New artwork: Christ Visits the Nephites III, a third installment in the series. This time round I experimented with a style that feels a bit like medieval stained glass. Fairly happy with how it turned out, though of course now I mostly see its flaws. (But early medieval stained glass was full of flaws and imperfections! So it’s in that spirit.)
Blog: #art
New artwork: Nothing Shall Be Impossible unto You II. A slightly different take on the same idea as the first piece.
Brain dump time. These are some of the things I think about re: art, specifically the type of art I’ve been doing these past few years (which admittedly has some quirks that other types of art wouldn’t necessarily have). These are in no particular order:
Concept. With this kind of minimalist religious art, the question is always: “How can I convey this idea in as few lines/shapes/colors/etc. as possible?” I usually mull over an idea, sketch something out until I feel loosely satisfied with it, then send it to my wife and we do a few rounds of feedback and revision. I also find myself thinking about other ways to represent things minimally, beyond just the circles, triangles, and rectangles I’ve used. (Yesterday’s Peace, Be Still felt like a nice change, for example.)
Process. The main question is usually: “What’s the fastest way to execute this idea without a drop in quality?” And, close on its heels: “What style do I feel like working in right now?” At the moment, the process I tend to use most is this: refine the idea in Illustrator, then export to SVG, open the file in Vim and add in the filters (turbulence, displacement, erosion, etc.), using Quicklook to preview my work, then open it in Inkscape and export to a 6500×6500 PNG (or thereabouts), which I then texture in Photoshop. Writing it out like that makes it seem fairly time-consuming, but it’s usually not too bad. (On average, I think I spend a total of perhaps an hour per piece, though it’s usually broken up over several days.) Lately I’ve been itching to simplify my texturing process, or perhaps to try wildly different textures. (With this type of art, I’ve found that it’s the idea that matters most. As long as it’s adequately conveyed, the rest — which tools I use, what style I do it in, etc. — doesn’t matter nearly as much.)
Releasing. I often think about whether I should care what time of day I post pieces (and usually decide that I don’t care), whether I should only post one piece per day max (I go back and forth here but usually post whatever pieces are finished regardless), and how much explanation I should give in the captions. I also think about how checking Instagram and Facebook for likes and comments feels a little like a soul-sucking death trap. Sometimes I think about ditching both platforms and posting art only to my site, but I’m not quite ready yet.
Storage. Last and probably least, I find myself frequently thinking about how much storage all these original image files are taking up. It’s a bit silly since it’s peanuts compared to video and I have plenty of disk space, but the part of my brain that loves plain text often points out that a novel takes up a mere few hundred KB while these original image files are usually a much larger 50–80 MB each (full-resolution lossless PNG; I’ve thought about JPEG but I don’t think I want to go down that road). And then I tell that part of my brain to hush, since it’s not a real problem.
New artwork: Peace, Be Still. I dialed up the SVG turbulence filters to get the effect on the left. Also used the erode operator throughout (with the feMorphology filter primitive). I couldn’t get Inkscape to show the lines with the filters applied, though, so I ended up screenshotting the piece via QuickLook and then upscaling in Photoshop (hacky, but hopefully not too obvious).
New artwork: Body of Christ. For this piece I re-used most of the code from Tree of Life II, with minor modifications.
Two new pieces: They Could Not Hit Him (Samuel the Lamanite on the wall) and Pearl of Great Price (about sharing the gospel).
New artwork: The Night Shall Not Be Darkened. On this one I used an erosion filter along with turbulence and displacement; the effect is most clear on the two vertical lines.
A few other new pieces: Nothing Shall Be Impossible unto You (about faith), Roll Forth (about the stone cut out of the mountain without hands), and Out of the Dust (about the Book of Mormon).
For a while I’ve wanted to explore using black and white for my art. Tell Me the Stories of Jesus was the initial step in that direction, but these latest four pieces are more like what I envisioned (a little more like ink on paper, to some degree). I’m looking forward to doing more work in this style.
New artwork: Tree of Life II.
I used the same circle packing technique to generate the circles, constraining them this time to be inside a larger circle. Initially I was going to have the tree visible as that larger circle — dark on a light background — but it ended up looking better to me with just the small white circles. (After that I used SVG filters and Inkscape and Photoshop as usual.)