Lately, various people have commented to me that it's odd that someone who is very creative would also be a, well, "techie". I never saw much odd with getting to know the innards of my computer (and hey, look - it's another marketable skill!) while at the same time using it to create art, but now I've been thinking about the science of art.

Once upon a time, artists had to be as much scientists as creators. A painter had to understand what chemicals created what pigments, and how those pigments would interact with linseed oil, or gum arabic, or whatever other medium they were using. A sculptor had to know the specific properties of different stones , or the expansion/contraction variables of different woods, or the correct purity of clay so that their work would survive the creation process and last more than a few years. Every photographer had to be as much chemist as artist; ditto for potters, who not only had to know the exact compositions of different glazes, but also what glazes would produce what effects in combination with different clays, under different temperatures and times, and what effects and chemicals would not only produce the nicest looking finishes, but which would then be safe to eat off of and which would be safe only for display.

Most artists practicing today have a choice - they don't have to create all their materials from scratch if they don't want to. (though some still do) Art stores are common enough that even little one horse towns can boast one. (My small town did - a little mom and pop place.) Even if you couldn't get to an art store, mail order catalogs like Pearl, Windsor & Newton, and Utrecht filled the bill. (I used to go through my grandparent's art catalogs and make up wish lists)

Time was, there wasn't a whole industry devoted to making art supplies. Painters would grind their own pigments from locally occuring minerals, and mix them on their own according to formulas passed down from teacher to student. Potters gathered and purified their own clay, sculptors made deals with local quarries for stone.

And this brings me back to my point (because I really do have one) - why shouldn't I understand my artistic medium as well as any painter of yore understood his or her pigments? The computer and printer are my pigments and canvas, and if I don't know them inside and out, how am I going to be able to produce decent work?

When this is the level of most digital painting tutorials. Yeesh. One happy jaunt to filter land and you've got yer'self a painting!

Now we have NJ's poet laureate being asked to step down because he implied in a poem that US and Israeli leaders had foreknowledge of the WTC attacks.

Wow. A poem.... a freaking poem people... and there are elected officials demanding he resign. He's being branded a liar and a perpetuator of lies. Instead of perhaps looking at this piece and asking, "what does our reaction tell us about ourselves?"

My god, it even mostly *about* that day. It was about all the other days. All the other reasons we as a people have to hang our heads in shame. Because the good people among us did not act, and let atrocities happen that we then sanitize and put in textbooks.

This is not some journalist, whose supposed job is to report the cold, hard facts and nothing else. This is a poet. His job is to make everyone *think*. A poet who does nothing other than feed us self congratulatory pap is a traitor to the long line of truth speakers who came before. He is no poet, only a propagandist. Poetry is the land of allegory, aphorism, metaphor, and sideways thinking. In poetry, a rose is never just a rose, and a line supposing that the US government sat back and took no action as people died means *much more than that*.

I read that line and I didn't just think of that day a year ago. I thought of all the foreign journalists *before* Daniel Pearl who were killed on assignment. I thought about the bombing of embassies and naval ships that elicited no public or journalistic uproar. I thought about all the things that happen in this world every freaking day that our government AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US turn a blind eye to. Those lines, those words weren't just a condemnation of smug legislators, they were a commendation of every single one of us.

You cannot condemn the US government without condemning the people of this country. And I do. Because it took *this* to get us off our asses. I am disgusted with my leaders for their smug, sanctimonious, wrapped in the flag "war" that they are attempting to wage. I am disgusted with my fellow citizens for their willingness to parrot whatever CNN tells us without even wondering if there are other facts that we are not being told.

Or, as Carl Gregory put it better than I can right now:

"His is definitely a poem that gets people to start asking questions at a time when people in power don't want us to ask questions"

The US and Israeli governments probably didn't know what was up. (Because they didn't *want* to know, an angry part of my brain whispers to me) But my government has lied to me enough that it's become my boy who cried wolf. I'll never be able to believe it/them totally about anything.

So the government wants to lean on the arts to show only what it wants shown. Speak only what it wants spoken. A year ago I asked, "where are we going?". I'm asking it again, a little further down the path. I don't like what I see behind me. I like what I see ahead of me even less. For too long parts of our society have been trying to muzzle the arts under the guise of decency, economy, and relevance. Now, with the anvil of patriotism, they are ready to sling rocks at a poet who writes words they don't like. What's next? Painters of "un-patriotic" images? Publishers of "un-patriotic" books?

When the government starts leaning on the arts, are blacklists really that far behind?

Locus Online has a nice article on Horror writing and why it's so hard to take most of it serously. Not only do I agree, but with the changing of a few words, it would be equally applicable to the SF/fantasy niche.

"Most normal readers - in the real world - saw horror as a tacky little subgenre popular primarily with teenagers, and ineligible for consideration as literature, or for that matter, "serious" reading. And, truth be told, probably 90% of what was published as horror did not deserve to be called anything other than trash. Still, there was a decent living to be made by hacks willing to churn out formula fiction, with the ever-present brass ring of a fluke bestseller, or better yet, a movie sale in the post-Exorcist boom times." Read More...

I want a tote bag. Actually, I really need one. my current bag of choice is an army surplus knapsack that is literally older than me. My mom used it when she went to college, and handed it down to me sometime in my early teens. It's been with me everywhere, and I've mended, patched and replaced things on it to the point where it is barely recognizable for what it once was. I don't think it's going to survive another round of mending.

This leads us to my current project - creating a new bag that will serve me as faithfully. I would buy something, but I'm picky, and good totebags or knapsacks are very hard to find. So I'm going to make one. (Hey, I've got this great sewing machine lying around that don't use nearly enough...)

Yesterday involved hunting around the remnants table at the local fabric store until I found some nice light upholstery fabric (and fighting the urge to pick up some muslin and try my hand at making a new skirt....)

Then came the cutting, assembling, pinning, and sewing. The cats got locked up in the bedroom for this (as I quickly remembered why I don't sew much anymore) Well, thanks to my inability to judge size accurately, I now have something that is less tote bag sized and more large duffelbag sized. So tonight will be the night of seam ripping and trying again.

But at least I'm having fun.

I was going through some of my favorite Photoshop sites today, and something occured to me - unless you are up in the Deke McCelland/Kai Krause guru/master level of photoshop godhood, you just aren't going to be able to perfectly duplicate natural surfaces and textures. By this I mean creating from scratch a surface/shape/texture that is completely photo-realistic. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Photo-realism is not always needed or necessary - a lot of the completely digital stuff I or anyone else does is on the level of illustration. And illustration isn't supposed to look 100% real. That's kind of the point.

However, there are lots and *lots* of tutorials out there (and some less than cheap books) that claim to be able to teach you how to make realistic textures from scratch. The end results of these tutorials vary - some are pretty near the mark. Some are good as abstract art. Some miss the target completely. For the beginning digital artist, all of them are a good thing, because they push you to learn the software in ways you might not have thought of before. They show you some neat tricks that you might never have come up with on your own. But what about the next step?

For me, the next step has involved a lot of photo compositing, collage, and digital enhancement. Projects where I either start with a base photograph and do cruel and unusual things to it, or take several photographs and pure digital pieces and mate them in ways nature and a darkroom never intended. For a lot of this work, I find that faking nature just won't cut it. No matter how good the method for creating dirt, mud, wind, highlights, etc.... nothing beats an actual photograph.

Working from reference shots is nothing new to anyone who has studied art, but there are a lot of people getting into the art/design field who never had any training pior to getting their computer and discovering the possibilities of pixels. There is an attitude I see reflected in a lot of the tutorial/photoshop sites that photoshop is the *only* thing you need to create anything short of a 3-D world. Not true.

Say you've digitally created a great sand/gravel texture, but it's lacking that subconcious oomph that says "real" in the back of your mind. You could play around with the lighting filter, but you could also either find a good shot of dirt/mud/ground or go out with your trusty camera after a rainstorm and snap away. Then you take the digital and the "real" images and mate them.

Ahhh.... I have been without a sketchbook for the last week (filled up the last one) and I didn't realize how much I was missing sketching until I picked a new one up tonight and started playing with those lovely blank sheets of paper. I still can't over the convenience of living near a large art store. (Pearl) Growing up, I'd have given an arm for something like that.

Current project - playing with my camera. The really nice 35mm one my mom got me for christmas over a year ago and which (until recently) had been gathering dust in my closet as I attended to the thousand and one other projects I had going.

Lessons learned so far:
1. The inside of my apartment is just too damn dark to shoot anything. Especially at night.
1a. Extending the exposure time of the shot without a tripod will only result in a blurry picture. And it will still be underexposed.
2. I will never again drop off a black and white roll of film to be developed at Shop-Rite, even though they claim to be able to develop black and white film.
2a. They developed the negatives correctly, but used color paper for the prints, resulting in three different color casts. (Some were blueish, some were pinkish, some were just muddy)
3. Scanners can fix the above problems.
4. The scanner I want to buy for my home office will have to have a film adapter.

For the time challenged literature fan - Classic Novels in Five Miniutes. Not a cliffs notes, these folks email you five minute installments of a novel daily.

The Education of the E-Designer at Communication Arts.

"The children of artists don't grow up with a lot of romantic notions about the role of the artist." - Would you believe I didn't write that line? Jane St. Claire did. Damn true though. You have no idea.