Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150.  Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now.  Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds.  Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands.  If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard.  Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once.  So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better.  Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet?  That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less.  Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole.  Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability.  I need to produce more book sales.  That’s a hard one.  The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now.  Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks.  Gotta keep it up, though.  Gotta keep working on it.  Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now.  Gotta go.

I’ve been vaguely considering designing a custom deck of cards, akin to tarot cards, for many years.  I’ve never really wanted to simply design a tarot deck, as so many others have done before me, simply putting my own artwork on the traditional 72 cards.  This has something to do with my understanding about about divination works, and what part cards tend to play in it (not to mention the other roles such cards tend to end up playing on the side).  I’ve wanted to not just create artwork for an existing system of divination, but to create a new system from scratch.  A wholly original deck.

Of course, I’m aware that Leviticus 19:26 makes it clear that God would prefer if I didn’t practice divination at all.  The context that Isaiah 2:6 gives divination is as a “superstition from the East.”  I’d effectively given up the practice a few years ago, after a brief, intense period of giving in to the temptation, but it’s been on my mind again, lately.  Not in the context of wanting to do readings or divine knowledge/wisdom/future, but in wanting to design the cards, and to publish a book explaining them.  So I started designing.  I want through a couple of interesting ideas, did dozens of sketches, and decided to go a different direction.

I’ve been working on steering my creativity in a direction toward more Christian writing.  Not entirely effectively, yet, but I’ve been trying to at the very least avoid going further in the direction of the sex, violence, and apparent lack of morality that the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction was pointing me in (though that changes character in the final books).  I have a partially completed book that literally explores the concept of the unforgivable sin mentioned by Jesus – with violence, sex, action, and all sorts of other apparent sins (and exploration of the meaning of ‘sin’) along the way.  I would like to write several explorations of the complex, interesting, and challenging things I have found in scripture and in my own Christian walk.  But first, I think I’ll start with something unconventional:

I’m designing a deck of Christian cards, and writing a book to explain them.  As I conceive it now, I expect the book to have three pain parts: One part, the expected breakdown, card by card, of how to read the cards for divination – what this one means, what it means ‘reversed’, how to lay the cards out and to interpret them.  One part, a theological and biblical exploration of divination, ‘Eastern superstition’, and related new age beliefs as a temptation for modern Christians, especially as for new Christians who prior to being born again practiced such things.  One part, an alternative breakdown, card by card, that uses the deck of cards as a sort of flash cards for learning about Jesus, Christianity, and the early church.

Part of the idea (which will certainly be included in the book) is that most things of this world are neither inherently good or evil, but it is our individual choices, day by day and moment by moment, that we do right or wrong.  That we imbue the things of this world with the good or the evil that we do with them.  A deck of cards -the ones I am designing, or any deck of tarot cards- is not evil.  It is not a tool of the devil, in and of itself.  It can be used to do evil, but the cards themselves are not evil.  If I do a good job designing them, if I write a clear and well-organized book, both of which I believe can only happen through him who gives me strength, then my cards will be able to do good by those who choose to use them for good, and to likewise allow those who choose to do so to use them for divination.  A tool.  A choice.

The production, distribution, and sale of the book is easy for me, right now.  I’ve got 10 books in print already, and adding one only takes a couple of weeks, once it’s written.  The production, distribution, and sale of the cards -especially as part of a bundled item with the book- looks challenging.  There are several options for getting the cards printed.  I could pay for a huge offset run, warehouse them somehow…  There are a couple of companies that will do short-run decks of cards (hundreds instead of thousands or tens of thousands of decks).  I found one place that will do “print on demand” of custom cards, but not like POD book printers do -they aren’t doing wholesaling, retailing, distribution, and won’t do one-offs-  but they’ll print as few as 10 decks at a time, and they’ll print (but not assemble) deck boxes, too.  And I found a place that sells microperforated playing card paper, so I can print a test deck or two on my own printer.  So I’ll probably go with that last one at first, get the cards how I want them.  Then go to the POD printer and get a small order (they have a price break at 50 decks) & have a matching print run at Lightning Source (who also has a price break at 50 copies of a book).  Then try to get them carried by Christian and new age stores, I guess.  

I’m considering some options like:  Putting the book out with a high cover price & one page being a coupon you mail in for a free deck of cards.  Doing all the distribution myself, so I can bundle them manually, and don’t have to worry about people who buy the book through other channels & don’t get the cards.  Writing the book in such a way that it stands alone, without the cards, but tells you how you can order the cards, and using the same distribution setup I have for my other books.  And… uhh… do you have any other ideas?  I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

The current plan is to do the research (ie: read the bible, concordances, and other bible resources) so I can write 2-4 pages (minimum) for each of the cards (at least 1 page for each of the two parts that break down each card), and to paint an individual painting for each card’s art.  I’m hoping to do each painting 8×10″ or less, so I can do a high resolution scan with equipment I already own, do additional work in Photoshop as necessary, but then to have an original painting for sale that corresponds to every card.  To make packaging & distribution easier (and because it fell together in the designing of the deck), I’m doing a 52-card deck, currently as follows:

• 5 ‘Major’ cards: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Death, & Devil
• 14 Apostles cards: 1 per apostle, including both Judas & Matthias and Paul
• 11 Miracles cards, each featuring one of Jesus’ miracles
• 11 Ministry cards, each featuring one group of people to whom Jesus ministered
• 11 Message cards, each featuring one basic, foundational, repeated part of Jesus’ message

I think the hard cards will be the Apostle cards.  I need to do the research, but I’m pretty sure there are a few of the apostles there isn’t two pages’ worth of information about in the bible.  Hopefully I’m mistaken.  Either way, I’ll have to figure out how to represent each of them visually – I plan to research how they’ve each been traditionally and historically depicted in the last two millennia.  Still, they effectively represent 14 paintings of “a man,” which, if you’ve seen my art, you know hasn’t exactly been something I’ve been perfecting.  So probably 14 abstracted expressions of what each man represented or something they did or … inspired by whatever was used to depict them historically.  Your suggestions are, again, welcome.

I have a list, a flexible, mutable list, of what I expect the 52 cards to be.  I’m thinking of creating 52 blog posts -perhaps in a separate instance of WP, or perhaps merely in their own category- one for each card, where I can write out my explorations of the concepts.  I’ll have to think about that, too.  What do you think would work best?  Are you interested?  What would hold your interest?  What would annoy you about blogging it?  

Up late again.  Didn’t do any audio work today (now I’m not actually “ahead” of the podcast, anymore – a lot of recording done, but no finished episodes ready to go from here on out), but absolutely have to do some tomorrow.  Who wants to try to get me up in the morning?  Say, around 8?  sigh.

I started sketching in a cheap sketch-book I had on-hand, while waiting for the paint on ‘darkness looming‘ to dry, and started trying to see what might turn into another new painting. After several pages of messy nothing, I came up with a sketch for a something I liked. Sadly, for you, I didn’t take a picture if it, and I’m not going to, now. Maybe later. Anyway, it seemed interesting enough, and I annotated a few lines and spaces with ideas for colors, and after finishing the inking on ‘darkness looming‘, I started to work on the first layer of ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘. This layer was intended to be seen only in the vertical split between the left 2/3 and right 1/3 of the painting, and in the square in the lower right corner, but I wanted to do it right (and add a layer of texture) so I painted the entire canvas.

Purple.

Then I waited half a day for that to dry. And then, before I started working on the painting again, I set up a video camera to capture the rest of the process. I put a line of 1/2″ tape vertically on the canvas, and cut out a square of tape for the square – it’s like a sort of stencil; where I put the tape, the purple remains when I paint over the rest. Then I painted on the red circle, the blue background, the off-color right-side… You’ll watch the video and see it, right? I don’t need to describe it all in detail? Well, I painted on the colors, and as I’ve learned to do from countless past tape-involved projects before, I pulled up the tape while the paint was still wet. So, to explain the next part of the video: tape isn’t perfect. So some of the paint leaks under. What you can see me doing is cleaning up the worst of it, trying to maintain the purple background as intact as possible without hurting the (still wet) pink and blue foreground. The image you see at right is the painting when this process was complete; the main elements of color are present, but I hadn’t yet put on any borderlines, and certainly hadn’t painted the most-foreground element (the black, horizontal lines), so this image is sort-of an in-between-takes image. It was taken in between where the camera angle changes in the video. The camera angle changed, by the way, because I waited until the next day for it to dry, and I had to put away the camera before Mandy came home, or it would have blocked the walkway.

After the new color layer had dried, it was time to deal with the remaining (slight) leakage (mostly of white) at the edges of where the tape had been. I had taken a day to think about it, and had decided to use pearlescent purple and blue paint pens to both clarify the division by increasing the contrast from one color to another, and to cover up an otherwise unsightly evidence of my process which (in my opinion) did not improve the end result. The video of my tracing the outlines of the previously-taped sections is not particularly interesting, but I decided to just leave it all in. Then, semi-satisfied with the result of the colors, and after the paint from the paint pens had had a chance to dry, it was time for the three rough, black lines that overlap the piece. I put them vaguely on (for scale, placement, and some semblance of erraticism) first in Sharpie, then with a paintbrush and black paint. I knew exactly what I wanted, and it was no problem to execute this final step. There were only minor touch-ups of the black lines after the video camera was turned off, and ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ was ready for hanging.

So that’s how I made this painting.  The title was selected while it was still a sketch, and ’1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ is now available for purchase at wretchedcreature.com

Anyway, last week I started work on another of my paintings based on a sketch / doodle I did in the margin of a page of notes at work last year.  At the time that I doodled it, I outlined what was supposed to be part of the drawing in red – you can see that there were some overlapping notes leftover, in the picture below on the left.  If you look closely at the picture on the right, you can just make out the pencil-line I sketched freehand onto the canvas to get things started for this piece.  It didn’t match the original sketch, but considering I was freehand drawing from a blurry photo of a doodle, and that the whole thing is in a pretty loose style, I wasn’t too worried about it.  The pencil sketch captured the important details of the figure.

Instead of doing what I’d been doing on the last few pieces, and building up layers, from foreground to background, I decided to just paint everything at once on this piece, and stitch the colors together with a thick border, akin to what I’d done to outline the figure in audacity of hope.  So, I knew the character’s skin would be a pale blue-green color, and wanted his hat & coat to be a darker, but cool color, somewhere between deep blue-black and a dark violet, or perhaps a dark grey with a hint of color.  But I wasn’t sure what color the background should be, so … I just picked the color that contrasted with dark blues and purples the most, and voila – an orange background!  Before the orange even started to dry (which is how I usually operate – paint one color, wait for it to dry, paint the next color, and so on…) I went ahead and got out some purple and blue and white to mix in for the band and top of the hat, and got to work on the hat and coat.  It was much more purple than I’d intended.  I kept mixing more blue in, especially into the coat, but in the end, it was all much too purple to match my intentions.  Since the orange had actually ended up much more saturated than I’d wanted, the contrast between the rich orange and the rich purple ended up being well matched.

Then, while those colors were still drying, I moved forward again.  I mixed up a pale blue-green for the skin, more blue in the skin and more green in the beard, but a very subtle gradation between hues was what I was going for.  In contrast with the blue-purple coat surrounding it, the green in the beard almost disappears.  I actually spent about as much time just on getting the beard to look the way I wanted as I had on the entire hat.  I knew I’d been planning on adding a thick outline to the major features of the character before I was done, but I also didn’t want to have to outline the beard – I wanted it to look furry/hairy on its own.  So I made sure that I not only was creating variations in color, but that I was creating a fully-overlapping color, beard-over-coat, with hairs and mess along the full edge of the beard, from lip to eyeball.  The other colors all had a bit of space between them, and were fairly rough, but for the beard I made sure that the edge I was painting would be an edge I was happy with.  More green added to the blue-green for the eyes, then black added to that for the centers, and then for the mouth.  For the centers, I also didn’t want to have them outlined, so I made sure the black was touching the green.  Then, finally, I decided to let it dry before doing the outlines.

The next morning, I went out to run some errands, among which was to pick up a gold paint pen.  I actually ended up going to six different places to find three items.  Only one of which was the gold paint pen that I used to outline the figure’s hat and coat.  I’d already had a pearlescent blue pen on hand to use to outline the figure’s eyes and mouth, and that was the easy part.  I fought with myself for a long while, trying to get happy with the shape of the hat, the thicknesses of the lines, how much purple was left, how much gold I wanted to use in total…  And the pen I’d bought was terrible.  Just terrible.  It was a real pain just trying to use it without screwing anything up, but after the morning I’d had running all over I wasn’t about to go out and start looking for another one, so I struggled through.

Then I spent a couple of hours debating with myself (and with a few people on Twitter) over whether or not I ought to add in the feather-in-his-cap that had appeared in the original sketch (but which, I think, would have made the figure look much more pimp-like, and much less jazz-y), and what, exactly to call the thing.  In the end, I decided no feather, and a title both evocative and descriptive in turns.

Thus, I give you: ‘low moan, wide hat’, available for purchase from wretchedcreature.com

You may have seen the first image, which I posted Monday night, which is pretty basic. I painted a simple, nearly cartoonish background. Blue sky, green hills, using the style I’ve been developing for creating interesting, dynamic backgrounds. This, in itself, is pretty straightforward: big, soft brush, lots of water, usually just one color and white – though sometimes I’ve used multiple colors, and often I’ll pre-create the hue I want from multiple inputs – this time I wanted a pretty basic palette, so I used the pure blue and green that Utrecht gave me. That was actually all I did with the painting on Monday.

Tuesday, it was time to begin the real work, so I booted up Photoshop and iPhoto, and got down to the digital part of the project. I took the photo from the previous day, and adjusted the image to “pop” the painting itself out of its background and into square, plus appropriately proportioned for the actual canvas size, as pictured at the right. This itself is a pretty straightforward thing to do, as long as you keep in mind that you don’t want PS to be creating any new information about your image – which is to say that all dimensions should stay the same or get smaller, never bigger. After this step, I cropped down so I was only working with the canvas, and then switched to iPhoto to find my “reference material”.

Which is to say, a few blurry photos, from my iPhone, of a doodle in the margin of a page of notes I was making at work one day. You see, sometimes I’ll be doodling and see something I really like, and I’ll work on it on the page, but then want to recreate it as a full-size painting. ‘eat to fill the void’ and this untitled one with the face are two more examples of this sort of starting point. As it goes, I have already got more tiny scraps of paper with notes and drawings on them than I can keep organized. So I decided to try to keep digital records of my sketches and notes instead, as long as my iPhone (which I always have with me) has a camera built into it anyway – thus, I took a few photos of this weird little guy that day and threw away the original sketch. Turns out that what I had been remembering as a “monster with robot head” (I kept remembering the little guy holding a giant balloon in the shape of a robot’s head) was actually a “weird little guy” (that’s the name of the photos in iPhoto – must have been what I was thinking of him that day) thinking about a camera. Weird. It also turns out that the iPhone’s camera isn’t particularly good at taking clear photos at close distances, so all three images of my doodle were relatively blurry. I took the best one, cut out the relevant part, converted it to black and white (to further clarify the lines), and placed it into the image in PS of my canvas-in-progress. I then spent some time re-sizing and and adjusting the placement of the drawing until I was satisfied with the composition. This sort of pre-visualization, especially within digital tools, really helps with the way I think about things. For example, the total height from the bottom of the creature to the top of the thought cloud is exactly half the height of the canvas. Also, the slightly horizontally off-center camera in the thought cloud is off-center by the same difference as the rest of the foreground imagery is off-center from the canvas. Next step: plug in my Wacom Intuos tablet (I have a very nice 9×12″) and trace the line art in a new layer in Photoshop.

Easy-peasy, I’ve done that plenty of times – I used to to online comics, remember? Speaking of which, I’d also been thinking of using the same coloring techniques I’d used on comics in the past, combined with those from ‘eat to fill the void’, to color this piece. So I added another layer in PS behind the lines I’d drawn and filled in some color. Just rough color for the time being; I was planning on adjusting the actual paint colors by eye (and by how the paint was behaving when I got to that step), not to reproduce exactly what showed on the computer screen. He had never not been purple in my mind, so purple he remained. Playing with the coloring a little in Photoshop allowed me to get a feel for the composition as a whole, and how the size of the elements and the contrast between the colors drew the eye around the piece, which was helpful to really clamp down on a complete vision for it. To get the drawing from the screen to the page, I used a tried-and-true technique that I would love to have the money to remove from my repertoire: I flattened the image to light grey lines on a white background and printed out “tiles” of the image with a reference line to the curves of the hill included so I could line up the printouts to the canvas.

Then I taped together the pages carefully in alignment, applied graphite (with a soft-lead pencil) to the backs of the pages where the lines were, and affixed the pages to the canvas so that my reference line matched the curve of the hills. From there, I carefully traced both the outside and inside edges of the thick line work with a hard-lead pencil, which transfered some of the graphite to the canvas. Taking the pages away from the canvas, I carefully and painstakingly went over the faint lines I’d created (and some that hadn’t transferred as well, I traced over again through the pages) with the hard-lead pencil, eventually creating a complete outline to paint to. I included many of the internal lines, which I knew I would be painting over in the first coat, as a reference to where to adjust the tint of the colors I would be applying. You can just barely see the lines in the picture on the right, below:

After giving my back a break for a few hours (I was in quite a bit of pain after bending over the thing, tracing and re-tracing the lines for hours), I got to work putting down some color. This, I don’t much know how to describe. It’s painting. I painted. I thought about how the creature’s colors ought to be related to its shape a bit, I thought about how I wanted it to be lighter at the top and darker at the base, about enhancing the contrasts between parts that were separated by thick black lines by creating different tints… But … it’s just painting. Originally, the thought cloud was pure white, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t take a bunch of photos, but it went through about a dozen phases from as purple as the creature’s belly to pure white and most things in between, with varying degrees of homogeneity (as opposed to streaks or obvious brush-strokes of varying hue and tint). I definitely wanted the thought cloud to be not the intense and pure white of pure titanium white; I wanted his thoughts to be “the same color he is,” as Mandy put it when she saw it. You may not believe it, looking at the end result, but I believe I spent more time trying to get that thought cloud right than it took to carefully lay down the colors in the shapes of the creature below it.

I let that sit overnight. To dry, sure, and also because it was late evening by the time the thought cloud was done on Tuesday. There was a lot of paint in that bit needing to dry. This morning, when I began work on it again, I put the paper back over the painting again and re-traced the internal bits: the camera outline and the creature’s eyes. I painted the color of the camera… well, close to the same as I painted the creature, I guess. In a way I don’t really know how to explain, except to say that it definitely involved a lot of thought and carefully adjusted hue, tint, and shade. That grey camera body contains not just black and white, but blue and purple as well. In some places (esp. in the flash) I was able to create the impression of yellow/brown as well. The lens of the camera is basically pure titanium white, though admittedly I didn’t properly clean my brush in between the camera flash and the camera lens, so there may be a tiny hint of grey to it. Oh, and then while previewing the photo I’d taken of my work for this post, I noticed I’d forgotten something, and colored in the two other features on the camera, one of which must be the shutter release? I don’t know, but it was in the original doodle. I took another photo after adding that.

Now, since I wanted to photograph it this afternoon, in the afternoon sunlight, I had to get a move on, and I wasted little time eating lunch before tackling the black outlines. I tried several brushes I thought would be “small enough,” only to find that they weren’t, and ended up using a brush that – last time I used it – I remembered being too small for my huge, shaking hands to effectively handle. Time and practice apparently make a huge difference, as well as confidence and determination, and after a couple of hours of painting tiny black lines and carefully building them up to be the exact thick lines I wanted, I was getting pretty good. My back was hurting, my hand was sore, and by the time I got to the final outlines of the cloud and the camera (working left to right, so my hand wouldn’t smudge the drying paint, instead of element by element) these things were causing me to make mistakes. Nothing I wasn’t able to correct or cover up, but … I may have been helped to spread the work out over another day, or a few more hours. My hand became strained and tired enough that it was shaking from exhaustion rather than nervousness. (I am beginning to believe that my problems keeping my hands sure enough to draw and/or paint a straight line stem somewhat from a nervous disbelief in my ability to draw and/or paint well. Vicious.) A little break, then fifteen minutes painting the white accents on the flash, and it was finally done.

I took it outside, set up my tripod, and photographed the finished piece. I then spent an hour or two working on a title for it while curled up on the couch, half in / half out of sleep. The final work, ‘audacity of hope’, is available for purchase now. For details, please see wretchedcreature.com