Resolution Every Day

Another Year, Another Drawing

2012-01-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

Cheryl took a face-drawing class a week or so ago, and I was sorely envious. I rarely have the discipline to keep to an arty regime on my own (except for writing, which I DO do every day), and I now have no $$ for any art courses at all.

Cheryl is my Good King Wenceslas, and I'm trudging along in her footsteps.

Oh, and when I was done, I threw the dried up marker out.

2012: Dreaming of Poppies

2012-01-02T21:35:00.001-08:00

I miss Spring.

Poetry from April

2011-07-13T15:45:00.000-07:00

I did some poetry in April as a challenge -- to write a poem every day. It was a dismal failure. But it was a creative act. Here's one of them:

Morning in April

The dawn glows
the trees rock
the blossoms fly through the air on the season's clock.

Birds couple
nesting here
I hear them in my trees and know summer is near.

The wind blows
air is cold.
Would it seem more like Spring if I were not so old?

Two Ballerinas

2011-07-07T17:06:00.001-07:00

This piece of art is called "Two Ballerinas" and it was done in the Paint program by Lillian Queen.

I've decided to share this blog with her -- after all, I'm not doing much with it, and perhaps, with her help, we can put more art work and creativity in it more often.

Welcome, Lillian, and keep up the good work!

31 January 2011

2011-01-31T16:41:00.001-08:00

The cover for the Piker Press this week, and the illustration for Bernie's piece, "Time."

Sunday 30 January

2011-01-31T16:39:00.000-08:00

A little tree study in pastels, done on my newly-rearranged work table in the studio.

Again with the White on Dark

2011-01-26T17:31:00.001-08:00

I'm getting so I can imagine what a picture is going to look like before I start playing with it in Photoshop!

I was looking at the palms in the dim light outside and realized I could hardly see any color to them on these gray days. And I thought it would look more interesting if I used a certain filter on a picture of them...

Another Cover: January 17

2011-01-17T17:53:00.001-08:00

Using an uncopyrighted photo from the Library of Congress' Flickr site, I made this cover for the Piker Press this morning.

I like using this treatment of pictures in Photoshop; I think that I could learn a lot from trying to duplicate stuff like this with pastels on colored paper.

If it ever warms up enough, or at least the damn fog lifts, I do want to make such experiments a priority.

Movie Review: The King's Speech

2011-01-14T20:48:00.000-08:00

That was today's effort, the review of this great movie.

I'll have to post a link to it on Monday.

I was really impressed with the movie. It told a story, certainly, but I know I'm going to watch it again and again to immerse in the depth of the acting.

** Here's the link:

The King's Speech: Review

Green Garlic Dressing

2011-01-13T16:02:00.001-08:00

On today's menu was spaghetti, with a salad, and cheesy garlic bread.

When I asked Bernie what kind of salad dressing he wanted, the choices being bottled ranch, garlic (mine) or peppered vinaigrette (also mine) he chose garlic.

It's a simple enough salad dressing to make, but when I went to pulverize some cloves of garlic, I thought it might be cool to make a green garlic dressing, making use of lettuce and spinach leaves -- after all, adding some substance to the mixture would make it cling to the vegetables better, right?

Into the Cuisinart food processor went six cloves of garlic, and about a loose cup of spinach and those curly little lettuce leaves no one in this family likes, plus about 1/3 cup of vegetable oil, and a bit of salt. I buzzed it until it liquified, then added 1/3 cup of water, and let the processor emulsify the whole thing.

It was delicious, although I have no idea how long it will last, but I know that I'll be making this again in the future.

More Writing

2011-01-11T21:08:00.000-08:00

I wrote quite a bit last night, but here's an excerpt from today's creative attempt:

"Her mother stretched out her arms in the light coming in the window, and Roj could see the emptiness her mother felt, even though Roj was no longer a baby -- it was the emptiness of a mother's arms whose child had died, gone far beyond recall or touch. Roj ached for her, for the loss of a child; ached with her, wishing that her own arms had ever held a baby. Here, as with Matt, there was no consolation, not one, for her death."

January 6, 2011: Simple Graphic

2011-01-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

I was playing a game of Spider Solitaire this morning, and when I had won the game, I interrupted the fireworks display at the winning of the game, and had a hard look at the graphics.

There were some visuals that I wanted to try to reproduce, so this is today's creative effort.

In addition, I completed another chapter of After Life yesterday, only to find tonight that I had made a technical gaffe and had to re-write the whole thing.

I'd complain, but that is what creativity includes. Recreation. Yes, I loved it, especially the newly-added kicking-open-a-door scene.

January 4, 2011: After Life

2011-01-05T19:16:00.000-08:00

I began writing this story as a 2009 NaNoWriMo effort, based on a flash of a dream I had.

As the story developed, however, I fell in love with it, and at 30,000 words or so, refused to hurry it or stuff it with empty word count. I bagged on NaNo, intending to work on After Life through the winter. I didn't do that, but the time away from it gave me a chance to daydream about what was going to happen, and I did get back to it. Most nights I write some more on it, most days I think about it to the exclusion of all other creative projects. Since I wrote "some more" again last night, I thought I'd share an excerpt. Not exactly what I wrote last night, as that would be a spoiler, but some scene I really liked ...

Candace Rogers ("Roj") is dead, but still trying to save the life of her boyfriend, Matt Trapester. Garrison is her crooked boss.

They were in Lodi in a matter of seconds, in an instant. Obviously there is some advantage to following an angel, Roj thought. The cafe was before them, Garrison within, and a person sharing a table with him who had an athletic bag at her feet. "It is filled with money," Desai said.

"Lovely," Roj replied. "Did he give it to her, or did she give it to him?"

"She has brought it to him," Desai answered.

"She smokes. I can smell her. She must have a lighter on her somewhere." Roj floated about the woman, sniffing, sensing, even without her senses, sensing. With gentle surreptitiousness, she eased a butane lighter from the woman's purse, and then began to slowly, oh, so slowly, to unzip the bag to expose the money, quietly so that the woman and Garrison would not notice.

"You'll keep that Pest off our shipments," the woman said in a commanding tone of voice to Garrison. "We still think he ought to be under ground, you know."

"He's off the force," Garrison said. "Totally off the deep end. Nothing he can say will hold in a court of law, the psychiatrist assured us of that. And we have a couple people making sure he has plenty to drink, at the bar he likes, and at home."

"You bastard," Roj snarled. "I've been too easy on you."

"Roj. Garrison's people have been giving Matt liquor to keep him from being killed. Listen to that."

"Why would Garrison change his mind? Because Max was getting too strong for him? I don't care why. Watch this."

The athletic bag full of money was open. When Garrison and his contact looked out the windows of the restaurant to the west, Roj took a bottle of olive oil from the setting of the empty table next to them and upended it into the bag.

Near the windows, a woman in an expensive tweed suit knocked over a carafe of red wine with an inadvertent wave of her arm.

Roj took the opportunity of the convergence of waiters at the window table to quietly drag the bag of money several yards away, give the oily packs of bills a quick toss like a salad, and then light the mass on fire.

At another table, a woman screamed as she saw the flames, drawing gazes back from the broken glass and red wine and clumsily mopping waiters. Both Garrison and the woman gaped at the burning athletic bag for an instant before shouting, "NOOOO!" in an impromptu duet. While Garrison dragged out his jacket and began flogging the bag, Roj flew to the ceiling and plied the lighter on the sprinkler system sensor.

The waterworks came on, diners screamed and ran for doors, and the manager ran into the room calling 9-1-1 and pointing at Garrison, trying to put out the flames, and his lady friend, who simply stared, her lower jaw dropped in disbelief.

A police car screamed into the parking lot, lights blazing. Two officers ran towards the front doors. "God dammit!" shouted the woman and sprinted, even in high heels, for the kitchen.

"Stop her!" screamed the manager.

Oh, and Desai is an angel. I love playing cops and robbers.

Once Again: January 3

2011-01-03T15:04:00.000-08:00

This is the cover image for the Piker Press story "Old Sugar."

I started with a reference photo of a drawing on rock in Macao, and sketched it with soft pastels (which crumble horribly in this damp weather). It still looked kind of rough-hewn, so I "poster edge' filtered it in Photoshop.

I think I'd like to work on the original some more one of these days, but at least today, I actually did something besides write.

Which I continue to do, working luxuriously slowly on a novel called "After Life." More about that later.

Chimichurri

2010-06-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, our friend Angelique had the Haverim over for a pot luck. Her husband Hugo was going to be grilling beef ribs, and while we sat around sipping wine or beer, she brought out some appetizers. There was a platter of chips and veggies and dip -- isn't there always? -- and a platter of sliced tomatoes with mozzarella cheese melted over it, topped with chopped basil. Scrumptious!

But then she brought out the dish that made me fall in love: small bread slices accompanied by a green pesto-looking sauce she called "chimichurri." I could not get enough of the parsley-garlic-olive oil mixture. It was heavenly.

I tried to get her to post her recipe on Facebook; I tried to replicate it from what she told me. However, it was only yesterday that I figured out how to make a comparable chimichurri.

After researching numerous recipes on the web, and remembering the taste of Angelique's version, I came up with this:

Chimichurri

8 cloves of garlic
1 cup packed flat-leaved parsley (cut off the stems)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil (and maybe a bit more, to suit your taste)
1 - 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper

Chuck all of it into a food processor and let 'er rip for as long as it takes to make the stuff into a bright green slush.

Serve over meats, pasta, veggies, however you like. Especially offer it as a spread for fresh bread.

Variations include adding basil, or onion, or hot peppers, or cumin.

So very good, truly a work of art.

Poppies sketch

2010-02-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

So, so very soon, the California poppies will be blooming.

With the aforementioned watercolor brushes, and a few passes of colored pencil, I finished this little bit of play tonight.

I held the pens with their flexible, brush-like points and felt an unaccustomed sense of jealousy; I got watercolor pens for Christmas (and I am grateful and pleased with the gift) but Alex got a graphics tablet for her computer, and she has been arting up a storm with it.

I've borrowed it a couple times, and oh, the things one can do with that beast! The future is unclear ... I may be able to use it while she is at work, and we three will co-exist peacefully, or I will have to get my own.

In the mean time, my daily creation has been either for writing, or cooking, and I've been a negligent blogger about it. It's only with the last two days of amazingly clement weather that Lillian has been yipping at me to work in the studio so that she can safely play out in front of the house. I am the guard dog who watches over her with the garage door open. It is better light for the studio, after all.

Brush Strokes

2010-02-10T20:39:00.000-08:00

Alex gifted me with some flexible-tip "watercolor" pens at Christmas, and I only just began to play with them.

The black brush-strokes were first, then a few green. Then I thought of centaurea, and how much I liked them in my wildflower garden of 15 years past. I added blue.

The yellow bits were just for some color balance.

2010

2010-01-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

With the New Year, I have been aware of the need to create something every day, and make that a priority.

New Year's Day and yesterday, I worked on writing the next chapter of Transitions, a rather boring soap opera that follows the next stage of life at the Reich estate and Owen Reich-Ambris' transformation from kid to trying on his father's shoes as owner of the estate.

One of the things I've learned over the past traumatic two and some years is that while I do enjoy writing and need to write when I'm ill or emotionally hurt, what comes out of my keyboard is not quality work. No less than four novel-length writings are pretty much all dreck. I've been re-reading them lately and felt my face burn with embarrassment all the way through. I won't delete them, but it's very likely that I will re-write them, or at least gut the hell out of them and just pare them down to a couple short stories.

The Cold Food Day

2009-12-08T20:59:00.000-08:00

[This is a cross-post from my regular blog. Both need attention; but this entry is really about creating something new for me. Foods!]

This morning I woke up hungry, not having eaten supper the night before.

I thought of taters and eggs, which I had promised Alex I'd make before she and John had to go to the Bay Area. I thought of the soft and scrumptious loaf of Dutch crust French bread I bought at the store the other day. I thought of what to make for lunch with things on hand.

There was a container of egg whites, left over from making pumpkin custard the day before yesterday, so the taters and eggs made use of that. Delicious. Perfect. Hearty breakfast accompanied by tomato juice. Good start to a freezin' ass cold day.

Around 10 am, I opened the freezer to see what was available for lunch. I spotted a small container of onions and ground beef that I intended to make into some variant of minestrone -- but I knew Bernie wouldn't eat that as it would have too much tomato flavor to it. Aha! A bag of pre-cooked prawns (50 % off sale at the grocers one weekend) and a package of chopped broccoli. Got it, lunch is on the way!

The minestrone fixins I pulled out as well, just because I couldn't stop thinking about them.

Baby portobella mushrooms ... a package of them needed to be used up, so I cut each one into halves or quarters and tossed them into a frying pan with Saffola Margarine (good taste for sizzling) and cut up half a yellow onion into 3/4 inch chunks and began to cook them in extra virgin olive oil. The pot of white basmati rice began to cook.

Prawns thawed in a solution of sea salt and lemon juice and water; some of the mushrooms went into a pot with the minestrone stuff on a back burner, along with a hefty amount of "Italian Seasoning" by McCormick.

A can of chicken broth was mixed with 2 tablespoons of corn starch, some salt, and a heavy shaking of garlic powder, and added to the onion pieces when they were done, to slowly come to a boil. When the rice was nearly done, I put the frozen broccoli on to steam. A few minutes later, most of the mushrooms went into the thickening chicken broth, along with the cut up prawns. (Some of the mushrooms went into the minestrone pot.) When the broccoli was done, so was the rice, and with that, lunch was served. Delicious, nutritious, and satisfying.

The minestrone-to-be slowly thawed on its low setting, seemingly forgotten, but not.

I walked to the school to collect Lillian. We checked the mail, and then, ambling up the street came a man with his Great Dane bitch. She was beautiful, black with a white spot on her chest, and a hint of whitish toes. Maybe a third again bigger than our dog Sebastian, but looking like his auntie. Lil and I stopped to talk with the owner, who assured us that she didn't bite, and we petted the large, lovely lady, comparing her loopy ears to Sebastian's, and the breadth between her eyes, and the gentle eyes themselves. Yeah, I think Sebastian has some Great Dane in his ancestry.

Return to the minestrone variation. I dumped some leftover fried cabbage (don't knock it until you've tried it, cooked with onions in bacon fryings) into the pot, and a cup of tomato sauce. A little later, I tossed in about a quarter cup of nopalitos (cactus strips) and a handful of sliced black olives. I added more oregano, more garlic powder, and a cup of asparagus, cut into half-inch pieces. Dumping in maybe a cup to a cup and a half of Wolfgang Puck's beef broth (no MSG) and about the same amount of the water from the broccoli steaming, and a cup of pasta ...

When the pasta was done, I cut a couple pieces of the French bread, and slathered them with cream cheese. Serving the minestrone in a bowl, I sprinkled it with Parmesan cheese and ooohhh, perfect soup, perfect meal for a cold, cold winter evening.

Tough One

2009-08-10T18:03:00.001-07:00

This one was hard on me, both in reading, formatting, and trying to find an image.

Jim Wisneski's sensitive and tragic story, "A Pile of Dinners" is about an Alzheimer's victim and a family member who has had to live with the horrible changes that the disease causes.

I don't think I did the story justice, but my all-too-recent experience with my mother's decline into Alzheimers made it hard to work with.

Almost a Cover Image

2009-08-10T17:57:00.001-07:00

Me, not keeping a clear line of communication open, and he, not keeping track of Upcoming Issues, well, Jonathan Scott and I did not know that I was cobbling up a cover image to go with his story, nor did we know in tandem that he already had a graphic to go with it.

"Ever So Slightly Mangled" is a fine representation of a storyteller's art.

I included my illustration in the later part of the text.

Narrative [1]

2009-08-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

M.J. Nicholls' cover story, "A Modern Narrative [1]" inspired this bizarre work.

Nicholls' story made me want to run in circles, shout "hahahahahaha" maniacally, whack my head with a stout book, and run into bookstores to risk arrest while madly toppling junk-ass-written best sellers to the floors.

At the same time, I sympathized with the fragility of a writer's ego -- all it takes is one person to hurt that ego so much that it never forgets.

Which is not to say that no one should ever say anything bad about others' writing, not by any means, but ... if you're not supremely confident about your writing (or any other art), mean words do hurt.

Hmm, supremely confident, or ... raking in the big bucks.

Haha!

2009-08-10T17:33:00.001-07:00

This one was a lot of fun to do, and I chose a flexible-tip ink pen for the lines.

The illustration is for Dan Mulhollen's poem, "The Man With Red Tights."

Gazpacho, The Dish

2009-08-10T17:25:00.001-07:00

So delicious, so nutritious -- Gazpacho.

I modified the recipe a little from the one I received from my friend Melissa 30-some years ago.

Surly Kid

2009-08-10T17:17:00.000-07:00

Cover image for Matthew Dexter's story, "Summer School."

I have no idea why the sky ended up looking banded. I didn't try to do that, and Photoshop gave no indication it would happen.

Different Dragonfly!

2009-08-10T17:14:00.001-07:00

Then there was this animal, who allowed me to take multiple photos.

Never saw any dragonfly like this in my life. A dragonfly with granny-panties!

This species isn't even supposed to be in this area, according to Bernie's research on the web. I haven't seen it since July 5, but I'll watch for his relatives from now on.

Blue Jay

2009-08-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, get ready for a few posts.

This one was the cover for Mark Lyon's beautifully written, "He Sure Do Want To Fly."

What a story! When I first read it as a submission, I was so moved I couldn't be sure of my opinion. I sent it to Cheryl, our Poetry Editor and Voice of Reason. She, too, was impressed, and I sent Mark an acceptance letter. In the mean time, Bernie took my printed-out copy with him to work to read, and after he read it, one of his co-workers snitched it from him, becoming so engrossed she hid the manuscript in a bin of parts so that she could read it while she worked!

Yeah, it was a good one.

Writing, and stuff

2009-07-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

Then there was the short story, "Pecking Order, " which took days to scratch out.

And many evenings and afternoons cleaning up the continuity gaffe in the serial novel "Transitions."

Plus a number of days when I was riding the horse to keep him from colicking, and working on formatting Press articles and fiddling with OPGraphics (Other People's Graphics) to make them Pressworthy ... Time just gets away, and there's never enough of it, and why the hell have I never in my life been able to say, "I'm bored, I have nothing to do"?

There is a preliminary sketch on a canvas in the studio. I can FEEL the blueness of the sky that is going to appear there. This week is supposed to be one of clement temperatures, so I hope to get out there and obsess over color and shape. I'll take photos, for sure.

Playing Catch Up As Usual

2009-07-06T17:52:00.000-07:00

It's just wrong how time gets away from me ... some say it's because I'm of an age approaching the speed of light, and others say it's because I'm a spacey, lazy old cow who would rather sit in the shade and sip wine with her husband rather than work.

Maybe it's both.

Nevertheless (don't I always say that?) I have been trying to keep busy. This image is from Lydia Manx's story "Dawn's Early Light".

Gazpacho!

2009-06-15T20:26:00.001-07:00

Michele Host's cover story for the Piker Press this week just about drove me nuts.

The story is called "Gazpacho" and although somewhat on the slap-your-hands-over-your-eyes ook, nevertheless made me long for gazpacho, a dish which I have loved for well over thirty years and never make because my beloved husband hates tomatoes in any form other than spaghetti sauce.

(Or fried green tomatoes, which I, in a strange cosmic reciprocation, loathe.)

The cover image, which said husband chose out of these three, is a digital photo, stretched a little and super saturated with color in Photoshop.

This one was a macro -- close focus feature -- which I also Photoshopped, this time with "paint daubs" as a filter.

I chopped a tomato and some celery and a white onion for these shots, all the while promising myself that I would use the ingredients to make some real gazpacho for myself later.

The last picture I used the artistic filter "paint daubs" on, and then another filter "poster edges." This probably would have been my first choice for cover, but Bernie has a good eye.

P.S. The gazpacho I made this afternoon was HEAVENLY.

But that's another creative post.

Luggage

2009-06-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

This was the cover image for Tyler Willson's story, "Castaways."

I wanted something vivid, but simple, and opted for a rough sketch in pastels, on black construction paper. As noted in previous posts, such sketches don't scan well, or even photograph well. What the eye sees doesn't correspond with the camera's lens.

I scanned the pic, then used Photoshop to super-saturate the colors. The I used "adjustments" to enhance the blacks. Luminous!

The red is for balance and deception. In Part Two of the story the following week, I left this image for Tyler as a treat:

Architecture

2009-06-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

Mary Andes' excellent story, "The Music Tells It All" inspired me to look up pictures of Mission Buenaventura and try to reproduce it in Photoshop.

Currently a pastel sketch of this picture graces a canvas in the studio, soon to be the recipient of oil paint. I hope. That should be good for a few days' creation.

After Years

2009-06-15T20:05:00.000-07:00

Chas Wallace's story, "Kinamoor and Darrelma" poked me to finish this oil painting.

Alex had stolen it from my art closet and given it a place in her office, but it was far from done. I stole it back and finished it, making a digital photograph for the cover art.

My memory is far more photographic than hers, so I can steal back this tiny oil (only 6" x 8") at will.

What? A Month?

2009-06-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

It's really annoying to see that a month has gone by without a post. Truly it makes one feel like a filthy piker.

So we'll catch up, with as many days as I can remember and have on hand.

First up is the illustration for Jerry Seeger's Piker Press story "High Desert Blues."

The lines that inspired me were these:

"To the stars, the planets must seem like mad prophets and rock stars, untamed and reckless as they careen about the firmament, but the planets are also bound, their courses charted and known. When planets speak wistfully of freedom, do the stars even understand the word? "

Foodies

2009-05-19T18:23:00.000-07:00

It was a collaborative effort.

Bernie told me yesterday he wanted pasta with prawns and peas in a white sauce. We spent a long time trying to pin down just which white sauce he was talking about. He claimed I'd made a really good one but couldn't remember what we had the sauce on. While in the grocery store, we narrowed the pasta down to fettucini; later while he was commuting to work and we were chatting on the phone, I bookmarked a white-wine-cream sauce that looked easy and was reputed to be tasty.

The sauce was easy, and I made it tasty by adding garlic to it. I think it would have been better, but I used a cheap Italian pinot grigio that was almost flavorless -- sort of pinot grigio soda pop without carbonation.

There is not a bite left, though, so apparently it was a success.

The Waiting Room

2009-04-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

I really think that this story is one of Mel Trent's best. "The Waiting Room" has a lot of subtlety and some powerful insights.

By no means does my illustration describe what I saw through her words. I suppose that means that eventually I'll go back and replace it.

Anniversary Issue

2009-04-27T21:07:00.001-07:00

Seven years as an ezine.

I called up this pic from the archives, and photographed it. Mel Trent has done some phenomenal work for the Press, and for her own passions. This illustration of her work is one of my favorites.

Cover Semi-Doggett

2009-04-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

This was the cover image for Richard Voza's story, "The Accident."

I wasn't really happy with it, but my time constraints don't allow me to nitpick a lot.

I used a non-copyrighted pic and modified it.

This guy looks too much like John Doggett (X-Files) in a too-tight suit.

The Obvious Slacker

2009-04-27T20:55:00.000-07:00

I've been slacking, I know.

There are days when I work on stuff, and days when I don't. And the days all run together sometimes, and I can't remember which day I did what.

I know that this was the cover image for the March 30th issue of the Piker Press. It was kind of fun, building layer upon layer, but I really wished I had one of those illustrator's pads that has a stylus and allows one to use Photoshop a little more accurately.

Still, it wasn't bad.

Wading through

2009-04-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't been keeping up my resolution, at least not day to day, but I do have some sketches I've been working on, and recipes to stun the very senses.

(Well, our senses, anyway.)

Lent and Easter are very busy times for us, and time on the computer is at a premium.

More soon.

Cover "Sweeper"

2009-03-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

This was the cover image for Richard Vosa's short story, "The Sweeper".

I did the pencil sketch, wasn't thrilled with it, started to putter with the same image in pastels, was even less thrilled, went back and scanned the pencils and erased most of it, just using shapes and colors in Photoshop.

Alternative Cover Picture

2009-03-17T14:19:00.001-07:00

Pastels. I wanted to see how the idea for the cover image would pan out in pastels. I dunno ... I think I like it in pastels better.

Wreath

2009-03-14T15:27:00.001-07:00

I've kept forgetting to include this one.

Our grape vine was trying to take over our neighbor's Japanese maple, so Bernie cut the two-inch trunk off at the ground, and we began yanking the yards and yards of vine out of the trees.

On a whim I wrapped and tangled the green vine around itself in a round shape, thinking I could use the dried framework for a Christmas wreath of greens.

However, later on I realized it was too big for a frame for a wreath for the door, and just left the poor strands parked up against the house through the rest of autumn.

Fortunate forgetfulness! The resulting lovely now graces a tall wall in my living room.

Color!

2009-03-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

I spent several days working on this pastel.

At 12" x 18" inches, it's one of my larger pieces lately. Originally, I was just going to do some stripes of color, but then Alex saw it and began to exclaim over it (I know she means well, but when it comes to artwork, that kind of drives me nuts with performance anxiety) and so I continued on to fill the whole sheet.

Humidity has been high, as you can see by the slight puckering of the paper.

Now, what is it supposed to be? Stripes of color, that's all. Gobs of color. I suppose you could gaze at it and at times imagine a lake and mountain scene, at others a sunset ... just colors is good enough.
What I have thought about is that although I worked it as a horizontal piece, it might be more interesting to rotate it 90 degrees.

Is it a cityscape on Mercury? Canyons seen through infrared?

Cover Art Again

2009-03-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

I guess this was the latest effort. The multiple gradients in the back were interesting play in Photoshop.

This one accompanied Dan Mulhollen's story, "Something I Forgot" in the Piker Press.

Editing

2009-03-02T19:51:00.000-08:00

This past week has been taken up with editing "Transitions."

Well, until Friday, that is. On Friday I succumbed to my granddaughter's latest viral introduction, and have been out for the count ever since. The last one started the New Year off with a hack; my cough was done for ONE DAMN DAY before this pinched-nerve crap started.

How timely that the next virus hit THE VERY DAY that I completed physical therapy for the pinched nerve. I'm really pretty fed up with fate.

"Transitions" is coming along all right. It's not a great story, by any means, but it feels good to write it, and spend time with the characters.

Blue Tree #2

2009-02-26T16:08:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-26T16:07:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-21T21:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-16T16:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-06T18:04:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-05T17:52:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-04T17:04:00.001-08:00

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"

2009-02-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

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"

2009-02-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

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.

Playing Catch-Up

2009-01-26T17:54:00.000-08:00

Three forward, one toe back,

Trailing scribbled lines across the snow,

Footsteps dance around the scattered birdseed.

In spite of neglecting this blog shamefully, I have been sticking to the resolve. Each day I HAVE been working on some creative act. (Well, with the possible exception of the last Steelers' game day. I do believe I was a waste, eating chicken wings and jumping up and down and screaming so as to wear myself out.) Not only a poem called "Winter Chickens", but also an Aser story "Sidelong", and two other short stories, one called "Fire" and the other "Wasting Time."

I think the poem and "Sidelong" are done. The other stories I'm still snarling over.

Then there is the pastel project I've been working on in the studio. Some days lately have been too cold and wet for working out there, and I have come to really hate the project, which is a practice lesson. Bernie observed my frustration, read the book I was working from, and pronounced that it was like Kliban's cartoon on how to draw a cat. He had drawn three circles in the first figure, added ears and whiskers and a tail in the second, and in the third, shown a lovely, realistic pen and ink of a sitting cat.

At this point, I agree with Bernie. The step-by-step photos look like the instructor started over on his sketch several times. Maybe he did. Maybe that's what we're supposed to do. Still, he could have said so. Shithead.

Excerpt from "Wasting Time:"

"Every day was the same, and that was good. Every day was the same, and that made me wish for anything different." She sat up on the ledge of the bath and looked at her reflection in the water. Pulling at her dripping hair, she turned her face from side to side, considering what she saw. "I hate my hair like this," she announced.

"Be patient," Margot muttered. "It'll grow out."

"I don't mean that! I mean it's already down to my shoulders in back and my nose in front and it takes an hour to dry! I look like a haystack with eyeballs."

And from "Fire:"

Kish opted to take two flat rocks and a stick, and roll three glowing embers onto one rock, covering it with the other. No one sleeping along the walls moved or noticed; he was free to stand, drape his blanket fur over his shoulders (making sure the edges did not drag on the ground and make a noise), and pad noiselessly on bare feet away from the fire.

To her, the dark-eyed one, who pleaded for fire. "Donai," she called it. He named her in the moonlight, "Ka-be-Donai" -- "Who Pleads For Donai."

He backtracked his own steps under the shine of the moon, glad that snow had stayed in the sky for so long

and not dropped to the ground to make his trail visible.

And from "Sidelong:"

Melody had to learn that however great her changes in her life had been, they didn't give her the right to quarrel with her company. And the Life That Guides the World knows that there are times in one's life when no amount of explanation is ever going to be enough. You could be the greatest orator on the crust of the world, but if you've somehow managed to fall afoul of your colleagues, you might as well just write the whole thing off and take your show on the road; either that or grow an alligator's hide and settle in to outlive them, hoping they don't have a penchant for reptile handbags.

Exercise!

2009-01-15T18:03:00.000-08:00

Seeing this picture on the cover of Via, I was, as always, entranced by the combination of purple and orange.

I decided that today's project would be to play with the image in Photoshop.

With the magazine in front of me, I drew the lines of the elements of the picture with my mouse. (When economic times get better, I've GOT to get one of those pen styluses instead of trying to use the talent of my right hand with a mouse, which my right hand almost never uses any more. It's like trying to draw an eyelash with a brick.)

I scanned the cover photo so that I could try to see what the colors actually are. Photoshop did not agree with me about what colors were present, but I pressed on.

After an hour and a half or so, I saved the file and made lunch. After lunch I pressed on, getting some good reddish colors and textures on the near hill. A half hour later, the power went out, and erased everything I'd done since lasagna casserole. I didn't even swear; I should have known better; I do know better than to not save every couple minutes. Dammit.

I liked the sky in the finished product, but as usual, was far from satisfied with it.

After the power outage, I must confess, I was deeply annoyed and quit probably before I should have.

And since I was lazy enough to work in only two layers, it came out better than it might have.

Idle Hands

2009-01-15T17:53:00.000-08:00

On Wednesdays, I take my granddaughter to her religion class, and while she does whatever religious studies first grade kids do, I have an hour to keep myself occupied.

This time I grabbed my sketch book, and once her class had begun, I decided to set a task -- to sketch 10 hands, just for practice, because I don't practice any where nearly as much as I should.

I tried to imagine basic shapes upon which to build and model a hand. And because I'm so damn timid about this sort of thing, I left the pencil alone and used a pen.

By the time I had scribbled the ninth hand, it was time to pick Lil up at her classroom.

However, I do include a stick figure carrying a shopping bag, and the foot, which started bare, grew a sock, and ended up with its toes on backwards.

And one too few of them, I might add.

Catching Up and Catching Disease

2009-01-10T09:51:00.001-08:00

This is the illustration I did for Tyler Willson's story "Mercenary."

That would have been on December 29th, and that was the last time I was able to keep to my Resolution.

New Year's seemed to take so much out of me in preparations ... I wondered about that, but didn't realize at the time that I was coming down with a bad cold. I was a little hoarse on the 4th, but then with a loud cartoon Kapowee! I was out for the count.

So I'm way behind on Resolution projects. Most of what I've done since then is sit still and wait for enough of the illness to pass so that I could sleep.

Last night, amid grotesque nightmares and anxieties, coughing fits and wheezes, I was able to doze for an hour at a time. One lovely nap lasted an hour and 15 minutes!

I'll be back to posting here again soon, I hope.

The Parlor

2008-12-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

This was a cover image to accompany Dan Mulhollen's story "The Man in the Front Parlor".

I had seen some interesting pictures in the Smithsonian Flickr gallery, (with no copyright) and thought that a crop from one of them might do.

After cropping to get the corner of the room I wanted, I added a layer in Photoshop for "painting" the black and white image.

Then, after merging the layers, I ran it through the Paint Daubs filter just to take the rough edges off.

That was yesterday. There has to be something cool to do today.

Variations on a Theme

2008-12-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

Lillian did a painting, in tempera paints, and then promptly forgot about it, and left it lying somewhere.

I took it and cleaned up the edges with scissors, not completely at ease with her choice of colors. Still, she is bold, and I am not, so I decided to use colors as close to her palette as I could and toss strokes onto a page, using her painting as a model.

It was fun to do, and while we had the really cold snap when I couldn't be out in the studio, I was pining for it.

When I was done, Lillian happened to come out to the garage studio to see what was going on, so I showed her my pastel, explaining that I was looking at her work while I did it.

She patiently explained to me that she had left white paper showing on hers, and that the color in the lower half had been mixed to make a kind of peach color. She wasn't exactly critical, but she knew it wasn't a replica.

"It's called variations on a theme," I told her. "Similar, but not the same."

She was good with that, and so am I.

Sunset in Winter

2008-12-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

That's what the sky looked like when I was leaving the parking lot of the church last night.

As I've said before, I love the gradient colors of sunrise and sunset. Last night the temperature was dropping rapidly in the chilling clear air. While I waited in line to get to the exit, I marvelled at the bright orange at the horizon.

The shadow of the orchard to the west of the parking lot was completely dark. Such simple colors, but so beautiful.

Writing again

2008-12-17T21:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was working on an abstract pastel, but it was too cold to open the garage door for adequate lighting for a photograph. Maybe tomorrow.

Today my bit was a story in Word, who knows if it will actually go anywhere.

""Do we have common ground any more?" the troll said, in a rumbly low voice that was pitched not to wake Melody.

"Well, let's see. Beer?" I looked at Margot.

She nodded.

"Fine dining? Bathhouses? Okay, that's three. Travel afoot? Four. Getting into trouble and knocking the shit out of miscreants? Five. Oh, and let's see, involvements that happen to exclude the other members of the company, would that be six? Or do I have to mention that empath you ruffled when we passed through my clan lands the last time?"

Well, that's part of it, anyway.

Creative effort.

Sick of Damn Stalin

2008-12-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

The last few days I have been looking at pictures of Stalin.

I have no interest in Josef Stalin beyond learning enough about him that I don't want to grow up to be like him, but he was the central character in Barry Udoff's cover story "Why Stalin Slept" -- and so ...

I started by Googling "Stalin" images. Nothing I found was in the public domain, and the Smithsonian's and Library of Congress's Flickr sites had yer basic nothing.

So I thought I would just draw him, from some photo.

Guess again. What I was seeing, I was not able to make come across on paper. Pictures of Stalin ooze suspicion and arrogance, and I was unable to capture it.

Not only was I not able to capture the "spirit" of the photographs, I also could not seem to make them silly enough.

This one I started in pencil, switched to ballpoint pen, then to a flexible-tip marker for the boldness. No go, doesn't look like Stalin, and even had I greened in the face goo, it would not have looked particularly funny.

That it doesn't look like him is strange, because I blew up a photo of him in Photoshop, dragged my light table out of the closet and installed it in my new studio (which I have been meaning to do for months) and actually traced the dictator's face.

In aggravation, I turned again to a search for public domain photos, and found some on Wikipedia, a site I don't trust at all, but does come up with public domain pictures, damn them for being useful.

Once again I downloaded the photo, printed it out after re-sizing it in Photoshop, and set to with the light table.

I gave it up as soon as the pencil sketch was done, and came back inside (shedding fingerless mitts and heavy duty sweats) and frantically resumed my search for public domain pics that might serve.

I found one, finally, and after yet another learning experience with Photoshop, was able to cobble up Stalin in a turban and green facial.

Then I was ready to leave the too-hot kitchen and slink back out to my chilly studio, and finish inking the second sketch, just because I should.

Doesn't look like Stalin. Lacks movement. Sucks. Still, I did it in ballpoint, and still like the way a ballpoint pen handles.

Nevertheless, I'm weary of Stalin (for the moment) and think I'll draw some ... I dunno. Flamingos. Raccoons. Old nude women who still think they're hott. Something. Just not Stalin.

Dink the Crude

2008-12-12T18:25:00.000-08:00

This is my first attempt at doing a portrait of Dink in Photoshop.

I can see after the fact that I should have limited the palette of colors more, and where I made mistakes in how I sequenced layers, but it's not too bad for a first crack. I like the speckles, and the tail. And the mane. The mane worked out really well, using a "grass" brush on a separate layer, and then rotating it with "Transform" and using the "Move" tool to put it in place.

I wrote a little bit last night, some 200 words on a new fiction story, just trying an idea on for size.

Tonight I still have ashes to clear from the woodstove firebox, and kindling to arrange -- tomorrow is an "Okay To Burn" day, and I can't wait for the steady, healing heat of the woodstove instead of the ineffective puffing of the gas furnace.

Another day, another little creative effort.

No Picture of the Pictures

2008-12-11T17:14:00.000-08:00

Today's studio project was to complete Step Three of my archiving of the 1972 cartoon "The Biting Poltergeist."

I've forgotten to blog about Step One and Step Two, so I guess I should do that here, too.

"The Biting Poltergeist" was drawn on several large pages of newsprint paper, back in 1972. One of my favorite mediums was blue Bic ballpoint pen. They tended to leak a little with overuse; I liked the sometimes globby result. I would sketch in pencil, ink the sketch, and then erase out the pencil lines. The newsprint pad had a roughish surface that took the ink like a dream.

The history behind the cartoon can be found at my other blog, this is more for the work I'm doing currently.

Step One, which just about gave me the hives, was to cut each individual frame out of the sheet of paper (each sheet was 24" x 30", I believe) with a utility knife. The paper is so fragile that it's disintegrating in spots. Newsprint may have taken the ink, but there's nothing permanent about it. One wrong twitch and an old cartoon could bite the dust.

Step Two was to cut up the empty pages of the newsprint pad into 8 1/2" x 11" rectangles. The plan was to affix the frames to similar newsprint, and then scan them before putting them into archival plastic sleeves, never to be touched again. That took the better part of an afternoon, plying the utility knife again as well as my reasonably good quality paper cutter.

Step Three was today, carefully using rubber cement to anchor the cartoons onto their individual old newsprint sheets. (I'd tested the rubber cement on some scraps a few days ago to make sure it wouldn't discolor the old paper. Looked fine!)

The studio is covered with drying paper sheets, and it was COLD out there, as I had the front garage door open so that Lil and her friend could play while I worked. 45 degrees is not all that bad, oddly enough, but by the time I was done pasting and numbering the 33 frames, I was ready to call it a night and come inside to find some supper and let my kneecaps warm up.

Step Four will be to scan each page into my computer; Five will be long and arduous, Photoshopping out the flaws in the paper. Six will be a modernization of the dialogue bubbles, and Seven will be uploading them to the Press so that they all have a copyright on them.

"Nightfall"

2008-12-10T19:02:00.000-08:00

There is an hour or so each week when I am nailed to a seat and forced to occupy my mind.

I take my granddaughter to her religion class every Wednesday after school; while she drives some volunteer teacher batty, I sit in the car and wait, with my laptop and/or drawing pads and/or notebook.

There are no dishes to jump up and wash, no Press work to be done without an internet connection; the church grounds are out in the country, so aside from the graveyard, there is no place to take a walk, and it's too dark at that time of day (and cold) anyway.

So in these dim days of December, the laptop is the toy of choice. I installed Photoshop on my laptop, but had never used it until today.

This simple composition was my laptop's maiden effort with Photoshop.

I've always been fond of sundown/sunrise pictures ... and dark-colored pictures. This one was fun to play with -- and I think that the "play" part of it was the most valuable result. I know I don't "play" enough with my talents; maybe one day I'll rediscover how to do that ... and then find myself at the Pearly Gates, asking, "Do we get computers with Photoshop on them?"

A Graphic

2008-12-10T18:56:00.000-08:00

I'm getting a little lazy about the "every day" thing, it seems.

Sunday I watched football and that was about it; Monday I did this simple graphic for the cover image accompanying "Rat in the Attic."

Tuesday I seemed to have no time to spare before Staff Meeting, and after that, was too tired to do anything but read.

Bitty Things

2008-12-06T16:52:00.000-08:00

Last night I finished "Rat in the Attic."

I've been working on it a little at a time, trying to take a more measured approach than my usual shotgun technique of just hammering words out and gleaning them later. I think I might want to add one more sentence to the first few paragraphs ... but maybe not. In spite of trying to keep it brief, I ended up with nearly 2500 words. I'm pretty sure, however, that I'll revisit the characters in the future.

So I've written a little every day, except for Sunday and Monday, when I made 6 pumpkin pies. I made the shells Sunday, and filled them Monday. I also did a quick rat sketch from a picture I found online, to try to get a sense of what a rat looks like, for the eventual re-depiction of Jimmy the Rat.

Also last night I did a quick sketch on a large sheet of paper of a tall jar. It was just for the limbering of fingers, not for any real work. Still, it was something new.

Tomorrow it goes into the recycle bag.

Rattiness

2008-11-28T15:07:00.001-08:00

Last night I worked on a short story I've been kicking around called "Rat in the Attic."

I was exhausted after making Thanksgiving dinner (which Bernie and I have decided that overall was THE best feast we've ever done in 33 years of married life), but I wanted to do a little something of writing. 400 words got me to a point in the tale where I have to stop and think about how I want it to move.

This afternoon I had another look at it and was pleased enough with how it played. However, I did make a mental note at my penchant for rat jokes. I honestly don't know how that got started. But it gave me "The Ballad of Jimmy the Rat" and "Fever Dreams 107."

It's sad that the original graphics for "Jimmy the Rat" were lost. I guess that just will have to be another two creative efforts in the near future, making new ones.

Catching Up

2008-11-26T18:28:00.000-08:00

This blue composition was the cover image for Pavelle Wesser's story, "Divine Destiny."

I knew Lydia Manx had some water pictures in her gallery, so I (she lets me play with her toys, really) pulled a segment and leached out all the color, messed with the contrast, inverted it, and then put some color back in. And then filtered it with "Paint Daubs." Creepy, wet and surreal -- that's what I was aiming for.

I really have been creating something every day. During NaNoWriMo, my goal is to write 2000 words every day, thereby finishing up on the 25th, which I did.

Gratefully.

In past years, and indeed, over the course of the past year and some, I have written some dreck. Some dull, I'm sure, and some maudlin and hokey. But I don't mind writing dreck if I enjoy the dreck.

This 2008 NaNovel was sort of dreck. I think that it could, if tended to and coddled and paced and researched, be a readable tale... but I absolutely hated writing it. The characters were all kind of stupid to begin with, and I had little respect for them, and no time to find a way to respect them. I wanted them to be funny, but they weren't. They were desperate, and what scenes were supposed to be amusing sounded more like whistling in the dark.

Most of what I wrote relied on uninteresting word fill, until I was within whacking distance of the 50k word goal, and then I just skipped the damn tortuous story and wrote the end. The main character made a counter-cultural choice that will probably mess up the rest of her life, and the secondaries were either unaccounted for or did things they will regret. Good riddance to them all.

The previous Monday, I did this cover image for Tyler Willson's story, "The Prisoner."

Using a photograph I took, I deleted the original sky, amped up the contrasts, drenched the landscape with redness, did a sketch filter, put in a gradient for the sky, and put some bars on it.

Yeah. I like red.

Cover Image

2008-11-10T15:28:00.001-08:00

I trust this image won't be so difficult to blog as the previous three. Jeeze.

This one was a modification of a public domain image. In the original picture, the woman's head was really amorphous. It was only after repeated filterings that it became apparent that there might be something on her head.

We'll call that something an emerging deformed brain, okay?

Calaca Cover

2008-11-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

I was working on a cover for the Press, for a story called "Boss."

It being the Press' November theme, Mes de los Muertos, I chose to make the cover image a calaca, a skeleton mimicking a real person.

Using black construction paper, I began

construction with a light blue pastel pencil, then added some interesting colors. Naples yellow, a purple, a dark blue.

The picture was too dull.

I added a bold bright blue, a cerise, an orange, a neon green, but though it was closer to what I had seen in my mind's eye, it was not enough.

Hovering above the sketch on a footstool with my digital camera, I became well aware once again that light applied to black paper produces a shitty result. So I took what I had and transferred the picture to my computer, and opened the file in Photoshop.

I selected the background black, and washed over that with real black. Using the "Magic Wand" tool, I got the rest of the blacks and made them real black.

Then I selected "Adjustments" and "Saturation" and amped up the colors. Yeah. That was what I was looking for, and in the end, got the image I was trying to achieve.

P. S. I have to say that whatever it is that Google is doing with their settings is really total suckation. It used to be so easy to upload multiple pictures, and now it's a major pain in the butt. this post looks little like what I tried to upload.

NaNoWriMo Again!

2008-11-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

It's November 1st, and I have already ticked out my day's quota of words.

I like to get a minimum of 2000 words per day; it gives me some playing room. This morning I went cheerfully out to the garage-studio with my laptop, opened the door to the stormy-looking sky, and typed a first chapter of 2033 words.

The story is called Going Hungry, and was initially intended to be a farsical attack on the culinary capabilities of a cook I once knew, whose cooking was really AWFUL but whose employers kept saying was unbelievably good. However, as I started thinking about the main character, who will be the cook's assistant, she began to change before my very [inner] eye.

As the book progresses, Gloria is going to have to learn how to appear humble at work in the kitchen, but at home be the head and the goad of the household. The family is wiped out financially, and the rest of the family are ready to just give up.

Ultimately Gloria will have to come to terms not only with her willingness to do whatever she has to do to survive, but also with what others can and will do. Going hungry isn't always about the stomach.

Here's an excerpt:

In the kitchen, her mother was pouring vodka over ice cubes in a highball glass. Gloria frowned as the woman splashed a little Seven-Up over the liquor to fill the glass, then raised it and swallowed down about half of it. The boys weren't home, for which Gloria was grateful. Seeing their mother swilling booze like this would not be right. When the liquid was gone, her mother tipped the Smirnoff's bottle again, nearly filling the glass. Again she poured a little Seven-Up to flavor it.

Halfway through the second glass, she looked up at the clock. "Ben and Will said they'd be home around seven," she croaked, her voice rough and loud, resonating in her swollen sinuses. "You're going to have to make dinner for them -- I don't want them to see me like this." She topped off her glass again with vodka, not bothering with the soda.

"Mom, you shouldn't be ... "

"Leave it alone, Gloria. It's not like I'm some drunk. I thought we were going to be all right, but I just found out I was wrong. Really, really wrong. Don't you understand? I'm losing my job. We're going to lose the house. We don't even have enough to pay for a damn apartment, so let me have some kind of anesthetic for one night, okay?"

"What? What are you talking about? I thought we were doing all right -- didn't Dad -- I mean, he said to me last spring that we were -- that -- 'everything's coming up roses' for us now ... "

"Sit down," her mother said. "I hate to have to do this, but I don't think I have a choice." The liquor had relaxed the bunched muscles of her face, and soothed her voice a little. She hadn't begun to slur, though Gloria suspected that was going to occur shortly.

"I thought we had life insurance on the mortgage," she said. "Your Dad signed up for it when we bought the house, so that if anything happened to him, the house would be paid off. And then there was his own insurance policy -- he cashed the old one in when we bought this place so we had money to remodel it, but he took out another one, so I thought we were okay, at least for a few years."

"But what, now?" Gloria felt her hands begin to sweat.

"He stopped paying the premiums in March. The policies were cancelled. I found out when I got home from work. Good thing they let us leave early because of the bad news about the layoffs, huh?"

"Oh, shit, Mom, why?"

"I have no idea. We always divvied up the bill paying. I took care of the groceries, clothes, and the utilities, and he always took care of the rent and car payments and credit cards. Well, we got nothing now. Even if I kept my job at the drug store, it wouldn't be enough to get by, not by a long shot." She rubbed her eyes with one hand, keeping the other on the sweating glass of ice and vodka.

"No savings?"

"A little, but not much. The funeral ate up most of what was there. We've got enough for another month's mortgage payment, and that's it. I'm so sorry, honey."

Gloria was young enough that the words had almost no meaning for her. Her father had had a pretty good job; the family wanted for nothing. Their toys, their appliances, their computers were all top of the line. It was only about four years ago that they'd bought this house, but Gloria had always assumed that they rented houses in the various neighborhoods they'd lived in so that they could save up enough for a down payment. She could not remember any time in her life that the family scrimped on anything; her mother often told people that she took a job in the drug store for something to do while the kids were in school.

Cars were on the list of things that were top of the line, too. Well, not top like a Cadillac or a Jaguar, but always new. Her dad was of the opinion that if you held onto a car more than three years, the maintenance offset the trade in value of the car. Every year for as long as Gloria could remember, the salesman at the dealership sent her father a birthday card and a Christmas card. When she and Will had finished high school, new cars had been waiting for them at the curb when they got back from the graduation ceremony.

"But Dad made good money, didn't he? There has to be some kind of savings account -- maybe with his company?"

Her mother shook her head, gulped another big swallow of the drink. "No, honey, there wasn't." She sighed. "Your dad used to say, 'Smoke 'em if you got 'em," and he meant to live life as fine as he could for as long as he could. He just didn't think he could die."

Where did the week go?

2008-11-01T15:59:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't been a complete slacker this past week. I just don't know where the time went.

On Saturday, I wrote a crappy short poem. Sunday was football and potsticker day, a weekly adventure that is adding tightness to the waistband of my jeans.

Monday I did this pen and Photoshop cover image.

One day I made a stellar batch of lima bean potpie (possibly my favorite food of all time), another a pork tip dinner, another a huge batch of macaroni salad for Bernie to take to a company pot luck, where it was eaten up completely.

I started a new pastel pencils sketch one of those days, and on another, rather thoroughly cleaned my new workspace and turned it into a real-looking studio, complete with swept and vacuumed floor, a clean chair for visitors, and all the piles of garage junk thrown out, sorted, and put away. (Now I like it better than the rest of the house.)

A couple evenings I wrote a little, but not a lot.

But it feels uncomfortable, not having posted here all week.

A White Sketch

2008-10-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

This morning, I was thumbing through a National Geographic and saw an ad that had a picture of a polar bear.

The Bogus unbleached drawing pad seemed to lend itself to attempting a sketch (it always does, but it also almost always disappoints me -- not enough "tooth" or roughness) so off I went with a very limited palette: white, cobalt blue, light gray, dark turquoise, cool dark brown, and a touch of black.

I started out with pastel pencils, which are fairly hard, and then shifted to soft pastels for the blue. For the first time, I used a foam make-up wedge to smooth the colors of the background... and hated the result.

Switching back to the pencils, I intensified the color of the foreground and background with crosshatching and no smoothing, and I liked the result much better. Hours later, i can see where I could have added a touch more blue on the bear's fur.

And this is the other day's work, with a little bit of mistiness added.

The above mentioned foam makeup triangles did well for adding a touch of mist.

So many of these sketches are less than stellar, but I'm having a good time playing with them.

Two Days' Effort

2008-10-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

Last Christmas, Bernie gifted me with Astrobrights cardstock -- neon pink, bright yellow, orange, red, and green.

I used a couple sheets for greeting cards, but was fairly stumped as to how to use the rest. However, Lillian the Covetous and Color-Craving began begging me for sheets. I decided to emulate her, and so dragged some vividly colored sheets out to the new studio to play with.

There's the mess I was fiddling with Tuesday, and today, Thursday (23 October).

By no means is it done. But I wanted to take a picture of it to show what it looked like before I ruin it trying to finish it tomorrow.

Also, I have to add that working on eye-searing paper ... uh, duh, sears my eyeballs.

We'll hand in a final decision when the thing is done.

O The Embarrassment

2008-10-22T18:53:00.001-07:00

I've been working on a new pastel, and the preliminary sketch for next week's Press cover, and furiously made three pages of notes for my upcoming NaNovel, but the completed item today was more crappy poetry. It's about creative efforts ... kind of.

Remember, it's supposed to be crappy.

A fat frog in a blender --
Not an image you should render
Even if you have been on a three-week bender.
It's sure to make someone puke.
"A cook who's being petty
Will put pigs' feet on spaghetti
And instead of apple, make Broccoli Brown Betty,
Daring diners to rebuke.

"You should not sew a ruffle
On a khaki Army duffle
It will make soldiers weep and stomp off in a huffle,
And the nation then would fall.

"But if you are going to write
And bring 50 thou words to light
Just pound out those flagrant phrases, pound with all your might.
It's November, after all.

An Abstract

2008-10-20T18:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, this was actually last Monday's creative effort, but the upload of the picture didn't work right for some reason.

I started this with an image from the Smithsonian's Flickr stuff, found the angles cool, and proceeded to add color to it, with a limited palette.

It's a palette selection that pleases me, as you can see from the autumn hues that I chose for the other work above.

Learning Patience

2008-10-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

This was today's effort.

It's a practice piece; an art book I bought called Drawing: A Complete Course by Jenny Rodwell has this as a study of shapes in charcoal and chalk, to be done on gray paper, so as to automatically do medium tones.

I have no gray paper, but I do have a brown coarse paper, and since I didn't have artist chalk or vine charcoal sticks, I used soft pastels in dark brown and white. And a Q-tip for shading, since I no longer have a supply of tortillons.

When I copied the proposed grouping (starting with a pastel pencil in naples yellow), the centering and balance were off, so I added another shape on the left.

The best part of this exercise was doing it in my new work area in the garage. My old work table has been elevated to a standing work station, with a tall drafting stool when I want to sit. I opened the garage door for a beautiful morning light, and loved having a wide open work area again after a year of trying to use this all-too-cluttered desk.

Yes, that was the best part. By the time I was nearly done I was tired of brown and white, and irritated with the explanation in the text and the mistakes in the lighting of the example.

However, it did warm me back up on some fundamentals, and I had the very pleasant experience of having Bernie come out to sit and have coffee with me while I worked. I'm besotted with the work area, the more so since Bernie decided I needed better light in there and went out and bought a new ceiling fixture.

I should probably do about fifty million of this kind of practice, but I know I won't.

A Familiar-Looking Baboon

2008-10-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

Looking through a National Geographic magazine, I spotted a baboon in the background of an ad, and decided to make that my first sketch in a new notebook.

Reminds me of Narsai. It's not the greatest sketch in the world, but I did clean most of the common areas of the house today, do laundry, and assemble my lovely, lovely new studio drafting stool, as well as tear apart my natural-light floor lamp and re-assemble it as a table lamp.

This is the first sketch I did out there in the new studio area.

Graphite pencil. 9B, as soft as you get without resorting to vine charcoal.

Thursday the 16th of October

2008-10-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's nothing great.

But I wanted to write some crappy free verse stuff for a thread (link later) in a forum. And here it is:

i was conversing with tejon just the other day
and he said that he thought my penchant
for crappy poetry would be my downfall
i told him that a downfall would at least
be some sort of movement
be it right direction or not
aser he replied you have no direction at all
you're right I told him and that is why no matter which way
i move i can count it as progress

your progress is another woman s landfill he told me
but i reminded him
that there are a lot of gullies to fill up
in west virginia

he was annoyed but could not refute me

the best he could come up with was
but maybe they like having gullies

fine i conceded
i ll send my stuff to shore up the levees
in new orleans

he laughed and gave me the address for homeland security
and the mayor s office in that beleaguered city

I love Don Marquis "Archy and Mehitabel" stuff, and have tried to emulate it since I discovered it 42 years ago. I should do more of it since I enjoy it so much.

Also, I flagrantly bought yet another drawing pad, this one spiral bound, named "Sketch Journal". I hope to begin using it tomorrow, and in addition to whatever writing I do, have a bit of sketch every day.

Fish for Fun

2008-10-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

I completely missed yesterday, probably due to Staff Meeting ... and because I was just a slug in the hours of the early day, and the only thing I did was pet the dog, post on the NaNoWriMo Forum, and make lamb steaks with mashed potatoes, gravy, and sweet corn.

But today, even though I was tired from dunging out my horse's paddock and riding through the orchards in the dusty harvesting, I did make time to sit down and draw a fish sculpture, and then put color, shadow, and pattern on it in Photoshop.

It was fun. Pointless, but fun.

Monday: Hold Your Nose!

2008-10-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

On the forums of NaNoWriMo, there is a section near the bottom called Off-Topic.

Within the Off-Topic forum there is a thread called "Did someone say, 'Urinal cakes?'" Don't worry ... it's a years-long story. (Six? Can it really be a sixth year of urinal cake jokes?) Yesterday I spent much of my idle mind time creating poetry. But not just any poetry -- this poem had to be truly stupid and crappy, designed to make people groan with loathing. Pointless, bad poetry.

Mmm. I think I succeeded. I can hardly bear to look at it myself.

"They flew through the air
with the greatest of ease
powered by a hand-dryer pair
above Badger's fleas

"More powerful than a hovercraft
Faster than an elephant on the moon
Cooler than Huck Finn's river raft
Admired by Alice the Goon

"Aliens and giant squids tried
To catch them, always asking why
They traveled that way. But they only cried,
"It's the only way to fly!"

I'll try to work on something a little less repellent today.

Saturday's Bit

2008-10-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

I tend to be more representational in my art; abstracts are hard.

Or maybe I wasn't really allowed to scribble as a kid, and so stifled my inner abstractivity. In any event, when I found myself using a funky brush in Photoshop, and it felt good, I just went with it. I'd picked out the colors a few days before to go with Mel Trent's story (coming up this next week) called "Cooties: A Love Story." (Link later)

That was Saturday, October 11. Sunday I took off to cuddle with my husband all day long.

A Grouping For Color

2008-10-10T17:37:00.001-07:00

I was looking at the peppers and apples dumped haphazardly on the counter today (I don't eat apples or peppers, so don't blame me) when I was mesmerized by the shading of colors on the peppers, so dark, from green to red and red to green.

I think I would like to try to paint or draw this; but for today, the arrangement and its subsequent treatment in Photoshop will have to suffice for a visual on creativity.

Besides, I made five dozen oatmeal-raisin cookies from the family recipe this morning.

Another Effort, and Learning

2008-10-09T19:05:00.000-07:00

I wasn't happy with the scorched ear as the cover image for next week's Press. (Link when it gets there).

I had a different idea today, and went along well with it until I got to the background graphic in Photoshop. Asking Alex for guidance, I ended up learning far more than I had wanted to know, but in the end, we came up with a graphic that was agreeable to me.

At least ... it makes me snicker.

Today's Effort

2008-10-08T18:35:00.000-07:00

On Task

There is no task but this;
No Time, no Earth, no nation.
No Lover here to kiss,
Just me for the duration.

Well, not just me, but this:
Attention, work, and purpose.
No company I miss,
No thoughts of 'rich' or 'famous.'

A kind of Heaven, here,
Distractions far from dragging
My mind to any fear
My spirit any lagging.

Step by step, stroke by stroke,
I build a bridge to Progress;
My job is not a joke --
The worth is in the process.

For I know what to do
And yes, who else would do it?
And who else would want to?
Nobody likes to edit.

Let me just say here, after 20 minutes trying to get this post to come out the way I wanted to without having to flick back and forth retyping it, that Google is a fuck up when it comes to interacting with "Word". There was no way I could compose in Word and copy and paste to this blog, and that is just plain old shit. It used to work. It doesn't work now. Therefore, I must assume that the change is for spite, and now I am on my guard about Google. Corporate hostilities are a given in this world, but I'm really sick and tired of us consumers being screwed over every time big guns feel a need to take aim at each other. It doesn't matter whether it's the US and Iraq or Google and Microsoft.

Assholes.

Writing Again

2008-10-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

Here's an excerpt from what I wrote this evening

He was glad of that, as he was tired of crying from the horror of finding Debbie's body, her coldness and stillness and stench in their bed. She had to have done it right after he left for work, a night shift at WalMart. The shift differential gave them some extra dollars, but she hated that he worked nights while she worked days, cutting into their play-times together, sex and recreational sips and smokes.

It's not great art, but I worked most of the day today on the Press, and just let go with some words for this evening. It's hacky, but no worse than some of the crap I see on the supermarket shelves.

Burnt Ear

2008-10-06T17:33:00.000-07:00

So Friday I made macaroni salad, enough to feed16 people a nice portion. Cheryl assures me that such an effort counts for creative work.

So then, must the barbecue sauce I made on Saturday to go with 15 pounds of ribs. Although I wrote the recipe down for the Piker Press, I made three batches of the sauce without looking at the recipe.

Sunday I rested from the onslaught of guests, who must have enjoyed themselves because they didn't hurry off after the meal was done.

Today I played around with an image of an assaulted ear, in Photoshop. I don't know if I'll use it for a cover image or not, but it was an interesting effort.

That's what the resolution is all about.

Poetry

2008-10-02T18:41:00.000-07:00

A surprise visit from an old friend prompted me to write a bit of poetry. This is a good thing, because I was too tired to try to tackle writing fiction or artwork.

...Young

On my doorstep
So different
After so many years
Than when we were...

A split second of confusion
Then exclamations at meeting again
Since when we were...

Your hair longer
Mine much grayer
You and I changed our shapes
From when we were...

Both of us have changed our careers
Peace is ascendant, unlike memories
Of when we were...

Much wiser now
Much calmer now
No foolishness afoot
As when we were...

We take stock of each others' lives
We promise to stay in touch, as close as
How when we were...

We say goodbye
Remembering
Our wild gusts of laughter
Oh! When we were...

Your smile is just as beautiful
As when we clinked our glasses together
Back when we were...

I don't know if the poem is done yet or not. It was a creative effort for the day, however, and I'll look at it again in a few days, decide whether or not to continue working on it, or possibly forget I ever wrote it.

Bwah-ha-ha!

2008-10-01T16:45:00.000-07:00

When we recently had a new fence put in, a pipe broke beside the house; this pipe carried water to my back yard sprinkler system.

It wasn't a problem to fix; pipes aren't buried very deeply. Howie, my faithful dog, and I dug out and exposed the problem area of the pipe; then Bernie put his manly muscles into the job and shoveled out a spacious area so that fixing it wouldn't be awkward.

Indeed, it wasn't awkward: one trip to the hardware store for fittings and fresh pipe plus five minutes of labor and voila! Happy dry pipe!

We turned on the sprinklers and yes, the repair worked just fine. However, the sprinklers in the garden did not. Following along the line of the irrigation line, not only were there clogs of dirt, but the 1/2 inch tubing had been pretty well chewed up by the digging and fencing.

Now when I first ran this irrigation line, ten years or so ago, I had a completely different landscape in mind. Over the years, as plants were moved, removed, or added, I just modified the emitters, adding bits and pieces here and there. Looking at the line to see where it needed fixed, I realized I had no idea what on earth I had been thinking long ago, and just decided to rip it all out and start over.

That's what I did today. 100 feet of irrigation hose and emitters for each major piece of shrubbery. It is so efficient compared to the mess that was there, it almost makes me laugh. Testing the system was a moment of delight: my project works, and works well.

So I did create something today!

Back To Resolution

2008-10-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

Some months ago I deleted this blog, as the creative effort of my resolve settled down into simply parking myself in a comfy chair with my laptop and writing, writing, writing... and my posts were very boring. "I wrote another 500/1100/43 words this evening/last night/this afternoon."

Not very interesting, especially when I wasn't about to share what I was writing -- some of it was too personal, some of it was too saccharine, and some of it just plain stupid. But it was therapeutic, as I worked through my grief over my sister's death, and therefore of value to me.

Some 200,000 words later, I've stopped writing every day; a tangled partial novel sits on my desk in a box (the other two are still in files on the computer) waiting for me to edit the tangles out of it so that I can go on and finish it. Eventually it will appear as a serial fiction piece in The Piker Press.

The idea of editing just puts a huge block on my creativity, and so, for the past couple weeks, the most creative stuff to come out have been the cover images for the Press. I'll post my most recent favorite here.

The picture was done first in plain old pencil; when I decided on the lines I switched to a super-soft 9B solid graphite pencil, which goes on paper almost like ink.

Then I scanned it into Photoshop for color.

It accompanies Mel Trent's story "End of the Line" from her book The Immortal Guns of Talon Constantine.

Many thanks to Wendy Robards for mentioning this blog in hers.