Keeping track of progress on creative projects
Starting with a line drawing from Pinterest inspired by Alphonse Mucha, I added color by using a stock photo of a piece of cloth from Rawpixel. The original was red, but I duplicated it into different layers and made hue, saturation and brightness adjustments to get the other colors. It took a combination of mobile and desktop Photoshop, but I was pleased with the results.
I downloaded this drawing by Nathan Pride from Everfreecoloring. It proved to be low resolution and not highly detailed, so coloring it was the work of an afternoon even with the light effect layers.
For this one I decided to mask rather than color between the lines.
Starting with art from Everfreecoloring, I backed it with matching gold and silver metallic layers from Rawpixel. Then I masked off parts of the gold layer to show the silver underneath. The final step was to add tones by coloring in with black at varying levels of opacity.
Overall I’m pleased with the effect, though I think it works better in the darker areas than it does in the highlighted stripe toward the right.
Today’s addition to It Takes Every Word is “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence. I’ve been having some trouble coming up with a story that fits with the Writing Club’s theme for its final meeting later this semester: Triumph. To be sure, this story features a Pyrrhic victory rather than a legitimate win. But it’s the best I’ve been able to do so far.
The horse’s head is a detail from “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” by Jacques-Louis David. Apparently the artist painted five different versions of the same subject. This detail was taken from the Malmaison version.
Though the horse seems distressed, I’m sure Napoleon himself had an easier time with the St. Bernard Pass through the alps than he did when he went to Mount Olive.
Popeye kicked his ass, which was the funniest joke I’d ever heard when I was 12. So feel free to share it with your favorite 12 year old.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials. I was endlessly fascinated by Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s paintings of alien species from science fiction novels, novellas and short stories.
Though I know most of them only through their pictures, I’ve read some of the source stories. Obviously that includes the Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. In tribute to my childhood fave – now grown somewhat loose-paged through age and use – I used Barlowe’s illustration as a color reference for this page from the Call of Cthulhu Coloring Book.
Working with a prompt from It Takes Every Word, I spent some time this morning writing a short story. Actually I came up with the idea for this story a long time ago. But it was a good fit for the theme we’re exploring at the next meeting of the KCKCC Writing Club. So that seemed like a good excuse to type it up.
The story itself is short enough to include here in its entirety.
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The Tulpamancer
“Don’t believe a word of it,” Sharon said to me. “She doesn’t even have a boyfriend.”
At this point I’d been at InfoTech Solutions for only three weeks. Still learning my way around and trying to figure out who was who. Sharon was officially the head of the HR department and unofficially the company’s gossip clearinghouse. So if anyone in the office would know whether or not Martina Green had a boyfriend – other than Martina herself – Sharon would be the definitive source.
Still, I felt I had to ask.
“Are you sure? Because she says she does. Claims his name is Barry and that he works for a different IT company. She even has his picture in a frame next to her computer.”
“Let me tell you about that picture,” she replied with a smirk. “One time when she was away from her desk, I stepped into her cubicle and snapped a quick photo of her supposed boyfriend’s portrait. Then I ran an image search, and do you know what I found?”
I let her savor her I-know-something-you-don’t-know moment, and then I prompted her to continue.
“What?”
“That’s actually a head shot of some male model she found on the internet. His real name is Dusan or something like that, and he’s a fashion model from Eastern Europe. So not Barry from another IT shop five blocks away from here.”
“I don’t understand. Why would she pretend to have a boyfriend if she doesn’t have one?”
Sharon gave me an indulgently exasperated look.
“Some women feel like they aren’t really a person unless they’re in a relationship with a man. So even an imaginary boyfriend is better than no boyfriend at all.”
A few days later I passed Martina’s desk on my way to the break room, and I noticed a large bouquet of roses in a vase next to Barry-slash-Dusan’s picture.
“Looks like someone has a secret admirer,” I said to her.
“Oh, Barry’s no secret,” she replied with a reflective smile.
“He must have done something really bad if he had to make up to you with that many flowers.”
“Heavens no!” she exclaimed with indignation, mock or true I couldn’t tell. “Barry never has to send me make up gifts because he never does anything bad.”
Definitely imaginary, I thought as I nodded and resumed my coffee break journey.
The next day the company owner made a rare appearance at the office.
“Can I have everyone’s attention for a moment, please?” he said in his most managerial tone. Immediately all eyes were on him and his two companions: Sharon from HR and a new guy who seemed somehow strangely familiar.
“Everybody, let me introduce Barry Newman. He will be our new SQL database administrator. He joins us from ZipData, our cross-town rivals. To welcome Barry to the team, there’s cake in the break room.”
From across the room I tried to read Sharon’s reaction to the new arrival, but she held her face still and expressionless.
They made no secret of their great love. The boss gave the new hire the cube right next to Martina. I was too busy with my own job to spend much time monitoring them. But every time I did happen to glance their way, they seemed to be locked in some private conversation across their mutual wall rather than doing anything productive.
“You two need to get back to work,” Sharon loudly snapped at them one Friday afternoon.
Exchanging one of those intimate smiles shared by couples who know something nobody else knows, they more-or-less did what they were told.
After work that evening, several of us went for drinks at a nearby bar. Normally Martina and Barry kept to themselves, but this time they decided to join their fellow employees.
It was a surprisingly good experience. Barry was witty and charming. And even mousy little Martina came out of her shell a little. Indeed, we had so much fun sharing stories and telling jokes that when the happy couple announced that they had to get going, a little light went out of the place.
I found myself sharing a table and a pitcher of beer with the ever-popular Sharon and Chuck from accounting. We made an odd trio, with the HR manager’s conservative mien and Chuck’s more laid-back attire and vague scent of marijuana.
By then I was five or six drinks in, and maybe that made me not quite worried enough about provoking the woman who held dominion over my paycheck.
“Guess you were wrong about Barry,” I observed.
“Yes,” she replied, her lips pursed. “I guess I was.”
“About what?” Chuck asked, not in on it.
I explained the theory about Dusan the fashion model.
At the end Sharon added, “Everyone has a doppelganger somewhere.”
“He isn’t a doppelganger,” Chuck replied. “He’s a tulpa.”
“A what?” the other two of us asked in unison.
“A tulpa,” he repeated. “A being conjured into reality by sheer force of will. The Theosophists came up with the concept based on a Tibetan Buddhist myth. The idea is that if you believe enough in an imaginary person, he can become real He’ll even have his own independent personality, thoughts and actions.”
“What a lot of …” Sharon started.
“Awhile back a group of fanboys on Reddit tried using group meditation to create completely real, living versions of characters from My Little Pony.”
“Did they succeed?” I asked.
“Depends on how you define success,” he replied.
Sharon shot him a wordless glare clearly expressing wonderment that such an obvious stoner ever got a job in accounting.
Slowly and by degrees, joy fled InfoTech Solutions. Our jobs all remained the same, neither more nor less engaging than they’d ever been. But a gradual sense of pointlessness set in, as if there was less and less purpose to spending my days writing code. Though nobody talked about it, I could tell that everyone else had the same feelings.
Everyone, that is, except for one particular spot. Between the Martina and Barry cubicles, warmth and light still glowed like the corner of the Selfish Giant’s garden. They chatted and laughed and sent each other memes and fed take-out food to each other over their wall and listened to songs with their headphone ear buds shared between them. Unlike the rest of us, they appeared to be doing no work at all now. And yet they were the most happy.
Eventually Sharon could stand it no longer.
“Alright you two, that’s enough,” she barked at them. “I’m putting you on report with a strong recommendation that one of you be moved to a different cubicle.”
Martina took a brief break from staring into her boyfriend’s eyes.
“Y’know, Sharon, I’m getting tired of you,” she said with a slight melancholy in her tone. “I think it’s time to let you go.”
The next day Sharon didn’t show up for work. Or the day after that. Or the day after that. Nor did the company show any sign that it had hired a new HR manager or was even attempting to replace her. It seemed as if whatever purpose she served simply no longer existed. Sharon was, and then Sharon wasn’t.
She still existed in the “Meet Our People” page on the InfoTech web site. Out of some strange, sourceless curiosity, I downloaded her photo from the site and uploaded it to an image search.
Her picture was an exact match for a real estate agent in Arkansas. Not close. Exact. There Sharon sat next to a stranger’s name and the assurance that she was the number one closer in the greater Fayetteville area.
I got out my phone and took a selfie.
I ran an image search.
No, I’m not actually writing a novel called “The Fins.” Instead, I’m going to cheat on the National Novel Writing Month parameters a little.
“Into the Mist” fans have probably already noted that last November I started The Legrasse Estate, but after a couple of days I quit blogging about it. I actually managed to keep writing for awhile after that, but in the end all the turmoil that followed the election killed the project. I don’t want to come across as a sensitive artist who can only work under ideal conditions, but the stress and trauma Trump caused were simply too much.
So my main focus this time around will be to finish the novel I started last year. It was around 18,000 words long when I bailed. My guess is that it will finish somewhere in the 50,000 word neighborhood, but that means I’ll only have to write 32,000 words this year to wrap it up.
To get the rest of the way to the 50k quota for the month, I’m going to finish “VIB,” one of the short stories in the Sunday Night School collection. I began this project during Camp NaNoWriMo in April 2020 but finished only one of the five stories I hope to include.
As I will be finishing two works in progress rather than starting a new novel, I’ve dubbed this project “The Fins.”
This one combines watercolor layers with standard coloring layers. I’m getting better working with watercolors, so overall I’m pleased with the results.
I had a lot of fun with this one. The monster here is a Hunting Horror, a creature that dissolves when hit with bright light.
The colors on the car are based on a photo of a Rolls Royce Phantom 1, but the rest of the colors in the picture are original. In addition to the coloring, I added the stars in the sky using a couple of spatter brushes, and I drew some green lines to supplement the black lines in the headlight beam.
With two gradient fills and some masking, I moved back and forth a bit between Fresco and Photoshop (the mobile version). This involved an annoying lag between saving the file in one app and being able to open the updated version in the other. Otherwise the combo worked reasonably well.
This was the first time I went back at the end and added a black layer behind the drawing. The extra step patched some of the inevitable gaps between the colors, improving the overall look.
