Blue Tree #2

On Tuesday, I betook myself to the studio and worked on a better cover image for Lydia Manx's story, "If These Walls Could Talk."

I started with a pen and ink drawing of a tree. Initially, I saw the tree as being much more leafy, but I really wanted the blue-to-green gradient and the moons to be visible, so the tree was limited to a crew cut.

Then I went to Photoshop and worked with a lot of layers.

As with many projects, once it was done I could see things I probably would have done differently. I think I'd re-do the ink of the tree and drop that branch down a little more, like a dancer with a fan. The light colored-leaves would contrast with the dark grasses just fine.

Blue Tree #1

Gad, I was so tired and achy Monday that I took an old picture of my Japanese maple, leached some color out of it, added some other color, and did some fuzzy hazes over it.

It was a creative effort, but it wasn't what I wanted to see.

Almond Blossoms!

I had a kickass photo-shoot in a nearby orchard today, in spite of the early overcasting of clouds.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/palmprintgallery/

After I brought the raw photos home, I plied some Photoshop to properly crop the pics, and was very pleased with the results.

In keeping with the recent torrent of creativity, I also cut some cardboard panels and put gesso on them to make them paint-worthy. They'll be useful for experimental stuff.

I think I want to put a second coat of gesso on them, though, so that if we want to sand them smooth, we'll have plenty of surface.

Gesso is a kind of thick paint-y goo that preps a surface -- almost any surface -- for painting upon.

Zoom! The Days Fly By

Monday was the cover image (see below).

Tuesday I wrote a little, editing Transitions.

Wednesday I painted -- oils -- on a painting I'd begun years ago. I was able to do some groovy blue on darker blue texturing, which I believe will set the tone for the rest of the painting.

Thursday, Lillian began asking questions about my art work; she was trying out new terminology and mis-used the word "stencil". I whipped out the Exacto knife and cut a simple shape from card stock, then used soft pastels to demonstrate what a stencil does.

While Lil experimented with a heart stencil I cut for her, I continued to mess with my shape. I added a little other color to the shapes, too.

When the air began to chill, I cleaned up the work table, and then smiled, realizing that what Lillian had done for me was -- get me to playing with my toys. Now that's priceless.

Cool Work, Me!

This was the cover for today's Piker Press.

The story is "Transitions", which I've been working on for ages ... well, today was the first chapter of it, not the whole mess of 88k words, of course.

Yesterday's creative effort was to pick up the massive pile of print out and go through it, editing as I went. After several months of ignoring the thing, it was actually fun, and I found the continuity gaffe that had been hanging me up and fixed it.

This morning (as well as at various times during the night when I woke up and worried about what the morning would bring) I thought about what cover image should accompany the story. I didn't want to do anything representational; I know what the characters all look like, but maybe someone else will have a different vision of them, and that's cool.

I went outside with my camera and took three pictures; the above is a composite of two of them, layered with about 65% opacity. The part with the ripples I adjusted separately, bumping up the contrasts A LOT. I had an idea of what I was going to do when I went outside, knew what I had to do with the photos when I fired up Photoshop, and whammalooey, it was done, and was just what I'd wanted to do. That's RARE!!!!

Ahhhhh.

Done With This Slop

As I was plying pastels to this picture this afternoon, I was also chatting to Bernie on the telephone.

"Yes," I grated into the headset, quoting a line from the original Battlestar Galactica, "I think we're done here."

I loved the colors of the painting I was trying to imitate, but I never could figure out what the order of their use was, or what exactly the painter was trying to convey. Now it is a fact that the original artist used oils, and I was using pastels, but still. I could discern no particular light source, or rationale for his use of purple.

I did try, but when vibrant color becomes boring through annoyance, it's time to hang it up, and maybe try one little piece of replication some time in the future instead of a big landscape. I sprayed the beast with fixative; in a couple days it will be dry enough to press between sheets of tracing paper and hide forever.

Simple Graphic

I have to admit this isn't a very complicated effort for the day.

It's the cover image for Dan Mulhollen's story, "In A Different World."

This gimpy shoulder and arm just don't make for comfortable computer work at all. I put up about half the Press yesterday, and after Physical Therapy, I did the rest. By the time I got to Photoshop, I felt very weary.

A little later I tried working in the studio on that damned weird-colored pastel effort (see above) but the Flex-all treatment of my shoulder and neck made it feel too cold out there.

While I was irritably scraping pastels across the paper, it occurred to me that what I should have done was take one small section of Svob's work and tried to imitate that. Taking on an entire page of his jittery style is just too much.

And tonight my arm and shoulder ache enough that if he came to the door, I'd smack him a good one, out of frustration.

Wet Paint

What seems like a couple decades ago (but is probably only about three years) I started this painting.

I was still using a film camera -- okay, maybe five or six years ago -- and I remember doing a pastel sketch as a preliminary. Then I took an old canvas that had a rough undercoat in blue and gold of a image of a fish, and used black oil paint to block in the palm trees.

And then I forgot it.

Lately I've been itching for oil paints, so today I bit the bullet and dragged out all the stuff -- the brushes, the canvases, the tubes of pigment.

I'm not really sure of where I'm going with it, but at least it's not palm tree silhouettes against a fish outline any more.

Not particularly interested in realism with this one; it's just an exercise.

Lessons learned: You must use it or you will lose it, and have to start back at Square One.

And student-grade cadmium orange doesn't cover underpaint worth a shit.

And Payne's gray + cadmium orange ends up looking like a dirty moldy green.

But it did cover the erstwhile fish.

Experimenting with Color

I've always been fond of loads of color, but also afraid of using them.

This book by Mike Svob, Paint Red-Hot Landscapes That Sell, has a number of interestingly improbable color schemes that intrigue me. I decided the next art project would be to fiddle with color per his example.

You can see I've tried to match up my pastel sticks to the colors of the photo of his oil painting.

When you do oils (my mother taught me) you begin with the darkest colors and then work into the lighter shades. With pastels, for me it seems to be the exact opposite, so I started with the yellows.

By the time I was ready to switch to oranges, my arm was really throbbing, so I sprayed the thing with fixative and called it a day.

The amazing part of it was that I was so engrossed in shapes and hues that I missed my 3 o' clock painkillers completely, and wouldn't have remembered them until Bernie reminded me at 4 that I was overdue.

That's good news!

Pastel Irritation

Irritating. Yes, that's how I would describe this "lesson" in using pastels.

I think I started messing with this a couple days after Christmas, and could only get back to it from time to time, due to low temps (and no heat in the garage studio), and then a cold; add in that after each stage the "instructor" wants the surface pigment stabilized with fixative.

Finally I got fed up with the change in color from instruction photo to instruction photo, and just finished putting the sparkles on the water and textured the sky.

I think I learned a good bit about making water appear watery, but bleah. Next time I do a study session like this, I'm going to look at the finished product first and work from that, and not from the lies with which the instructor misleads his irritable student.

Cover for "Betrayal in an Envelope"

The illustration accompanied Kathryn Long's story "Betrayal in an Envelope."

It had to be simple, yet vivid. Vivid to match the story, and simple, because my shoulder and arm were still screaming non-stop pain.

Bernie wanted me to skip putting up the Piker Press for a week, so that I didn't have to sit at the computer too long. But instead I worked on it a bit at a time over the weekend, so that all I had to do Monday morning was the illustration.

I took two envelopes and crumpled them. Then I took them to my studio and flattened them, then used a smudgy foam triangle to drag red pigment over one, and blue over the other.

I set them on a piece of paper on the floor and took a photo.

In Photoshop, I cut away all the "paper" background, and inserted a background of sort-of-sepia. The layer with the envelopes I "adjusted", messing with the hue and saturation. And then I called it done, wishing that the painkillers would kick in.

Had I been in my right mind, I would have intensified the colors I hazed over the sepia background, and cropped the picture a little more.

Cover for "Patient Zero"

This was the cover for Mel Trent's story, "Patient Zero."

Begun with a background gradient of yellow ochre to olive green, I added a cut and paste of a man from a public domain picture. I elongated him using "Edit -->Transform", then colored him with red and orange. Then the "smudge" tool.

Then I added some translucent red to the layer with the gradient.

This was done a week ago Monday ... I had no idea that the next day was going to bring crippling pain to my neck, shoulder, and arm.

Such is life.