Before the World Was VI. Another take on the celestial yin & yang version.Follow Me. I really like the bolder colors here. One of my favorites.I’ve a Mother There III. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do another negative space piece but decided to go for it.In Their Own Image. Finally branched out to some other scriptures for my Heavenly Parents pieces. Initially this one looked too much like a restroom sign. Also, I don’t know that I’ve found the simplest way to represent this idea yet.A Beloved Daughter. I was reading Elder Renlund’s conference talk and realized I hadn’t done this yet.Prodigal Son II. Fairly close to the first iteration but without the unnecessary ground.
Other art
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.
Pattern 001. This is the one that wasn’t procedural; I made the heightfield in Figma. While I like the way the sun lamp lights things evenly, it still feels maybe a little too harsh to me. I think of this piece as some kind of vintage fabric.Pattern 002 A. Kind of going for a Central American archaeological feel here. For this I wrote a Python script that generated rectangles on a grid in SVG for the heightfield. Switched to a spotlight lamp, and added some fog. I added the green in post.Pattern 002 B. Same script as 002 A, this time with different textures and lighting. Going for a Middle Eastern archaeological feel. I also added a slight bit of rippling and rotational blur on top to make it feel a little magical.Pattern 003 A. New script. Fairly pleased with how this turned out — all the different varieties that come out from random circles. (Since that’s all the heightfield is, really.) I added the lower-level squares on a last-minute impulse and I’m glad I did.Pattern 003 B. Same script as 003 A. I love love love the way the heightfield texture makes it look like things are growing, in a creepy way. Added depth of field to make things look more underwater. I’m happy with the old-photograph feel, too.Pattern 004. It still blows my mind that I can take a black-and-white heightfield and use it to generate art like this. Kind of cool how several of these look like they’re bowls even though the interiors aren’t actually rounded.
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:
I used paged.js for the typesetting, so I was editing HTML and CSS files instead of wrangling InDesign or Affinity Publisher or LaTeX. It’s a different workflow, to be sure (lots of reloading in Chrome and then finding my spot again), but overall I love having the source files be plain text.
The line-breaking algorithm isn’t as nice as InDesign’s. Had to finagle the 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.)
For the typeface I went with IM Fell DW Pica, which is no doubt anachronistic but I like the feeling it gives the book.
I proofed the PDFs in the Documents app on my iPad. Much nicer than printing the whole thing out (which I used to do, years ago).
I made the cover using Cirque with textures applied in Affinity Photo.
