How do you make that crazy stuff?

December 19, 2021

I’ve had several people ask me how I make my digital artwork. It’s a difficult question to answer because over the years I have adopted several methods that seem to serve me pretty well. But like most things, each desired outcome relies on specific methods that may, or may not, be part of another outcome.

Ahem….

So, here now I present to you several of my super secret recipes for digital satisfaction. Hehehehe….

Method One: Direct Illustrator Satisfaction.

This is the process used for at least fifteen years, and still probably the one which is most comfortable for me. After Adobe Illustrator refined their gradient annotation tool, making gradients supremely variable and much more natural, I began using it as a quick and easy way to create organic shading totally within Illustrator. It takes a lot of finessing to get the gradients correct, and often it involves layering several gradients on top of another with blending modes, but it is a fantastic tool to use when creating smooth subtle and generally realistic (and sometimes stylized) color gradients to depict shading and lighting effects.

The animated Holiday Card I made when I was working at STAK Design is a good example of this. It was actually one of the first projects I made after Adobe introduced this capability to Illustrator’s gradient tool. Before that, you pretty much just had either linear gradients or strictly circular gradients. But the Gradient Annotator opened up the ability to stretch the shape and transform the origin of gradients, making them much richer in appearance than ever before. And now, the gradient tool has become even better with gradient points and lines, which are even more sublime. Ooooooh!

The Illustrator image, showing the objects as outlines.

Detail of image with gradients, all in Illustrator.

Method Two: Illustrator Becomes the Prime Object Maker, and Photoshop Becomes the Master Shader.

This is one that generates more organic, naturalistic results similar to OG art, like traditional airbrush illustrations (which I love). It is an extremely time-consuming way to make paintings, because it involves so many different steps. And I always find the way I’ve made one or several “friskets” along the way is not quite right, and I need to go back and edit the path to make the frisket correct. But this is its intrinsic beauty; it has advantages in preserving the various steps used to create the artwork, so later edits are much easier.

When creating these, I generally start with a pencil sketch that is brought into the computer via scan or crude photo from the trusty iPhone. Then I bring it into Illustrator and trace over it to make paths. Those paths are used as “friskets”, or masks (alpha channels) in Photoshop. The paths in Illustrator always contain registration rectangles on the perimeter that are always copied and pasted from Illustrator into the corresponding Photoshop document, so everything lines up automatically when pasted into Photoshop. An old trick I learned in college printmaking classes that has served me well throughout my professional career, no matter the medium.

These paths are used with various layers and blotchy brushes or Photoshops regular brushes set on Bitmap mode to make splatter airbrush effects. It is also used in the same manner in Painter for airbrush friskets.

There are any number of examples of this technique shown throughout my portfolio., but here is an example of this technique in action. This is part of the fever dream tattoo idea for my brother.

It all started with a lot of research for the crazy elements I wanted to include. I have a large folder on my computer with images of praying mantids, steampunk airships, octopus, manta rays, the monkeys from Wizard of Oz, etc. Then came volumes sketches, starting in a sketchbook and later going big on sheets of tracing paper. I like tracing paper because it allows for easy revisions by tracing over earlier “almost correct” versions. I think this painting had about a dozen variations. It began with the idea of a giant flying octopus attacking the Alien queen and her entourage, mounted on bio-mechanical preying mantids, and their guardian flying monkeys, who cannot breathe the atmosphere of whatever planet they are on and therefore have gas masks, as they travelled through a sunset sky.

Original idea for background, a composite of 3 or 4 photos in Photoshop

I decided a flying octopus was not strange enough, so I turned it into a mutant hybrid of a shark head, octopus tentacles, and manta ray wings, plus mammalian breasts to indicate it has offspring lurking somewhere, and they are probably hungry.

I created several sketches to find the right combination for this imaginary beast, but just couldn’t quite get what I wanted, so I decided to make a small sculpture to help visualize it. I made an aluminum wire armature for the tentacles and to hold the body parts, and formed the masses with home-made play dough. It finally appeared as I wanted.

Play dough sculpt of the top of Mantapus

Detail of Mantapus maquette underside. Dig that Jaws mouth!

From this, I completed the sketches and assembled the composition in Photoshop. But there was another element that I was trying to incorporate that just didn’t seem to fit. Bettie Page is an iconic figure of pulp legend that I have always wanted to include in art pieces, and try as I might, she just wasn’t working when I attempted to put her into this scene. Although the follow-up to this painting, still in progress, includes her as the captain of the airships seen in the distant background of this piece.

Anyway, the sketches were composited in Photoshop and from there, I opened it in Illustrator and made paths to define the shapes and areas. The line width tool is one of my favorite tools in Illustrator; its inclusion has made creating variable line weights, which simulate variable widths of brush strokes or marker pens used in cartooning and fine arts, so much easier than it used to be, where you had to create a stroked path, convert in into a shape, and manually add control nodes and then adjust the distance between the opposing nodes to taper lines. I adjusted the line widths of all strokes to create a more organic look to the illustration. Each character was on a separate layer to make it easier to see what was going on, and to help select elements separately when I imported them into Photoshop.

Now comes the fun part! I decided to try something a little different for this piece. I would normally use Painter for an art piece like this one, but because it was originally intended as a tattoo design, I decided to keep it in black & white. In Photoshop, I wanted to simulate a stipple effect like a tattoo artist would employ, so I did all of the shading using brushes in Dissolve Mode, which basically sprays binary dots rather than smooth gradient shading.

Close-up of the Dissolve brush mode used in Photoshop to create this piece.

The piece itself is very large: Nearly 100” x 65” at 200 pixels/inch. It gave the stipple effect a nice appearance. Since then, I have purchased brushes that beautifully achieve this random, hand-made effect, but in 2016 when I made this, I was not aware of these brushes (assuming they even existed back then).

I imported the Illustrator drawing into Photoshop and changed all the shapes to black. I then created layers for each character and used the lasso tool to make rough selections for the various parts I wanted to shade, like old-school friskets for traditional airbrush paintings. Each element was meticulously “airbrushed” using these selections on their respective separate layer, drawn over the imported Illustrator art. The outlined sketch from Illustrator was placed atop the other layers and turned to Multiply mode.

All of the foreground characters with shading

Some of the Illustrator outlines needed to be softened, so they would fade into the distance. I selected the area of the outlines using the lasso tool, used control-shift arrow to turn just that part of the outline into a controlled selection, and used a white-loaded brush (again on dissolve mode) on the selected outline to fade out that part.

In the end, the shading by itself appears pretty rough since the selections in this piece were hand-drawn. The overlaying of the outlines is what ties it all together, like a nice rug ties the disparate elements of a room together.

Finished piece (detail) with outlining and shading.

The Evolution of a Design

December 18, 2021

I have been friends with Jon McPherson since we were in high school together. He is now (and for many years has been) a distinguished and award-winning winemaker. I’ve always admired his creative, off-beat sense of humor and methodical manner in his pursuit of excellence in winemaking. Over the years, I have had the good fortune to create some wine labels for his winery. This has surely been to the consternation of the owner of the winery, because he is apparently a man of practical drive and has not the time for whimsy. An old-fashion businessman; get to the point and move on, man.

So this particular tale of design started several years ago, in early 2007 to be exact. I had started a new job with an exhibit company while going through my divorce. I had moved out and was holed up in a little apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood, poring through Cinefex magazine, which featured articles about the creation of special effects for movies, and Illustration magazine, which had beautiful exposés about talented but mainly now-forgotten illustrators from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s (a fantastic magazine). My days also consisted of watching the news as I got ready for work each morning, and burning my dinner each night after work. I was also going through a period of watching old film noir classic cinema on Netflix disks (before there was high-speed internet), and doing a few freelance jobs with old clients to make a few extra bucks.

My daughter visited with me at my scary little apartment every other weekend, and one of these weekends we went to the Ft Worth Museum of Modern Art. This was a favorite haunt of ours, along with other local galleries and museums. The Modern had an exhibition of works by Matisse at the time. As a quick aside, one of my former employers was a huge fan of Matisse, and I remember a coffee table book in our studio with his works, including his paper cut-out pieces.

Even though I am a huge fan of Paul Klee and his simplistic assembled paintings featuring whimsical juxtapositions of animals, architecture, landscapes and such, I recall thinking Matisse’s paper artworks in that book were silly, childish, and not really anything special. Too rudimentary to be elevated to the level of masterwork. But when my daughter and I saw the exhibit live, which included paintings, some beautiful sculptures, and these silly paper cut-outs, I was overwhelmed. I was fascinated by the way the paper had been treated, carefully drawn, then cut out with such passion that I could almost see the Artist’s hands holding and carefully cutting out each piece and then meticulously arranging them on the pages. I could see his thought process inscribed in the almost invisible pencil lines covered with paints, and the devotion to his artistic ideals.

I was transformed by the simple elegance that I had not recognized by looking at the photos in a book.

Skip ahead a few months. I got a call from Jon, who had a batch of several red wines that were not of sufficient volume to bottle as small batches, so he was going to blend them into a superb table wine. He wanted a unique label for the blended wine, something distinct from South Coast’s normal branding, because their traditional branded wines are normally high price-point, and this, being a blend, had to be sold for $10 range — so it couldn’t sully the main brand. He laid the name on me: “The Big Red Table”. He said he wanted the label to feature a dining table painted red, so there was a pun involved in the name. I told him I would give it some brain time.

Sometime later, I was reminiscing about the Matisse exhibit, and I had a sudden vision of the label a la Matisse. Treated, painted cut-out paper shapes on painted paper. Abstract, bold, immediate. I thought it also had to have some sense of scale, and for some reason I imagined a dog curled up napping under the table for the back label. I think I had seen a commercial on TV that lead to that slumbering canine detail.

Eureka! I had it!

*The first doodle of the Matisse paper labels*

A few quick sketches should suffice.

I went to work in my little apartment, painting construction paper and cutting it into shapes, trying different versions and “view angles” as I imagined master Matisse had done so many years before, making a small sample of my idea. I went through several options before coming to one I liked, and I then emailed it to Jon.

*The front and back labels captured on painted, cut-out paper*

I got on the phone with him and explained the rationale behind it. Jon, being a creative, art-loving guy, thought it was fantastic. He understood it right away, but he admitted he might have some difficulty selling the idea to the owner.

In the meantime, I made larger pieces based on the small maquette version. Full steam ahead! It was only paper, after all.

A few days later I got the call. The owner didn’t get it. Even though Mr. Carter collects art, he prefers Americana, traditional Remington-style art. He wasn’t having the weirdo European-flavored art on his labels. So back to the drawing board, as they say.

Jon and I still liked the idea, so he suggested to try presenting it in a different style. So I made a more painterly version; a rough acrylic painting on a small piece of paper, keeping the same idea of the big table and a dog sleeping under it. But that attempt fell flat as well, with Jon and even in my own mind. It was just a sloppy, meaningless painting. It lacked spark.

Thinking about it in hindsight, I think the dog is what actually killed the idea.

Jon is a cat person.

At that point, my day job was crashing down on me. It was time for the big annual trade show that most of our clients attended in Las Vegas. Thirty-some-odd client-companies, each with a multitude of different types of graphics for their booth. Hundreds of graphics under my management — my first year doing this at this new job. I was not really prepared for the volume of work I had to deal with. I had to shove The Big Red Table in the back of my mind in order to keep afloat in the deluge of work. It was panic time.

I slogged through the two and a half months of production phase for the trade show, then went to Las Vegas to install and supervise installation of all of these immense exhibits. It was overwhelming. May was horribly hot in Las Vegas that year, and there were all sorts of problems; I remember when I first touched down at the airport my phone lit up with the office calling to tell me an entire crate of client graphics was missing. I wasn’t even off the plane yet. For the better part of a week it was nothing but graphics missing, colors wrong, clients deciding to change graphics at the last minute, etc etc. Things were looking bleak. I was sure I’d be fired upon my return to Dallas. But things started to clear up after four or five days. Those local vendors in Las Vegas are accustomed to last-minute, late-night rescue missions for us poor bastards on the trade show floors, and they have always been saviours.

I remember walking through the Las Vegas Convention Center on the day before the show opened, when all was finally looking like we were going to make it out alive. My head began to clear. The panic abated, at least for a moment. Something on the show floor caught my attention and made me think, somewhat randomly, about one of the articles in Illustration magazine; some artist who did pulp magazine covers. And I witnessed, as I walked through the chaotic Convention Center hallway, two people sneaking a kiss. It made me wonder how, in this calamity, they had found each other, and what was their story? Married? Co-workers? Secret lovers? I’ve seen friendly hugs in this environment when old friends reunite, but a smooch? Nah….

At that moment it all hit me like a flash. It was all there in one big roll of the cosmic dice. The Big Red Table was about a pulp romance magazine cover, a torrid film-noir affair, sprinkled with a hint of mystery.

And the napping dog under the table was replaced with a pre-tryst lipstick smeared cocktail napkin, just like in the movies.

*Several pages from my notebook, showing the early ideas for the labels and the shelf-talker, detail of the shadowplay on the wall, and the initial logo layout.*

I made some rough sketches and called Jon as soon as I got back to Dallas. He was excited and he wanted to see it. I made a quick 3D model of the interior of a dining room, a photo of a cocktail napkin Photoshopped into the rendering, and used the rendering of the scenes to make the digital oil paintings in Painter. I wanted these to have that loose, hand-painted old-style illustration feel. I created the logo and pulp-magazine style layout for the labels in Illustrator, and wrote some stand-in description text for the back label (Jon always writes his own back labels, describing the balance of different tastes and characteristics of the wine). Compiled it all in Illustrator and sent it to Jon. Then waited.

He called me a few days later. He had shown it to the owner of the winery, and said I had “Knocked it out of the park.” Jon said the owner didn’t love it, but he understood it and thought it was unique enough to sell. He said he would keep my stand-in description as is because it fit the theme so well, and another fruit-filled description of another red table wine just wouldn’t be right. I felt honored.

And as it turned out, it won several awards for most unique label design.

It was one of the most rewarding, although hard-fought, designs I had made to that point.

So thank you, Raymond and Celeste. Whoever you crazy kids are.

Shelf-talker art for promotional pieces, with the romantic shadow play and the watching detective, to add some mystery.

Now, go check the window, then let the dog out.

The Most Recent Geek-out: Food and O2 for Mars

May 1, 2021

Several weeks ago, I was scrolling through Facebook posts. As you may know about me, I am a space geek. I grew up during the Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union (now disbanded and mainly referred to as Russia, the main constituent of the USSR of that era).

Anyway, being all about art, science, technology, retro design, and science fiction, I subscribe to quite a few esoteric pages. So while scrolling, I paused on one whose title was something like “NASA is looking for creative ideas to feed the colonist on the moon and Mars” or something similar. Yeah, who isn’t? Sounded like one of those insipid Science dot com pages that actually lead nowhere and impart nothing I don’t already know. Idiocritized science for people who know little to nothing about current science.

I continued scrolling and soon came across a random science article about “Duckweed: The Next Superfood”. Okay, I know a little something about duckweed from having aquariums. Little tiny lilypad-looking plants that float on top of the water and eventually get sucked into the aquarium filter and cause grief, if they don’t multiply so fast that they cover the entire aquarium surface and you have to scoop out most of it with a net so the rooted plants below the surface can get enough light to survive. And, apparently, if they are not in your aquarium but rather in a pond, in the wild, ducks eat them like caviar. Hence the name.

So I scanned through that article and it proclaimed how one particular variety of duckweed is an excellent source of protein. Eaten in Asia as a source of protein higher than soybeans. And, not only is it edible, and grows prolifically, but it is a fantastic natural water purifier, removing CO2 and nitrates from the water (and air). It can detoxify water and produces (drumroll please): Pure Oxygen. Good little plants!

Ding Ding Ding!

Suddenly the previous article about NASA needing ideas for food sources on MoonBase Alpha became a hydroponic solution using this tiny little duckweed which not only filters out the CO2 from the base’s atmosphere, makes breathable O2 for those poor bastards (of which I wish I could be amongst), and they can also spread it on their microwaved salmon, deli sliced turkey or peanut butter sandwiches for extra protein boosts.

Sidenote— I watched a YouTube video while researching this and discovered there is a company in Israel that is bringing to market this duckweed variety as a protein spread, I assume available sometime soon in health-food stores. The video included taste-testers who described the taste as mild, kinda like almonds, and would compliment just about anything. The company seems to be also test marketing a sleek-looking counter-top smoothy machine for the product, so they are targeting high-end health-conscious consumers.

I also saw another company doing similar research with this duckweed varietal.

Back to the main story: Plus, this plant has been used and proven effective in municipal water filtration systems to clean and purify sewage. But I would guess this duckweed would not be introduced as part of the astronaut food chain, at least not directly. Maybe as a fertilizer for other plants or feed for fowl grown in the MoonBase farms. So you could use this same plant to help the sewage system on the MoonBase, and it’s own waste could be used to fertilize other edible crops or fauna.

WHICH LEADS ME TO…

I decided “Why the hell not?”

—Or—

I need a real life.

I have been procuring various cheap components to try out this idea of using this wee little duckweed to filter water (with added CO2) and see how well it does. I am sure my results will not be valid as my test equipment will be pretty slam bang theater, and not actual control equipment. But maybe if I show a bit of results, it might merit further research at a more reputable lab with better equipment.

The most difficult aspect of this entire experiment has been finding this actual duckweed variety/species. Wollfia Globosa. That is the golden child. There are other variants of that species, but that one superfood is not to be found anywhere that will ship it to little old me. If you happen to be reading this and have a source for that exact plant, please let me know. As it is, I have found several online aquarium outlets that have a very similar species; that is what I will be starting off with. Wollfia (undetermined). Looks like what I want, but who knows….

My idea is to use the wire shelving racks with full-spectrum LED lighting strips I already have, which I use to root garden plants, with some cheap polypropylene storage bins and some aquarium air pumps, valves, etc. I think four bins will do, maybe six. I will make clear acrylic lids to place on the tops, because all of these cheap tote bins have opaque lids which will block the lighting. Drill holes for aquarium tubing and seal the tubes with silicone glue, bubble stones for aeration. All get hooked to aquarium pump, issuing regular air. Several get hooked up with regular air and also injected with additional CO2 via a tank/valve system, to simulate the dirty CO2-rich air that a CO2 scrubbing system would need to have on a MoonBase. Several “Control” bins, several bins with duckweed. Some O2 sensor and CO2 sensor (which I have learned are waaaay more expensive than I thought they would be and will probably be purchased after I make sure the main experiment is viable) will be needed to validate the crude experiment.

It may all be a silly bullshit experiment, but that’s the sort of stuff I enjoy.

Science the shit out of it! (But leave the math for somebody else!)

Geek. Me.

Live Long and Prosper.