Abyss Tract

This is the other scrap of paper I was trying to use up. 

The Last Nerve

Part of a quick-n-dirty project to get rid of these two scraps of watercolor paper I'd made backgrounds on but never found any projects for. 

When They Fold Space HD

..::UNTITLED::..

Not exactly what I wanted to work on, but maybe what I needed to work on right now. I may revisit this as a practical item, with the red done as liquids in a clear tank like I did for White Cloud. In fact, I got the idea from an article about Jaws 3, referencing how surreal the poor matte work makes the floating fish head in the beginning. I'd remembered seeing that opening years ago, but didn't realize how flawed the effect was.

BaRoW Card 28 & 29

The Sword Card.

The Jewelry Card. 

BaRoW Card 11

BaRoW Card 9

BaRoW Card 8

BaRoW Card 6

BaRoW Card 4

BaRoW Card 1

Rubeno Florajoj

I posted this to my aunt’s Facebook timeline. She can’t see it right now while she’s in the hospital (not to mention heavy sedation following the surgery for her stroke, which was while recovering from a previous surgery for removing a tumor), but she said she really liked my red and black ink pieces. I happen to like them, too. They’re a kind of comfort zone for me. 

Initially, there was green for the grass, and I tried a texturing technique involving marking up my fingertips and rolling them gently along the bottom to create leafy-looking streaks. It really didn’t turn out that well. These do look best when it’s only the red and black against stark white. There is a smaller trading-card sized version of this that does have green grass, and it looks okay there.

Seventeen

Finally got a rectangular hole punch. I'll still use the other one every now and again throughout the rest of this series, but this one simply feels right somehow, more authentic. 

Planarianes

Hadn't distressed paper with tea in some time, so I cut up my cheap watercolor paper again into tall strips. It has a nice texture to work with, and the wide landscape format carries its own special challenge. After applying the green tea and letting it sit for a bit, I got the idea to give it a reddish tint by really diluting the red ink I use and applying it as a thin layer, something that would give the impression of dried blood on parchment. It was also a nice change of pace to have a more earthly color palette instead of the normal stark whites and cool blues I tend to favor. 
I love sumi-e ink and wash paintings as well as traditional Asian calligraphy, both ideas I wanted to visit for this piece. 
This has also become a somewhat impromptu preview of a project I've had on the backburner for far too long. If you saw my "Magic Middle Finger" piece or my Elements Journal video, you saw part of it already. I worried about repeating myself, but these are thematically different enough that I didn't even want to give it a similar name. 

Snowfall

Got the idea for this from a Royksopp video. It was a fan-submitted rendition of their song "The Drug"  that used very simple, almost abstract neon shapes for rather fluid animations. One sequence showed a forest, conveying scale and distance using only parallax scrolling and basic perspective. The idea of a forest got me thinking about D2 for the Dreamcast. It had this really eerie opening cinematic of a man drudging through the snow, bloodstains accompanying his footprints. The red really stood out against the white... and then it turned green. I wanted something to convey that same unsettling feeling. May have honestly gone overboard on the blood. I'd forgotten how much ink my nylon brushes actually absorb ink and ended up overestimating. It's only problematic because while the texture of this watercolor paper (cheap stuff) works for the snow and trees, it doesn't quite work for the blood. Ah, well, it was an exercise to get me back to making art after a fairly slow period I'm still going through. June and October are almost always Hellish months for me for various reasons, and I've simply felt very bogged down and unmotivated to start anything planned or finish anything in the works. I can't let myself fall into that kind of spell, even if I've still been keeping up with my "notebook" quota of a page per day, even if it's a short list in Evernote or something.

Practice > Perfect

OR:
Vent-ish Art of Sorts
 
Fun fact before I drone on in a "woe-is-me" fashion: this was originally upside-down, the red veins meant to convey "branches and trunks" of sorts. When I looked at it again, after applying the horizontal lines, I realized they looked more like roots hanging over an underground river, so I flipped it around. Good thing I didn't sign it ;P 

It's been a rather rotten day, the sort where this is the best thing to come out of it, and it was merely practice before the main shoot. 
I'd planned to shoot three videos today. They weren't anything special, little more than, "Hey, look at these ridiculous things" plus a trailer for the ePub edition of The River of Blood going live on Smashwords, as well as possibly some reader stores like Kindle, Kobo, and Sony. However, the first ridiculous thing video this morning simply fell apart. I had one of those epiphanies best summed up as, "The Hell am I doing?" It didn't help that for all the talking points I had worked out, they didn't fit together as well as I thought once I started rolling. It's like those behind-the-scenes docs where the team is putting together a monster costume, making sketches, forming molds, shooting test footage in the lot with a camcorder, and it's all looking real good... then they get it on set and everyone realizes how utterly ROFLMAO stupid it looks. 
So, I figure, "Brush it off, I haven't made a video in a while." and write the whole thing off as practice. I decide to hold off on the second one, which is just showing off something funny about a notebook I bought (don't pretend there aren't worse things on YouTube with a thousand times the hits my whole channel gets), and double-down on the third, the trailer. It involved a lot of fairly complex editing of very tight shots of me painting the cover illustration (or rather, an approximate likeness thereof). In the meantime, it was a very frustrating day out with my roommate, whose recovery from abdominal surgery has her in a fair amount of pain; pain's she's somehow convinced (like far too many problems in her life) can be alleviated by whining about it endlessly whilst carrying on doing things to aggravate it. It didn't stop there, suffice it to say: Not a great day on that front. 
Managed to wind down after that, get a bit relaxed so I could work on the trailer video, making the practice image above to nail down a brush technique, which can be a bit hard to do with Sharpie brushes as they tend to dry out fairly easily mid-stroke. I've got some calligraphy markers from them that may fair a bit better if I make anything like this again, though the fading does have a nice effect in their own way (like my sumi-e pieces). The video frankly looked ridiculous, totally unfitting with the tone of the story, and I realized I was simply not in the mood to edit the damn thing. Like post for my drawings, editing for videos is the step I like to minimize as much as possible. If I were a Hollywood director, I'd be very much in the Kubrick vein of the long take. 
I may still resurrect the trailer later, possibly tomorrow, on the off-chance I wake up in better spirits. It's not likely, which is why I'm posting this here.

Pretty Gold Dress

This was an idea I had been toying with throughout the week. I may well revisit this one (truth is I could probably draw her forever), as I meant for the dress to be impossibly long and flowing. Instead, I misjudged the size of my canvas, and ended up bringing the "camera" in a lot closer than intended. Ah, well...

0-2-7: Variations on a Theme

While researching Marcel Duchamp for another project which may well be cancelled, I came upon his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even piece, and wanted something that would have a similar energy and starkness. Got a bit carried away, especially with the bottom of a cardboard box.