composting, scavenging, hoarding & nostalgia
I was just discussing with my roommate/Person I Chat With Art Art/Game Theory/friend/concept artist Rachel Kahn about the Importance Of Talking About Stuff On The Internet, and am currently watching all the GDC talks on the internet, and decided I should start documenting the projects I work on because I get so much out of that, and because I miss talking about myself the creative process to a wider audience. The internet has become a scary place in the last few years.
The project I’m working on today is a combination of interests that have percolated for a few years. I thought I will show this process I have used many times in my work as a pack-rat-scavenger-illustrator but I’ve never read about before on the internet. I reuse ink that dried up 8 years ago. Sorry if this post is crusty, it’s been a few years since I’ve written long form. I feel like I’ll loosen up as I go.
Falling In Love With a Collection Of Ink Jars
In high school I came across this stash in my parents house of beautiful bottles of ink. My parents are also scavengers, and as a child I completely took for granted that magical things could appear in my house without warning that I could claim them as my own. This particular stash was of these absolutely beautiful inks, from the 70s I think. There were about 12 bottles, 1 red, two or three purple, two shades of blue, all so dark you could only tell what colour they were by the splashes of ink on the labels of the jars. Most of the bottles, originally, only had dried pucks of colours on the bottom I would add water to to revive, although I know at least a bottle of the blue and purple were nearly full and impossibly vibrant and opened easily. Most of the bottles were sealed permanently shut with rust and decades old ink. I could only get about 5 of them open at first. Later, in university, I broke a few of the jars by trying to force the lids off through a variety of methods. I was so attached I even kept the ones I broke.
I lugged these inks around for a few years. Part of the reason I would try to get into them every year or two was because the glass jars themselves were so wonderful. They were made of glass, about the size of a baby-food jar, and ingeniously had a glass inkwell lip inside the jar the glass was probably a good quarter of an inch think and so almost indestructible unless you ran them under boiling water and then tapped them with a hammer. (I really wanted to get into them!) Long after I used up (or spilt) all of the ink out of the jars I used them to store india ink because that lip was so damn useful. It drives me crazy that I can’t find jars like that again, it’s such an obviously useful design. The only reason I don’t stil have them is because I had a house fire a few years ago and tragically didn’t remember to dig them out of the rubble.
The inks are still long gone, but as it turns out I am such a horder I still manage to use them to this day.
The Frankenstein Monster That Is the Jack of Spades.
Of all the pictures I made with these inks, or random splashes I’ve scanned from old sketchbooks for testers the Jack of Spades picture especially has been mutilated to death. The picture was originally painted while listening to a Muse cover of ” Please Please Please Let Me Get What I want” and didn’t have any particularly meaning, but I invented a little story for them while I was painting it to tell deviantart. I’ve used it’s textures in several different projects, including my first after effects animation, and several other after effects experiments too ugly to show the internet. I’ve revisited the little story I made up for these characters a few times as well for media experiments in university.
Being a particularly pretentious and self absorbed individual, I have enjoyed mythologizing and then cannibalizing “symbols” my own work to the point of making it utterly inaccessible to anyone, ever. As well as cannibalizing the actual physical elements of the paintings themselves.
Dismembering Jack
I hate initially drawing digitally, and I hate inking over pencil. Instead I scribble with pen until I have something with stuff in it that I like. Then I scan and basically redraw the entire thing in photoshop, which is finicky work I love for some reason.
I discovered the Photoshop “puppet warp” tool during this project, which is how I adjusted the fucked up texture in Jacks neck-scarf thing. I had to redraw it but it was great for shifting the sketch for reference.
For this project, Jack needs and front and back that are pretty close to identical in shape. I drew the front first, scanned him, cleaned up him. Originally I flipped him over and emptied him out so I could draw his back. I set the front layer at 50 opacity underneath so I could judge how his patterns lined up. The method ended up being no fun at all, so I printed him and his friends out on my crappy inkjet printer and drew all their backs with the same pens I used on their fronts. If I did this again I would have retraced his outlines onto another peice of paper - one becasue printer paper feels ugly when you’re used to lush sketchbooks, and two because rescanning the printed lines ended up super pixelated when I rescanned them and I ended up having to do a lot of patchwork clean up that was totally unnecessary. Realistically, with the size I’m printing this at, no one is going to see this, but I always operate under the assumption that after I die someone will be tasked with adapting all my work to billboard size for use on dirigable advertisements for my museum tour so I better work in the absolute best quality possible. Also, as previously mentioned, I like to cannibalize my own digital assets a million times over, and it does me a real favour if I save my work at a huge resolution at million different points during the process.
Now, here is where the REAL shredding of history takes place.
This image was not created entirely with the previously referenced glorious inks. Some of the brown and green is watercolour and some of the linework was Staedtler Triplus fineliners I’m pretty sure - in any case, some kind of coloured pen that was water soluble so it bled really nicely. The above image is actually a version of the painting that I cleaned up digitally a few years ago, it used to be a lot bloodier. I went through and eye dropped a bunch of the outline colours I fancied and made a new layer, scribbling them as a palette.
Next I cut out the big areas of colour I wanted to steal into their own layers, and used a combination of healing brush, cloning, and eye dropping colours to paint out details and then blend into the texture with the healing brush tool. Now I have largish areas of colours. And because I know I’m probably going to want to do this again someday and this is a pretty neat element, I save this file into my elements folder in addition to my current project folder. I keep is REASONABLY messy, to keep a bit of the accidental joy one gets from painting into digital.
Speaking of messy, next I do this:
I copy my colour palette, flatten it, and copy it until the holes are all mostly filled in. I select my linework and mask those colours. Unlinking the mask from the group on the layers menu means I can now move that layer around “behind” my linework, shuffle the individual bits inside the layers to line up to other spots. I do the same thing again but once my linework is selected I right click and select “Select Inverted”. Then I apply the mask, and baint bucket black onto the huge segment of the mask that’s not actually a part of my image. No I can swirl around the linework and the innards independently. This step is mostly because I am terrible at picking colours.
A bunch of shuffling later, something like this. Taa daa! Okay, this was a bit of a narrative jump but really, getting from the last step this this is not anything I should teach anyone else because it is a mess but I am refining it, don’t you worry. Also this guy will be redone after I’ve done a greyscale study for the entire project because the black placement is terrible.
This informative essay has been brought to you by Gillian Needs to Procrastinate, A Lot, Always, Inc.