LookingLand

i went ahead and spent some money and got a handful of markers to give 'em a go. i have mixed feelings of joy and trepidation.

things i like:

1. consistency of color.
2. no streaks/ease of blending.
3. no buckling on the paper.
4. it gives my work polish that i just can't seem to get with paint because of my tentativeness.

things that concern me:

1. Learning to use them. they color pretty no matter what you do with them, which is great, but i don't want to get too sloppy. also, while i like the brush nibs very much, somehow i can't control them as well as an actual brush with paint. i keep wandering out of the lines.
2. cost (?). i bought more colors than I probably really need, though ~ over time i will figure out a palette.
3. colors! zooks, i'm bad at choosing colors. i chose out of the "sepia" family, figuring i'd trust it to be, well, sepia (as i know it), but it's awfully bright. it's not that big of a deal because i can adjust the saturation on the computer (as i did above), but i'd like to figure out a truer color match eventually.

this is all so bizarre. i could color for (technically) free if i just did it on the computer, where i have bajillions of colors at my disposal and can erase my mistakes. but...

it's all about the artifact.

if i don't have something i can hold in my hand, i don't love it.

at any rate, i colored four pages this morning before noon ~ fastest coloring job ever. that alone is worth a lot. now i can spend the rest of the weekend working on totally new stuff! yay!

hope everyone is having a great weekend!

: D

p.s. the panel above is from a page you won't see until october 12th, i think. please note the dreaded corn field!

home sick today. this is unfortunate because i have a bazillion things to do and am hacking and sighing too much to do any of them. the house is a horrendous disaster and i desperately need to do laundry. the good news is that i managed to dress, put a hat on my greasy head, and wander out to the farmer's market up the street so that i could buy fresh veggies with which to make a cauldron of leek soup.



in case you didn't know it, leek soup is the 9th wonder of the world.

despite the mung, i am going to try to get a good pile of work done. july is at long last over and i can throw myself headlong into working on Reconstruction. i have the first twenty pages (more or less) completed, which is quite the buffer, but i don't want to let the line go slack because i'm going to be posting 4 days a week (monday through thursday) and that buffer is going to get eaten up quick!

yes, you read that right: i'm posting updates monday through thursday with extras on the weekends (perhaps). it's only a slightly brutal schedule, but i decided on it because if i force myself to draw every day i'm hoping i will let go of some of the inhibitions that have kept me from being faithful to this project over the years.

this also means you will be seeing some wildly inconsistent artwork and i am trying to be okay with that. this isn't "real" artwork, after all, right? it's just a storyboard. so i hope you will be forgiving at least. and know that things will even off once i get into a rhythm with it all.

meanwhile, i will share with you this teaser. some of you had seen the digital version of this image. this is the "redo" in watercolor.



i'm really looking forward to the August 16th launch date.

now i must eat my soup and try to shake off the pall of mung so that i can be productive this weekend. if i have to be sick and it means i get a three-day weekend, then i had better make the best of it. later, there will pomegranate ice cream. naturally.

happy friday all!

: D

one of the things that i really needed to fix with regard the Reconstruction site and its contents was the curious absence of Razi-el in all but the pale introduction. i think part of me has always been just a little chicken to fully integrate Razi-el into the story in an overt way, fearful of wrecking the sense of realism (clearly my sense of realism is a little off if that's the case). but considering that the whole story is driven by Razi-el's presence in Lewis Fletcher's life (irregardless of whether he's aware of it), i really need to make sure his presence is felt by the reader.

so, enter Razi-el.

furthermore, i thought it would be amusing to share a rough draft of some small something with you. i often read about the process of other writers on my flist and enjoy (in the best sense of the word) their struggles and wonder, sometimes, at the piles of papers and edits and other detritus that may litter their desktops. editing is a violent thing (leastways i think some part of it should be!).

this is something i wrote last night (from Razi-el's pov to get him into the game). you'll notice it's accompanied by a wee little scribble (thinking forward to what picture to draw to accompany it). you'll prolly get to see the finished product of this by sunday. for the terminally curious, this is written with a plain ol' black Pilot pen on the back of a draft of some boring work thing (you can faintly see the ink bleed from the printing on the other side). sometimes i throw a color wash on the scribbles if the paints are handy.


hope everyone is off to a great friday! i have beta stuff to read and much to write, so i expect it will be a productive weekend in this corner of the world.

i've just spent the last three hours over-processing pictures for Reconstruction. didn't i have some very simple rules for this challenge? i especially seem to recall that these rules very specifically meant to cut out the post-painting digital processing (shading, lettering, etc.)

why am i having such a problem following my own rules?

...so annoyed with myself.

edit: okay, i undid the mess. all is well in the world again.

: D

i have decided to quit all of my creative pursuits and just write a blog about the ever-evolving state of my desk. er, as opposed to what i seem to be currently engaged in.

i had to reconfigure the desk. the books were walling me in. they're very clingy, needy things sometimes. they make it hard to concentrate. so i turned my tv into a dictionary stand (you've probably not seen my 1893 Funk & Wagnall's dictionary ~ it's kind of immense), and moved all the books over to the table it used to occupy. this had made the dictionary crabby, but i will find it a place of honor elsewhere (just not right now).


anyway, this has alleviated the crush and made the source material easier to get a hold of (that teetering pile was just ridiculous after a week). i also put Hartranft's Letterbook into a binder (dunno what took me so long!). of course this meant punching it full of holes (that's okay, it's a lousy copy), but worse, i wound up whiling away an hour trying to read Hancock's letters. i'm getting better at it. it only takes me a few minutes to remember how to follow the stroke of the pen. bad as his handwriting is, it's consistently the same kind of bad throughout, so once you know how he writes "to the" as a one-word one blobby mess with no crossed t's, you can pretty much identify it across the board.

so yeah, that's been my morning. and just to share, i have this photo, which sold on eBay last year and which i never even bothered bidding for (as i knew it would sell for way more than i could ever hope to afford). from looking at his pictures (pretty much all of them), it's easy to see why people were scared of this guy. if all accounts didn't say what a marshmallowy underside he had, i prolly wouldn't believe it.



Hartranft in uniform seems a pretty
rare commodity. this one and another from the
same photographer of him sitting,
sold for $550 each.
all right, i'm going back to work as soon as read my flist. hope everyone is having a happy weekend!

: D

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i was made much jealous by the exciting project notebook of friend moo (which has since been upgraded to a binder!), and despairing over the state of my desk, i did, as promised, undertake to clean it off and get something like organized.

my efforts proved slightly successful. at least the piles are vertical and straight at the moment. the dali cup in the middle (i forgot to point out on the picture annotation), is actually the water cup for the paints. scandalously, i might add, the total worth of the library books on my desktop exceeds $1,000. i have never really assessed my own collection, though i am sure it is equally obnoxious. i really could blow my tax refund on books (and, in fact, am eyeing something delicious on eBay even now ~ i know, i know! i need an intervention).



aren't you impressed?
do you think it will last like this
at least through the weekend?
currently, Reconstruction doesn't require much space, so it's dwarfed by In Pursuance of Said Conspiracy (i have better committed to memory the 1,001 details of Reconstruction than the intricacies of the other, which always seems to me a terrible tiger tail every time i try to get it in some kind of order).

so yeah, i am daunted, but not yet defeated. it doesn't help, however, that my own notebook (binder, actually), contains an outline that seems to have been all out of control from the start. i seem to like the idea of organization a lot more than actually being organized.



i don't know what's worse about this:
the fact that i've scribbled so many arrows all over this
thing i hardly know what order anything goes in anymore
or the fact that it's mostly encoded with acronyms and
page numbers, which i now have to decipher all over again.
i've saved the first page of each of the drafts i began of this work (and there have been many!). i've thrown the rest of it away entirely.

my goal for the weekend is to finish a handful of pages for Reconstruction, and to try to get reacquainted with this other mess. i've already re-read the last chapter of Lincoln and Episodes of the Civil War just to put myself in the mood. it's interesting, but every time i read it, i find Poppet's slant against the King Drunk more peculiar and suspicious. he makes no accusations outright, but at least twice in close quarters makes an overt note as to the King Drunk's actions seeming to scream a little too loudly: i had nothing to do with it!

but then, that's how conspiracy theories get started. the imagination is a powerful thing.

: D

the sun sets on another sunday ~

i have worked on a lot of odds and ends this weekend (prolly more odd than end, but that's about par for the course). it took me most of the evening to draw the "rembrandt" picture i mentioned the other day. it was a lot more complicated than i anticipated and i'm mostly pleased with the results, though i am not sure if it "reads" well. i posted a preview under the cut if you want to take a gander at it and tell me what you think. it ain't finished, but the shape is basically in place.

the lettering will be larger and legible on the final, but in case you can't read it, it's Mark 4:37-40ish. i'm sort of torn as to whether the image conveys well enough what i want it to, and don't know whether the quote helps or just confuses the matter. again, mebbe you swell flisters can give me your impressions. other than dead andy lying in state, this is the "opening" image of the story, so i feel like it has to carry all sorts of important tonal/metaphorical junk (you know, all that writerly crap).

okay, enough of me blithering again.

( click me if you want to see the pencils )

hope everyone had some bright moments this weekend! i saw 3:10 to Yuma on sattidy. review is in the works.

: D

john debney's tracks from The Passion that are an absolute rip off of james horner's Glory score (and yet still inferior).

if you listen to them back to back it becomes more and more obvious: same cadence, tempo, shifts, and swells. debney's score just has (literally) fewer notes and no trumpets.

it's kind of perverse, i think. like listening to hans zimmer's score on Carnivale (shudder) ~ the humanity!

~ * ~

i've been trying to organize the mess that has become my hard drive over the last few years. i've been especially horrid about squirreling away drafts of things. the James scene i posted earlier is actually written in a "review" file with film notes. hardly where it belongs!

this is compounded by the fact that i not only squirrel, but hoarde. so i have folders within folders of things i've lost track of. recently i posted about losing a critical scene. today, whilst cleansing the beastly folders, i not only found it, but a lot of other miscellany which i had forgotten about.

the most perplexing to wit:

The Day John Wilkes Booth Robbed C & R and/or Beautiful Snow (variously called)

a weird time-travel novel about John Wilkes Booth. C & R was a men's clothier back in the day and the impetus for the story was a dream i had while under the influence of paint fumes. i had fallen asleep face down on a book about the assassination of lincoln (broke the spine even) and dreamt that j.w. booth and lewis paine were robbing C & R (the manager being the character actor who used to come out on the irish spring commercials) ~ i think i posted here in lj a million years ago, an illustration that i made of this dream.

anyway this novel was lost in an infamous hard drive crash in 1991. only bits and pieces were recovered. probably a good thing since it's really wretched, but i feel a little nostalgic for things about it that are gone that i remember. all that remains is a couple of scenes, a couple of unreadable chapter files (now in the trash), and a prologue of the hanging of the assassination conspirators.

the basic premise: the lincoln conspirators (not entirely on good terms with one another) are resurrected in 1984 to save a gubernatorial (and future presidential) candidate from being assasinated. but they're squabbling over loyalties from the outcome of the last mess, and trying to cope with the modern world at the same time (insert ample time-travel-style hilarity).

the end scene was brilliant ~ they're at an antebellum cotillion fund raising banquet when the deed goes down and the candidate, whose name was something Abrahams (can't remember) is dressed, of course, like lincoln ~ and i think he's a black man (and booth, of course, is dressed like booth). it's so so silly.

this has to be the weirdest story i've ever conceived. i honestly dunno what i was thinking at the time.

it's strange that i saved these bits and pieces from a book that i lost (no hard copy exists). i was tempted to just chuck the files, but i'll save one for posterity. if nothing else it has what i think is a nice flashback from j.w.'s childhood with his brother edwin.

when i look at this lost project i realize: you know what? i did write fanfiction when i was a teenager.

anway, i also found half a dozen other drafts of things (mostly unfinished). i corralled them, and stuffed them in a folder labeled "Dead Ends". one day i'll likely purge them completely.

two finished novels ( The Dissolute Heir ~ my 700-page jack the ripper novel and Stain the Earth Red ~ my 900-page dances with wolves epic) were reformatted and likewise stored away. i tossed all the extra drafts and notes. i still may one day rewrite Stain the Earth Red, but it sure feels good to clear the hundred documents that were drafts and bits and pieces of it.

no novel ever needs to be 900 pages long. i must have been on crack when i wrote that.

i was certainly amibitous back then. i churned out a lot of words. those books were written more than fifteen years ago. if i didn't value them for what they taught me, i'd find that (and the fact of them being pretty much "garbage" that should never see the light of day) depressing.

it's all good. cleaning house is good. now if i can get my Razi-el folder under control, i'll be a very happy camper and better prepared to start doing some more writing.

it's like when i was a child and didn't want to clean my room: i crammed everything under my bed time and time again. finally one day my sister took a broom and dragged all that stuff out and it was such a huge pile of junk to clean up that i have since vowed never to put anything under my bed (and to this day haven't). maybe from here on out i'll stop squirreling and hoarding and i'll keep my files better organized.

one can hope ~ !

: D