Cover Images Again

Reading Scott Archer Jones' essay in the Piker Press "Why We Write" I was inspired by his words about the characters inside his imagination wanting to speak, so that he had to find the right words to satisfy them. I went to the Library of Congress Flickr gallery and found snippets of people.

And then I got a book from my shelves, an ancient book called In the Heart of the Sierras, by J. M. Hutchings, a book so old it doesn't have a page with a copyright date in it. I photographed a page without illustrations, leached the color out of it in Photoshop, and added my snippets.

I like it.

And I love the internet. I did a search on "In the Heart of the Sierras" and found that the book was published in 1886 -- the title page was torn out of my copy.

Working with Public Domain Photos

This one was a 15-minute project. In fact it was more like a 10-minute project. I wanted to make an illustration to go with Pete Armetta's short fiction "Gypsy Hill" in the Piker Press.

I found a public domain pic of a park online, cropped it to pare it down to the elements and the dimensions I wanted, and used the clone tool to make certain elements disappear. Can't find them, can you? In Photoshop, jarring objects can become invisible!

From Image--> Adjustments--> Saturation, I saturated the colors a little, making them more vivid, then darkened the pic a little. With Filters, I used Artistic--> Paint Daubs. Voila!

 There was a time that I sneered at "flash fiction," but I find that Pete Armetta's short-shorts can inspire some arty effort in me. He's made me a believer in tiny snippets of writing.

This Watercolor Took Several Days

It's nice when you can finish a project in one day, but it doesn't always happen that way.

This one, the cover image of the Piker Press to accompany Ndaba Sibanda's story "The Escape Route in the Dark," began with the part with the man's head near the bottom.

Following through with admonitions to let everything dry, I skipped to the form of the woman, the skulls and skeletons, the cows' heads, the bees.

I let the work stew for a day, then added the colored brush strokes, all with the same brush you saw in the previous post. (I love it!)

In the next step, I taped the picture to my watercolor board on the tabletop easel, and wet the paper in the bottom right corner; the picture was taped up so that the colored pigment would flow to that corner. When that was dry enough to stop flowing, I brought the paper into the house to dry in the furnace's warmth.

Finally, I used my Pilot V7 pen to outline each brushstroke, with a Staedtler .1 pen for the really tiny bits in the smallest skeleton. From there we were Photoshop-bound to add in the black background.

Now the original resides in my scrapbook, protected by tracing paper. I'm thinking I'd like to add the black background in ink, and then frame it under glass. Time will tell. I was pleased with the result.

Tinkering with Watercolor

Nothing like a clean studio to make you want to do something in it.

I set out four sheets of watercolor paper on my watercolor boards for stretching, but then turned to dry paper to mess with the paints while the ones in process dry.

Yes, I know, those are just your basic kiddy watercolors from Target, but I like the colors and I don't have to worry about getting them all gunked up.

I did some geometric shapes on one dry sheet, and then had to let them dry before I can do anything more with the page. A book on watercolors I got at the library had one important point which I knew about but kind of evaded: you have to let them dry.

So I moved on and got really too ambitious, but what the hell, and I got this much done for the day. I'm enjoying it so much I know I'll get back to it soon, and I'll post my progress in the future.

The picture of the daylily is my reference picture. Really, really beyond my skill, but who cares?

One thing I know, the new brush I'm using is fantastic. It's called a "#7 Pro Arte Prolene Plus. I'm getting tiny lines and nice full swaths, and I'm convinced I never had a brush good enough before to make watercolors fun. (And it was inexpensive.)

A bit of creation every day. Feels good.

Bwah-ha-ha!!!

 Well, I tried again to make French bread.

I used this Emeril Lagasse recipe, because I admired his fettucini alfredo and his enchilada sauce became the foundation for mine.

She shoots -- she scores!!

This time, when I gave Joan a taste of the bread, she didn't spit it out and walk away. She waved her arms and screeched for another bite.


The texture is divinely rich and delicate, the flavor outstanding, the crust just crunchy enough to make you want to sop up some of your marinara sauce.

With butter, and accompanying a lasagna casserole, the bread went over big with everyone.

More Cover Art

This was the cover art for the Piker Press story by Terry Petersen, "Between Chester and Me."

I used a public domain image and the texture function in Photoshop, then Filters--> Texture--> Texturizer--> Burlap (for the background) then flattened the layers of the image and Filters--> Artistic--> Poster Edges.

Playing with the Moon

Sometimes all you want to do is just fiddle with stuff and see what happens when you press that  button.

I took one of my digital photos of the moon, and cropped most of the sky out of it, and then "inverted" it. (In Photoshop, Image--> Adjustments--> Invert.)

Very simple procedure, but fun.

One From Lillian

I think I love Lil's art teacher.

Every Part of the Animal

That's one of my stainless steel mixing bowls, but that isn't the animal in question. The animal is cooking and waste.

An appalling amount of food is thrown away in this country. Real food. The stuff that can keep hungry people alive. Wintertime is one of those times that it is so very apparent: when oranges cost $1/pound at the store, and under almost every orange tree in town there are bushels of oranges the owners don't want, just lying on the ground, rotting.

We've been watching a show on the Travel Channel called "Bizarre Foods," in which a fellow travels to different countries and samples the weirdest foods he can find, or in the cases of poor countries, what people have to eat in order to survive. In those poor countries, nothing goes to waste.

We made enchiladas the other day, and Spanish rice and refried beans. We used beef that Bernie had canned earlier in the year, and of course he made his own beans. It was all delicious, but when I looked at the liquid left behind after the meat and the beans were drained, it bothered me that it might just go down the sink. We put the juice into the refrigerator, and I let my mind simmer on it.

Yesterday it came to me. Simmer indeed, a stew.

I sauteed some chopped onions (from my garden last summer) and some thin slices of celery in a tablespoon of Saffola margarine. When that was "sweated," I added potato and carrot slices, and the liquid from the beans. A bit later, the liquid from the canned beef. Suddenly the kitchen was full of a wonderful smell!

When the potatoes and carrots were cooked, I added zucchini and chopped mushrooms, and at the very end, just a minute or two before serving, I put in shredded chard.

It was great. It was healthy. It was a creation. It was ... not wasteful.

And then Bernie gathered up all my potato peelings and fried them in oil, as he'd heard a chef on TV explain about not wasting any food. They were great, and there weren't enough to go around to everyone's satisfaction.

Illustration for a Poem

I like that the Piker Press is getting more poetry submissions these days, and I like having some sort of image to accompany the poems. This one came to me as I was thinking about Bernie's poem about rhyme, "Poetry Writ Bad."

When I attempt to write poetry that rhymes, I always write the alphabet across part of the page. For this illustration, I put white letters vertically on a double gradient.

Simple, but I like when an idea sweeps into my mind so forcefully that I have to scribble down the plan on any piece of paper handy. This one was penciled onto the blank space of Howie's dog license renewal that was lying on the table.

A Tile Pattern

And then, after drawing the giraffe, I put my sketchbook away, to concentrate on watching football. Suddenly I dashed for the paper again! I could see in my mind's eye the tile pattern for the hall threshold, which is the last little bit of tiling we have to do.

Six-inch tiles form the outer two lines, and I have just enough teeny tiles left from the other threshold pattern into the kitchen to make a line in the middle. I see the two darker lines as being custom-cut from the remains of the darker tiles. With the standard sizes of the six inchers and the teeny ones, I can vary the width as necessary of the darker ones to get the proper coverage.

Pen Sketch Giraffe

What if all you drew on the giraffe were its dark spots? I tried this and it was pretty cool. I stopped looking at the outline of the animal and just put the dots in the position they seemed to go. Not bad.

Pen Sketch Rocks

Cross hatching with the V7 pen was interesting; using the side of the point was almost like using a pencil. The only interesting element on the page of my travel guide prompter was a pile of rocks.

I decided to use a pen in these sketches to force myself to not think about erasing. When I draw with pencil, I tend to be very timid and tentative.

Pen Sketch Elephant

So I have to add these pics in some order.

I've been watching Alex with her sketchbook in her lap, busily sketching away while she sort of watches television. I decided to try this myself.

I used a V7 Precise pen from Pilot, and a AAA travel guide for prompts, vowing to take some element from each page for sketching.

Wow, Has It Been That Long?

Well, apparently it has.

So here we are in the improbably-numbered year 2014, and I'm not dead yet, and I'm still trying to kick myself into creativity. There are two problems with this: 1.) I'm a lazy procrastinator, and 2.) my scanner doesn't work with my everyday laptop, so I am at the mercy of my old laptop for scanning images, which has undergone some weird regeneration and now works just fine, but I still don't trust after it ate an entire chapter of a story I wrote just before I replaced it. (The laptop, not the story.)

The first day of the New Year, my creative burst was to defy my mother.

Mom believed that meat and potatoes belonged on the same dish, but never, ever, ever in the same pot while cooking. She said that it made the potatoes look unappetizing, although none of us would have dared declare a dish unappetizing when it was served as leftovers, all cooked together. Over the years I've thrown my turnips, potatoes, and beef into the pot all together, and my ham and potatoes and green beans all into the pot together -- and I can't taste a difference. Sorry, Mom.

New Year's Day we always have pork and sauerkraut, with mashed potatoes and dumplings. It's for luck, they used to say, so your new year goes smoothly. We love to eat it, so we go along with the superstition.

However, babies don't necessarily love sauerkraut, so I cut some bits of pork and potato to cook up separately for Joan, who is about 18 months old. I browned the pork bits, and threw some slices of potato in with them to sizzle in the fat, thinking about Mom turning over in her grave back in icy Pennsylvania. The potatoes browned up quickly and crisply -- maybe a little too crisp? -- but I threw in the tiny bit of water and put a lid on the pan for braising.

Five minutes later, I pulled it all off the heat. The pork was delicious and tender; the potatoes ... divine. They had softened and soaked in some of that yummy pork browny flavor. Bernie and I loved the flavor and texture, Joan not so much, but then her focus was entirely upon the pork bits, which she devoured like a piranha.

Happy New Year!