Errantry

Pen lines with colour added in Photoshop. Based on a photo of me in a tree, aged about 3, and a very grainy video of me hamming it up on the piano for reference purposes the other night.

I maintain that all children should be forced to learn the piano – after that, you can read the music for anything else.

Usually I work in pen and ink, markers and scratchboard with digital colour, but I want to learn to paint. Now that I have a house with room to move I am making myself pull out the paints and brushes, even though the “studio” is currently storage for extra chairs and the paints are old and it’s chance as to whether the tube I think I want will be dried up.

At the moment, I’m just trying to loosen up and to learn to think in terms of painting instead of drawing+colouring. Yesterday afternoon I painted this – acrylic paints on an offcut of matt board.

I decided not to use a pencil first – I end up keeping too close to the lines. I’d gessoed the board a few years ago so I rubbed crimson over it and then did an underpainting in crimson+pthalo blue, and then painted over the top. I really like the colour of the crimson wash – it is the same colour geranium petals make when you scrub them on concrete (misspent youth).

Other projects continue. My sister is sending me pictures of wild dogs and I finally found the toy rhinoceros I misplaced (it was in the bag with the abacus beads), but I have not yet organised a knitting reference photoshoot.

I was on a panel about short story writing yesterday, and two ASIM editors mentioned issue #41 of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine , but I had only received issue #40 recently and didn’t register until after the panel that #41 was out and for sale in the dealers’ room.

My story “The Splendour Falls” is in this issue It’s about wishes and dreams, and getting them and giving them up, and possums and housemates and Kismet and literary references from Shakespeare to A. A. Milne. 

Conflux is going very well and we ate a great deal at the historical banquet last night (1883 Louisana, this year) and I know photos were taken of costumes, so I am sure they will show up the internet at some point.

My sister, on the left here, will not even agree to be a subject for photoreference. When she suspects I am drawing her, she starts moving and shifting position. Sometimes she starts up when I am drawing something else altogether, and then I don’t enlighten her.

Otherwise, she is excellent company. She wakes up to the smell of biscuits (snickerdoodles today), and I come home to the smell of fresh-mown grass.

iWoz – Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith: I really enjoyed this. I think it was mostly the voice – it was written based on taped interviews, and that shows in many little verbal tics and idiosyncracies that made the memoir endearing as well as interesting. I’d quite like to hear Steve Wozniak speak one day.

Teen Idol – Meg Cabot: I didn’t mean to sound like I was Cabot-bashing last month. I don’t mind her, and this book hit all the things that I really like about her books – the voice that was catchy without being annoying, the highschool-is-hell set-up, the nice person learning to be better (if not as “nice”), a few subverted expectations. Over-the-top and sweet and fun with one of my favourite forcible-makeover scenes (she does do these well).

Size 14 is not Fat Either – Meg Cabot: Light, fluffy, the voice got a bit irritating at times. I wanted the protagonist to take control a bit more, like in Teen Idol.

Underfoot in Show Business – Helene Hanff: So much fun – the story of how Helene Hanff didn’t become the next Noel Coward. New York and Broadway and playwriting and creative retreats and hand-to-mouth artistic existences and the beginning of television and a bad experience with Lord of the Rings.

Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens: The BBC miniseries of this is my favourite BBC miniseries, so I did know the outlines of the story going in (sometimes this helps). This book is now my favourite Dickens to date. So rich and complex and interwoven, so funny and sad and beautiful, it is difficult to pick a plot to call the main one. The mysterious character of the kindly but shadowy Rokesmith? The rise of the dustman and his wife, come to an unexpected fortune? The predicament of beautiful, poor, grasping Bella, willed to a man who died before she met him. The moral quandaries of the lovelorn taxidermist drawn into a web of deceit by a scheming ballad seller whose amputated leg he bought? Strong, capable Lizzie, who saves her brother and cannot save her father and must keep saving herself? The myriad of smaller backstories? Is it the loves – dangerous, sweet, murderous, unfaltering? The friendships – of the pawnbroker with the dolls-dressmaker and the factory worker, of Bella with her father, of the Boffins for all those less fortunate than them? The hatred and the paths paved by the love of money, or the paths shaped by the river? I love the book for all of these, for the mistakes and misteps and hard decisions, for the repeated references to Little Red Riding Hood, for the unexpected physicality of relationships, for the dear humanity of clerks in dingy offices, for the heroines who cannot wait by their lover’s sickbed because they have to go to work at the factory, for the descriptions of shops and of rusting chains, for the girl who rescues a victim of violence and carries him to safety, for the sharp tongue of the dressmaker and the many buttons of the false foreman, for the comeuppances and the happy endings, and the bittersweet ones.

Once on a time – A. A. Milne: A short fairy-tale novel. Oh, read this if only for that wonderful, terrible woman, the Countess Belvane. And the army of Amazon(s) marching round and round a tree. And the recommendation that poets wear green when the muse is upon them (as inspiration or warning). And the conclusion that the Gladstone bag has killed romance. But mostly for Belvane, that enchanting, scheming villainess, who keeps a diary and in it writes sadly that today, she became bad.

ETA: Dagnabbit! I thought I’d scrape in on time – it isn’t even 11pm and the new topic is up!

Some people say the nursery rhyme “ring-a-ring-a-rosies” is about the Black Death, but I think it’s perfectly obvious from the second verse that it’s all about a plague of zombies.

The illustration is a direct homage to and heavily referenced from a number of Molly Brett’s illustrations for Underneath a Mushroom: A Second Joy-Book of Juvenile Verse compiled by John R. Crossland and first published 1934 (given to me by a friend who learned my tastes very quickly, though I note the book is rather heavier on fairies than living dead). The words are hand-lettered, but based on the font in the book.

The picture is dip pen and ink on typing paper, but the background here is a scan from a blank page of Underneath a Mushroom.

From diagrams of feudal hierarchy found in supermarket parking lots, the mind moves easily to bees.

I made bee cutouts for reference, then drew the line art in pen and added flat colour in Photoshop. It’s the usual model.

At one stage I considered myself a world authority on bees. Diagrams of the larval stages of bees still give me strong flashbacks to grade 3.

I’ll put up the final images of the Cloud & Ashes cover art soon – the thumbnails are up now: Anything as much fun as simply messing about in Photoshop?

I have mentioned Kelly Link before now. As well as being a wonderful author (I have plans for a costume based on one of her stories), she and Gavin Grant are the editors of Small Beer Press. Kelly and Gavin were meant to come to Australia to tutor at this year’s Clarion South workshop but circumstances conspired against them.

In February (days after the first of the posts alluded to above) I received an email from Kelly. In spite of being able to sit fairly calmly (I think) in a pub after realising we had unintentionally sat down at the next table to Neil Gaiman, I can be a fangirl when the occasion demands. I had checked the email while standing up, and I nearly missed my chair when I sat down again (this is pretty excitable for me).

Kelly asked whether I would be interested in doing a book cover for Greer Gilman’s new book Cloud & Ashes. I was quickly convinced, especially once I realised it heavily references one of my favourite poems, Hopkins’ ‘Spring and Fall’. So I accepted.

The book, by the way, is dense and beautiful and very redolent of the poem, which is impressive given that it runs to about 400 times as many pages.

Kelly sent through details of what they had in mind, the dimensions and extracts from the book as well as some reference images. Some of these were Samuel Palmer’s art, and others were works of mine that had liked (there were some surprises there, but I often cannot figure out other people’s tastes). She also sent through the font they were thinking of for the cover.

I had a few ideas and techniques I wanted to try running through my mind, so I rummaged around to find some references, printed the pictures and stuck them up around my desk.

Next: Roughing out of thumbnails

When a time capsule is opened at his son’s school’s 50th anniversary, Nicholas Cage, a professor at MIT who has given up the search for meaning in life after his wife’s death and become estranged from his father (a minister), discovers that a piece of paper covered with numbers by a schoolgirl 50 years before in fact predicts major global disasters since it was buried. There are only three left, and the last one may be the end of the world.

Knowing was visually lovely: the observatory white over autumn foliage, the floating stones, the quality of light in the 1959 classroom, the little details of life. Visual beauty cannot always save a speculative/philosophical film (c.f. What Dreams May Come, Dreamcatcher), but it can make it a pleasure to watch with the sound off. What seemed ultimately hollow was the loss of that beauty.

It was also remarkably restrained. There was a surprising amount of hugging (I’d be interested to get a final tally), but no love interest. What promised to be an awkward blind date never eventuated. The major female characters were Cage’s sister and a drawn and haunted Rose Byrne who never was the subject of a romance (she got hugged, but no-one will escape). Considering the final role of the children, the child characters never took centre stage. Necessary graphic violence was not accompanied by gratuitous gore. Anguish and heartbreak and terror, while visible, were not dwelt on, and there were scenes and histories and possible side-stories which were alluded to but not pursued. That same restraint, however, ultimately cheapened all those lives.
The restraint did make the movie occasionally creepy. We knew we were being played – the light, the music, the placement of windows in a scene – but the audience, to its own amusement, yelped more than once. The sudden contrast of the full-on scenes of destruction were also (variably) effective. I quite like epic, world-destroying cinematography, and although the scenes were not always believable and sometimes over the top, they weren’t flinching, and the devastation seemed appropriately devastating. It’s just a shame that the destruction was more interesting than what was being destroyed.

The lack of connection may be Nicholas Cage’s fault, because I don’t watch him to see him emote. It’s not that he can’t. I could see the emotions he was going for quite clearly. I wanted to feel for the man, but I kept giggling, or worrying he was accidentally going to do the splits. Of course, it may not be all Cage’s fault – I noted at the very beginning that I wished the X-Files movie had started like this one, and all to the end I kept thinking that a few tweaks would have made this a passable X-File, and in that case we could have watched David Duchovny while not thinking about the science or the plot (which were so aerated I’m not going to go into them).

In the end, there was no-one else to think about except Cage. No-one did anything. Well, Rose Byrne stole a car, and we approved of that, but most characters stagnated and were odd, or off-screen and I didn’t care about them one way or the other enough to be particularly concerned with their fates. Not even the animals. Not even the rabbits. Especially not the rabbits. As a result I did not find the ending hopeful or tragic or appropriate or anything I thought it might be meant to be. Disturbing and peculiar and odd, yes. With alien-angel beings and religious references which didn’t prove anything or go anywhere, and vaguely prehensile-looking grass.

Without the philosophical/religious underpinnings, this might have been just another end of the world, but the movie’s allusions and questions and conclusion didn’t make me think or twist my view of reality or raise or answer any questions. They seemed to me to be so shallow, gratuitous and wrong that ultimately my reaction to the movie was not “whoa” but “huh”. Or possibly, “Huh?”.

Disclosure: I received the pass in return for doing a review.

If you like one-line reviews: It was Deep Impact meets a Watchtower tract (purely for the visual impact of the final scenes).

Further thoughts: Lately I’ve been thinking about whether and how religion and philosophy combine with science fiction (or fiction at all). For example, if you level the playing field as far as research and characterisation, I have big (literary) issues with a lot of ‘Christian fiction’ and barely any with secular fiction which happens to have Christians in it, even if one is as orthodox as the other. It may be a difference between being hit over the head with something and observing someone else live out what they believe, but I’m still refining those thoughts.

This week’s Illustration Friday picture is an scratchboard illustration (with colour added in Photoshop) for a game, and also a reference back to my “contained” illustration in January.

We used to play “What’s the time, Mister Wolf?” a great deal when we were little – more than “Red Rover” or “Branding” (although I have a story about that) or “Crack the Whip” (popular but dangerous) or “Sharks and Islands” (invented and evolving) or “Eggs Bacon Chips or Cheese” (convoluted). It may have been because it has a low entry threshold and shallow learning curve. (Wikipedia gives some information on the game – we tended to play the simplest version).