kaolinfire

It's been a while since I did art for art's sake. I was inspired by a piece on DeviantArt that a friend showed me--I didn't quite like it, but it had an idea going that I wanted to riff off of. Of course, I am _not_ skilled in the manipulation of visual images, my many accidents to the contrary... nor am I really good at _actually_ visualizing. More--feelings, ideas. So what I wound up with has next to no relation to what I wanted, though I do like it, and I can trace the path. ((of all things, I looked up a few tutorials for how to draw clouds, none of which told me anything new, none of which I could actually duplicate--at least, not with my mindset as it was).

Not sure if I can hotlink from deviantart... probably not? Hmm. Looks ok...

Up at my folks for a few days--birthday present was some paint and canvas. And so, like any good devotee of video games--I used one on the other.


Mesmer


Mountain Trip


Star Blossoms


Private Garden


Mountain Blooms


(clicky to embiggen)

[edit: the userpic is an older painting. ;) ]

It's apparently been over a year since the last time I painted. And it had been eons more since the time before that, before I painted with any sort of pretense of regularity.

The one that was completely fresh, I don't quite like--but it's growing on me. The two others were started a few months ago, but left to dry to be painted over. I think I did a great job salvaging them. :)


The Sun Wakes


Hungry Sea


Cosmic Heart Flare

(clicky to embiggen some--with a warning that they're not the best photos :/ )

It looks like crap as a thumbnail... detail is important, and it's abstract, to boot...


just 6 layers in photoshop, maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Started because I wanted to finally understand the trick of generating "lightning" in photoshop. It really spiraled out from there. It'd been forever since I did some 2d abstract photoshop art for its own (and my own) sake...

http://clio.alethe.net/

Clio is a stab at a site like Duotrope for artists. Any contributions/suggestions/whatnot are welcome. I'm mostly wondering if this is a viable idea other people will get behind.

I'm just starting to try to gather information, hoping a) that having the information gathered in any form will be helpful; and b) that having the information gathered will spawn more information being sent to me; and c) that having the information all in one place will help me figure out what is essential information and what is not, and how best to organize it all.

The results come trickling in, as they try to weed out spammers/stuffers and the like.

Pockmarked Cement didn't make it to the top 10; but the art for Pockmarked Cement did, so that's cool. And hopefully the contest got the story a little more reading.

Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Stories:
14. Pockmarked Cement, Kaolin Fire, Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20061106/cement-f.shtml

Artwork:
9. Pockmarked Cement, Thomas Dodd, http://strangehorizons.com/2006/20061106/cement-f.shtml

Book/Ebook Cover artwork:
11. Children of Wrath, Kaolin Fire (artwork), http://shop.renebooks.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=FRANK%2D004 ((so close!))

Writers' Workshop:
12. Imaginaries, http://imaginaries.org

Writers' Resource:
21. Writer's Planner (track and plan submissions), http://writersplanner.com

Okay, a misleading subject. Just wanted to say--it's damned odd to not know when or what a cover is going to be used (for). Did a tiny bit of sleuthing today, and found:



I should add that to my covers page, neh? :)

I wonder what else...

http://www.photovu.com/products_g.html

A little pricy, though. But I keep flipping back to a render I recently did ( NSFW ).

How cool would it be to have my recent artwork up on my wall? Eh?

Without the cost of printing and storing and all that jazz.

It appears I did this one out of order, so I've got some reading to do--but I'm fairly proud of it.

I made all the textures myself (from photo references), made the room, made the glass (bezier curves), figure is creative commons and drawn over in photoshop, and the red thing--that's, er, supposed to be a fan. I took a prop I found and altered it significantly.



Blender, photoshop, wacom tablet, the usual. This and the last thoughts comic I did were both done (drawing-wise) with middling opacity on the brush. I'm liking the feel that gives, though I've got a long ways to go to refine it. Here it's perhaps too subtle. On the thoughts comic it's perhaps much too not.

My book cover for My Sister's Keeper has been nommed at the Critters.org's Preditors & Editors Poll. =)

Vote please? :)

Submitted to Poe Little Thing

going through the tutorial. la la la. of course, I'm expanding on the tutorial's directions and spending far more time on it, er, yeah, the usual.

And I really like the monkey head that comes with blender. :)

Twenty minutes into "a simple figure":


Many hours later:

Installed the latest version of blender, yafray, python (well, the latest that blender wanted to autodetect), and spent ... 5 hours I know that I shouldn't have spent running through the first few pages of an awesome blender tutorial

Voila:



It's always bigger bang for the buck, timewise (nearly?) to learn something new, rather than refining existing skills. Pleasure-wise, at least. Maybe.

Or something.

There's a billion things I should be doing.

But...

Meep?

And with a bit of photoshop: