Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Tone Of Extreme Phantasy

Here's the first night's work of my digital Lovecraft piece. The concept from the Commonplace book is "man transformed to island or mountain." You can't see it yet but the center will have a pyramid/mountain structure that I'll be building up motifs of bones, internal organs, distorted faces, etc to showcase man becoming mountain. I'm a sucker for detail so I'll have a lot more going on around that, labyrinthine passages, wild arrays of creatures flying, crawling, oozing and drifting. My digital process starts off with just throwing a pile of found photos and art that reflects the direction I want to go in across a loose composition that will be tightened with each following layer. This is around 60 layers and with 3 - 4,000 more layers to go everything seen here will be covered up. It will be interesting to see the difference in the final version and this opening sketch. This will be a triptych stretching 18 x 36 inches so this is the biggest I've gone with digital imagery. It's gonna be a mother fucker to get done in the next 2 months.

4 comments:

Swellzombie said...

How did you know that I wanted to see your process for coming up with that insanely great work? Thanks for the mind reading.

Ray Frenden said...

Do you try and get high res images so you can stitch them together for an eventual print, or do you google search shotgun these?

Aeron said...

Interesting that you were curious about my process, well this is the opening stages of it. I try to get high res pics and need to go around and take a pile of digital pics at high res to use in the future but for now I just ride out what I can find online. I use the Library of Congress, sxc.hu and a few other image collection sites. I've amassed thousands upon thousands of pictures over the years that I organize into loose categories like Clouds, trees, buildings, landscape, etc so I can pull out stuff that I want. The resolution on the images isn't too big a deal for me as I layer things together so much with translucent bits and pieces which I assume maxes out at the ppi set into the image size. This image was created at 36 x 18 inches set to 600 ppi so 21,600 x 10,800 pixels. I made a very nice 18 x 12 inch glossy print of the Max Ernst portrait I did for the Arf Forum at 300 ppi which turned out really really nice. So I could probably take this Lovecraft pic into a printshop when it's done and get a decent poster sized version made at 72 x 38 inches without losing any of the quality.

SEAN said...

I like the set up, i do the same thing in terms of having tons of original sources for my non-figurative work (which i actually do!).... but i just input all the variables into a pre-drawn geometric shape using a pencil.