New Writing Blog!

In an effort to keep the focus of this particular blog on visual work, I have decided to clutter the internet further with another blog, this one devoted to written work.

I am adding a link to the new blog to the sidebar on the right of this page, and additionally you can find it by clicking on this link, which will also take you to its inaugural offering: a short story that's been cooking in my brain for a little while.

Look to the sky! It's digital work masquerading as brushwork on scrolls!

To accompany this story, and something which I think ought to be a habit of mine from now on, I decided to make companion illustrations as headings. Half of the story is set in China in 1006 A.D., so I decided to try my hand at an imitation period Chinese painting, even though I opted to imitate the Yuan Dynasty's style, which came about 200 years after this story is set (1006 A.D. would have been the Song Dynasty, but paintings of that period tend towards monumental complexity and I chickened out)


The Chinese text at the top-right corner is Ke Xing 客星 — literally "Guest Star" — a name given by Chinese astronomers of antiquity to temporary or unexpected events observed in the heavens, a phenomenon that factors into the story on the other blog. Hopefully I didn't utterly butcher the rendering of the text, or generate a pastiche image of culturally inept banality (I always hope that part, though.)

Totila

Trying to channel a bit of Gustave Doré here I suppose...

Just a quickie little rough tonal sketch here, done in Corel Painter.

I've always been fascinated by the marginal corners of history, people and events either shrouded by obscurity or by not having been chronicled. This is a not-at-all-historically-accurate fanciful rendering of Totila, the 6th Century Ostrogothic warlord the day he conquered Naples. It had been a long siege and the locals were terrified that once they had surrendered they'd be massacred by the supposed barbarian. To their surprise, he instead delivered a speech about how Italians should resent being an exploited colony of the Byzantines, and gave a rebuke of colonialism that sounds strikingly modern.

I imagine him here having just entered the city, standing atop their walls to address them — imposing and alien, yet stoic and egalitarian. Part of the pose was inspired by the Soviet war memorial near Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

More practice images.

Here comes trouble...

Just another practice image from Land of Winter, same general setting as some of the other images — a rain-swept village that's the site of a brutal bloodbath. 

This week marked the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. For a country that has not had a peaceful history, it's arresting to think that its most devastating, bloodthirsty conflict was against itself. It was the first industrialized war, with mass produced rifled bullets able to fire a straight shot, but strategies that relied upon bunching men together in easily targeted groups. 

It's also intriguing to note the euphemisms that are still used when referring to the war's motivations. The argument that it wasn't slavery that motivated the conflict, but "states' rights" is somewhat misleading, as the only "right" that was under threat was the right to own and exploit human beings.

The Civil War also has the onerous distinction of containing the single bloodiest day in American history — the Battle of Antietam, in which 23,000 men were killed. From 6:00am to 9:00am, one man was killed every second.

"When we came to that beautiful cornfield... That was when the trouble began... Oh but the bullets did fly. I didn't see them, but I saw their effects. Men were falling all around us. Our bugler was standing near me when a cannonball struck him in the head and cut it from his shoulders. I think I got some of the blood and brains in my face... Brave men on both sides are falling, to rise no more. Thousands of them."
J. Polk Racine, on the Battle of Antietam