New artwork: Behold My Beloved Son. Basically a Christ Visits the Nephites but with a different title, one actually from the scriptures.
I painted this in Procreate, and goodness, it messed up my back a bit. (Which is unfortunate because I really like the woodcut-style look on the white triangle. I may still do occasional pieces this way, when there’s not a billion little circles like I have here.) It’s frustrating when my spondylolisthesis keeps me from making art the way I want to. At some point I’ll probably try to figure out a way to do this style with code. (Speaking of which, I generated the circles here with a little bit of JavaScript. It was fun doing a piece that’s a little more three-dimensional.)
Another new project. I wanted to do something with the words of the scriptures and came up with this style, where it’s intended to be more decorative/evocative (so legibility isn’t at the top of the priority list). It’s also a fun way to play with textures in ways that I don’t always get to with my other art.
A new experimental nerdy thing, for people who like hymns, sheet music, and textures:
How I make these hymn prints (as I’m calling them):
Typeset the first phrase (or so) in MuseScore using the Bravura font, with the spacing trimmed to within an inch of its life
Play it out loud to make sure I entered it right (cough) and export an SVG
Drag the SVG into a frame in Figma and use the SkewDat plugin to skew it -4°, center it, then export a 4,000px-wide PNG
Use ImageMagick to do some erosion and dilation (to simulate age and ink spread): convert input.png -morphology erode disk:18 -morphology dilate disk:16 output.png
Texture the image in Affinity Photo and export the PNG
Upscale with Real-ESRGAN to 12,000px-wide
Downscale a little in Affinity Photo, add 8% monochrome noise, and export the final PNG
I’m still figuring out how I want to do these (full bleed or not, barlines, clefs and key signatures or not, etc.). Also thinking about possibly doing some abstract versions as well, to avoid all these music typesetting issues entirely.
