Research (III)

Peggy
September 27, 2021

I am still into “my fursonas sitting around lavish libraries”. This one was started back in 2016, and left at a pretty rough stage because I just really did not feel like drawing all those books at that time; now I’ve got a pretty good workflow for this, so when I remembered it existed, I pulled it out and spent about six and a half hours finishing it.

The unicorn on the ceiling is Noelle and the dragon is November-4; the dragons on the bottom are Enmerkar (seated) and Peganthyrus (sleeping). Noelle and Enmerkar are my spouse’s; originally this was just a picture of Peggy visiting Enmerkar at his home in the Library of Babel, but the way I drew the books above the arches made me decide to make it clear that space is a bit broken in there, and put someone on the ceiling.

High res and AI source are on Patreon; prints are on Redbubble.

Research (II)

Peggy
September 24, 2021

It’s just been that kind of a month. I think I am probably still recovering from Hurricane Ida. And maybe from some old Katrina PTSD that Ida dredged up, as well. I feel like I have at least one more “my characters sitting in a big library reading” drawing in me. Possibly also because we got some new bookshelves this week, and I’ve been working on finally getting all my books out of boxes and onto shelves.

This one’s a bit of an experiment; I have a commission at the sketch stage that I think will be well-served by evoking a Japanese woodblock print feeling. Sometimes when I want to explore stuff like that I will make room in the price range for the commission to fuck up and redo from scratch; this time I felt like exploring it in some personal work.

I tried four different ways to get an outline happening:

my initial shitty rough

Astute’s Dynamic Sketch tool

just some simple, monoweight lines

trying to make Illustrator automatically add an extra, thick outline to everything

illustrator’s Blob Brush

The blob brush looked the best, but I kind of hate the blob brush because it feels like working in Flash. And it still felt kind of really sloppy no matter what I did. So I just did a slight variant of my usual methods: I drew some solid-filled shapes, and had an outline on them. I had to be a little more careful about certain aspects of how I overlapped the shapes to make sure the outlines looked good, but it was only slightly slower than my normal methods, and felt a lot less insane than trying to nail the whole thing down as a composition in the line stage, then decide how to best flood-fill everything. Probably by using Live Paint.

Which, yes, is a thing most artists do all the goddamn time, I know. I haven’t been working lines-first since about 2000 and it really just breaks a lot of my workflow to do that.

My original sketch had her kind of flopping coils onto the shelves, but it didn’t feel right. So I looked at some pictures of snakes climbing up sheer walls and ladders and trees, cloned the body layer, and drew something new on the original layer.I liked the results so I deleted the copy.

And then I had to fill some more bookshelves. I drew new book-spine brushes instead of using the ones from the previous picture, and thought a bit about ways to quickly shuffle around the brushes and colors on them. Astute’s Super Marquee is already a tool that’s found a place in my workflow, and its ability to select a randomized subset of the paths in the area it’s selecting was super useful here. I threw together the above image to share it this process on the Astute chat; I could maybe add some more details to how it’s done, but that’s for some other time.

Overall this took about seven hours to do. Which feels like a while for me for a single character drawing, but I spent a couple hours on things like “testing four different approaches to creating a fake ‘ink line’ look”, “making the pattern on her clothes via some tools that let me make symmetry groups that Illustrator’s native pattern tools can’t handle”, and “figuring out why the rug pattern that I generated with the source of a Twitter bot is coming in as black-on-black”.

Anyway. Patreon supporters can get the AI file over here if they want to pick it apart; if you have a blank space on your wall, in your cupboard, or on your body that you think this image would fill nicely, you can get it printed on a bunch of stuff over on Redbubble.

meat

Peggy
September 23, 2021

do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and say to yourself, why hello Chauncey, we seem to have woken up in a piece of meat again, look at its memories, what a strange journey this meat has had from its mother’s womb to this point in time, and then your nose starts running because evidently the locus of consciousness currently sitting in your body riffling through your memories is moderately allergic to being meat but it will just have to deal with it until you can go back to sleep and hopefully wake up with a different locus of consciousness that is okay with this whole “meat” thing, but it’s hard to do this when you keep on having to blow your nose instead of lying there in bed and turning your attention inward, away from waking life?

Research

Peggy
September 18, 2021

Earlier this week I woke up and felt like what I needed to be working on was a picture of Stella sitting in a library, reading. This may be a sign that I need to do some research before doing the next few pages of her grimoire; I’m feeling the kind of resistance to working on them that usually means “something needs to be nailed down more before I get into drawing”.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in these bookcases. Firstly, the books are just simple straight lines drawn in various colors with an assortment of art brushes I made:

They’re all drawn flat, then warped into goofy cartoon perspective with a distortion mesh. Which is the weird shape highlighted in red in the above screenshot.

You may also notice that a lot of the sets of books are just a couple of lines in the outline view above; that’s done with a blend between two lines. And a little randomness is added by putting the Transform effect on each of those two lines, with a small vertical transformation, and the Random box checked:

And finally, I use Astute’s Block Shadow effect (in the Stylism plugin) to give some depth to the books by extruding them:

Each shelf has different angles to create a vague sense of perspective. It’s kind of sloppy, but all the lighting effects hide that. If I wanted them to be clearer I’d spend some time thinking about a way to get the edge of a page block in there between the covers. Good enough for now, though. And it took a ton less time to give the books depth with the Block Shadow plugin than it would’ve taken to do it manually.

The whole thing took about five hours, spread out over three days. I shudder to imagine how long it would have taken if I’d had to individually draw every book by hand. I think it was like an hour and a half of work from “I have empty shelves placed where I want them in the composition” to “I have shelves full of books and a few knick-knacks”, thanks to thoughtful use of art brushes and the block shadow effect.

The AI2021 source file is available over on Patreon, if you wanna poke around. It may be weird if you don’t have the Astute plugins. And if you want this on a shirt or a laptop cover or a mug or something, you can get that over on Redbubble.

a hurrication

Peggy
August 30, 2021

This week, my husband went off to visit their parents in Ohio. I figured I was gonna have a little bachelorette time. Maybe I’d get Psychonauts 2 and play it.

But Hurricane Ida had other plans. A couple days later I was frantically getting all the boxes of stuff off the floor and packing bags of the absolute bare minimum of stuff I could take out, and leaving lots of food for the cats who live under the house. And then Saturday I was hooking up with some friends and putting those bags in their car, and spending four hours to drive two hours to Hattiesburg, MS because of highways clogged with other New Orleanians fleeing. The traffic would have been worse if we’d hugged the coast like most of them, even worse if we’d gone west. And then Sunday we were pressing on to Birmingham, AL, where we ended up glued to the internet as the storm passed over the city.

The predictions kept on wavering between a Category 3, 4, and 5. It hit the land, and the city, as a 4, on the sixteenth anniversary of Katrina devastating the place. We were all there for Katrina so we were all kind of feeling a lot of PTSD rising up.

And… our worst fears weren’t realized. The levees held. The whole city lost power, but the Sewage & Water Board’s generators kept running – they had barely enough of them up to keep the pumps going, got one more up the same morning that Ida was coming, and ended up with one shutting down once the worst of the storm had passed. Those people are fucking heros and they really need to be paid a lot better. So far there has been all of one hour officially reported, though more are probably coming.

This morning, we saw this absolute wonderful unit on CNN. And I had to draw him.

Twice, because the first time was from memory while waiting for lunch, and I knew I could do better. I could probably do even better if I tried a couple more times, I was being lazy in some ways the second time too.

At present I dunno when I’ll get back. The mayor’s asking evacuees to please stay out. The power’s probably gonna be off for at least a week. I do want to get back soon and see what the state of my home is, and also start feeding the poor kitties under the house. We have a possible sighting of one of them from some acquaintances who dropped off some food, and they probably would have mentioned it if the house was obviously missing a chunk of roof, but I can’t know for sure until I’ve been inside. If the place is screwed then we have at least one spare bedroom we can stay in for a while. I’m gonna go to the REI here in Birmingham before we leave and buy like a dozen solar chargers for myself and whoever I know who wants them, FEMA’s promised to pick up the bill for evac expenses and help with rebuilding too.

All the friends I’ve been in contact with through the storm are okay too. The friend with an incredible library of early American newspaper comics in his house still has it. The city’s sustained damage but nothing like Katrina.

And unlike Katrina, Biden declared a goddamn state of emergency before the storm even hit. Have I mentioned how much I hate Dubya for his bungling of that? Because he sure did fuck that shit up and he can rot in hell for that.

Anyway. I turned on the computer thinking I was gonna work on this drawing:

…and decided to make an update on my status for Patreon because my last one from before leaving was pretty damn bleak, and I figured I’d say something here as well.

Gibson’s “Agency”: some thoughts

Peggy
August 15, 2021

Last week, when my Mac’s battery went to shit for the third time in the four years I’ve had it (there’s a design flaw where this model eats batteries, it’s pretty annoying), I had an enforced vacation. I spent it reading.

One of the books I read was William Gibson’s latest, “Agency”. Whose title turned out to be profoundly ironic, as that is exactly what the main character, Verity, lacks. The first decision Verity makes in this book – to take a job with a company trying to commercialize a military AI – is pretty much the last one she makes; once she starts testing this AI, it spawns a vast web of sub-programs that go off hunting information and doing stuff for her. The front end of the AI doesn’t even know what her agents are doing; she just suddenly knows that, hey, this deal is about to happen if she tells Verity to go sit in a specific place in a coffee shop and trade a bag full of an absurd amount of cash to a guy with a mysterious case. Possibly the AI doesn’t have much agency in this story either.

Soon, the AI is telling Verity to start running because the company who she’s working for are… vaguely bad or something? I don’t recall much about consequences, just that Verity’s lack of agency becomes even more profound as she’s handed off from one person working for an agent of the AI to another. And then she gets connected with a set of people working for bored rich assholes in an alternate future, whose hobby is spawning and manipulating what they call “stubs”: timelines branching off from their past. It turns out that these rich alternate-future assholes have determined that there is a very high chance this stub is about to erupt in nuclear war, and that Verity’s AI is the best chance to stop this. The rich future assholes have super-powerful computers that make it easy for them to analyze the stubs they create and manipulate them; maybe they’re the only ones who have any agency at all in this book.

And then the AI is “destroyed” (with a lot of hints that it’ll come back) and it becomes even more of a sequence of disconnected events, without any characters Gibson’s spent time persuading you to care about. Every now and then someone mentions the looming nuclear war. There’s some action scenes. Verity continues to be a passive viewpoint character; the last part of the book (I would call it a “climax” but that implies it was exciting) sees her dressed up as a mannequin who’s lifted up a tall building by drones hauling a hammock, as part of what appears to be An Art Installation. She’s repeatedly reminded to not move at all lest this blow her cover. And really this sums up her role for the entire book – just do what everyone tells you to, as part of their intricate plans, which are only vaguely hinted at.

And of course in the last few chapters the AI reassembles herself from data carried by her agents, and I guess nuclear war is averted, and also I guess the company that wants the AI back is defeated, but honestly after about four hundred pages of a sprawling cast of vaguely-sketched characters all excitedly not really doing anything about any of those things I really was just glad to be finished with the book.

Arguably this is an eminently realistic depiction of being in the hands of a hypercompetent networked AI – sort of a longer version of Sterling’s short story Maneki Neko – but it’s the exact opposite of exciting, in a way that reminds of of Niven’s complaint that there was a point in his future history of “Known Space” where it was just impossible to write an interesting story, because all of humanity had the genes for the psychic power of “Very Very Lucky”. There are some interesting moments and images throughout the book but none of them ever really felt like anything to worry about, because the AI returning felt absolutely inevitable.

It’s not like most of Gibson’s books really come to a satisfying conclusion. But at least usually his characters have things they want, that they get to make decisions about how to acquire. Verity spends this whole book just having things happen to her and around her and I just kinda quit caring after a while, and that’s probably a valuable thing to remember about story construction.

The Archangel Dragons Of The Directions: Preface

Peggy
July 23, 2021

In early 2021, I accepted a magical art commission.

There is a ritual that many modern magicians perform known as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, wherein they define a space that is both of this reality and outside of it. A space where Magic is easier to perform. Perhaps a space where the magician’s imperfections are carved away, little by little, every time they enter it.

A major part of this ritual involves visualizing four angels: RAPHAEL before you, GABRIEL behind you, MICHAEL on your right hand, and AURIEL on your left. The client wanted help doing this, and felt that they would find it easier if they were given the shape of dragons.

I was given a page of the text of the version of the rite they were working from. (There are a lot of different versions floating around; the original was cobbled together from diverse sources in the late 1800s by members of the Order of the Golden Dawn (no relation to the modern Greek neo-Nazi party), and ever since their secrets were made public, the variants have bloomed – both small tweaks within the same religious framework, and big tweaks like swapping out Arch-Angels with Hebrew names for members of pretty much any pantheon you might prefer.) This particular one was from the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn.

Beyond that, the only direction I was given was “flat colors rather than full shading” and “needs to fit on a letter-size page”. This could have been enough to start with. But I wanted more. So I broke out my copy of Skinner’s Complete Magician’s Reference Tables, dug through Israel Regardie’s The Middle Pillar, flipped through Damien Echols’ High Magick, pondered a few versions found online, and a half dozen other books. And I started taking notes, writing down ideas, and making sketches. In a little sketchbook with dragons embossed on its leather cover that my in-laws had given me this past Christmas – it felt like a book for a Project, and this was obviously the right one.

I pretty quickly settled on the idea of building each Archangel Dragon upon the skeleton of their sigil. I worked them out myself with the Golden Dawn’s Rose Cross sigil method. It took me a little longer to read the OSOGD’s version of the rite and pick up the repeated mention of colors “flashing” on the angel’s robes; this word is used in other places in Golden Dawn instruction to refer to very intensely-contrasting color pairings that tend to clash and vibrate in your eyes.

I set up an Illustrator file. With all those sigils. And a couple more, because the variant of the LBRP/LIRP I like the most adds in an additional angel above and below you. I hadn’t decided if I was going to do them yet but I figured I’d leave the option open.

I started doing the Ritual of the Pentagram regularly. The Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram in the morning, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram in the evening, as directed by my copy of the Golden Dawn material, rather than doing the LBRP twice daily as almost everyone tends to tell you to do it now. Some of those ideas on how to approach this project were sitting there in my mind as I woke up, ready to be written down in the dream journal I’ve kept by my bed for a few years now. If I’m going to make images designed to be used as magical tools, I feel it is part of my job to do my best to make them potent. And part of that involves inviting the subject into my life, maybe to pose for my third eye, or maybe to just spend a little time sitting behind me while I work and casually dropping ideas into my head.

Continue reading →

The Archangel Dragons Of The Directions: Uriel

Peggy
July 23, 2021

I have been commissioned to do a set of illustrations of the dragonsonas of the angels one calls upon during the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, if one is a neophyte in a magical system derived from the Golden Dawn documents. This is the fourth one. There may be more eventually but this is it for now.

Uriel (or Oriel, or Auriel; nobody can agree on which vowels to add into the consonants-only Ancient Hebrew name) is the patron of magicians, the Overseer of Tartarus, and is helpful in matters of divination, finances, and obtaining the treasures of the world.

They carry a shield, to remind you that this direction is associated with the suit of Pentacles.

Prints, posters, shirts, phone cases, etc, on Redbubble.

The Archangel Dragons Of The Directions: Michael

Peggy
July 22, 2021

Michael is chief among angels. He rules the Fire signs of the Zodiac, and is the angel of the orange sphere of Hod on the Tree of Life. He is helpful in matters of remaining chill during crisis, protection, success in business, and expressing your ideas well. He has very strong Cool Dad Energy.

He carries a sword, despite this direction being associated with the suit of Wands. Perhaps this is a clue.

I haven’t been able to see any other names on his nametag.

Unlike the other archangels, Michael gave me the distinct impression that his reaction to this project was that he already has a fursona, and that it is a lion, and if I am going to make him into some kind of dragon then it should be a seriously leonine dragon.

Prints, clothes, journals, and other whatnottery are available on Redbubble.

MA-X: Inner Library

Peggy
July 10, 2021

So a while back in early March I was cycling lazily through the park thinking about Magical Stuff when this lady popped into my head and said “Congratulations! You have found the Inner Library!” and requested an access code. None of my first guesses worked. Perhaps I will get it eventually.

I drew this pretty soon afterwards, then let it sit for a while because I knew there should be some kind of sigil above her head, and that my attempt at drawing what had popped into my mind was not right:

Last night I finally got my head into the right place to investigate this, and scribbled down a quick version of the one you see in the main image; today I put it into Illustrator and am posting this. Time Sink says this image took about two hours of actual work in AI, if you are curious; I’ve gotten really good at making it do this sort of visual vibration quickly!

I don’t know why this wants to be numbered as Major Arcana X (Fortune). It just did, so I went with it. There’s certainly some visual correspondence with the image I did for the Silicon Dawn, and some of the other Majgickqghal Correspondences link up to that card, too:

(that’s a screengrab of stuff hovering off the side of the canvas in a “notes” layer)

Want this on a print, a t-shirt, a magnet, a journal, etc? Go over by my Redbubble shop.