is finding footing for where the ink goes. that's the essential zen of it: making the marks on paper is to provide a flightpath, a landing strip, the suggested foreknowledge of where surety lay. never definite. simply the surest places to put lines, in the wild mind of the penciler who wishes they were instead inking. if followed they may not all be Great Lines but they will be True Lines. not all True lines are Great. Not all Great lines are True. this is my general policy. it leads me, by instinct, by the nose, as i build things. i'm working on the Kammerer portrait now, and the ticonderoga is the perfect tool for making predictive pencil marks with an eye toward brush. it's got a wide tip-- a quarter inch, across the head if it's perfectly flat (which mine never is, worn to an ovoid nub) --and because of the broad body of the pencil it can be held in ways that mimic the deftness of stroking an inked brush across paper. it's a good pencil. perhaps my favourite, next to the mechanical drafting pencil i habitually use. although of late it's been whatever pencil's handiest. i don't truly have an axe. i've drawn with chopsticks
You could record. You could. You could record, and playback, the process of hacking out the art. The layout process. The correcting and re-positioning of elements on the page. You could. You could record.
Often I do. Yesterday I did not. Nor the day before. I did not record those days because there is a crudity and artlessness to the uncertainty in the initial stages of sketching, a goofyfootedness. Often I don't.
Recording is something I do when not altogether there. There's the OCD, y'see. If the obsessive-compulsive mark-maker is In, in the driver's seat, in the director's chair, then "I" am less in evidence.
Then I'm more liable to record. But if it's the layout guy, the composition hack, that's less Inspired. That's mechanic brain; that's function and form guy. That guy doesn't do much that's inspired. No sense to 'im.
No sense recording that. But the camera's charged. Battery pack plugged in. Tripod extended to full height. So maybe next session. Maybe tonight. Or tomorrow. When the brush is in hand. Maybe then.
No major art updates lately because, simply, I've barely been drawing. Work's put a minor damper on productivity. That said, the Hierophant card's coming along slow, and I'm working out the future cards for the deck. Normally on a Saturday I'd be slogging through a shift at the bakery but it seems the chill has blown a water main over in Skokie, thereby shutting down Evanston, so I'm going to be in the studio, hacking away. Perhaps expect some art / studio process vid later on this evening.
On the script front, as ever, if I'm not writing on Promiseland I'm pondering how to move forward with it. Set myself a minor challenge & not really quite certain what to do with it. It's my fault for asking "What have you never seen done with a seance, in fiction & film?" because the answer (I came up with one) is a bugbear of bother & bullshit. So Promiseland remains in process.
Meanwhile, over at the comix I draw & you never see, thumbnailing continues. Page layouts for Azure Pantry & Denizen are ongoing. Who knows, maybe I'll just start posting roughs. Practicing on Painless could prove fun, too. Protip for amateurs: don't have too many projects. Just don't. There are days when it pleases me to have three whole novels in my workbag, and there are days when I wish I'd had these scripts in hand a decade ago, when I was a little less physically challenged.
my ocd is acting up so a lot of the raw penciling began being built with granddad's lightbox, then the markmaking brain took the wheel-- the bark & shading are all hands running on automatic with "me" as a backseat driver. doing my best to go with the flow r.n., to not kick & argue with the compulsive impulse, because this is what my subconscious & the card wants. when we listen to the OCD the work comes out clean. look forward to the dry brush stage of this thing.
"automatic penciling" sessions 1-3:
automatic penciling 1
automatic penciling 2
intermission (gingerbread)
automatic penciling 3
addendum: final strokes
a variety of things, but let's concentrate on the making of lines on paper tonight:
i hate needing to explain who i am in order to explain what i am which is a total headcase
i can't just say "artist" because i taught myself to do this stuff so i could hold myself together
this world is not nice & is extra hard on everyone & especially brains
today's blogisode: sorry i ain't no ///max///headroom///
Chicago had snow, then rain. I had a case of the lows, now my brain's ringing. No big talkies today. Redacted thoughts are redacted. Head's a wreck. Christ, the ringing. If it's not vertigo or being a goddamned mental patient it's tinnitus. Gonna try to grind more tarot art tomorrow. Think I have this composition down. Honestly, why are you reading this? Go read a paper book. Something with real words by actual people. The internet will only break your spirit & wither your glands.
defining the style of linework for the finished product. tonight's not going well. i know what i need to fix. having a lot of mental health trouble right now. it's very noisy in my head. trying to focus through. not easy. persistent ideation, disrupted sleep patterns, etc. interview tomorrow. hope it flies
strictly a pencil upload this time. this one's next on the block to ink, but that will wait until decent prints are made of the pencil stage. turned out better than i'd hoped. glad i took the time. only last night fixed the reflections on the rim of the dish and corrected a kneecap-- i leave it to you to figure out which knee
cliff's notes: the central figure is styled on Mariana Pineda's statue, The Oracle. i fell in love with that statue the first time i saw it. just a marvelous gestural figure. so evocative. i wanted to homage Pineda's work & pay tribute. by using Pineda's oracle to replace the priestess i wound up triggering a series of changes in the composition...
first by the addition of the putto: a cherubic figure meant, along with the oracle's robes, to evoke imagery associated with the lady of guadalupe-- the putto ordinarily would be supporting a crescent moon, in the original ikonography, whereas in my version would be presenting a choice: the grasshook or the lamp?
the four suits are represented here for the first time: the sigil (or pentacle, in rider-waite; the intersecting alchemical symbol in the dirt), the grasshook (standing in for swords & athames & all that), the lamp (for the clubs / fire symbol), and the bell (standing in for cups / chalices)... which i realize on first glance plays hell with the standard elemental symbolism, but i'm not going to discuss that here because i don't feel like typing & revising for 5hrs to justify myself aloud for an exclusive audience of my own crazybrain
the drapery that hoods the oracle bears a pattern created by the artist known as Gerhard, who endured dave sim on cererbus for more than can be acknowledged in the length of this sentence. the pattern was the background motif of the cover to cerebus 186, inverted here as a cheap counterspell against the diabolickal magicks dave sim indulged in throughout his most infamous work. dave sim was a correspondent of mine for a time, but if he'd known i was gay he wouldn't have spit on me, let alone talked shop about brushes & composition. my mother was a feminist. so fuck dave sim. gerhard's a real one for putting up with that crank
the underside of the drapery is patterned on pamela coleman-smith's original art for the high priestess: this pattern hung between the pillars, behind the priestess. i believe pamela intended the fruit to be pomegranates
the pillars are engraved with the "crown" motif from the imp card-- as is the bell, if you look carefully. the pillars will be explored more in full with other cards, such as 'the initiate' (the revised hanged man card), the lovers, and temperance. these will be different perspectives on the floor of a larger temple. this will be one of several instances of my trying to use the framing device of the cards to offer different perspectives on three-dimensional spaces or objects
i'm interested in the psychological effects this has when the cards are dealt & their meanings juxtaposed: i want to see how they're read as pages in a book dealt out of order
have i mentioned that i am a crazy person?
i think that's all the important stuff. wait, what else? oh, yeah, i forgot to complete my thought earlier, about composition:
by adding the putto to the figure of the oracle you have a subtly queered helix ascending between the pillars. that was my main fixation when building this. composition drove almost all these cards for me. symbolism & mystical interpretations were almost as an afterthought, if i'm honest. it was like that with the imp card, it's been like that with all these. i just follow my OCD and eventually i have art on the other end
...if i'm luckyNext: o - fool
(no, for serious this time)
 |
| xv - imp |
Short for Impetus. I do not believe in the devil. Full stop.
Let's start with the devil.
I had an unconventional upbringing: consequently I possess a peculiarly personal conception of magic that needn't concern you in depth, suffice to say I do not believe in magick, Crowley or all the freaky racist gibberish baked into western occult traditions. I don't believe in Ghod or the judeo-christian schema ruling every moment of our shitty little American microcosm like some weird judgmental micromanaging cuck, perched in the corner of everybody's lives, scornfully disapproving, dick in hand.
And I don't believe in the devil, either.
But I do believe in the material existence of spiritual evil. Just not the way the rest of this frankly insane country does. And I do believe in magic-- &, weirdly --I DO believe in god: as the organizational principle that keeps our atoms dancing to ever more complex arrangements of weird tunes. So when I undertook re-creating & re-interpreting the Rider-Waite deck, I wanted to preserve the Spirit and overall composition of Pamela Coleman-Smith's work, with her intricately theatrical staging & all the little narrative suggestions which make tarot so compellingly suggestive, as a storytelling vehicle, constantly hinting, like panels in a comic strip cut up & re-ordered.
I saw a number of ways to address all these concern, here, in the Imp card.
Because the Impetus is not the devil. But he is. I don't believe in Sssatan, but satanism, if treated like surrealism, or communism, any sticky -ism you can name, satanism illuminates some specific issues-- let's say, classical themes --which even a novice tarot reader might find germane. (Today, of all days!)
There are a few details to finish in the art, here. The gradiants in the far background and the final touches of flame. But otherwise, personally? I think it's the devil to the tee. The Imp looks nothing like Pamela-Smith's devil card, and is one of the only ones to have been so thoroughly & completely retooled. But I think it's honest to her intentions, and I like to believe she would have approved of my efforts.
This guy was designed the year before covid hit. I borrowed from the loteria deck for the wardrobe on the gender archetypes, as well as the left-side devil face, hoof & chicken leg-- el catrin, la dama, & el diablito, respectively. The right-facing mask of Lucifer (if that's how you choose to read that solar figure) is represented by the capering 'Angel of Hearth & Home' by Max Ernst. The tails, the Fruit & the Flame are repurposed from Pamela Coleman-Smith's original Devil card, and re-contextualized; the imagery of the Fruit & Flame owes as much to Coleman-Smith as it does to Waite's instructions.
It took a while to figure out how to put these elements together, and if I'm entirely honest it was not an entirely conscious process, as I was principally concerned with Queering Symmetry, a recurring fixation throughout this series. (You'll see what I mean soon enough.)
I did all the real groundwork on inking & tones during the covid shutdown.
I think that's all the stuff that matters.
On to the other cards.
Next: o - fool
james knows: comix is a helmet you commit to. james KNOWS
a helmet that, when you put it on, you may just neck yourself "--but it's cool"
what better metaphor for comix, than stryfe's galactus dildo helmet?
i ask you. I ASK YOU
s/t: 'blankets of ice' by tom kasas
'radio friendly unit shifter' by nirvana
'eldorado' by electric light orchestra
s/t for this one is special, dear to my heart
matmos / rachel's - full on night (recension mix)
roll so hard for this shit. this is my shit to ink to
"5:38"
s/t: Madvillain (feat .Madlib & MF DOOM) - "America's Most Blunted"
Mars In Hell (covering Angelo Badamenti & Dean Hurley) - "The Pink Room"
"2:27"
s/t: Mars In Hell - "The Pink Room" (concluded)
"8:09 (that's too long)"
s/t: Apollo Brown (feat. Earl Sweatshirt & MF DOOM) - 'Dirt Between Villains'
SBWY - "Echo Snov
Ryuichi Sakamoto - "Firewater"
This phase could be called "sugaring Stryfe".
Because I am workin' to tidy those eyebrows, believe.
Bonus pod s/t: Jordie Bellaire, talking 'Redlands' & her meteoric career in colouring.
Decent progress today. Finalized thumbnails for pages 1-10 of The Azure Pantry.
This all looks perfectly inscrutable to you, I'm sure. Which is fine.
After all, these aren't the comix themselves. Those will arrive before your eyes eventually.
Bottom row: my very 1st two sketches for the project, for panels 1&2 of page 7.
[1] s/t: Tim Hecker - 'Chimeras' & Edgar Froese - 'Videophonic'
[2] s/t: Der Eisenrost - 'AW-225' & Wang Chung - 'Black - Blue - White'
[3] s/t: (jangling nerves & the applause of crickets)
*thanX xrybody for a productive night*
with bonus soundtrack:
