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.
Blog: #religious
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.)
New artwork: Within the Walls of Your Own Homes.
I realized (this is the very small breakthrough I mentioned yesterday) that I could use Blender to add 3D texture to my pieces. Verisimilitude has been the goal all along, and using an actual 3D renderer brings so much to the table that it boggles my mind that I didn’t think of this much earlier.
A closeup of the texture:
How I made this piece: I mocked it up in Illustrator, then exported it to SVG where I manually added the turbulence and displacement filters (in Vim) to distress the edges of the white square, which you can see in that closeup. I used Inkscape to export the SVG to a 6500×6500 PNG.
Then, in Blender, I created a plane and went to town on the shading, using a combination of procedural and image textures to mix the colors together and displace the geometry of the plane. There’s a key light and a dim fill light. And in the compositor I added a little chromatic aberration around the edges with the lens distortion filter.
Rendered it at 5200×5200, which took about two hours on my 16″ MacBook Pro. I tend to work a little smaller and then upscale to 6500×6500 (for square pieces), since Photoshop’s upscaling is fairly decent these days. After upscaling, I added my signature thingie, which I’ll add in Blender in the future so it fits in better.
Here’s the node setup on the plane (and in the future I’ll use groups to make things more manageable):
Overall, I’m happy with this technique. It’s more time-consuming than painting textures in Photoshop, but I can do other things while it’s rendering, and the result looks much better to me. Working in 3D is more fun, too. Most importantly, using Blender gives me loads of new options that would have been harder to do well with my old technique — shiny paint, glowing materials, etc.
New artwork: Plan of Salvation. Inspired by a comment my friend Naomi made about another piece.
This is also one of the first times (maybe the very first time) that I’ve superimposed things like this, especially out of chronological order. Hopefully it doesn’t make the piece overly confusing.
Last but not least, I’m really liking the SVG filters for making the edges seem more hand-drawn.
New artwork: Before the World Was II.
It’s (in my opinion) a much better execution of Before the World Was, which used a quick DrawBot script that didn’t pay much attention to placement.
This time, working off the Generative Artistry circle packing tutorial, I wrote a Python script that places all the circles so there’s no overlap, then outputs an SVG with the turbulence/displacement filters I wrote about not too long ago.
For comparison (original on the left):
I also went with a slightly less saturated background in this new version, and I put a little bit of texture on the circles themselves to make it feel slightly more painterly.
Another First Vision lecture! On Sunday night, Eric Jepson gave a lecture entitled Triangulating God as part of the Oakland Stake First Vision Lecture Series. He included First Vision VIII (at around 15:16), First Vision XIII (at around 34:08), and First Vision VI (at around 35:57). I haven’t watched the whole talk yet (same story, I know), but I’m looking forward to it.
Last night Richard L. Bushman gave a Center for Latter-day Saint Arts Zoom keynote:
In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Restoration of the Gospel, foremost scholar and historian of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Richard Bushman shares the art of the First Vision. He addresses this seminal event in the Latter-day Saint faith tradition as it has been visually represented from artists all over the globe. Bushman also answers questions about why the arts are significant to revelatory development.
With my permission (though with the artwork’s Creative Commons license it wasn’t actually necessary), he included my Let Him Ask of God piece at the end of his talk. That part starts around 29:54. (I haven’t watched the whole thing yet — it just got uploaded an hour or so ago — but I’m very much looking forward to it.)
New artwork: Love at Home.
I’ve been enjoying Emily McQueen’s The Green Hymnbook project (@greenhymnbook) — typewritten hymn texts with lovely linocut illustrations underneath.