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.

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.

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.

Poppies sketch

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.

Luggage

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:

After Years

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?

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? "

The Obvious Slacker

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.

No Picture of the Pictures

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.

A White Sketch

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.