Another reason to get on Photoshop

Editing this without Photoshop was painful. Apparently I no longer have the cool fonts in Paint. Yeah... time for an upgrade. On the upside of frustration... The final card design is done!!!!!!!!!!

Though there was some final editing in the www.moo.com browser.  The blue outline and the last line of the sentiment are missing. It looks great either way. And the words are a bit redundant. I tend to get wordy.

But I saw that book at Horizon about programmed brushes and ways to apply filters to them.... I see so many possibilities in my head and I want to get to it.




But in the meantime: This year's Christmas card is done!!! And I am selling them. 3.00 each or a dozen for 20.00.

Private messege me at facebook and we'll hook you up with gorgeous cards from moo.com

Progress 2012 Christmas Card Design

So the guord houses are on hold until I get this finished. I'm shooting to be finish by the 21st so that I can take advantage of a coupon at moo and have some Christmas cards printed. At this stage I am about 16 hours in. I know. But I've been lax in my practices for too long. And this vacation is about 3 days longer than I really needed and I needed to really stretch. So... here we are stretching.

watercolor on bristol paper

I've let my facebook friends know that I am taking orders. The deadline is the 21 November. That is when the coupon expires. 3.00 each or a dozen for 20.00 You can find me on facebook and leave me a messege with the pertinent information. Pay Pal will be quickest.

The final painting I hope will be done tomorrow. And another picture will be up either tomorrow or Monday showing the final product.

In Which I Get a Bit "Duckie"

So I was flipping through some Dover books while at the bookstore on my vacation... it's something that I like to do even though I have trouble forking over 15.00 for a book that only costs that much because of the CD rom which I thought I didn't want. And sadly, I found enough to justify a black friday trip downtown. Anyway... one book in particular yielded some great information.

According to a book published in 1948 by Bruce Publishing, which was reprinted by Dover and assembled by Burl Osborn, Constructive Design, that fun thing we like to do on Pintrest had a different name. Those Inspiration Boards that Michelle Ward reminds us to collect and all those yummy folders she's tagged as evidence of her artistic life & thought process, the folders and folders of pictures on my desktop that I like to call a Virtual Corkboard went by a   different name.

Artists way back when used to call that kind of collection...


the Morgue

I kid you not. Seriously. The Morgue. I am still trying to figure out what the hell that is all about. Kinda gives new meaning to "Murders in the Rue Morgue."* since the story doesn't really take place in a forensic setting as our modern, crime drama minds conjours. I suppose a street full of shops in Paris could be considered inspirational enough to be called a Morgue in that context. But wow... I only see the file cabinets full of folders of dead people in my head. Oh wait.... let me check the Internet.

And... I guess that is where the name came from.

A Morgue is a building where the dead are housed, slid into walls on slabs behind doors that if you look close enough, do resemble a file cabinet. One particular building in Paris, having been constructed or set aside for that purpose, would undoubtedly have rooms with walls resembling banks of drawers. Similarly, Newspapers at one time had rooms of file folders containing resource and referencing material... their own library catalog. Undoubtedly, some witty newspaper man back in the day took one trip to the morgue and was unnerved. To settle his nerves upon returning to the office, he must have indulged in some schadenfreude humor... that dark wit that comes from having ones nerves completely jangled by surprise, an seeing the similarities between the two rooms began a trend.

Sadly it is a trend that only Design school students and word geeks are going to keep. And now I wonder if Michelle mentioned that and I missed it. And I wonder HOW DID I MISS THAT!?!?!?!?! That just screams my kind of "laugh at a funeral" humor.

Not to worry... I shall make up for lost time.


*And as for Poe. Apparently Rue le Morgue was the street in Paris in which the first mortuary building stood. So the whole street was named for the famous... infamous? building. And while the murders do not take place in the Morgue itself (which really, English teachers, you couldn't fill us in on the origins of the words to avoid confusing us with teh ambiguous nature of the word?) they take place in the shadow of the Morgue. And now I have to go read that short story again so that it makes sense in my head. NOW that I know where the confusion was. Erhmmmm.... education cuts indeed!

Peacock kurbisshaus

Just another day at the art table. Nothing like some color to highlight my mushy pumpkin drawing skills. But since these are just fantasy punkinhouse if they start a little mushy thats fine. The real ones end up mushy anyway.

It was a six hour project. I finally when the light disappeared for the day. Winter is gonna kill me with the light being utterly useless at 3 pm.

At anyrate... HOW COOL!!!!!!!!!!!! I was a little scared that this was not going to work out the way I wanted to since the paint mixing was such an excruciating process. It is going to need the whole night to dry out thoroughly so that I can see the true color values. Bristol board makes the dry time so much shorter. And maybe by morning I will have figured out what I want to do with the first floor body. I have figured out that the downstairs windows will be dark. The two towers and the balcony lights will be on for the evening. But downstairs all is quiet.

The real test is the top storey windows. They need something... perhaps a curtain in there? Something purple for certain though.

All in all... love the start of this. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

I kinda miss writing on paper

Preliminary

or drafting is not my thing.

from the skethcbook

I love architecture of all kinds especially Baroque and the more organic work of my current muse Antoni Guadi. Rocco had its place. Traditional Greek design and the gothic megaworks of Europe boggle my mind. The scope of those projects....

And then I remember all the math and drawing involved before a sculptor ever gets a chisel to marble or an iron smith gets to crafting the mould. And it is the drawing that gets me every time. Rather the draftwork involved.

There are special considerations for vertices and arches. How do you support a dome without taking up all the interior space? How do you make a straight line intersect with a curves and not have the building fall down.

I am, perhaps, being too hard on myself since these things are never going to be real buildings that anyone could walk into. Nor are they going to be "real" buildings to the wee creatures I imagine would carve their own Halloween house with tooth and nail. And that really is where the idea for these came from. Imagining a pumpkin field as a city for mice, shrews and the other things we don't want living in our houses. They are fantasy.

And I think that my type A persona should leave well enough alone. Except that I can see my iron peacock over the front door is off center. And the peacock vane on top isn't really sitting on the ball for the domw too well. A cat goes stomping through that neighborhood and there goes the weather vane!  I've already started editing this on paper. As with the last one; a photograph gets you some good distance so you can evaluate how solid your drawing is.

It is essential to do this no matter what you are working on. But in this instance, because I may turn these into rubber stamps, it is more important than color. My fingers are so twitchy to get a brush in hand that I feel I really want to skip over the edits and improvements. If I do that it won't really be my best work. And that will make me feel worse than the compulsion to get the drafting right and the frustration that I am not as much a draftsman as a person who appreciates fine lines.

Edits

wash of Hookers Green over the original gourd color
 

There was something that bothered me about the nearly completed painting. It is the same problem that I had with the first house. Not enough black. And, while inspired by the work of Antoni Guadi, I had rather missed something in my work that I appreciate in his.


India ink detail above the green base

Chiefly, I did not have my spaces broken up quite enough. And the undulating lines of his work were missing in mine.When I washed the Hooker's Green over the gourd and gave it some flowing lines I realized the that eaves were what were missing in my gourd. I also realized that the stained glass transom over the entry was just hanging out. It wasn't really tied into the design for the entire entry in any sensible way, though it is tied to the entire aesthetic by virtue of its motif. So bring out the India ink. AGAIN!
And what I like about how this turned out is that it now more closely resembles the spiny ornamental gourds you see out for the holidays. I also enjoy the fact that the lines are more serpentine and less abrupt than my hand usually draws. Not sure if that is fatigue in my hands or just the nature of being heavy handed with the pencil. Though... now that I am blogging and only looking at the picture on the right instead of the whole thing I see that the spires in the valley are not as smoothly transitioned as I would like. And I could join the eaves to the doorframe...

You'll also notice that at this stage I have removed all of the masking fluid and the formerly white spots now have an eerie green appearance. Later in this session the top of the gourd got a good dose of Indian Yellow that really makes everything pop. And that sloppy swash of green is now fully integrated. I have an idea of how this is all going to work out so that I have a great holiday ornament for a desk or childs dresser that uses my rubber stamping techiniques.


cut from the background with more details added though that
bat on the door is still giving me fits of pique. I may have
the problem solved, but it is going to require some trickery.

 

Once I have the mechanics worked out I should have a marketable item. The first one is going to Jesse with another for her to auction at her kids' school fundraiser this year. The third one is going to go to etsy. We'll see how that goes before I get crazy about building these things enmasse. Of course, with the way the Internet works and the fact that we "live in the future" I can always build on demand and not worry about the overhead of stocking product. So now that I have some of the bugs worked out of this one I feel a bit more confident about that Venetian Peacock house.

A bit.