B6F: Hatchling Call Pulp

Killoran and I were at the dollar store the other day, looking for a tea-infuser (in Canada, "dollar store" is apparently a pretty loose term as two-thirds of what I saw in there was $1.50, $2, $3, &c.) when I wandered into the office/school supply aisle and started looking over the paper. I spied this little 72-page booklet, saddle-stitched, with unlined pages and it struck my fancy. The paper is really thin and cheap, a sort-of newsprint-bond, but I liked it and said so to Killoran. She asked if I like cheap paper because I grew up poor. She's quite perspicacious, my girl.

To be clear, I didn't grow up in dire poverty or anything. In fact, for a couple years after my parents split-up my mother continued to spend money like she had it, which maintained some kind of illusion of middle-class standing -- but she didn't actually have any money, and eventually she filed for bankruptcy to escape debt collection. From the time I was about 10 to when I left home, the only household income came in the form of child support payments from dad and Supplemental Security Income which my mother collected after bouncing off the rear-end of a car. This is all extraneous information. The long and short of it is that while I always had clothes and food and a heated bedroom and a fairly steady supply of comic books (they were $.75 when I started reading 'em, and by the time I quit were still under $2), more extravagant purchases were sometimes a bit hard to come by. So, when I took-up the drawing habit, I'd just draw on what was around. I had a box of fan-fold paper that my dad had given me with my first printer (an Okidata μ92), and I remember drawing my first two comics on that stuff. When I'd visit my grandma Fern, she always had boxes of Hollerith cards around, and I'd draw on those. I got my first pad of Bristol when I was 17, and I remember never wanting to use it because it was expensive. I still get that way about paper; I'm always reluctant to do a drawing on illustration board when I think I can get away with doing it on bond. Paper's expensive!

As a result, it's kind-of a point of pride for me to be able to make/do things cheaply and with cheap supplies, to get good sound from a cheap guitar, to use old software, to use old/cheap computers, and so-on. One thing I've seen true in art school is that I can turn-in a much more professional-looking piece of work on crappy paper than some of my better-funded classmates can manage on much spendier stuff. Professionalism comes from how you use your materials, not the materials you use. I was quite pleased to have Kurt Hollomon reiterate this sentiment when I took his Word & Image course last spring.

Anyhoo, here's a tree study that graces the second page of my dollar-store exercise book. Less than two cents worth of paper, probably a couple cents worth of graphite from my pencil, and some time -- making something out of nearly nothing, it's like a conjuring trick. Killoran doesn't mince words, she says it's magic. In the absence of modesty I'm inclined to agree.

B4L: Of Dedication to Digital Doodling

     I tell you this, friends: I am a long-time lover of the monochrome bitmap (if we're being picky about the language, all bitmaps are monochrome -- anything with more than one bit per pixel is a pixmap, but that's neither here nor there). It feels sometimes like I have used just about every monochrome paint program of the last 30 years; on the 68000 Mac I've done MacPaint and Superpaint and this paint and that paint, on the Atari ST I've done Degas and PrismPaint and Pixart and Artis, on the PC I've done MS Paint and GEM Paint and a gaggle of others and through all this I've come to find that absolutely none of these work exactly like I want them to*.  So! Something I've wanted to do for a long time is write-up in whatever language was convenient a very simple monochrome paint program that did work exactly like I wanted it to. This past weekend, that's precisely what I started doing.

*     I'm happy to note, however, that in the area of indexed-colour paint programs I find great satisfaction in GraFX 2 which, after having been in development limbo for a time is now actively being maintained/updated again. Hoorah!

     When I've the luxury of more time (and inclination) I'll write all about how that's progressing, but for the moment, this exciting bulleted list will have to suffice:

• It's being written in ActionScript
• It's coming together quickly
• It's already quite usable (for me, though the UI is spare and cryptic), and 
• I've no regrets about spending all of last Saturday working on it instead of schoolwork. 

     As I was doodling with my Doodler (that's its name -- I'm trademarking it! Mine! *hiss*) I thought it might be interesting to print off one of the drawings and paint on it to create an under-painting that the bitmap would then be composited back on top of. Sort-of a bitmap-painting-bitmap sandwich. I hastily performed the experiment, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about the result. Below you can see the three stages. The astute observer will note that the last picture, with the bitmap overlaid, has been reduced to 16 colours. This was done because the, um, digitalness of the bitmap was, to my eyes, just too incongruous with the organic qualities of the paint. They looked terrible together. But flattening the colour space, introducing that banding effect of a limited palette, helped the two gel, I think.

B49: Computer Art

"Computer Art" is just not a phrase that you hear much anymore. I think it went out of vogue in about 1987, right about the time computers had become so commonplace in homes and offices that any mystique the word "computer" once had had was gone almost entirely. Either way! Computer art, generative art, whatever folks are calling it these days is something I've always had some interest in.

For an illustration project last week I was trying to come up with an abstract background for an image, something that had a similar visual character to models of Calabi-Yau manifolds. Upper-dimensional spaces and what-not. After some unsuccessful paint sketching, I remembered a program I'd written about a year-and-a-half ago in ActionScript that generated these ever-changing, overlapping, intersecting patterns with circles and lines. I fired-up FlashDevelop and started poking around in the source and watching the program go and decided, yep, that was exactly what I needed.

I had a great deal more fun tweaking the program and grabbing stills than I did doing the illustration. So here are some screen grabs to show the kind of stuff I was playing with. 

B41: Face The Face

I have a big project due on Monday, and I've got exactly 0% of it done. Ugh. But! I've at least accomplished this little warm-up painting! The mouth is terrible, the ear is barely an ear, but whatever! It's okay for a warm-up, I think.

I really wanted to write a caption, but I couldn't think of one. Balls.

My intention is to execute six little acrylic paintings like this, although a bit more developed, over the course of the next three nights. Without laughing at myself too hard for having said that, I shall now step away from the blog and see if I can try and actually make some kind of battle plan.

Good luck, me!

B3D: K

One of the great things, I've told her, about her bein' so pretty is that I'll never match it, y'know? No matter how good I draw or paint or smear coffee onto paper, whatever beauty I manage to capture and confine there, she'll always do me one better.

The unattainable goals are the best ones.

B37: Rocky Mountain I

The assignment: a "map" (not necessarily geographical) integrating a self-portrait and some form of personal information. The result:

From the get-go I wanted to do something with the Columbia river since it's the geographical feature that ties my two "homes" together, and then to integrate the Pacific coast and Vancouver island since it's taking on increasing importance for me as the oft-visited home of my bonny lass. I was stumped about what to do beyond that, though. The composition finally came after much doodling when I realized that the mighty Columbia follows the outline of my beard pretty well, and when I saw that Pend d'Oreille would be sitting, appropriately, in my ear, I took pencil in hand with intent and worked my meagre magics.

In critique, the question was raised of whether this is watercolour or gouache. The answer is water colour, gouache, coffee, and white acrylic. The colours look awful on the computer by comparison with the genuine article. I did a bit of tweaking in GIMP, but I'm just never happy with scanned colour artwork.

Lastly, "Ag Mneas" was the name of a planet in a science-fiction story I tried to write a few years ago. I have no idea why it popped into my head for a title. Peculiar, because I haven't even thought of that story since the last day I worked on it.

B32: The Sneaky Stack

A couple of months ago as I was trying to assemble a portfolio to challenge placement in a second semester of basic drawing class. Part of the required portfolio was supposed to be a sketchbook. Well, I've always hated sketching in a book, so, naturally, I don't keep one. Instead, I decided to cobble together a sampling of loose-paper sketches that I had laying around. This task was met with some difficulty though, as I kept rifling through papers thinking, this is all lousy stuff! Don't I have any good stuff?

Apparently, I'd consolidated my good stuff into a pile some months previous, and subsequently forgotten where I'd stowed it. I was quite pleased to rediscover that pile today. I came across this little drawing (about 8cm wide) that I'd forgotten all about, and I thought, that little doodle needs to go on the blog! Transistor talk. PNP parlay? Something like that.

 

Incidentally, my challenge was successful, even though my "sketchbook" was all B-grade stuff. Yay getting-by!