Final Design!

Well, the final design for now at least. Note both the signature flash fiction from Rob, and a blurb from Joe Loya. A long time ago, the missus and I were driving around the East Bay on a sunny Sunday, listening to This American Life. Joe was reading from his book, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, and it hit me pretty hard. I come from that class of person who typically winds up choosing between prison and the military, and while I'm not a criminal, I've, well. Been in cars, shared apartments, and so on. There have been a few times when I had opportunities, but I always backed away.

Joe didn't, and he gave me a view into the life I dodged.

A couple of years back, I attended Lip Service West to see a friend's performance, and Joe was there -- here's his reading, it's the third one down. This was lighter than what I'd heard from him before, but there was still the same feeling that he and I had a lot of territory in common.

So when he said nice things about Swill on Facebook recently, I was pleased indeed. And when I realized I needed a blurb for Swill, I turned to Rob and said, "Get me a blurb from Joe Loya!"

And he did. Holy smokes.

Thank you, Joe!

(Blurb subject to revision.)

Anyway, I'm hip-deep in the final rendering process, which is turning out to be more effort than I expected, of fucking course. I'm converting this from a highly pixel-bitten raster file to a rather pretty vector file. The results are very promising, but I'm having to go through and continually erase hidden objects as the file size increases to astronomical proportions. Why do I always wind up needing every fucking bit of RAM I've got?

It'll be worth it, though. Clean vector printing, reproducible at any size -- and you should see the weird patterns the autotrace is making at the edges -- this will be something that you'll want to look at close-up even when it's blown way, way up. Fun stuff!

Or Not

Okay, it needed a couple of little color adjustments. Now to import it into Illustrator...

Swill Six Cover Image Complete

I still have work to do, but at least the image works now. Damnit.

Just A Little Fiddling...

Well. A couple of adjustment layers, a couple of minor color changes, and it's a world of difference. To me, at least.

I need to put pink-and-white flowers in the foliage on the left, increase the contrast in the foremost mass of foliage, deform the lower right-hand side of the red rock in the middle to fill in the gap under the pitcher plant, cut an appropriate edge in the soil at the same spot, and then make the big rock in the center lighter.

But it's almost time to play music, and I need to shower, so it ain't getting done today. Getting close, though.

Further Progress

It's almost getting to the point where I can start worrying about the details... Once again, there's that weird Arizona Highways vibe.

What's Been Going On

My blogging has grown sparse partially because my thoughts have been occupied by concerns that make for bad reading. I have been undergoing an intense process of self-evaluation and improvement, and as a result, most blog posts I write are as flat and self-satisfied as so many mud turtles. Complex, sophisticated, highly-evolved, and truly beautiful in their own way, they are exquisitely dull to any but the specialist.

So I don't post them.

And while I was going to break that cycle and post this one? This post I've been working on since five this morning? I can't do it. I love you people too much to encourage you to read that kind of sludge.

But part of it was worth saving!

Of course, there were some moments that made it clear that we were still deep in the heart of Oaf country... I have a particular spot in my heart for the nameless doctor who burst into my room to tell me about the patient to whom she had just attended, a pre-op male-to-female HIV-positive transsexual prostitute.


"He's out there -- she's out there -- shit, I don't know, but, you know, no protection, no condoms, no nothing --" and the doctor's beaded cornrows rattled as she drew her hands apart to indicate great size, "-- with these anal warts like, like..." and she drew her hands apart again, with an expression of delighted horror at the indicated magnitude. She shook her head. "Just would not listen. Some people, you know?"


I grinned and shook my head, and said, "What can you do?" But what the fuck was up with that? Was she just overwhelmed in the moment? Had my physician suggested to her that a good anal-wart story might prove efficacious in the treatment of nausea, sort of like putting out a well-fire with dynamite? Is there some kind of Hippocratic loophole that lets you bitch about patients to other patients if the patient on the receiving end is sort of delirious?


Medicine is a mystery.

Listen, if I can figure out anything interesting to say about the recovery process, I will, but right now? It's too much like discussing anal warts.

And A Little Tree, As Well

Of course, now that I've put the composition together for a test peek, I find out that I do, in fact, need to render in the little tree at the base of the mid-range rock. It is the wee details that make the difference in the end, god damn it.

Not bad, though. I like it -- it's less doomed than most of my art.

And once again, I'm reminded as to why I almost always  use inkblots for my very unrealistic skies -- the right choice adds a fat slab of energy to the composition.