I made this a couple weeks ago but haven’t posted about it here yet:
When we were going through my dad’s things, we found a framed version of the original piece that he’d hung up in his office. That version was more representational than my more recent work, though, so I decided to do a more abstract, minimalist version in memoriam.
My dad died this week. He went missing on Tuesday and we found his body in the mountains on Friday after three excruciatingly long days of searching.
It’s been awful, but in spite of the core-shaking pain and a whole lot of crying, I’ve felt at peace — even more than I was expecting. I am so, so grateful for Christ and his gospel, giving me hope that I will see my father again and that this is just a temporary separation. I’ve also been amazed to see such a massive outpouring of support and love from family and friends and complete strangers.
Over the last day or two I’ve felt I needed to make this new piece about my dad and all the people supporting him and my family on both sides of the veil. It’s called Taken Home:
A new art piece:
Process notes: I mocked it up in Figma and exported a PNG, imported that into Procreate and painted it, upscaled it, made a heightfield image from that, used Blender with the heightfield as a displacement map, and then in Affinity Photo composited it with the original painting and added textures.
I’m intrigued by the idea of using Blender to add 3D texture and (hopefully) make things look a little more like a real painting. A couple years ago I first experimented with this on my Within the Walls of Your Own Homes piece.
In rereading that post just now, apparently back then it took two hours to render the image in Blender. Whew. No wonder I didn’t continue down that path. If I remember correctly, I was compositing a bunch of different textures together directly in Blender before doing the displacement. This time round, making the heightfield beforehand using Procreate and Affinity Photo seems to have paid off: render time is a mere one to two minutes.
The material nodes in Blender are pretty simple — image texture for the color, image texture with the heightfield through a multiply node to the displacement input on the final shader node.
(Also, to be clear, I haven’t done a deep dive into whether this is the actual reason the render times are so much faster.)
New story: Unlocked. About fifteen pages long, fantasy.
Also, some new generative art. For these, the fundamental idea was to lay out horizontal bands, where each band was composed of rectangles of random widths, rotations, and color variations on a base hue for the band. I wrote some JavaScript to generative the patterns as SVGs and rendered them to 4500px-wide PNGs via headless Inkscape. I painted textures on them in Procreate on my iPad, mostly using MattyB’s canvas brushes. I upscaled them 2x via Real-ESRGAN on the command line, added noise in Affinity Photo (12% monochrome), and scaled them down to 7500px wide. Real-ESRGAN was a brand-new addition to my workflow but it turned out quite well, I think.
Lately I’ve been playing around with making meaningless decorative pieces in Blender, using displacement maps with (for the most part) procedural heightfields. For these I’ve generally textured the heightfield in Affinity Photo and sometimes also textured a separate color map. Looking forward to doing more work in this vein.
New artwork: But If Not.
Two new pieces. First is He Sent Forth a Dove, a reference to Noah and the ark:
Second is Taken Home to That God Who Gave Them Life, about the period between death and resurrection:
I expect to use this clean-line approach on most of these abstract pieces going forward (feels like a better fit).
Three more new pieces: An High Mountain Apart (the Mount of Transfiguration), By the Laying on of Hands II (same idea as the original piece, but using the flat hands I used recently in Principles and Ordinances II), and Peace Be unto Thy Soul (Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail).
New artwork: One in Mine Hand.
New artwork: From Everlasting Death.