story I'd written for Swill is now free. I'll do a rewrite this weekend and get it of to Mr. Byron to compensate for the loss of the story I'd promised him before.

So I need to come up with something for Milvia Street and something for Monday Night. One piece is going to be about my first three clear memories -- bedwetting, agnosticism, and a doberman attack. The other? I'm hunting for inspiration.

I'm putting off scheduling a print day for my art until I'm done with the Anomalocaris canadensis piece. Yesterday I spent some time studying Illustrator techniques for handling color rendering. One that looks interesting is to use the gradient tool to lay in rough tones, then convert it to a gradient mesh and refine it. So that's the tack I'm taking. Soon as I get this posted it's gonna be time to pick some colors and start laying down gradients...

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.

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.