sometimes something i write doesn't suck!

isn't that a nice feeling? coming across something you wrote last week or last month or even last year and it sings like a blade across the page and you just get that "hot-dang, i was on that day!" sort of feeling?

yeah....

: D

and this to make up for the fact that i didn't get a whole lot done yesterday. most of what i wrote, i ended up ripping up again (like badly laid sod).

~ * ~

painting: yesterday sb77 posted an image of a girl in a red coat. try as i might to reproduce the effect digitally, i just can't seem to get it, can't even figger out the right tools. that's the look and feel i want for Razi-el. that's it. plain and (not-so) simple. so, uh, stephan, do you take commissions? hahahaha ~

~ * ~

important news in kitsch: i got an advertisment from the bradford exchange in my mailbox for a light-up stained-glass thomas kinkade wall clock ~ at last, my life can now be complete!

( image under cut to protect you from the horror! )

it even has interchangeable front panels with each of the four seasons on them.

: o p

a whole bunch of not-work getting done this morning. who can work on a saturday anyway?

i need to go to confession later this afternoon, so it's hard to get focused on anything but that. meanwhile, i keep surfing around mindlessly.

~ * ~

starting writing episode xxvii last night (in Art's voice). i don't know Art very well, so this will take a lot of massaging. anyone on my flist from ohio? anything particular about the way ohio-people talk that i ought to know about?

truth still is, i just get tired when i try to think about how to tackle Reconstruction these days. it's like that critter in The Thing when the guy's head falls off and sprouts legs and skitters away ~ and here's me with a blow torch saying: "you gotta be effin' kidding."

problem is, i don't want to torch it, i want to make friends with it and keep it in a nice-lined box and make it wear a funny hat and call it booboo-fritter.

didn't i just say in a post earlier that i don't tend to talk about my writing as if it were alive? so much for that.

~ * ~

i've also decided that if i hope to get a move-on with regards to the 50bookchallenge i'm going to have to give up on doctorow. so pathetic. i managed to read a dreadful victorian novel positively oozing purple prose and laughable dialogue, but couldn't make it past chapter three of doctorow's award-winning The March. sigh and piffle. i've no idea and am tired of speculating. back to the library you go, silly book. hey, i tried.

now i'll need to find new books to read. i've lost my list (ha!). i may just go browse the shelves and pick things off ~ it's seemed to work well so far ~ i haven't loved everything i've read, but i've found some interesting stuff. the new Montmorency should be out by now, come to the think of it (yup, just checked ~ unfortunately it's gotten feh-feh reviews...hmmm). i'd also considered reading more sigrid undset, so i may yet pick up Kristin Lavransdatter. nobel prize winner vs. lurid children's book? tough choice.

(now i want to go to the bookstore!)

~ * ~

we will now conclude this mindless entry with a nice picture.



the Rouen market about 1873

i haven't been drawing much lately because i'm having a problem with backgrounds and media in general (the same-o problems). so the Red Door is sort of idling at the mo'.

last night as i was laying down to bed, i thought i should set up a site (blog, or whatever) to try to post daily doodles. it would help me to actually write the thing, first of all because i would have to work out the scenes, and secondly, it might take the pressure off the work ~ it wouldn't have to be "good" because it would just be scribbling to meet a daily deadline.

i dunno ~ the lack of orderliness of it might make me bonkers. i never really thought about how obsessive-compulsive i am until recently. i mean, i always knew i was compulsive about certain things, but it's just occuring to me the degree to which having certain things disordered will shut me down like a trip switch on an overheating reactor.

the house can be a mess, my social life a disaster, but for God's sake don't leave dishes in the sink with water, don't put the milk on the counter (ever! the milk should never leave your hand if it is removed from the fridge!), never leave clothes on the floor in the bedroom, and i can't possibly post things out of order or unfinished without ten-thousand caveats as to why.



a test-run on the french countryside

so i was noodling with this bit of scenery and playing with textures in the trees and whatnot. it's inneresting, but i don't really like it. it's too dense (and i don't mean the picture, i mean the gradients). i seriously considered going very minimal with the backgrounds and using very spare line art, but the problem with that is so many scenes take place in the dark (or perhaps i should say an equal number of scenes) and when i think about (for example)redrawing the bar scene with eugenie, i'm not sure how it will fly with just line art. all the art i most love seems to get away without complex backgrounds. i need to study it some more i s'pose.

margh. i dunno why i resist just doing what i know i can do.

: o p

jediwonderboy posted this artwork in comicart. he's playing with the idea of eliminating the balloons and using the words as texture/background.

while i don't think it would really work (for me) for a standard comic ~ especially one with a lot of dialogue, i'm intrigued since lately i've been trying to come up with word balloons for Razi-el and i'd only got as far as something that looked suspicously like Morpheus from The Sandman.

i love this idea of words as texture because then they can be free-range, shaped funny, sporadic, dense, all over the page without boundaries ~ and they can run around in the background of other scenes as a sort of soundtrack (which the reader has the option, of course, of completely ignoring. i think everything Razi-el says is contextual anyway. i'll have to rig up a scene and see if it works.

~ * ~

i went on a creative bender last night ~ the place looks like a craft store exploded. i also found out what happens when you overcook Sculpey Flex. i wish i had more of a scrapbooker's sensibility. ladyazure does such cool work with paper stuff ( you can see her art here: The Spellbook Studios).

didn't i just ramble on a few entires back about how artists usually pick one thing, stick with it, hone it, etc.? i think i'm honing attention-deficit-disorder and procrastination ~ i'm beginning to think those are my master art forms. hahahaha ~

: D

~ * ~

gots lots of adr work to do today and don't really feel like doon it (what's new?).

here i was whimpering that my f-list friends were all signing off for lent, only to come back after a spell to find 40+ posts since i last visited ~ ! oy! that'll larn me. hope i din't miss nuthin' important!

~ * ~

i had my first word scrabble today on page no. 7 of "The Red Door". Eugenie suggests "laissez-moi vous appeler un fiacre" and i was wondering if "fiacre" was the right word. so i went to look it up and the thought came across that i could use "cocher" instead.

linguistically it's very interesting because "cocher" in spanish means to be a pig and "cocher" in italian (i believe) means something even more vulgar. i love that, but i wonder if it's not playing one game too many. even if Eugenie did say "cocher", it could have a double-entre that i simply don't mean ~ and that would be unfair. he's really asking if he wants a fiacre, after all ~ quite literally. i think the scene is suggestive enough for anyone who doesn't read french, let alone complicating the matter by making it too ambiguous what they mean.

for those of you for whom this is driving you crazy, fiacre means taxi and chocher means driver. so just get your mind out of the gutter! (snicker)



eugenie counters with a suggestion

i got pretty sloppy with this page. i think it's passable, but there's nothing especially wonderful about it ~ pretty basic, straight-up treatment.

i'm still working on "The Red Door" ~ just got sidelined due to other stuff for a few days there ~ and with this mung, i'm much slower and make more mistakes. this page (no. 6) is riddled with them, but the overall effect will do.



anselm asks a suspicious question

i've got three more pages mostly drawn, just haven't been able to finish them for scanning ~ and i've plotted through the three pages that follow. then i'll hit a wall, but i'll worry about that when i hit it. i've got plenty to do before then.

: D

so i sat down this morning thinking to myself: okay, enough of this hopscotching around, maybe i should hunker down and draw a real sequential start to finish and see what i can learn from the process.

so i started looking for something to draw ~ anything ~ and realized that i have never been very good at writing short stories and have only written a small handful of them over my writing life (that's more than 20 years). the ones i have written are not only pretty poor to begin with, but also would make for poor translation to the comic form.

so here i am with nothing to draw. how'd that happen?

what i need: a short stand-alone script that will be visually interesting.

the thought of generating such a script off the top of my head is daunting to say the least. i think i have short-storyitis or short-storyphobia perhaps.

how do we solve this?: steal a story from within a larger work. surely i can burp a little self-contained scenario from one of my books and make it into a three or five page story. i've cannibalized before and it's worked okay (even won an award with a story extracted from From Slaughter's Mountain a while back).

maybe this is a good time to take another running leap at Razi-el's Dream using this straightforward comic style. i've tried it in two other styles and failed. maybe i ought to see what it would look like in this one.

okay, i'm off to explore. it's 12:30 now. i'll be back at 3:30 to post the results.

: D

holiest of cows ~ ! i finally found a picture of the Good Shepherd in the archway below the Gros Horloge! all of my life's problems are solved (well not really, but this is pretty exciting since it will prolly be another decade before i ever get to france ~ curse, yodel, and spit).



isn't it just everything you could have hoped it would be? look at the little baa baa baas! look at the cool dramatic pose of Christ as the shepherd! thank you thank you thank you Stéphane L'Hôte <~ i will love you forever! there are also ridiculous more photos on this site of the Cathedral and the city (as well as some of Rochester, Minnesota which made me laugh). definitely fate.

: D

dunno about these pictures ~ they have their plusses and negatives. i'm stymied about backgrounds and am tempted to just leave them out altogether, but i don't think i can actually get away with that ~ hahahaha ~ i think, taken together, these three actually make a triptych. translations courtesy of mephster.

"C’est le Camelot là-bas?" Foyet then asked, with no small measure of displeasure.



Anselm did not disagree, but was keeping his opinion to himself. "Il est Parisien," he clarified instead.

edit! okay, i did some dickering with the second picture to see if i could liven it up a bit. it seems a little better.

i do love to sketch.



maybe it's a good way to try to break the disneyesque doodling habit i have ~ to not work so hard to make clean lines ~

: D

Father Foyet always looked harried when Anselm darkened his doorway. Anselm never stepped foot in his office unless there was trouble and if it was a student at the heart of that trouble, he found it especially odious to deal with. He hoped in vain that this was not the case that day, but was disappointed as expected. There was a problem with one of the first year candidates.

"Réjean Davignon," Foyet repeated the name absently. "C’est qui?"

not 100% fixed on the translation for this one. i mostly like it, but i'm not sure about the second line (whether it's not too slangy). i may change it to something more simple, like: j'ai pris une claque. thank you to boobirdsfly and keigan

He had two black eyes in the process of healing. By the lack of swelling and the discoloration from pale green to royal purple, it was certain the impact which caused them had occurred a considerable while ago. It was also clear that the bruises were the result of trauma to the bridge of the nose and forehead, which had resulting in a bleeding outward from beneath the brow.

"Qu'est-il arrivé à ton visage?" Anselm asked.

"Je me suis fait passer à tabac," he replied.

"Pourquoi?"

"J'étais une cible de choix."

thank you to boobirdsfly and cagouille from the ljtranslators community.

The master's library was bright like all the other rooms, with a wall of multi-paned windows that reached to the ceiling through which broad bright shafts poured onto the rows of shelves. Great drifts of motes danced in the rectangles of light. The room was overall poorly kept and the books were grey with dust.

On the far wall there was a prie dieu below a tall, darkly painted image of the Virgin. The paint was cracking like old bark off a dead tree around the edges and her consoling face was webbed with fine hairline fractures.

"Magister," Morse said to get his attention. Then he added apologetically, "Je ne veux pas de traitement de faveur."

Laurent looked up at him from between irregular stacks of papers and books on a long desk near the doorway. His irritation went from the usual mild, itchy expression to full-blown discomfort. "Que vous le vouliez ou non," he said, "vous en avez besoin."

Once upon a time I had this idea that I was going to write a "graphic" novel. Razi-el's Dream was that novel and at some point in the process, I realized I couldn't draw, paint, or design worth a hoot! Ha!

I had tried using the computer to help out with my lack of talent and as you can see, the results were mixed ~ computer illustration is hard for me (looking at the screen and messing with the mouse ~ though I understand Wacom technology has improved that aspect).

At any rate, all the goofing off with Corel Painter 8 this week reminded me of how much I love to paint (drawing skills not withstanding).

I've decided to go back to writing this as a graphic novel (the language problem is not so much a problem when you can see what they're doing! It's also a lot easier to "subtitle."

I considered still trying to do this as a digital project, but my love-hate relationship with technology won't allow it (part of what I really love about painting is the contact with the materials) ~ it's just a different art form.

So last night I sat down and drew the first of what I estimate will be about 1500 tryptiches (for this first book). I only painted one panel, but I thought I would share the pictures with you!