After about 4 months of very off-and-on work on my Muse painting, I am nearing completion.
Life has been busy, especially at the old 9-to-5, due to the upcoming AWS and STAFDA trade shows in Chicago and Atlanta, respectively. Since about August, I have usually been too tired to do anything other than eat and take a nap when I get home from work. Shows are shipped, finally, and the stress levels are down a bit, at least for the time being.
In any case, updates on the progress of the Muse project can be seen in slideshow format here (requires Flash plugin). I have more photos in my camera, slideshow will be updated in the next day or two as I continue toward the finish line.
I have a new project underway, one that I'm pretty excited about. Having just received my glorious Adobe Master Collection CS4 package, and subsequently having to add another gigabyte of RAM to my computer because one of the boards died on me, I am completely geared up and rearing to go on my latest brainstorm.
Not being quite the prolific illustrator I had once hoped to be, projects involving the use of my hands and a paintbrush tend to be rare. However, they are almost always something I dive into with passion and enthusiasm, and I always find painting to be an enjoyable and very Zen undertaking.
This latest painting is a tribute to inspiration, and to someone who has been a constant source of ideas, feedback, and collaboration on some of the most important work I've done over the past year. She is my own personal Muse, and a damn good one, responsible for such varied inspirations as an idea for a movie script, comic strips, and input on the redesign of my website, portfolio and resume, and the recently completed trailer for "A Band of Roses". I'm hoping to have this thing done in time for her birthday (Guy Fawkes Day).
Lacking the convenience of posing living human models and costumes for this piece, I've been using Poser as a digital substitute. So far, so good. I intend to finish the poses, lighting, perspective/camera angles and a final render, and bring it into Photoshop to add a decent background and any image adjustments or effects I deem necessary. All of that will merely serve as a reference photo for the final phase, which is to transfer it to canvas and repaint it for a more organic finished piece. As it stands, here's where I'm at (still needs a lot of refinement, especially the lighting):
As for the painting itself, I'm currently leaning toward either oils or acrylics. Acrylic seems more likely, but I must admit my technique in that medium is pretty weak compared to working with oil. Oil is messy and takes forever to dry. I could switch to alkyds, but that would probably mean an investment of money into a completely new and unfamiliar medium, so I think I'll just stick with what I know. If I need it to dry faster, I'll just stick with my old standbys of liquin dryer and varnish.
The trailer is done! It's posted on YouTube, and the customer, Pat McDermott, seems to be very satisfied with the results.
Upon uploading this video initially, I was faced with a major disappointment. For some reason, the video appeared blurry and pixellated, until I clicked on the little "HQ" toggle on the lower right side of the movie player frame. I was scrambling to find out what had gone wrong, and apologizing profusely to my customer for delivering a sub-excellent product.
It all made a little more sense after finding this blurb in the YouTube Help forums:
We made improvements to standard quality for video uploads! Unless there is a large difference between standard quality and HQ , the upload will produce standard quality by default (and not HQ as before).
In other words, the bar has been raised and you're going to find it hard to get HQ encoding at present, with the "upgrade" to "standard (normal) quality." It can be done but you may need to search the forum to find out possible ways that could work for you. Most of us are too tired to repeat ourselves on this, and no one I know is convinced they have a foolproof method forrendering that will ALWAYS give you HQ encoding.
In other words, the resolution and quality of my uploaded video was TOO GOOD. So good that YouTube split it up into high-quality and low-quality versions for the benefit of people with slower connection speeds. I will have to keep this in mind for future projects, as I think the whole HQ toggle thing is obnoxious, and frankly, unnecessary. If anything, the HQ display should be the default setting, allowing people to lower the quality if needed for streaming speed, etc.
Regardless, this is a very exciting milestone for me. I have been interested in working with video for many years, and have never really had the opportunity. Now I am dying for my recent purchase of Adobe Master Collection CS4 to arrive so I can do even cooler stuff from here on out.
Ms. McDermott is currently on a rampage (in a good way), posting this link on her site, her Facebook page, and sending it out to a staggering number of colleagues, web loops, discussion groups, and a company called Blazing Trailers that specializes in showcasing exactly this kind of media.
I am proud of my work on this project. If it generates some more work of this nature in the future, even better. I look forward to creating more trailers for Pat when she rolls out the remaining books in her series!
I seem to be satisfied? I'm ecstatic! You did a fabulous job, Rick! I'm glad you've extended your considerable talents into video. Thank you so much!
— By Pat McDermott, on
May 21, 2009 12:22 PM
You're very welcome! I've already got a few fragments of ideas bubbling for the next one.
— By Shag, on
May 27, 2009 9:49 AM
Quick news flash! As of yesterday evening, author Pat McDermott now has a fully functional blog, which I suggest you read. Pat is the author of "A Band of Roses", and the upcoming "Fiery Roses", two action/adventure stories set in an alternate world in which Brian Boru survived the Battle of Clontarf and propagated the rule of Irish monarchy to the present day. Good stuff.
Her book can now be purchased as an e-book through Red Rose Publishing. It's very obvious after reading a single page that her novel is the result of a lot of hard work and research. The sequel, "Fiery Roses," is coming soon!
In the past month or so, I've been doing some work on a few new projects and ideas, in addition to keeping (thank God) my regular 9 to 5, bill-paying job.
Keep an eye out for a more smoothly integrated photo gallery system on my site. I was using Web Gallery Creator, but I hate it. I mostly just used it because it was easy, but I had major annoyance issues with the fact that it wasn't possible to work with the code so that it fit into my own site template. At the moment, I'm screwing around with a nifty and simple little freeware program, which bears the hilarious title of "ThumbaWumba" (link here). I have one test-gallery posted already, but I need to perfect the HTML template before I take the time to process the rest of them (they've been taken down for the moment). I do NOT like the text-based controls(next page, previous page, etc.) and am planning to replace them with graphics.
Anyway, this one's pretty easy to use, and the templates are completely editable using HTML. One slight problem though, which I am amazed the program's author didn't foresee: The HTML template editing feature limits each line of code to a specific number of characters... let's say it's 60 for the sake of argument. This means any HTML tags that exceed those 60 characters get chopped in half and moved to the next line of code. Long lines of script and the finer details of image and href tags are destroyed in the process. Since my website's template uses a ton of rollover images, meaning tons of long-ass script in the head content, that does not make me happy.
I am about 99% of the way to finding a way around this using a system of Dreamweaver templates, because creating customized, easy and fast image galleries is going to be a huge factor in...
My latest project, which is a full start-to-finish website for a local custom homebuilding company. I'm very excited about this, I think I can safely say it is my most professional-grade freelance project to date. I would post a link to the test-site here, but I prefer to wait until the site is completed and the owner, one Matt Harkins, is satisfied with the results.
Beyond that, I have been learning SQL and ASP at work, and I find it both fascinating and mind-wrenchingly irritating. Luckily, I'm a quick study, because my knowledge of this stuff is quickly inflating my value to the company at a time where many people are uncertain if they will even have a job in the near future. (We'll see how well they remember this when I'm up for a raise in August.)
A few days ago, my boss said he had some bad news for me. I jokingly asked him if I was fired, and he said there was no way I was losing this job, even if I wanted to. Then he went on to tell me the REAL bad news, which was that he had somehow screwed up the data source for our current ASP project, meaning my entire day's worth of work on the company website had to be done over more or less from scratch.
In the spirit of Halloween and scary thoughts in general, here's a sketch of an in-progress piece that I consider something of a departure for me. It all started about a year ago after a few terrifying nights reading H.P. Lovecraft stories before bed. I decided to create something of my own based on all of the elements of Lovecraft's work that I found most terrifying.
At the moment, it's just pencil on newsprint, 18" x 24", and I must say, it is far more striking and disturbing as a real-life drawing than on a computer screen. Something I hope to remedy as I progress, obviously, but unfortunately it is a pitfall of displaying work in digital format. Something always seems to get lost in the translation to 1s and 0s.
Due to some incredibly frustrating coding problems with my blog template, I have opted to temporarily roll with one of the icky pre-fab Blogger templates (chosen more or less at random) to avoid potential glitches until I can figure out what the hell I'm doing.
Apologies, the Illustratology-style format will be back as soon as I can manage a rewrite.
After some constructive criticism, a too-long hiatus from blogging, and an in-progress effort to organize my life and career somewhat, I wanted to announce some forthcoming changes to the site.
Effective immediately, or as soon as I get to it, the Blog will most likely be split into two separate blogs, and all unnecessary posts removed temporarily, until I can find a new home for them. Due to the lack of any apparent relevance between my social and political rantings and my graphic design/illustration efforts, I have decided to rein in this portion of the Blog to act as a self-serving promotional tool. Keep an eye out for posts including sketchbook pages and journal entries, info on projects in progress, and announcements of new clients, completed work, and general scuttlebutt about life in general.
Other changes to the site will be somewhat more subtle, but my aim is to increase the fluidity and navigability of the site overall, clean up outdated links and remove old and unimpressive projects, and make the experience of visiting Illustratology more interesting for any who dare to enter.
Thanks! Check back soon, changes will be ongoing for the next couple of weeks.
I have a new finished piece up on my Illustration page. If you haven't been over there in a while, maybe you should take a minute or two and check it out. There's some new stuff up there (newest stuff is generally towards the top of the page) that I've been too busy to announce to the world.
In other news... uh, nothing. I have some site design changes in mind, but it may be a couple of weeks before they go into effect, due to the tedious and daunting nature of web design in general. I'm also still working (sporadically) on a new pinup painting. No idea in the world when it may be finished, but I'm optimistic that it will be some of my best work.
Yes, I am becoming one of those "blog people". If you'd like to know what the blog is going to be about (eww.. I hate the word "blog"... I wish it was called something else. It sounds like some kind of gross combination of "blood" and "egg") I really don't know quite yet.
This blog is mostly inspired by sheer laziness, please note the irony of that statement, since the actual mechanics of putting the blogging tags into my own web format were a living hell that drove me to the brink of insanity. I just decided months ago that I wanted an extremely simple and fast way to post any random thoughts, ideas, or news that I had onto my site without having to go through the whole hassle of republishing a page every time.
Anyway, hope you enjoy it when it actually begins to accumulate some substance.
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