Cropped from the full-size piece to feature the airship only to make for a more up close, boldly detailed, and vivid view of the work (available as 18×12 metallic prints, and as 36×24 giclees on canvas in my store)
This desktop is 1800 x 1200, but can be resized or stretched to fit your needs.
Enjoy!
A month back, I did a cover image for the Gatehouse Gazette, my second cover for them. The Gatehouse Gazette being a black and white publication, with a standard of using line-art for the covers, I decided to do the piece in pen and ink.
Though not exactly an expressive and creative masterpiece by any stretch, the piece made me happy looking at it, as it reminded me very much of the sorts of things I used to draw at my desk behind a makeshift wall crafted of several propped up books and a huge overfilled backpack. It also threw me back to the days of hoarding strange fiction pulp comic books, cyberpunk or dungeons and dragons manuals, and sci fi books – which I collected primarily for the artwork and imaginative worlds within.
I tend not to see works which simply look ‘neat’ or communicate a scene as art, more I see them as concept art or illustration, as such is typically the purpose of these works. No underlying meaning, no personal expression, no sociopolitical undercurrents or overtones, no mysteries contained within… just a scene from a story, a character or item from a book.
In this, as much as I looked at my line art piece, and desired to see it at its very-most complete, I thought it would be best to push on to other actual artworks – but this what rather hard to do, as the piece was continually, incessantly calling to me – so, in order to remove this distraction, I took to it with several tubes of acrylics and have been working at it a little each night.
I can’t say how oddly happy this makes me, as I work on it, and as I look at it at the end of the night – running my fingers over its surface as I know I shouldn’t – fascinated by the results because in all my time looking for that perfect surface for me – I never really gave bristol or illustration board a serious try, especially when it comes to paints. I like to at least have the illusion that my work will last forever and am forever trying to find more time tested and durable media to work on, to print on or to paint in. Though bristol has a high archival rating, I always think of all the things that could possibly happen to a piece over a few hundred years – and shudder to think of it.
The trade-off however – very nice. No tens of layers of gesso and sanding. No fighting/working with the grain of the wood or the texture of the canvas – a nice smooth surface which is easy to draw on before painting, and handles the paint rather nicely once a base coat has been applied.
It may not be an historic or ground-breaking work of art in the art world – it is however ground-breaking in mine. Not only have I found a new surface to love, but I have reminded myself once more that all art is self portraiture – as even though not intended, it unavoidably communicates the loves, interests, desires, fears, fancies, and soul of the maker… in this case maybe only my love for strange pulp fiction horror/sci fi, or perhaps a little more. I may never know, but I certainly won’t know until it is finished.
Well, enough of my musing… I now return you to your regular programming.
Oh… some progress piccies:
Today, I sent off three giclees to Gallery Nucleus for the “Lift Off!” art show, adding subtle miniature new artworks within each piece including (but not limited to) added airships, additional polar bears, bottles of rum, additional cephalopods, brightened constellations and other details in order to make each giclee its own unique piece of art.
For these I not only hand-stretched and varnished each one, but I have-made the supporting wood frames with a lot of extra care. I took some photos as I went, though admittedly it is hard to take photos of oneself working without use of a tripod, timer, and a lot of shots. Anyway, I got enough good shots to put together the tutorial this site has been needing for stretching and mounting canvas prints (Shipping giclees unstretched is a greener, less expensive solution – and stretching is not all that hard or expensive to do).
Oh… the show details…
Take Flight!
January 9th (opening reception) thru January 30th
GALLERY NUCLEUS
210 EAST MAIN ST
ALHAMBRA,
CA 91801
http://www.gallerynucleus.com
I reached the point where I *wanted* to add “just a little bit more”, but typically, as one learns over thousands of years of banishment to Earth, this is the point where one more brush stroke equals “overworked”. I waited about fifteen minutes just staring at the thing, and was happy with my decision.
Taking photos of paintings in artificial light don’t tend to yield the most spectacular results – there is a slight color shift seen from one edge to another (especially visible on the full shot). I’ll be getting it professionally scanned while I am away, proofing it when I return on the 29th, and since my printers are local – I’ll be able to start shipping these around January 11th.
They are however available now, in large limied edition metallics, limited edition giclees on canvas, and medium-sized open edition metallics (18×12 inches).
A bit about the painting:
I wanted the sphynx to be foreboding forgotten monolith, but I also wanted it to look “alive”, so I decided to put the tentacles emanating from the portal in the sphynx, putting the one winding around the back in the position a cat’s tail would be in were it thinkiing about ‘pouncing’.
In the shadows of this painting, are a night sky – something to dress up the dark spots, and to fulfill the need I had to make a starry sky out of my cloudy lightning-filled sky.
These weird shell things- I wanted rocks, but did not want them to be boring old rocks, I also wanted the desert to look almost as if it were a dried out ocean… so these fossil-like shell-like patterns in the stone served to fill these needs.
The lightning field – The way I wanted everything to be lit, required that lighting was coming in varying levels from many angles. I also love lightning. The floaty cages are a throwback to back when I did purely surreal artwork… and I thought they would add a nice ‘living’ touch to the landscape without ruining my desolate scene with actual plants.
Lanterns everywhere – this one in the netting and reflecting off the portal window. A view of the coal bin, lightning field, floating cages, and propellers as well.
Oh… the nautilus. The nautilus-like submarine from “the Rescue”, now beached in the middle of the desert. Why??? … umm… Don’t tell me how to run my painting! It was a whim!
Gondola – and lots of netting. More fishnet than a goth club on a Summer night. It serves well as extra cargo space. Ladders and doors for a sense of scale.
The whole painting. Please forgive the obvious color shift from right to left, it is the result of uneven lighting on the painting when I took the shot.
On Saturday November 28th of 2009, Spend more than $100 My Store, and receive an original 8.5 x 11 inch drawing, drawn on 400-lb 4-ply archival bristol board in pencil.*
*Terms:
1) The theme and style of the image will be chosen by the artist according to your purchase, and made to mesh well with your purchased items. For example: A purchase of a giclee of “The Rescue” might yield a drawing of an airship, while purchase of a couple of “Conception” prints might produce a drawing of mechanical insects.
2) The artist reserves the right to end this promotion should an unforeseen high amount of interest be expressed in the form of purchases (but will still make good on all sketches owed up to the point of cancellation).
3) Drawings will be shipped with their corresponding purchases, and as a result there may be a delay of up to one week on shipping (but only if there are a lot of drawings to be made as a result of this promotion).
4) Offer Ends at 11:59:59 PM Saturday November 28th, 2009, Pacific Standard time.
The new Adventure Mission Generator is now online and running.
I added this mission generator last year to the Miskatonic Archive in order to make my days a bit more interesting, keep the ideas fresh, or at least somewhat random. It was still in its beta stage back then.
Apologies to those who were damaged or killed in the mechanical breakdowns and malfunctions caused September 8, 2008, I do hope you are feeling better for this glorious day of unveiling.
New to this mission generator:
1) Lots
2) A static image with text in the image, instead of text upon a background, this makes it compatible with most everything – no more stylesheets in LJ throwing it off, no more codemuching in myspace to throw it off.
3) A different mission per each name per each day of the year. No more having to type different names to get better missions… just come back tomorrow, if you survive.
4) The image generated is permanent, in other words, it is not going to change on your profile the next day. Yes, this means you must come back to get another one, but it saves you from proudly displaying a neat mission, and looking silly when another less flattering one replaces it.
5) It is an excellent merging of various types of server-side and client side code – since I am amazing, I thought it would be fun to make something of my wide assortment of skills and languages.
6) I really do not get to say that often about myself. If there is one thing I am incredibly adept at, it is anything algorithmic – which there was a lot of in this exercise. No randoms – same mission per name per day. Test results posted on your pages remain the same, even if I reprogram everything here. Yay. I am happy with it.
Adventure Mission Generator copyright © 2008, 2009 Myke Amend
New Steampunk Wallpaper: “The Antarctic Experiment” (Sepia antiqued variant of the original image), 1280 x 1024, from the series “Airships and Tentacles” – a Jules Verne and Hp Lovecraft Inspired series of explorers in dirigibles in precarious situations.
Click image below to download or view:
A color version of this, in 1280×1024 and in 1600×1200 is available at Ettadiem.com
