This is a few years old, but I still like it.
This is a few years old, but I still like it.
There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams. ~Stoddard King, Jr.
“…let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creatior is soley preoccupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fulfill the role of a flower.”
“There was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and the facts were only plastic toys, or rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose.”
Quotes from Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees.
Look close…can you see her?
I have a pretty long net history. I remember how, the first time I heard about something called the “World Wide Web” I exclaimed, “Who needs that, when we have Gopher!” I built my first web page in Notepad, before there were any graphic browsers: you had to click on image files you wanted to download to your computer, and then open them in a separate program. And then Mosaic came along and changed everything, mostly for the better.
But this isn’t really meant to be a paean to the Internet, just a preamble to explain that, over the years, I’ve put a lot of content out on there on the Internet, much of which has disappeared in the ever-shifting landscape. Because I never throw anything away, I thought it might be fun to dig into my personal archives from time to time and throw whatever I’ve found up here. It’s an adventure, of sorts, looking back, trying to see how much I’ve changed, how much has stayed the same.
For instance, in the late 90s, I seriously explored the idea of setting myself up as a web designer. Remember that the Web was still a wild frontier back then, and anyone who could sling HTML and Javascript, and could figure out how to make a decent button gif that only took a couple seconds to download had a good shot of pulling in some cash. I even went so far as to make some free pages for writer friends of mine, by way of establishing a portfolio for myself.
Part of my campaign to set myself up as a web designer was to create a free graphics site. Web graphics had a very different look and feel to them then most do today. Everyone was sort of going crazy with Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, just seeing what they could do. Everything was extravagant, unrestrained…often just plain tacky. The style I liked best was ornate and bejeweled, done so well they almost looked like someone laid a piece of jewelry across your screen.
My own gimmick was stained class. At my site Cut Glass Designs, I offered up theme sets, buttons, bars, backgrounds, the whole shebang, under the moniker “Anastasia” (I don’t remember why I used a pseudonym, but everyone seemed to be doing it). Everything had a sort of stained glass look, naturally. I started at first with Photoshop’s stained glass filter, plied over gradients and lens flair effects in order to create the feel of light coming through. My work improved radically when I put together a technique that used photos of actual stained glass samples and patterns.
The pieces displayed here are what I considered my “gallery” work: large-sized originals that I would shrink down for background borders and so forth. I don’t know how much credit I can take for the work, since all I did was put together beautiful things that other people had made. But they are pretty, and I’m glad to have a chance to dust them off and hang them up for a new audience.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that web design and graphic design were changing so rapidly that the learning curve as a designer would be huge and constant. I didn’t want to commit all my time to just keeping abreast of new technologies, because I knew it would detract from my writing. Web design might be fun and all, but writing was where my heart lay. Of course I never stopped playing with graphics and web design. I still maintain my own web site myself, and my proficiency with Photoshop has grown by leaps and bounds (though I’m still no expert, by any measure). But there’s a difference between doing something for a living, and just doing it for fun.
I still struggle with the balance between visual art and writing though. I want both in my life, but I often feel that I’m indulging one at the expense of the other. Where does the path between them lie?
Click to Download Desktop Wallpaper from Deviant Art
Because we’d all rather be at the beach.
It’s a wet and rainy day here in Southern California, but I have a mug of chai and a warm kitten on my lap…what else could I wish for?
Okay, someone to clean out the oven for me, maybe, and a revelation about the story I’ve been working on, so that the plot actually makes sense. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the story so far, which has the working title, “The Wizard of Pentassari”:
She took my hand and led me away from the squalid collection of huts and shacks that called itself a town, and the natives with skin gone green from lives spent forever beneath that leafy canopy. She went into that dark and secret wilderness and I followed, curious but desperate to go wherever she led.
There was a path at first, a track that wove between the trunks of enormous, grasping trees, but it faltered quickly, leaving only the trees and a riotous undergrowth of broad-leafed vegetation. Fingers of blue-tipped fern slapped our legs; snake-vines tangled underfoot; sodden brambles raked our skin as we pushed through, engraved our palms to match their delicate crimson blossoms. Still she led me on, not saying anything, far enough that I stopped gaping at the unfamiliar foliage and began to wonder if we should turn back, lest we miss the sailing of our boat.
“It’s not far,” she murmured, reading my unease in the sweat that dotted my brow. “Look.”
Where she pointed, in the dim spaces between the trees, transient specks of lilac and turquoise flickered in and out of sight. As we watched, the flicker became a flutter, and then the flutter became a rush of butterflies, butterflies so tiny that a dozen could have perched along my forefinger and not been crowded. They kaleidoscoped around us, a shifting cloud that tickled my eyelashes and spun pale streamers from her hair.
Now, to make some sense of the rest of the story before I’m supposed to take it to my writers’ group tonight!
P.S. If you like my photos, you should definitely check out the work my multi-talented friend Nin Harris has been doing lately, discovering the tiny details in the world that so often elude us. Also, she has some awesome performance shots from recent concerts she’s attended. Go see!
Also available on black!
About a year ago, I tackled my most ambitious painting to date, Firebird. I have always loved the basic design, and thought it would work well on a t-shirt (or as a tattoo!), but I was dubious of my ability to digitize my rough sketch into a clean graphic that would reproduce well.
I am happy to say that I have figured out how to use Photoshop’s pen tool, a nifty little device that lets you draw curved lines and (here’s the important part) adjust them until the curves are perfectly smooth and go exactly where you want them too. Thanks to the pen tool, I was able to get a nice crisp outline of my firebird, every curve in place. I then filled it with watercolor texture that I painted last week (the same I used in last week’s lettering post, in fact). It was, all in all, much easier than I could have hoped, and I’m looking forward to digitizing some of my other swirly sketches in the near future.
I’ve made this design available from my CafePress shop, in a few different styles, including some in black (and other dark colors). If there’s interest, I might add a few other items…Mugs? Mousepads? Wall Clocks? Dunno. Look for other designs coming up in the near future, too…I’ve got a great Phoenix sketch that will complement the Firebird nicely, a very simple peacock, and a few other things that I think will look cool on shirts. You know what they say…if you can’t find what you like, make it yourself. So that’s what I’m doing. Hopefully, some of you will like these too!
