I’m moving my blog pretty soon and I will be folding it into the portfolio I’m building. While this is going on I won’t be posting any updates here. It shouldn’t take long, but in the mean time here are some .JPEGs.
I’ve come to appreciate the innate chaos that permeates our universe. That is, chaos, in the sense of complexity beyond what the feeble mind of a singular human (mine, to be precise) can grasp.
A couple of years ago i would have snorted derisively at the notion of deliberately leaving anything in the inelegant hands of chance – those clammy paws, tearing down every shred of human faculty.
Now, i welcome it. In a sense.
Creation, surely our purpose as sapient beings, although borne of human ingenuity and vision, is often hampered by the droning sub-routine that makes us crave patterns like drooling addicts. We often settle into alarmingly predictable modes that makes it hard for us to create anything that is not part of the pattern. This is where disorder, mined from naturally occurring nodes, may be introduced into the process to break apart the pattern.
This is a “plate”, composed of several images created in Alchemy, a piece of software worthy of your investigation.
Here you have five quick sketches, each of then clocking in at five minutes, and all of them based on the “plate” above.
I like this one. Especially the swollen, bulbous form that seems to have sprung up from nowhere. There also looks to be some kind of drifting space-whale in there.
Soup, maybe. That one shape looks like it might be a witch travelling through a worm-hole.
Some kind of vegetation, or the hideous guts of an organic space-craft. No, wait, that’s dentist-hell, for sure.
I have no idea what this shit is. They can’t all be winners, i guess.
We excel at locating patterns, however improbable or slight. As Penny Arcade pointed out earlier today, there’s even a word for it: Apophenia. Why not gather the chaos and see what unlikely order we may divine from it’s swirling madness?
Progress on the latest project has slowed to a grind over the last two-three days. Now, this wouldn’t be such a dire development, were it not for the steadily encroaching deadline. It happens all the time; I upset the delicate balance that allows me to make stuff up all the time. It could be lack of sleep, or maybe I have to much on my plate right now, or I might have offended the muses in some horrible way. It might just be something I ate.
I have a list of steps that I go through when this happens. Every check-box corresponds to something that has worked in the past. Every now and then nothing on the list works and I have to figure out what new affliction has crippled my fragile fucking artist mind. But that doesn’t happen that much any more – It’s a pretty long list.
It did happen over the weekend though, and I just couldn’t seem to figure out which of the myriad psychological scales need to be readjusted to restore the equilibrium and bring back my mojo. After a while I decided to try to just push through – as a last recourse. This has never worked before – I have conducted rigorous studies. I don’t really know if it worked this time, but I do not feel as shitty as I did twenty-four hours ago.
When I’m struck by this mysterious malady I can’t complete anything, mainly because I quickly realize that what I’m drawing/writing/making is horrible garbage. I feel like a cave-dwelling monster that has roamed into a village during the night and ruined everyone’s day by smearing feces all over the town hall.
“Aw, man, seriously? Not cool, dude. Not cool,” one of the villagers says. “We’ll have to clean this up now, and we were totally going to chill out today.”
“Come on, you guys, it’s art though,” the lumbering, grotesque creature mumbles as pitchforks and torches start appearing all around.
Oh shit I just realized what this project needs I gotta go. Here, have some art.
And here’s a page form my sketch book, relating to my last post.
Here in Norway, the holidays descended upon us like a shearing tempest of razor winds, unforgiving ice, bleak skies and festively profuse amounts of food. Like so many years before, some deep-seated instinct compelled me to embark on the maddeningly stupid trek northward to the place where I was born and nearly froze to death for twenty years.
I ate and drank, and then, as tradition dictated, contracted some vile plague that ravaged my body and tormented my mind with dark visions of impossible horrors and unending agony. When the time came to return to the blessed strife of everyday toil I was left a shattered man.
After convalescing in the tender embrace of unyielding stress for a couple of weeks, untainted by the grip of regular sleep, I emerged a moderately less broken man.
Now, I’m finally back to making .JPEGs but I fear I am forever marked by my fevered-ridden vision quest down into the darkness.
While sifting through fragments of previously written material, scavenging for salvage for my current project, I stumbled upon a story prompt I wrote about a year ago. I thought I’d share it here, seeing as it would probably end up languishing on my tertiary hard drive, named “Oblivion”, otherwise.
Here it is:
Rain ripped through the night over the citadel and blanketed the streets in a fine mist. Lights from nearby buildings reflected in the submerged cobblestone and created an eerie rythm of violent pools along the road towards the royal observatorium.
Among the flickering lights a dark, huddled figure slipped through the rain, surveying every alley he passed as though sensing some unseen threat. He drew his robes closer and hefted a leather satchel further onto his shoulder. The contents of the satchel seem to whisper to him with every foreboding step toward his goal, willing him to turn from his path, and yet he pressed on.
At the massive iron gates before the observatorium he stopped for a moment and let his gaze drift to the dimly lit spire that cut against the darkened sky. The last time he was here he had been cast out in disgrace, stripped of his rank among the sentinel wizards and exiled from the citadel. Now, he held the very thing that could end the perpetual night that had fallen upon land nearly twenty-five years ago.
I’d feel weird if there wasn’t at lease some unrelated .JPEG attached to this post. Here’s a sketch from that project I’ve been talking about lately.
