Tag Archives: photography

Mildly Unsettling Macros

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There will be no trigger warnings. This post encapsulates my mood right now with a fair degree of accuracy.

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Here’s a momento mori for you. We all die. Tomatoes sooner than humans, usually.

Feeling positively nasty today, a fine combination of chronic pain, sleep deprivation caused by chronic pain, and that weird, crusty, dirtiness of a day-old tattoo that begs to be washed but at the same time prevents you from taking a good shower or hot tub soak, because you spent a lot of money on that tattoo and you need to baby it if you want to keep it.

So, even though I had a comic idea, there’s no way I can use the tablet tonight. I can barely type. So, here are some macros. The first one is a dead leaf from last year’s tomato plant. Not my plant even; I’ve never successfully grown a tomato bigger than a marble out here.

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Yech. Blech. Meh.

This is an aphid infestation on a bean plant. They are fava beans, to be specific, but I hesitate to mention that fact, because the second you say “fava beans,” people’s brains fall out of their ears and all they can do it babble on about a nice chianti. This picture isn’t even that great, but it makes me kind of itchy.

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No, thank you. Feel free to leave at any time.

Finally, this is a mouse that The Man found inside his gym shoe. Apparently my cat was losing her freaking mind over it. Most likely, she brought this little vermin in the house to play with and then got annoyed when it didn’t want to play. I didn’t want to play with it either. I wanted The Man to remove it from the house. He wanted me to photograph it, which is why it’s in a mason jar here instead of a shoe. He thought that he should put a mouse inside a vessel I use to store food.

Hopefully I sleep tonight, because 3 days without sleep renders me pretty useless. And allow me to point out that yesterday I was so tired that I literally forgot my car. I mean, I left it downtown and came home without it and then realized well into the night that my car was very far away, which would have a large impact on my day today. So, if yesterday I lost my car and today I was unable to go to my volunteer job or draw a comic, just imagine how hilariously I’ll screw my life up tomorrow if I don’t sleep again.

Dotty Mandala and Macrophotography

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It’s a bit spotty, isn’t it?

That was another breakneck weekend. And now it’s over.

This mandala is stark and cold, like the snow icing the mountains, making the desert look like Denver. It being somewhat threadbare, here is some macrophotography to fill in any gaps the white space may have left in your visual pleasure receptors.

Humans have visual pleasure receptors, right? Feast your eyes on this:

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What else are you missing?

This is the bud of an aloe flower. Tiny and pretty!

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Twisty!

This is a detail of a small garden sculpture my mother bought me at a street fair. It happens to be the curly hair of a little fairy, a very specific fairy, in fact: the first year dance fairy. You can tell by how she holds her feet. It’s a long story. But a small detail.

There ya go. Happy Monday.

The Season of Lights

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Luminarias show the way on the darkest of nights. 

I fully intended to draw a comic today. I fully intended to do a lot of things. But none of those things happened. Other things happened instead, but very few of them were intentional or productive. The season of very little natural light does funny things to my brain.

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The fountain in the cactus garden under red and gold lights

The biggest bump to this day was the publication of my article about Travis Hanson, who draws awesome dragons and other things like that, sometimes with magical tales to go along with them. I urge you to check it out if you’re the least bit interested in that sort of artwork and storytelling.

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Do you know why this tree is blue? Maybe it hates winter as much as I do.

In lieu of something hilarious, please accept these photographs from a luminaria event at the botanic garden down the street. It’s a fun evening of lights and music, and even though I’ve lived here for 6 winters and have had a garden membership for a lot of that time, I never attended before, in part because it cost money and in part because I don’t tend to do a lot of Christmasy things. But in this case, I got in free, because The Man’s band was among the many musical acts of the evening. Since it’s a klezmer band, it wasn’t too Christmasy, either.

Everyday Beauty

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There is a roof on this porch now; art to mark the passage of time.

I had an idea for a really deep comic; it took me about 45 minutes to write the script and another 30 to just figure out the storyboard, which source images to use. Since the comic itself is about symbols, there were a lot of choices to make. Most of the text would make sense with a variety of images, but the meaning would shift slightly depending on which image paired with it, and I wanted to draw some very straight lines, so to speak. Sometimes it’s easier to make an appeal to the present by talking about the past.

Now the concept of the comic is locked down, but it’s past midnight, which means this interesting idea won’t see the Internet until Tuesday. And all I have is a couple artsy photographs of all the construction work we’ve been doing around this place. That’s one great thing about photography; it helps you small the small, everyday beauty of things to people who haven’t got an artist’s eye.

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They came off the roof, and they’re going back on the roof.

These pictures aren’t color corrected or anything. The second one could probably benefit from a little red boost and some judicious cropping, but it also has some merits without any help.

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A little slow on this one; it could have been a picture of 4 hands in the window, one of which was holding a hammer. So the meaning changes a little. Perhaps it’s more ambiguous.

Everything has its lovely details if you know where to look, or if you’re compelled to look for small beauty because the ugly details are huge but hard to focus on.

Friday is the kickoff for the 4th Ave Winter Fair, which means I will see the Bear! And maybe buy some new prayer flags for my new porch.

The Altar of Experience

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Steal your own life.

Steal your own life.

This is my little motivational poster from yesterday when experience kicked me in the head. The really sad part is that the knowledge I took away was something I’ve always known and only periodically forget, which is to save your work, you fool. In my defense, that’s what I was trying to do when everything crashed. This version is pretty cool, but the initial D in the original was so much more elegant. That lettering took about 90 minutes, which seems excessive. Why don’t I improve at calligraphy, something I’ve practiced all my life.

Constructing the altar of experience was a lot of fun. That little artist’s model really isn’t good for much; his legs are different lengths and his his joints don’t move very far and he’s actually not capable of assuming many natural poses. However, he does have magnets in the little wedges that serve as his hands and feet, which has possibilities. I considered a few items he could be holding in a 3D comic before I gave him the book and let him hang upside down. He could hold, for example, a tiny metal sword and shield. The idea for the text came after the visual concept, which never happens with comics, but sometimes does for bulletin boards.

Still have a couple comic ideas kicking around, but this stiff-limbed little wooden fellow has some possibilities. Got a few things in the works.

The Stories of Our Lives

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That's so cool! I was actually thinking about getting into smashing the patriarchy myself. Is there, like, some kind of newsletter I could subscribe to?

That’s so cool! I was actually thinking about getting into smashing the patriarchy myself. Is there, like, some kind of newsletter I could subscribe to?

I’m getting excited about writing again. As a few people know, I have written 10 novels. Two of them are bouncing around the Internet, 2 of them have been nudged and prodded by a couple agents and a publisher before whimpering off with their tails between their legs, and most of them just sort of exist. They have plans, but no executions. After completing my last novel, I massive undertaking, I sort of walked away from 25 years of constant novel writing to think about visual art; you can go back to page 1 of this blog and read it in order to get the entire story. It takes a while to tell it.

But I did send the ms for this last novel, an 800 page behemoth, out to the Desert Rats: Rabbit, Fox, and Owl. And I’m just starting to get some feedback on it, and the feedback seems good. The revision actually seems possible. I’m rereading it myself–it’s been about 2 years, I guess–and liking what I have, seeing where it could be tightened, noticing problems that didn’t get fixed in my last pass.

Plus, I’ve been working on a short story in comic form. Short stories are not my forte. I’ve only ever written a couple I was completely happy with. I can do novel, and I can do flash, but short stories elude me. But working in comic form might be liberating. I know the entire story, suddenly. It started out as a 16 panel gag, a short of blunt, deadpan, New Yorker style punchline at the end, but it took 20 panels to get to the end, and by the time I got to the joke it was more poignant than funny I was too invested in the characters to let their troubles be a joke and immediately I started to see the solutions to their problems. Now it’s 56 storyboarded panels, and if I can get out the rest of the dialog and thumbnails and actually find a style and draw the entire thing, I will feel much more confident about my graphic novel project, which is only one chapter from being completely scripted (although I stopped storyboarding before that, when I realize my thumbnails were completely useless and that you can’t put 12 panels on every comic book page if you want the images to actually express something.

As for this photo comic, it’s, as The Man has taught me to think of it, Kaufmanesque, in that I know it’s bizarre and I really couldn’t care less whether or not you think it’s funny. I think it’s funny.

3D Dragon Comics #1!

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You were probably expecting something with a little more depth, but that's just a matter of perception.

You were probably expecting something with a little more depth, but that’s just a matter of perception.

There’s a type of psychological intervention known as Sand Table Play Therapy, which basically involves arranging objects and figurines in a tray of sand. Sand is nice, but it also goes everywhere and I don’t really think it’s all that integral to the actual symbolic actions that comprise this treatment, which is basically about forcing rigid adult minds to become malleable enough to throw off the limitations of maturity engage in meaningful play. I’ve got a million of these little objects–I could easily have created dozens of different tableaux using stuff that’s already in my office–and it really is soothing to rearrange them sometimes. It’s also nice to justify owning all these tchotchkes.

I’d been thinking about doing this type of 3-dimensional photographic comic for a long time, even before I started this blog. Reading Dave McKean’s Pictures That Tick made it seem like time to try. For some reason, I thought this would be faster than actually drawing a comic, which was not in any way the case. It took twice as long as Dragon Comics usually take. But it was more fun, and got me away from my desk.

It would be really nice if there was some easy way to build a model that didn’t fully set: one whose features couldn’t be smushed, but whose arms and legs could be repositioned. And then I wish I had the equipment and knowledge to make stop motion animation films.

Anyway, I wasn’t really ready to do a comic about my demons, even though creating them yesterday also inspired me to do this. Maybe one day. I’m still puzzling over my comic about depression. It’s funny: seems like everyone gets depressed, and yet depression is a really personal and idiosyncratic experience. At least mine is.

No New Art Today; Here’s an Image

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I could have drawn a Dragon Comic about little kids wanting to pick up every single creature they come across but after the nonstop mayhem of my sister’s wedding, my brain is scrambled. I want to sleep, and even if I did draw a comic, I probably wouldn’t be able to upload it, because this hotel has the world’s worst wifi. (I’m using The Man’s hotspot but we have to turn it off soon because data costs money.) Anyway, my eyes are swimming. No drawing today.

Here instead is a photograph I took of some interesting plants growing out of what I assume is a pylon that once supported some kind of dock in Lake Whatcom, which is a funny name if you pronounce it as it’s written. The T, however, is silent: “WA-cum.” I guess it’s a funny name either way.

How long do you have to leave a chunk of wood sticking out of a lake before nature starts to reclaim it?

How long do you have to leave a chunk of wood sticking out of a lake before nature starts to reclaim it?

I had to wade out about 20 feet from the shore to get this shot; I was very cautious with the equipment. I really wish I had a waterproof camera, though, because then I would be showing you some stunning images of dragonflies on lily pads. Trust me, they were beautiful.