self-portrait

[egypturnash]

It's me.


bandwidth: VCL

I did this in Painter 7 for a change. The subject just didn't feel like something that should be done in hard edges. Color was blocked in with the 'Graphic Paintbrush, Soft'; details were added with the 'Scratchboard Tool' pen and the 'Small Round Smeary' brush. The background was smeared about with the 'Palette Knife' brush.

Lots of layers; two of them had to be cut in half and re-arranged in the final stack so that the flowingly-painted ethereal snake went around me properly.

Special thanks to rainwing for making me look at my neck in the mirror and get it right.

Comments

[gatcat.livejournal.com]

It. Is. Nice.

Your body language speaks a lot about the way you see yourself and the world around you. I don't know what the snake represents, but if she's an aspect of you then she's an interesting complement, her focus as casually attentive on you as your focus is disdainfully attentive on the the Outside. What does it mean? What does it mean?

I dig the skriffy, almost crayony edges of everything, e.g. the incursion of the black edges as a frame. I wish it were something I could easily recreate in Illustrator.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I can think of at least three different interpretations of the picture. I didn't really have anything in mind when I drew the original pencil sketches besides 'something coiled around this would be cool... how about... an etherial/vaporous/otherwise translucent snake?'; a lot of the creative process happens beneath the surface for me. When I notice metaphorical loading, I'll deliberately mutate it, just to make things more mysterious. Why are there burning sticks stuck in my hair?

I have no idea how to do this in AI. Well, I do, but it'd be terribly tedious. Which is why I used Painter instead. *grin* Sometimes I have to take a break from carefully-planned curves.

[gatcat.livejournal.com]

>Why are there burning sticks stuck in my hair?
Because un-burning sticks are so 909.

Tedious. I've been to Tedious, too often in fact. I'm ready to hook up with Excruciatingly Simple for a change, until I tire of that, too. So what tool in Painter makes that specific effect?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

The 'Graphic Paintbrush (Soft)', found in Painter 7's* factory default set of paintbrushes. (As opposed to the default pencils, erasers, airbrushes, watercolors, image hoses, etc.) It's great for slashing in large areas of color with a ragged edge. The 'Graphic Paintbrush' is similar, but not as fuzzy.

Neither of them does any smoothing, which is why they're so much faster than nost of Painter's brushes. They have a gritty pixelly feel to them, which varies depending on the texture of your paper.

* I don't know if they're found in Classic, 6 or lower, or even in 8 - my experience so far with Painter is that the factory default settings vary dramatically from one version to another!

Drive-by critique

[origamipoptart.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of stuff going on there. Visually, there were three things I thought were especially striking:

• The snake is opaque to itself, but translucent to everything else. I feel like I'm looking at one of those 3D-triangle optical illusions (http://www.wilstar.net/science/illusion-triangle.gif) when I try to keep both sides in my head at once. 'Course, I may not have noticed it if you hadn't mentioned it before.
• The snake's hood is in front of the dark brown border, pulling the border into the middle-ground of the scene. Without that overlap it could've almost been brown paint scraped off of a window or mirror, but with it you get an actual "triangle illusion" with the successive overlappings. Or I do, anyway.
• The smoke from the sticks is the only angular element in the center, which is especially unusual because smoke is usually so sinuous.

But, yeah, once I noticed the oddly-angular smoke, I began to view the drawing as a contrast between the curves of the snake and figure and the angles of the border, with the smoke linking the two.

I do go on, don't I.

[radd.livejournal.com]

I'm barely keeping a tooth and nail grip on conciousness at this time of the night, so I'll li,it myself to saying that this picture is magnifcent. I love it. There's lots of little things I love about it, but I'm not going to bother trying to list them off until sometime after 8 hours of sleep.

[medox.livejournal.com]

Beautiful.

[rainwing.livejournal.com]

Yes!

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

This is supposed to be unfinished??! I don't know who this person is at Epilogue, but this is far from rough or unfinished. It's definitely a complete thought. Like you, any symbolism that makes it into my works is accidental with no meaning generally applied to it except by the viewer later on. When pointed out, it always makes me think, "ahh, well that makes sense. Wish I were that clever on purpose."

I like the overall color palette quite a bit. There's a hint at animation without it being blatant. The expression works well against the other exotic elements, as if the figure's thinking, "well, burning hair and coiling smoke-snakes -again-." Perhaps someone unaware of their own unique qualities? A slight bit of bemusement shows in the quirked eyebrow, a bit of sadness in the lips and, to me, a suggestion of horror in the shredded border. For such a still pose, there's a lot of tension going on.

I have one, possibly indelicate question; is the lack of a finger on the figure's left hand intentional? If this mirrors a real life aspect, I'm embarassed for asking. Otherwise, it could be another link to your animation background. (Also, I feel a bit cheap as we've now both aimed comments about fingers at each other's art in the space of two days. :"D)

Oh, and as a side note, I saw your boss in a commercial on TNN last night for the new, 'adult' Ren and Stimpy. Until he talked, I swore he was Austin Powers.

-T'

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

There was going to be a fourth finger kinda back-silhouetted behind the three visible, but it made things too cluttered, so I cheated it away. I have the full complement of eight fingers and two thumbs.

I thought about possible symbolism as I was drawing it, but only during the phase of tying down details. The process of art for me careens back and forth between just letting the pencil go wherever it wants to and putting lines down with lots of analytical thought. The snake could be a goddess touching me, could be my own personal demon whispering bad things in my ear (am I listening?), could be my cold-blooded, scaly soul inhabiting this monkey shell... as soon as I thought of a theory, I'd try to push the drawing to support it, and to disprove it, at the same time. Which is why I had a hard time picking a title - I didn't want one that embraced any one particular interpretation. It ended up being put online as "Metaphor".

My general theory of meaning in art is that if you put absolutely nothing into it, people probably won't get much out of it - but if you deliberately put two or three meanings in, preferably somewhat incompatible ones, then people will have enough material to build elaborate meanings atop it. This works for anything, not just visual art - books, lyrics, movies, video games, whatever.

The painting ended up rather sadder than the sketch. And older - if I turn off the layers involving the glasses, I look absolutely used-up and haggard.

[lapdragon.livejournal.com]

All cartoonists are born with only 4 fingers on each hand.

... Yep!

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

lovely composition and textures and colors! the neck situation is a little iffy/scary/broken(?) to me, though, at first glance. why so sad and weary-eyed? those two smoldering flame effects are very cool!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

If you think it's sad and weary-eyed, you should see it without the glasses - I look positively haggard! I think it's a side-effect of the shading; I was using a lot of green to try and capture the 'olive' tone of my skin when tanned, and could have done with a little brown or blue or something in there. I liked the weariness, though; it seemed to fit with the way the painting evolved.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I do not have the critical facilities to explain why I like this piece, but I do like it. It reminds me of something out of a UPA cartoon, or perhaps the scene in "Invitation To The Dance" which has Gene Kelly interacting with an Oriental serpent. Excellent work.