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.
New story: Research Notebook 17, about ten pages long, fantasy.
This one was surprisingly easy to write, and I really enjoyed the process. The story originated with my Edge of Magic web novel (the one I abandoned years ago), went through several upheavals as I tried to figure out what to do with it, and landed with a completely new story. The only thing in common is the name of the main character.
New story: Mother Tongue, about twenty pages long, fantasy.
I started working on this story back in 2016 but it didn’t come together at the time. This story is wildly different from that early draft, with the characters’ names (Dagh and Maria Bonita) being about the only parts that have survived.
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.
Just added diagonal graph paper to the note paper page. It looks like this:
Why would you use this? No idea. I haven’t been able to come up with any good use cases for it, but the itch needed to be scratched so here we are.
Sidenote: I made the original lined/grid paper with PlotDevice but decided to use SVG instead this time, converting the files to PDF with Inkscape.
After what feels like a long absence from bookmaking, I’ve gotten back into it and have a new release: Historia Calamitatum, available as a PDF.
The book is a medieval autobiography by Peter Abélard, a Catholic philosopher who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in France.
Some notes on the making, for those who like that sort of thing:
word-spacing and letter-spacing properties a bit to fix some more egregious spots. (At the same time, I wasn’t fixated on making the spacing perfect. Nor did I fix the hyphenation stacks, because they don’t bother me. I’m clearly becoming a bit more relaxed about typesetting rules as I get older.)