Done With This Slop

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

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

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

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

Simple Graphic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wet Paint

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

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

And then I forgot it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it did cover the erstwhile fish.

Experimenting with Color

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's good news!

Pastel Irritation

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

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

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

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

Cover for "Betrayal in an Envelope"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover for "Patient Zero"

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

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

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

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

Such is life.