strange art

[egypturnash]

Art: another of my Puzzlebox selves. This is not the nice one. Not at all.


(bandwidth: VCL)

Can you hear dying butterfly, falling nightmare?
[...]
Dying butterfly never dies, never dies. — Can, "Butterfly"

To be honest, half the reason I whipped this out was a post in the anti-yerf LJ community where someone got all passive-aggressive about a couple of violent pictures calicougar posted. I thought I'd push that rule a little, and also push the still-unwritten 'all images must be representational' rule. In the end, sense prevailed, and the version uploaded to Yerf is a tighter cropping of only Sosael, which may still be too much for some people, given that she's covered in her own blood.

It was going to be more abstract, but things don't always turn out the way you want them to.

Illustrator 10 over scratchy pencil roughs.

[ Oh, later addendum: thanks to fourprint for pointing me to the song I quoted as one that Sosael makes him think of! ]

Comments

[lapdragon.livejournal.com]

That looks like something that belongs in an art museum. o.o

Ver' nice!

[non-grata.livejournal.com]

Well... Sosael does have a painting up in the Museum in Puzzlebox. Although I doubt that this is supposed to be that painting.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I nearly did give it the same title as that in-game painting... but it's not the same image at all, no.

[draca-serpens.livejournal.com]

Nice triadic color scheme! I never thought I would see a working one in action outside of Andy Warhol.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Triadic? Hmm. Looking on a color wheel, that'd be yellow/cyan/purple, not yellow/cyan/red, I think. I did the colors by feel; the red comes from the fact that, well, Sosael is a seething cauldron of hate, and cuts herself when there's nobody handy to assault. The red's a given with her. And the yellow zig-zag was part of the original sketch; I just knew it had to be yellow. So I had red and yellow, and orange from gradienting between, and an off-white from her, and an off-black for her victims... and wanted something to contrast with it all, to pop her, and to add some shocking violence to the composition (since she's a shockingly violent thing). And cyan just... worked. It offset the heat of the red/yellow/orange, and was still garish and eye-assaulting.

I probably would have struggled for this a few years ago. I guess I've learnt something about color. Cool.

[supersocks.livejournal.com]

Haven't gotten any complaints yet, passive-agressive or otherwise. :-) Wanna take bets on how long until someone starts wailing in A-Y without having actually contacted anyone about it? :D

[supersocks.livejournal.com]

Though I love the non-representational stuff!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to! Though the version I posted on Yerf is more tightly cropped:

(bandwidth: Yerf)

No victims gushing blood from eye and chest, just self-abuse, done a lot better than twelve-year-old angst art is.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

This is absoultely stunning, Peggy. It's tribal/archaic and techno all at once. That splash of turquoise in the middle really keeps the palette from becoming too monotonous, but doesn't rip away from its harmony either. I would absolutely love this as a large mural and thanks to AI, it could be done that way. I think this is the most organic, flowing, "warm" thing I've ever seen done with AI. Just flat out excellent work. Imaginative, pushing the boundaries and all that. Did I mention very keen? :"D

-T'

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*blush!*

Archaic and techno suits the subject and her world quite well. It's always good when visual theme matches story theme. The zig-zags just sort of happened in my disconnected pencil rough, and then got the chaotic side-strokes added.

The palette was instinct, as I mentioned in the comments above. I was honestly surprised that the cyan worked so well, and didn't work when I tried to dim it out. This is an unnerving, aggressive subject, and she needed a jarring palette note...

And the organicness is almost entirely fake - I used two art brushes that're part of the sample art brushes that ship with AI, mostly applied with the pencil tool for some spontanaeity, but some carefully laid down with the pen. With varying transparancies, of course. And a lot of low-opacity strokes of different colors in the wings, to give them an iridescent feel (including a green that's only used there).

The outline view is a lot messier than normal, what with all these overlaid art brushes.

The most interesting thing, technically, is so subtle you can't really see it - there's a black square in the middle behind the main figure, with a very complex opacity mask on it, to pop her out more. Circular gradient, 0% brushstrokes over that, copies of the knives at 0% to give them some motion... it's a mess.

[raki.livejournal.com]

What did you think of Patti Smith's Ain't It Strange?

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Good stuff, as always.

[mutleyjames.livejournal.com]

Stunning, Peg.

And this will sound somewhat odd...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...but how big is the final AI file for that thing? =O.o=

Re: And this will sound somewhat odd...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

3.1 megs. Kinda big, actually. I think it's because it also saved a flattened PDF, which includes many, many copies of the art brushes I used.

By contrast, that picture of Revar I did a little while back is 928k; the recent one of Charlotte is 2.7m, and the more recent girl in front of all the hatching os 1.2m.

I could probably make it a lot smaller by judicious turning off of options in the save dialogue.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Just for reference, 3.1 megs for a Illo file isn't all that big really, especially for that size and detail. My files tend to be about half as big, but that's cause I suck by a factor of at least 8. :')

Just one question. How did you do the feathers? Is that freehand, or a brush template?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

You mean the antennae?

1. Drew the core of it.
2. Drew the overall shape of the antenna-fluff as a solid shape.
3. Select antenna-fluff shape, make opacity mask.
4. Enter the opacity mask. Draw a bunch of pure black lines (or was it pure white? can't remember) to reveal the original shape.

The numbers in the abstract shape in the background of 'Numbers Station' were also puched out via an opacity mask.

3M feels big compared to most of my work. In fact, this is the single largest source file I've made; I just checked. I also checked and found that if I save it without the embedded PDF preview, it drops down to a much more reasonable 1.3M. Heh. Something to remember when I want to swap AI files around, I guess.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

*noodles* Cool. I spent most of today just getting familuar with Illustrator again. I really need more focused practice. I am feeling better about AI all the time.