Drawing with DMC

A couple of posts ago Elinor Blackwood (Ashira) was asking for me to divulge the process that goes into making my coloured images, so I shall now oblige.

So, I start with the line drawing on paper (yes, a real piece of paper!) done with a sepia pencil for no other reason than I like the feel of the media and the brown looks nice. Some folk have mistakenly thought these charcoal drawings, but they are not, just coloured pencil.

Having scanned the image in at 600 dpi, in Photoshop I then make a layer on MULITIPLY setting, onto which with the PENCIL tool I draw/paint/whatever it is you do in the digital context, areas of flat colour corresponding with the lines of the original drawing.

Usually making a copy of this FLAT COLOUR layer – as I call it (turning off the original flat layer, thus preserving the original should anything go awry) I then mould the copied flat colour layer with the BURN tool, working in shadows and form as appropriate.

Finally over the line drawing and the moulded colour I make a HIGHLIGHTS or SHINE layer (sometimes both if I am really pushing things around) onto which with the BRUSH tool I work all the glimmers and glows and shines that pull the image out and finishes it off.

Not much to it really, just time and the right ordering of layers. I highly recommend some form of drawing tablet for this though, drawing fine details with what amounts to a bar of remote soap (by which I mean a mouse) is not so much fun and does not allow quite the same finish without some extra frustration and effort. (Believe me, I have tried for many years with mouse only, and when I finally got a tablet it was like a whole new world opened up… usual story.)

What I like about this combination is the immediacy of a real drawing yet the glamour and finish of fine digital colour. Oh, and I used the same process for the image of Europe you see as a background to this blog.

I hope that is what you were looking for, Elinor.

All images (c) D.M.Cornish, 2011

Notebooks & False-gods OR Ben's Questions asnwered at last!

About a million years ago, Ben Bryddia asked some questions and it is high time I say - HIGH TIME! - that they were answered. I shall reproduce much of his comment enclosing said enquiries here for context.

"Do you have an index for all those notebooks? If so, how is it set up? Yeah, it's a strange question, but I'm curious what form of note organization you've found most helpful..."

Ooh how I wish I indexed my notebooks, bit they are merely a repository for collecting thoughts as they come to me. 36 notebooks in I am starting to find it difficult to find older ideas, though it can be an adventure to go hunting for some half remembered notion I KNOW I wrote back in NB 32 or was it NB 31...? It can also drive me a little nuts trawling through every page when I just want to get on with what I am currently focused on.

I am very much a scatty-headed creative type, and though there is a quite complex system of symbols to show what each note is, there is no indexing; so I have no help for you there, Ben, sorry.

[SPOILERY BIT AHEAD]
"I was rereading the conversation with the Lapinduce in Book 3. Out of curiosity, if land monsters are birthed from threwdish muck, where do all the river and sea critters come from? Is there such a thing as threwdish waters or threwdish ocean muck?I'm assuming that the false gods are to nadderers what urchins are to nickers and bogles. Is this correct? I seem to recall that Kraulschwimmen and false gods aren't on the best of terms."

Kraulschwimmen and false-gods are on very bad terms. Indeed, it is the kraulschwimmen who have been set watch over the mad false-gods - the pseudobaths - to make sure they never rise again as they did in the beforetimes in the folly of their arrogance. The false-gods were once like the urchins but sacrificed their place for the sake of seizing more power and so were thrown down and made idiot, the drool and seethe in the crushing black of the lowest oceans, whilst kraulschwimmen keep watch and wrestle with them when e'er an everyman seeks to call a false-gad back.

With the oceans, the deeper down you go the more threwdish they become, and the water deeps are fairly throbbing with threwd, and as you surmise, their muds are fertile places indeed for spawning new monstrous life. River nickers and other fluvial critters are either sprung from the sludge of waterways bubbling up in strongly threwdish lands, or from the slimy beds of shorelines that runs past threwdish places. Of course this is not the only way monsters come to be...

I hope that suffices.

(This post needs a title...)

Hello hello, hello! Still here, still kicking about, avoiding the blank page and all that.

A favourite truism of mine (heard as a sample on Ride's "Going Blank Again") goes, "even a stuffed clock tells the right time twice a day." So in that spirit I am blogging again after an extended hiatus.

First, I have an interview for your perusal over at fellow author, Greg Mitchell's page.
A caution for those of a less religious bent that one of the answers gets pretty religious, so bare with me.

Well, I have some questions to answer, I will have a crack at one:

The glorious Justine H. asks: "... How exactly did you come up with the idea for leers? Are leers able to fall in love?And where on the Half-Continent did you come up with such an epicly amazing character as Sebastipole (and his amazingly epic name?!)?!?!"

Well, I think it came first with seeing something that made me think it would be "cool" to put a large box right on someone's face but then have it that instead of impeding their senses it heightened them.

Leers are just people who have soaked their eyes in chemicals to see things not normally possible and are trained in the use of a sthenicon and olphactologue, so as to falling in love, I suppose that is as variable for them as it is for any other soul. I can add, however, that being in relationship with a falseman might be awkward at best or downright frustrating/terrifying as they could always tell if you were speaking the truth or not, so fob-off answers like "Nothing," to the question "What's the matter?" would not work so well.

Sebastipole is actually a misspelling of the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol, made known to me through reading on the Crimean War. I have since figured however that as far as the Half-Continent goes, his name actually comes from the fact that his mother is Baste from Sebastian and his father a Pollard from Pollux (a bit odd to name your child thus, but Sebastipole's upbringing was a cold thing and it is the Half-Continent after all...)

Both Ken and Amanda were asking after the availability of my books in the necessary e-formats, and whether I am all down with it.

Firstly, I believe each publisher in each region (North America, UK, Australia/NZ, each of the European nations etc...) is figuring out how best to provide those formats and what the royalty rates ought to be. So it is happening, but the publishing industry is in a massive bit of flux at the moment as it transforms into the digital.

Am I down with it? Bring it on I say! I am, however, getting rather ticked with "torrent-ing" and otherwise illegal digital thieving of such formats. Sure, I could look at it as free advertising, but consider that if I can't make a living from these tales then I am not going to be able to write any more of them. Grrrr....

And here is a *SMILEY FACE* just to end on a happier note.

(Mr Bryddia, I shall get to questins soon(ish))

To geek or not to geek...?

Hello all.

A little while back I heard a fellow of prominently public position speak of a film and its director, saying something along the lines that the director was a self-proclaimed "geek", which the fellow took to mean "prone to making immature decisions."

What do you all reckon?

Is there some truth to this?

Rossamünd Married?! ... or, Questions Answer'd #120302

Actually I have no idea what number of "question answering" this is, but, you know, just having fun...

Alyosha asked a little while back why there seem to be few/no married folks in the MBTs, and I have to admit myself a tad perplexed by this. I too have realised such a (Freudian?) anomaly, and can only think that it is for the same adolescent reason that many spec fic novels deal mostly with the filially/conjugally unattached - it is simpler; no ties, no needed to refer back home to sooth anxious loved ones, just freedom to go and do and be as the adventure proceeds. Having said, I have quite pointedly had Rossamünd writing and "keeping in touch" with Verline, and refer in his thoughts to her and Frans and Pin, have tried (after committing the cliche of all cliches by making him an orphan) to give him filial connections that require tending - for I see Verline and the two one-time foundlingery masters as an ersatz family to our little adventurer.

... Maybe the non-married thing is a product of my own un-married state at the time of beginning MBT (a state happily reversed at this present time!), or the desire that I think many men of Western culture possess/have inherited: to do their growing on their own - but that is a whole can-o'-worms [TM] that I do not want to open here...

After all this, I am hoping/endeavouring to have a main character (yes, at least 1!) who is attached in the matrimonial way, though whether said attachment comes along for the ride is another matter. Anyone have thoughts on this?

An Annony Mouse was wondering: "Will the movie be filmed in Australia?"

To that my answer is unfortunately at this stage brief - I do not know. You all will be among the earliest to know when I do (my wife, close friends etc will probably get to know first, but after that it will be you.... at least that is my intent!)

chana was wondering: "How old is Rossamünd?It's been bugging me incessantly for quite a while now. Since Threnody must be at least fourteen, that would mean Rossamünd would be twelve/thirteen years old? It makes it just a little hard to relate to him."

Well, I have always found the "fact" of his age a slippery one, but for me it floats around 12ish - remembering of course, that he is small for his age. It is a bit odd I suppose that I should be a little hazy on his years, but the fact of his own "entry" into the world are hazy themselves. I hope this makes him a tad easier to know...

Oh, and me, as to that "something more to the olfactory presence of MBT books", is is I who make that happen, sitting in my lounge room with a crate of bottles of specially made book-cologne spraying every page - it is why you have to wait so long for them to come out; I actually finished writing the MBTs years ago, it is the spraying of this literary perfume that takes the time *looks sadly at tired cologne-spraying finger*.