Tool-Assisted Sigil.
Process: write statement of intent, cast out vowels/duplicate letters, draw cool sci-fi versions of letters, rotate/join/overlap until happy. Make pattern fill, crash Illustrator a lot while doing so (because I accidentally did my source imagery at a very large size, I think).
Abandoned version, part of the results of an hour or two of fooling around with a very stylized font I recently acquired.
Another one of those “someone on /r/illustrator asked an interesting technique question” pieces. The question posed was “how can I get this fading-into-the-fog” effect, with this as the reference image.
No idea who it’s by, or what the actual medium is – I could guess anything from “3d rendering” to “an actual fucking dead horse chopped up and suspended between pieces of foggy plexiglas” given that the image was on the Saatchi Gallery’s asset server; image search just turns up the cover of the eponymously-titled first album by a band called “Nothing But Thieves”. [edit: it’s by one Miriam Sweeney]
Anyway. My initial technique suggestion was “make some alternating layers of fog and parts; the fog layers just hold a background-colored rectangle at like 10%, the part layers all have a blur effect applied to the whole layer, with succeeding layers more and more blurred”. They came back saying “this looks better than my initial attempt but still has some banding”, so I actually fired up Illustrator and fooled around. I refined it to “move some parts to the next-deeper parts layer, and draw some shapes at 20-50% on their original parts layer to add a bit more definition to the shape”. And of course I drew a dragon because I am a goddamn nerd who likes drawing dragons. :)
And here’s the source if you’re curious. fog source.zip
(worth noting: there’s an opacity mask on the frontmost layer of dragon parts, to blur the transition a little bit – I liked the way that looked.)
40min, could use some more love on the parts poking out of the fog bank if I was going to call this a truly finished piece.
Now and then I go through the Adobe Illustrator subreddit and answer some questions nobody else has had a good answer to. Usually this means I am procrastinating.
One person wanted to know how to draw a thing and kinda do puppetry with it.
I usually do stuff like this this way:
If one part ends up way off-center as a brush, try this:
With everything selected, you can see that the arms and legs on those two dudes at the bottom are just simple lines, quickly drawn with the pencil tool. I grabbed the point at right elbow of the running dude and moved it around until the elbow roughly aligned; originally the big elbow bump was very definitely not on the joint.
(Also this way of drawing elbows is totally based off of the way Fred Hembeck draws knees. Because it made me laugh, and whenever I do images to explain or work out something asked on a forum, I always try to make them funny.)
You could easily do full-color art for your puppet parts; I didn’t feel like bothering. Also there is the new Puppet Warp to fool with; this way is a lot easier if you’re gonna do a lot of re-use. I don’t use it for puppet parts, but I do use it for repeated stuff in my comics – logos on clothing, tattoos, whatever.
And then here is some abuse of pattern fills.
“use pattern fills full of whatever” was one of two and a half ways I gave someone who wanted to duplicate an image that was made of two colors: white, and a big bunch of smeary painterly color swirls.
(The half a way was to use a global swatch to draw your stuff, then alt-drag the pattern swatch OVER the original swatch. And the other way involved putting your B&W art in a layer’s transparency mask, then drawing a bunch of colorful stuff on the layer. I’m sure I go into that in more detail somewhere in the Illustrator posts on here.)
I didn’t save the source of the puppetry piece but here’s the fill pattern’s source.
So today’s D&D session was a bit of a weird one. The DM had recently pulled the curtain back and revealed that half of our identities were false, due to us actually being emissaries from a city that had come unstuck in time, trying to make sure our homeland continued to exist. We spent the session group brainstorming random bits of history to hook things into – a player would pick an aspect of their past to dig into, and then everyone else would roll a d20 and the high roller would fill in some of the gaps.
This is one of the new bits of the backstory of my character. He is a shy, bookish dragonborn teen who is amazingly oblivious to how hot he is; he and Saranté would hang out and shoplift together and join slam poetry contests together. They got good enough at the former to gain the notice of the thieves’ guild (“join up or stop stealing on our turf”) and good enough at the latter to pick up the odd Honorable Mention or third prize at the poetry contests.
I didn’t intend for him to look this sexy, but it kinda happened in the sketch and I went with it.
so um yeah
we were stonedly discussing some stuff about parallax
then the subject drifted
and suddenly nick was proposing marriage
and it was mostly for legal reasons, we are pretty much married in all but name at this point but
holy shit did that conjure up some feelings
because “marriage” has a lot of shit tangled up in it
then we went back to talking about parallax but yeah i guess this is the day i got a marriage proposal and said yes
we are so not getting married anywhere near valentine’s day holy shit no
So today was my first full day in Santa Barbara. I got up and visited the same coffee shop I went to last night (it’s two blocks away, I’ll probably be a regular there until I leave this rental), and met my hostess on the way back when I picked up a plush husky that her kids had left on the ground and put it somewhere more visible. Then I sat with the computer and hopefully nailed down exactly why dragon.style went down last night and this morning, and hopefully made sure it won’t happen again any time soon. Welcome to the People’s Glorious Social Network, which is maintained by people in their spare time rather than people tied to a pager.
I thought about doing laundry but blew it off; cobbled together an outfit that passed the sniff test and walked a couple miles down to the beach. When I got there I realized that Santa Barbara has one thing I kinda consider a problem in places I might consider living: it’s generally a very smooth slope down to the sea, which means that if a tsunami happens the whole place is basically fucked. Yes I think about things like this. I come from a place regularly savaged by hurricanes; I can’t not think a little bit about the local disasters when I wander around a place.
It’s a nice town aside from that. Lots of Spanish architecture, which always makes me happy – New Orleans’ French Quarter is actually mostly Spanish work, so that tends to feel kind of homey to me. On the way down I was delighted by all the flowering plants; it may be the dead of winter but flowers are still happening and bees are doing their thing.
Birds of Paradise! Growing all over, opening their petals to all and sundry.
Xeriscaping getting pretty aroused here. “It’s tentacle season”, said a friend who lives in town, and this definitely wasn’t the only one of these absurd obscenities I saw.
At one point I tooted that “I am filled with happiness by the sight of a Latino dude driving by in a pickup truck with large knobby wheels and a CONVERTIBLE TOP that’s down.” Because that is such a perfectly California thing. I hope he had the most awesome day, because seeing him and his car sure made my day.
My first stop was the beach, where I took my shoes off and stood in the Pacific for a bit. I tend to feel a need to do this every time I’m near it; it’s some kind of ceremony I don’t entirely understand. This time it felt somehow important to tell the ocean that my mother had died since the last time I stood in it. It didn’t care; I didn’t expect it to.
I may have left a sigil drawn on the sand some distance from the beach, in sand made wet by my feet, asking for the ocean’s aid in bringing me back to SoCal again. I may have photographed it and posted it in a secret place. I may even have wandered away down the beach and been completely unable to find it again when I passed back, and been pleased by that. Nah, I’d never do anything like that.
I wandered about downtown. Sat in the outdoors section of a cafe looking over Nick’s script for Parallax and liking what I saw, while slowly eating a “BLT”. Which, this being California, was served on a six-inch long sub-type piece of bread. And was open-faced, full of some mild but tasty hot sauce, gourmet pork bellies, artfully shredded lettuce, and a fried egg daintily perched on one end.
Eventually the shadows got long enough that I decided to walk back to the place I was staying. About an hour, going up seventy feet over two miles – I might rent a bicycle for a few days tomorrow. I changed my clothes, then went out to that nearby cafe again and roughed out a couple pages based on the beginning of the script I mentioned earlier.
And now I am sitting here while the laundry machine in this apartment does its thing, wondering if I wanna go find some kind of supper, or if the sandwich I had around brunch plus the snack bar I had in the morning is enough given that I had a personal pizza last night… maybe another snack bar to fill in the gaps? Feh, I wish I’d thought of this on the way back and stopped at Ralph’s. I really don’t feel like walking a half hour there and back after all the walking I already did today.
The bottom of my coat now smells vaguely like the sea, and this makes me happy.
Today, I got on a train in San Jose. Five hours later I got off in Santa Barbara, where I’ll be spending most of the next week.
Normally I’d have pulled out my computer and gotten something done on a trip like that. Trains are great for working – room to spread out, and really shitty cel/WiFi. But this time I went to the observation car, plopped my ass in a seat, and just watched. For five hours. And I am pretty sure I made the right decision. There were some amazing views as the train wound through the mountains outside of San Luis Obispo. Lots of farms and hills and distant mountains before that – which would normally be tedious but were kind of compelling, once I’d made the decision that I was going to experience the vast majority of the terrain I was covering.
And then, finally, the train came around some hills and there it was. The Pacific Ocean. I think I have missed being near it ever since I left LA a bit more than a decade ago. I kind of haven’t let myself acknowledge how much I missed it, and I won’t let myself remember this when I go back to Seattle, either. I drank in prettt much every inch of its coast I could. Endless waves on rocks. A little town with lots of trailers and a couple kite-surfers. The occasional lone surfer on a secluded beach. A single car parked by a scenic picnic bench. And. The sun. Slowly setting out over the Pacific.
basically the shittiest photo of a beautiful sunset I have ever taken
I lived in LA for most of a decade and I never got tired of its sunsets. Every one was gorgeous, and I often stopped on the way home from a long day feeling sad about where my animation career was going when I’d cross a street and see yet another magnificent sunset.
I don’t have a point I’m making here. Just that I sat watching terrain pass by for five solid hours and holy crap I wish I could have that kind of attention span more often. And that I’m in SoCal again.
also Santa Barbara we need to talk about your font choices darling
This morning I found myself watching the episode of Muppets Tonight guest starring The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. In the shower, I ended up singing the theme from the original Muppet Show, which got branded into my kid brain in a way the Muppets Tonight theme never did.
Well, because I am old and haven’t really thought of that theme in ages, I sang fragments. Mostly Statler and Waldorf’s lines:
Why do we always come here?
I guess we’ll never know.
It’s like a kind of torture
to have to watch this show!
So that question was on my mind. And I came up with the objectively worst answer: Statler and Waldorf were a gay couple who contributed a lot to their city’s theatre scene; they worked behind the scenes for years, helping with every aspect from stagehand to finance wrangler. They made their world a brighter place. But they died in solidly Christian territory, without acccepting Jesus as their savior. And thus, their purgatory. Endless confinement in their box seats at the Muppet Theatre.
It’s not too bad. They never feel thirsty, or hungry, or tired. But holy crap it’s sure not good.
(This is of course the objectively worst answer because “they’re actually dead and in hell/purgatory/heaven” is always the worst possible recontextualization is a story.)
Writin’, she says. It fives yself something to do when y’r all alone by yourselfs and getting way-ass stoned.
So stoned yez got the death fear coursing through your brain in crackling Tronwave obstacle courses.
So sez Tipsy Zerphichore, the Space Cyber Pilot.
Thrill to her electric purple techno adventures, every Friday this fall on SpaceTube!
That’s the pitch and it’s terrible and garish and loud and Extreme and that is probably the road i’d rather go on with oarallax omfghow m
how much time DO i wanna giv to parallax anyway rn
parallax gets me nick cuddles and parallax gets me cum snuggles but parallax is Not Drowning City Damnit
oh hello Eyes strobing at the edge of my vision, dark voids of personal symbolism from Rita thou art the High Priestess between paired negative portals, blinking black and white strobing bells of resonance, sing O sing of another take on the Tarot omfg no that’s TOO damn far from my personal visions even if it WOULD have the broader net of Tarot Enthusiasts – no the Dawn was more than enough, she’s my slow burning bit of fan art to draw in people to My Vision (though i could use that ych as the Lust in a deck somewhere down the line? that could be a fun slow-burning back-doodle project? The Slutty Porn Tarot of Pushy Garnet, ha ha ha nnnooooo)
come to within a block or two of the freeway
and sleep
with your spine aligned to the flow
open up your senses (no, the other ones)
and just dip in
like a pelican skimming the surface of the water
like a spaceship skimming a sun’s photosphere with its fuel scoop open
don’t take too much, you see, you’ll drown
perhaps make a few passes, skim down going both ways, bring in a bank of the opposite polarity to better balance within
but be careful, you’re not the only one to know that all that hurry, hurry, hurry going in one direction for years on end carves open its own kind of ley line
and be careful to not get sliced to ribbons on the complex harmonic fields generated by the intersection of whole cloverleaf (i found Rez to be a useful metaphor to pass through intact, YMMV)
now i know why I miss LA, it’s a giant hole in the world torn by its neverending gyre of freeways, and it must be real good for sucking in popular stories or something, because it is our nation’s source of Dreams.