More art.

This probably won’t display properly, but what the hell. I set out a fruit plate a couple of days ago and I was struck by the accidental composition I had made. I don’t do a lot of still-life painting, but I wanted to do this one. This turned into an exercise in how many ways I could think of to break Adobe Illustrator.

I spent more time saving or recovering from crashes than I spent actually drawing this. This is a vector, drawn with Illustrator. No Wacom tablet. No photographic reference. I approached this like a digital painting a la the sorts of things that people do in Photoshop and Painter (for a GREAT example, check out Craig Mullins at www.goodbrush.com). Not a lot of people do this sort of thing in Illustrator, though, and probably with good reason.

Be that as it may…

Enjoy:

Famous Monsters

One of my favorite artists is Basil Gogos. Gogos, if you don’t know who he is, painted many of the covers for Famous Monsters of Filmland. I think this is my favorite of Gogos’s horror portraits. Along with the E.C. Comics crowd (especially Jack Davis and Graham “Ghastly” Ingels), Gogos was partially responsible for twisting my little brain into the odd configuration it now enjoys.

Like the work of many pro illustrators working on a deadline for practically no money, Gogos’s paintings are heavily photo-referenced. What Gogos does with those references is remarkable, though, transforming old black and white images into vivid technicolor tableaux. His paintings are what you might get if you remounted those old movies with Italian director Mario Bava at the helm. It’s not an easy trick, let me tell you.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. I’ve been working on a tribute of sorts to Gogos. I’ve been trying to work the same alchemy on old horror images using twenty-first century technology. Here’s an early result, a portrait of Bela Lugosi, referenced from an old black and white publicity still for The Mark of the Vampire. I’m not even in the same league, but the love is there, I think. This is a vector image created in Adobe Illustrator. I have several versions of this image saved in the Illustrator file, but this is the one I like the best. I think I’ll have to do one of Boris Karloff to balance the karmic scales.

In addition to the subject matter, I’ve been using this project as a means to experiment. The classic analogue to Illustrator’s interface is that it’s like constructing an image out of a bunch of pieces of cut-out construction paper. I’m trained as a watercolorist, so I decided to take a more watercolor-ish approach to things for this image, experimenting with a lot of transparencies and custom art brushes. It was also an excuse to break out my long-neglected Wacom tablet to draw directly into the program. So far, I’m not sure what I think of working this way. (And I’m sure that only a small handful of people reading this will have even the slightest idea of what I’m talking about…c’est la vie).

In any event, enjoy…

The End of Civilization as We Know It….Part Deux…

The early seventies were a strange and horrifying time. There were MIMES on television. MIMES, I tell you! And there were…”artifacts” like this floating around the culture at large. William Shatner has nothing on THIS! Beware, this may cause your head to explode. You’ve been warned…

The Fat Man is in Istanbul…

I ran across this story earlier this week. If you don’t want to click the link, here’s the nutshell synopsis: The Maltese Falcon has been stolen.

When I first ran across this story, my first thought was: “This can only end badly. Don’t the thieves know that The Falcon is The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of?” My second thought was that Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are alive and well. Note to self: Pick up the new DVD of The Maltese Falcon sometime soon. Not only is it a great movie, but the DVD also includes the two previous versions. Not that the two previous versions are any great shakes. You would think that Bette Davis might make a terrific Brigit O’Shaughnessy, but you would be wrong. They aren’t very good, but I’d like to have them for comparison.

Apropos of nothing: I need to get a woman’s fedora from the 1940s. Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll be able to find one that will fit my fat head. Alas…

St. Valentines Massacree Took My Baby Away From Me…

For reasons I would rather not go into, I’ve been away from the internet. Much as I love my online correspondents, I think its a good thing to walk away from it every once in a while. Ordinarily, I would prefer to have some choice in the matter, but still…

Yesterday was St. Valentine’s Day, or, as I like to think of it, the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I’ve been celebrating this day in my own idiosyncratic way for a decade or more. I usually watch gangster movies, preferably gangster movies about Al Capone (or thinly fictionalized versions of Al Capone). Capone memorably said: “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can get with a kind word.” That needs to be on a card.

Last year, it was Scarface (1932) and The Public Enemy (also 1932), two films that are eerily similar to one another. Some years, I’ll go all soft and sentimental and watch Some Like it Hot, which features the St. Valentines Day Massacre as a plot point. Some years–years when I’m not working the day of–I’ll watch The Godfather movies. And, of course, there’s Roger Corman’s imaginatively titled The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre from 1967. This year, I did something different. I took in My Bloody Valentine, a palpably awful film from the first wave of slasher movies in the early 1980s.

What can I say. I’m a romantic at heart.

Nuts

Felicia asked me to pick her up some nuts at the grocery store last night. She’s been snacking on them at work. “No peanuts,” she said, and she probably assumed that I’d get her cashews. Instead, I got her a tin of mixed nuts. When I took it out of the grocery bag, I noticed an interesting product warning. It said: “Warning: This product contains nuts.” No kidding? But the label wasn’t done looking out for my interests: “This product was packaged at a facility that processes nuts.”

I’m not one of the people who scoffs at the McDonald’s coffee case–the details of that case are pretty horrifying, if you bother to look it up–but the end result is unintentional comedy everywhere. And, really, if you know you have a nut allergy and decide to indulge in mixed nuts anyway because the warning label doesn’t specifically note that it contains nuts? I got no sympathy for ya, pal.

Imitating Art

At the beginning of the year, I set myself a few guidelines for the coming year. One of those guidelines was the creation of more art. In general, I’ve done that, but mostly with physical media. I started work on a large (2 feet by 4 feet) piece at the beginning of January and I’ve done a couple of quick watercolors. I’ve also been tinkering around in Adobe Illustrator, a vector drawing program that I use extensively for my work.

In the comments on that original posting, Val suggested that I show something to everyone. Well, I can’t show the physical stuff yet–the big piece isn’t anywhere near done, and the watercolors are larger than my scanning bed. But I CAN show the digital stuff. Which is where these two images come from. The first is a portrait of actress Audrey Hepburn:

The second is a work in progress. It’s a template on which I plan to experiment a bit with some of the functions in Illustrator that I never use. Nekkid women are superb subjects for this kind of thing:

I’m not generally comfortable showing my work, I should add, for many of the reasons that I’m uncomfortable singing or dancing in public. You are never so naked as you are when you do these things. I suppose I could be like William Blake and never show anything to anyone during my lifetime. But where’s the fun in that?

Enjoy.

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