NEW MEDIA: Art

Well, I thought I was going to have to depend on the old technology for drawing.  I needed to replace the photo images of Mars, Earth, Edgar Allen Poe, Jesus Christ and a tunnel.  Only one of which could I have had the opportunity to photograph myself.  Of course, that’d be the tunnel, but I don’t feel secure standing either on I-84 in Hartford at night or on the Merritt Parkway in Hamden–the two lit tunnels close by that I’m aware of; so that too, was up to drawing rather than the old camera.

However, my initial plan was to draw in pencil, scan it into the computer, and maybe Photoshop to colorize and distort as needed (several copies in varying states are needed of each image).  This, because I don’t have the experience of drawing in Photoshop and past experimentation proved I had about the control of fingerpainting with the mouse. 

BUT!!!  I drew both Mars and Earth in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, though depending upon a circle template as a starting point so as not to make eggs instead of planets.  My version of Mars–even though I had the original image to guide me–was somehow mixed up with Jupiter and so it turned out redder and swirly until I realized my mistake and made sort of a cross between the two.  Earth was a bit harder.  I had to look at images of globes to see what was placed where in the oceans.  My shapes of South America, the bottom of North America, and the side of Africa are a bit geographically incorrect, but I put treesies and mountains in where I thought they should go, a lion on the tundra and gorillas in the mist.

I’m working on a tunnel now, and because I like the last shot in the series, I’m working my way backward.  This means going from a stylized birth canal to a fairly realistic tunnel, and believe me, it was easier to turn a tunnel into a vagina than vice versa.

So that will leave me with Poe and Jesus.  These shouldn’t be quite as hard for me to do since my forte in art is portraits if I’ve any talent at all.  And for these two, I’m definitely going back to paper and pencil.  For Poe, I’ll have to depend on the photographs available of him, and I will likely use the pose I’ve used already in the clip. 

For Jesus Christ, my model will be Bob Dylan.