I know this couple’s story.

The guy is really nice, despite his appearance – responsible, a hard worker, kind to children and animals. He and the girl hang out and have lighthearted innocent fun together, watching movies and dancing around in the clouds. However, there are religious differences and the girl’s stepmother seizes on them. The woman is increasingly unhappy in her marriage, so she takes her frustration out on the girl. She asks obnoxious questions about the guy’s sexual history, says nasty, angry things about him, and tries her best to break the couple up. When the guy brings the girl roses, the stepmother accuses the girl of sleeping with him, because of course no guy would give a girl flowers unless she’d done that. 

In the end, the woman wears the girl down, and the girl’s father doesn’t do a damned thing to stop her. Who knows; maybe he’s just happy because his daughter is being targeted, not him. The girl has a breakdown, dumps the guy, and does some idiotic things things to escape “home”. She regrets all of it for years, and doesn’t feel whole until she and the guy get back together. He’s turned out great and is much respected in his career jabbing people with pitchforks. He even stepped in as a surrogate father to put a nephew through pitchfork-jabbing school.

When the girl’s stepmother finds out, she shows signs of wanting a second go at busting them up, but this time the girl has wised up. She won’t put up with it. When things escalate some more, this time targeting  her young mutant spawn, she realizes the price of staying in contact with her family is too high.

Oh. Wait. That isn’t the couple in the picture. That’s my story.

The picture was actually inspired by an Artuš Scheiner illustration published in a 1901 edition of the magazine Lustige Blätter. One can see a facsimile of the magazine in online archives hosted by the University of Heidelberg, along with enough grotesque racial stereotypes to make a Klansman get a hate boner.

I think the picture is titled The Fugitive Saint, but I can’t swear to that. I also know nothing about the backstory of the drawing or the events Scheiner was trying to illustrate. However, I found the juxtaposition of opposites intriguing, inspiring enough to want to rip it off create my own version.

I began by posing some digital models on my computer, more or less reproducing Scheiner’s composition. I soon found the positioning of the tail unsatisfactory. In Scheiner’s picture the tail wraps around the angel, embracing her as effectively as his arms. That was the object of merriment and ribaldry in an online group I follow, with commenters identifying the tail as a symbolic phallus. I don’t think they were wrong.

Four or five work versions later I elected to go full circle – or spiral, rather – posing the tail in front of the demon’s personal area so that it would form a more obvious symbolic phallus. Thanks to the lighting, we can’t actually tell the nature of his real anatomy. Given the fallout from the movie The Shape of Water, which involved some wag marketing a personal aid inspired by the sea creature’s privates, perhaps that’s just as well.

I didn’t care for the color of the angel’s dress, so I made a new texture. White is probably traditional for angels, but it looked monotonous. I put her in ice blue instead.

With the major design issues squared away, my attention turned to minor issues such as the shape of the demon’s ears and facial features and the fact that his tail was so dark it could barely be seen. I also found the angel’s hair growing right through his fingers, the feathers of her wings jabbing through each other, and concluded that her halo looked dumb.

With those issues resolved, it was time to give the happy couple a backdrop. This setting is straight from the tradition of ripping off Alphonse Mucha, although someone better able to keep a straight face might call it an homage or use the phrase “inspired by”.

The phases of the moon are from NASA’s “dial a moon” utility.  The planet and the starry backdrop were created in Filter Forge. The final image uses a couple of Photoshop brushes, Ron Deviney’s clouds and Lily Fox’s halos. As usual, everything was composited and retouched in Photoshop.

And that, as they say, is that.

My latest, Eos and the Anemoi, is named for characters from Greek mythology. Eos is the goddess of the dawn and the Anemoi are wind gods.

I have my friend Susan in Central Victoria, AU to think for that title. When I’m creating an image, it usually has a descriptive working title such as Fairy Puffing Cigar or Demon With Coffee. Once the picture is done, I try to devise a title that’s more thoughtful. I didn’t know what to call this one until Susan came to the rescue, mentioning Eos and the Anemoi. I owe her. It came dangerously close to being titled Dame Hanging Out With Weird Dog While Knocking Back Coffee.

I created the bulk of this picture in a 3D program. Texture creation, compositing, and edits were done in Photoshop. I don’t know if that’s it for this image or whether I’ll have it printed on fabric and turn it into a stitched piece. Either way, I’m glad for the adventure.

Here are some production notes.

 

Composition

Eos and the Anemoi had its genesis in an exhibit I saw over the summer, Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters.

That exhibit made me remember the works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a 19th century painter. I don’t know how historically accurate his paintings are – I’m guessing not very – but I find his use of detail and texture very satisfying. His pictures often have a romantic flair, depicting the likes of sheet-clad women lounging around on marble lawn furniture while nursing headaches or counting pomegranate seeds.

Rounding up the Sushi  Silver Favorites, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Naturally, when I came home from the exhibit I had to rip off Alma-Tadema’s sheet-clad dames, marble columns, and blue Mediterranean sea and sky. To those I added some touches of my own, thus creating my own warped take on Greek mythology. No doubt he’s spinning in his grave.

 

Cerberus

One of the first additions to my scene was a cerberus, a three-headed dog. These creatures are a staple of Greek mythology. They’re supposed to be the gatekeepers of Hades and are usually depicted as fierce, snarling creatures. I thought it would be a nice change of pace to have one which is a peaceful yet alert-looking puppy, complete with an octopus chew toy.

Each time I work with a 3D program, I have to choose between making the models myself or finding some readymade. Making them from scratch is more satisfying in many ways. It may also be necessary if my vision is so peculiar or unique that a model doesn’t exist. However, it can be very time consuming.

I didn’t see a commercially available cerberus model I liked, so I overlapped three dogs, posed them, and selectively hid any components I didn’t want. I did end up with some ugly seam lines and bumps in the render, but removed them with Photoshop.

The image above shows the three dogs with all of their limbs visible, the view we would’ve had if I hadn’t hidden most of them.

 

Coffee

Coffee didn’t appear in Greece until the Ottoman empire, so it isn’t a feature of Greek mythology. Nevertheless, I felt that my goddess deserved steaming hot cup of the stuff.

The cup is based on the Anthora to-go cups used in New York City. It’s just a simple lathe object made in Blender with a custom texture applied. Alas, the render of the cup is distorted, a result of my camera setting. If I was a good person I’d go back and fix that.

The steam is the same steam texture I put in every one of my 3D pictures, available from textures.com.

 

Airship

Fun fact: the airship is staffed by a crew of tiny naked men. I could have clothed them, but I didn’t bother. They’re the size of gnats in the picture and every piece of geometry I put in chews up memory and increases render times. Those with delicate sensibilities needn’t fret, though; the tiny men are every bit as anatomically correct as Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken.

I created the ship with some kit-bashing, much the way one would take pieces of plastic from two different car or airplane models and glue them together.

Here’s the way the airship originally appeared. It’s a commercially available steampunk dirigible, the Spirit of Punk Airship. I deleted or hid the cabin and some other details. I also created textures more in keeping with my theme.

The new “cabin” is the hull from a model of an ancient Greek boat. At first I didn’t know which end of the hull was the prow; I had the hull turned the wrong way with respect to the airship.

Of course, when your ship is powered by a group of naked men rowing through air, perhaps accuracy isn’t that essential.

 

Wind simulation

Eos’s gown is pretty but too static. It’s time to put a little physics to work and do a wind simulation.

 

Here’s a simulation with settings of one Earth gravity and a breeze of one mile per hour. I thought those sounded quite moderate and … um, yeah. That’s exactly the look I was going for. Just like that, with her breasts and one of her hips popping out.

This is typical when I run simulations, whether they’re cloth or fluid or particles. I read the documentation, if there is any, set things up in what seems a reasonable fashion, and whee! There goes her dress! That’s when I laugh, take some notes, and try some different settings.

Some of the simulations were hilariously awful. I ended up with the dress on the opposite side of her body at one point, and at other times it drooped off and tried to slither down her body.

 

Here’s the setting I ended up with, zero gravity and 1 mph wind. I also duplicated her body, increased its size, and made it invisible so the wind could interact with that instead of her “real” body. That helped eliminate an issue with her breasts and hip poking through.

Sometimes it isn’t a matter of one adjustment fixing things. Often I have to tweak several things.

 

Lighting

I used a couple of different light sources in this image. One was an artificial “sun” whose intensity and position I adjusted. I also used an HDRI projected inside a gigantic dome, surrounding the scene. The images above show the “sun” turned off and the dome rotated in a couple of different ways. This lets us see how the dome environment affects the lighting.

 

Geometry issues

There’s always something wrong in one of these renders. No matter how much I inspect the scene in the 3D program, when I look at the resulting render on a pixel by pixel basis, I find problems. The question then is whether to address it in the 3D program and do another render or fix it with Photoshop.

Here’s a typical surprise. This commercially available model of a flower had its blossoms floating above its stems. That might not matter for a picture the size of a postcard, but for something several feet across it’s unacceptable. Should I go back, edit the 3D model, and do another render? That could take several hours. Or should I simply splice in some more stem in Photoshop, a matter of about five minutes? I opted for the latter.

 

Another unwelcome surprise, the woman’s hair going right through her arm. Her arm was supposed to act as a collision object and have the hair wrap around it, but that obviously didn’t work out. Once again, Photoshop to the rescue.

 

Lovely. Her chain is going right through her dress. Yet another Photoshop edit.

 

The final version, with edits listed above. On to the next adventure.

This post is dedicated to my dishwasher, which has decided that it’s going to run continuously without actually washing or rinsing dishes. That’s what I call a “good” problem. It’s annoying but fixable. In the meantime, I have soap and a sponge and I can wash dishes by hand.

It’s so much better than having the furnace or the clothes washer break. I really don’t want to burn books or furniture to keep the house warm, and I don’t have a river handy so I can go beat my clothes clean on a rock.

Broken dishwasher. Good problem.

Also, as it happens, broken sewing machine = good problem. That chip I replaced has done wonders; my Bernina thinks it’s brand new now. I wish I’d made the repair sooner. However, that’s hindsight. When you have deadlines to meet, you tell yourself that it’s better to have a machine that sort of works part of the time than a machine that doesn’t work at all. It feels scary to jam a soldering iron up your machine’s delicate parts and risk breaking it even more.

Now, of course, I can slap myself on the back and chortle “Hey! It worked out fine!” But I didn’t know that at the time.

Today I sent this off to be printed on fabric. I’d been holding off on some projects because of the sewing machine issue, but now that seems to be resolved.

Its working title is Art Nouveau Cyborg, although Art Nouveau Android would be more accurate. I need a better title, something which highlights the fact that the only living thing, in some sense the only “real” thing in the picture, is the hummingbird.

This piece harks back to Art Nouveau, which is a style inspired by natural forms and structures, such as the curved lines of plants and flowers. (Paraphrasing/ripping off the Wikipedia entry on Art Nouveau.) However, my subject matter is quite the opposite of natural, an artificial creature against a background of circuitry. I thought the contrast would be interesting.

The composition is  a blatant ripoff of inspired by the works of Alphonse Mucha, particularly his use of ornate circular frames.

Image provided by Art Renewal Center Museum, image 4417, Public Domain

This piece, Dance, was a particularly helpful reference.

As the lines in green show, I traced right over key portions of Mucha’s composition in order to come up with the layout for my own. I used circuit lines as design embellishments rather than butterflies and flowers, but the arrangement of the background is substantially the same.

The foreground figure is a purchased model, Pix-Synx, whose geometry was created by Pixeluna. I posed and rendered her in a 3D program.

Here she is, rendered and ready to layer in with the rest of the elements of the design.

I fiddled around with several poses before arriving at one that seemed decent.

This pose reminded me of something I saw at the Louvre the week before last, only not as classy.

Mmm. No. I’m not trying to make android porn.

This just worked for me somehow. There was something a little awkward and innocent about it, and when I introduced a focal point, the hummingbird, the picture began to come together.

Ah, that hummingbird. I think I bought the geometry for this thing for about $1 on sale. It’s posable, and it’s one of my favorite models.

Since I’m working in 3D, I can change the texture on objects. I seriously considered making the hummingbird out of chrome or brushed metal. I really liked the way it looked and the way it popped against the background. Unfortunately, having a metal bird would change the message of the picture, which is about the hummingbird being the only natural thing there.

This is the texture I ended up using. Not my favorite, but it contrasted with the background nicely.

When I began drafting the picture, I had no idea what kind of background texture to use. This is one of my false starts, tread plate. I think I made this with Filter Forge. Have I mentioned before how much I love Filter Forge? Yeah. Only about a thousand times.

Here’s another Filter Forge-generated texture. For a brief instant in time, I thought about giving the picture a steampunk flavor.

How about a nice steampunk porthole? (Also created in Filter Forge) That would automatically create the circles one sees in a Mucha composition.

Filter Forge gears. Yeah, no. Interesting but too cluttered.

In the end I referred to photos of blue circuit boards. I sampled dark and light hues from a photo, made a cloud texture in Photoshop, then motion blurred it to create these streaks. That gave it a nice subtle texture.

All the circuit board ornamentation in the picture is made with Photoshop brushes, the Cyber Circuit Brushes by Orestes Graphics. I applied them in separate layers, tinkering with opacity to emphasize or deemphasize them. It’s a delicate balancing act. If the circuit designs have too much contrast, they’ll fight with the foreground for attention and the whole picture will look cluttered. However, if they lack contrast or they’re too dark, they’ll fade away during printing.

Now I wait and see what comes back from the printer. It’s always a surprise, and it always changes some more after I sew on it.

 

This entry walks through the creation of this image, “Coffee Break”, which will be printed on fabric and transmogrified into an art quilt. As usual, click on images to enlarge if desired. (One of these days I’ll get around to fixing the site’s style sheets and layout. One of these days. Probably about the time I get my sewing machine repaired.)

 

As with much of my work these days, Coffee Break was created with a combination of 3D graphics and Photoshop. Here’s the layout in wireframe mode, showing the models in the scene.

 

Assets

If you work in 3D, you either have to make your own models or find them readymade. I did the latter in this case, using purchased models of a fairy, wings, hair, and the forest in which she’s relaxing.

The fairy model is the digital equivalent of a posable doll. I like to credit those who provide or create the assets I use. Alas, this model is merely credited as a “Daz Original”, so I have no idea who made it. It might have been created by a Bulgarian artist working in a shed, a corporate slave at Daz headquarters in Salt Lake City, or someone else entirely.

Regardless, I appreciate it. When I need to make a specific figure, I do, but otherwise the process is so time-consuming that it’s nice to be able to get figures “off the shelf”.

 

This fallen tree is part of a construction kit that includes trees, vines, and little chunks of terrain. The pieces can be arranged as one pleases to create a custom environment. It was created by Stonemason, aka Stefan Morrell, an artist whose models and scenes are much beloved. He’s an interesting person to read about in his own right:

• Stonemason’s Deviant Art page
• Digisprawl article on Stonemason

 

Arranging the scene

I began by arranging the fallen jungle tree in a sunny field, then plunking my creepy bald fairy on top of it. The resulting image is mildly disturbing. It’s a good example of the adage “you have to start somewhere”.

One of the nice things about working in 3D is that we can rapidly try out different lighting, figure poses, models, and camera setups. We can keep the elements that have potential, such as the tree and the fairy, and change the things which aren’t working.

 

The second iteration of work. The fairy’s pose looks more natural; I’ve moved her left hand so that it’s draped across her thigh instead of stiffly hovering above the tree.

She now has hair and wings and her eyes no longer have a hideous staring quality. I’ve added some trees in the background, so we have a sense of place. The scene now feels more natural than having a fallen tree sitting out in the middle of a meadow.

However, we’re not done. The lighting is poor and the waterfall background behind the trees isn’t a good addition to the scene.

 

I’ve added a light source in the upper lefthand corner of the scene, beyond the edge of the picture so we can’t see it. The light gives the scene some contrast and dimension.

Her hair shows up better beneath the light, but the color is uninteresting.

A tree in the foreground gives the scene some depth. I’ve also turned on the depth of field setting for our virtual camera. Our fairy and the tree she’s sitting on are in focus. However, the trees in the foreground and background aren’t. This helps draw us into the scene.

The fairy now has a book, a fancy-looking volume bound in leather with gilt embellishment. This helps develop the story behind the picture a little. We aren’t just looking at a random bored fairy who’s sitting on a log; we’ve caught her in the midst of doing something.

The type of book tells us something about the fairy: she appreciates classics. Perhaps she’s even reading a volume of fairy tales. If she had a stack of magazines or a trashy-looking paperback with a studly bare-chested male elf on the cover, that would tell us something different about her.

 

The fairy’s hair is now red, which is a little more interesting than the blonde.

I’ve added a coffee cup, which adds to the story: we’ve interrupted a fairy who is taking a coffee break or simply trying to have a quiet moment or two to read. Perhaps she’s been trying to dig into her book for ages, but when she sits down for a break at home, her kid starts bellowing about the oh-so-stressful mission he just completed in Far Cry 5 for the ElfBox One. She feels like her head is about to split open and some not-very-dainty things are about to erupt from her delicate lips, so she’s flown off into the woods for some quiet time.

I debated with myself about what kind of cup to give her. The possibilities are limited only by what one can download or create. How about a coffee cup shaped like a cat’s head or a feminine china cup painted with roses? As with the book, each option tells us something about the fairy. However, I didn’t want the cup to become a distraction, so I opted for something simple and white.

As is often the case with this kind of work, once you fix a few problems and rough in the major parts of a scene, other issues become obvious. At this stage I noticed that her back wing was at an angle, which makes it hard to see. That got added to the list of things to fix for the next iteration.

 

Here’s the final scene in wireframe mode. As my husband puts it “No, it wasn’t faked in Photoshop. It really is a scene put together in 3D.”

 

The entire scene as viewed from the top. We can’t see the fairy, but she’s at about the middle of the picture, hiding beneath the trees.

 

Here’s the scene viewed from top with the trees turned off and some color turned on.

The essential components of the scene:

• Camera circled in pink. This behaves much like a real-life camera, with settings including f-stop, focal length, and depth of field.
• Fairy, book, and props circled in blue
• Light source circled in yellow. 3D programs offer many options for lighting scenes, such spotlights and point lights (similar to a light bulb). I usually find them annoying to position and adjust, which is no doubt a character flaw on my part. Instead, I often plop a plane in the scene and make it glow as though it’s a light.

 

Our fairy scene with a very minor adjustment to back wings, so they’re more visible.

I rendered this at 6300 x 5400 pixels, 150 dpi. That’s large enough to fill a 42 x 36” piece of fabric. So I’m done now, right? I spent hours putting this scene together and I let it render for 20 hours. Surely it’s ready to send off to the printer?

Ha ha ha ha ha. No. In some ways, the fun has only begun.

 

Post production

Look for problems

Maybe other people don’t have trouble with their renders. I always do. Always. Always. Even when I inspect the scene over and over and over again before rendering, I find problems. Sometimes they’re bad enough that I make adjustments in the 3D program and do another render. Other times I address them in Photoshop.

Here’s a typical problem, stuff poking through other stuff. When I zoom in on the picture at 100% and inspect it, I see moss and a leaf poking through the book. That might not be noticeable when the entire image is the size of a postcard, but when it’s blown up large enough to go on a wall, it’s a problem.

Ideally, one would find that kind of thing before blowing a day on rendering. However, if not, one can sometimes fix it after the fact in a program such as Photoshop.

 

Brighten up the scene

The picture looked a little dim for my taste, so I brightened it up. To do that, I opened the picture in Photoshop, duplicated the layer, and set the blending mode of the duplicate to Color Dodge at an opacity of 50%.

One can try different blending modes and opacities. It’s a good experiment; sometimes there are happy or at least interesting surprises.

 

Add a background

Right now the background behind the trees is black. That’s okay, but I wanted just a little visual interest so the scene would feel more realistic. However, I didn’t want the background to be so cluttered that it would fight with the foreground for attention.

I began with a large version of this picture, which is somebody’s imagining of a jungle. (It’s part of the Heart of the Jungle background set.)

 

The jungle picture after a gaussian blur in Photoshop

 

I could get the jungle background in my picture by adding it to my 3D scene, starting a new render, and waiting another day for the computer to finish that set of calculations.

However, I’m lazy. It’s faster to mask out everything in the foreground of my picture and drop the background in with Photoshop. Using a mask such as the one above is a nice way to isolate elements and make edits after the fact. It’s often faster than rendering the scene again.

Daz users: see my entry “How to make masks in Daz Studio/Iray”.

 

Here’s the scene with the jungle background dropped in. It’s a subtle change but it adds a little life.

 

Adding steam from coffee

Our next task is to give the coffee some steam. Again, one can use props and do this directly in one’s 3D program, but I prefer to do it in post.

The steam is a graphic from Textures.com, a wonderful resource for those who do 3D or other sorts of graphic work. I’d post a photo of it, but I’m concerned about violating their terms of service. Here’s the link.

 

I’ve pasted the smoke/steam on a separate layer. Its blending mode is screen, which makes the black background of the smoke disappear without further effort.

 

Next I stretch it, rotate it, and erase the parts I don’t want in the picture. Voila. “Steam”. Only you and I know that it’s actually incense smoke which someone was kind enough to photograph and share.

 

Here’s the scene with steam added. It’s a small touch but it adds a little life.

 

Adding light rays

I want some light rays. They should come from the upper lefthand side of the screen, mimicking our light.

There are plenty of tutorials on making light rays in Photoshop. Here’s a good one.

 

I begin by making a new layer in my Photoshop document, setting my color palette to black and white, then rendering clouds (Filter -> Render -> Clouds). I then go to the menu bar and select Image -> Adjustment -> Threshold and hit “okay.” (All of this is in the tutorial I linked to above, btw.)

If I’m feeling wild, I’ll select a portion of the graphic with my marquee tool and resize it/expand it so it fits the screen. Different black-and-white patterns yield different results, so it’s good to experiment with them.

 

Finally, I take the layer with the black-and-white graphic and go to Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur. I put the center of the blur near where the light source should appear, set the blur method to zoom, and fiddle around with the amount until I’m happy. There isn’t a preview mode on this blur, so sometimes one has to CMD-Z or CNTRL-Z, go back to the radial blur filter, and try a new blur amount.

This sort of looks like light rays. Sort of. But now I have a new problem – how to get the light rays in the picture without obscuring the items in the foreground.

 

Yep. It’s mask time again. This time I’ve made a mask which isolates the fairy, her props, and the foreground tree. I apply that as a layer mask on the light ray layer and set the layer blending mode to soft light. After I play around with the opacity, I end up with this:

 

Adjust brightness balance

It feels like the scene is most of the way there. However, the tree at left is bright and distracting.

I’ve muted the foreground tree out with a layer mask. But – oh, great – now the tree behind the fairy looks too bright. Shall I make another mask for that?

 

No. I’m sick of fiddling around with masks. It’s brute force time. I grabbed the burn tool and darkened the tree by hand.

 

Adjust eyes

Her eyes seem a little dark. She’s a fairy. Even if she’s having a rotten day and just wants to drink her coffee, she should have sparkly eyes.

 

Here are her eyes after using a dodge tool on the midtones. Now she looks depressed but with, you know, sparkly eyes.

 

Darkening of graphic during printing process

My goal is to print the coffee break scene on fabric. However, from sad experience, I know that when I send out images to print on fabric, they often come back dark. Here’s an example from a different project.

 

Check out that boot. That’s the boot in the file I sent to the printer, with subtle highlights and surface texture.

 

Here’s what I got back on fabric, an amorphous blob of black. Guess what? The fabric printer doesn’t do subtle highlights, at least not if they’re on the dark end of the color range.

 

Similarly, here we have a pile of rocks. They are distinct, individual rocks, happy in their grayness and individuality.

 

Aaaaand here’s what we have after printing on fabric. Another black blob. I can use thread to fix some of this, but it’s vexing.

No, it isn’t unusual for prints on paper to look different from the images one sees on screen. However, this is the most pronounced case of that I’ve ever seen. Perhaps its related to the fact that we’re printing on fabric, not glossy paper stock.

Regardless, anything at about RGB 70/70/70 or less will be black. Thus, the next step is to go through the scene with an eyedropper tool and the info box displayed. If I don’t want something to turn black, I need to adjust it so it’s brighter than 70/70/70.

 

Here’s a shrunk-down version of the file sent to the fabric printer. It’s 6300 x 5400 pixels, 150 dpi, which is large enough to print on a one yard length of “Cotton Poplin Ultra”.

 

Here’s the printed fabric. See any difference? I sure as heck do. As usual, the darkest tones in the design are even darker more after printing on fabric. In particular, the light rays I so carefully, lovingly put in are all but invisible. I’ll see if I can pep them up through my thread choices, but it’s annoying. I specifically corrected for that. However, I didn’t correct enough. Let the designer beware!

Next stop: quilting.

Here’s my latest quilt, Do Dragons Like Cookies? 

It measures, um, 39 3/4″ wide by 32 1/2″ tall. Thought I’d throw that in. Some folks like to know about sizes.

 

The stitching

A closeup of some of the stitching. Don’t look too closely at the craters on the moon. They aren’t scientifically accurate. They’re more along the lines of “stitched in a desperate, manic fashion after drinking far too much coffee”.

I’ve been thinking of coming up with an obnoxious label for my style of stitching. We have McTavishing and thread painting and I don’t know what else. I’ve been toying with names like StitchGanic (a bad combination of Stitching and Organic), DesperationStitch, and my favorite, ResentStitch. What do you think? Could I market a book on ResentStitch®? I’m envisioning chapters with themes like “What to do when the coffee runs out,” “Is there a problem? Just sew over it,” and “Yes, I totally intended it to be that way.”

 

Whee. More stitching.

 

And … even more stitching. I have nothing nice to say about the process of sewing the snowflakes. Let’s just say that the closer the wings got to the little girl’s body, the harder it was to make out what was printed on the fabric. And I designed the @#$% thing. In several places I ended up making my peace with the Devil’s Thread, aka clear polyester monofilament.

 

What the heck. I’ll throw in a couple of views of the reverse. Some folks like to see that sort of thing. Just pretend that I went over the surface with a lint brush before taking the photo, okay? Pretend you don’t see stray threads here and there.

 

This piece is notable for being the first I can remember where I avoided the Valley of Despair. (The Valley of Despair occurs when one has been working on a project for so long that one can’t remember the beginning and one can’t see the end.) That may be because I broke the project down into half hour increments this time. Each time my timer went off, I made a hash mark on paper, then got up and stretched. It made a world of difference as far as time tracking, taking care of my body, and having a tangible measure of progress.

 

About the surface design

The surface design is a 3D rendering printed on cotton. If you’ve looked at my work recently, you know the drill: you create or acquire geometry on the computer, apply textures to it, light it, and have a computer calculate what the scene would look like.

Here’s the scene layout in wireframe mode. Hopefully that makes it clearer what I mean by “geometry”.

I originally intended this piece to be a lighting study. I thought it would be fun to do a scene inspired by paintings such as The Lanterns, by Charles Courtney Curran, and Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, by John Singer Sargent. However, instead of a bunch of little girls with lanterns, I used a dragon and a fairy holding a firefly. I can’t remember why. Probably it was late at night and I was getting a little loopy.

Here are the models I started with:

This little girl is Skyler, offered by Daz.

This is what she looks like when she’s loaded into a scene initially. Boom. No clothes, no hair, just the computer equivalent of a rag doll for you to pose and dress and so forth.

 

This is the Millennium Dragon LE, also by DAZ.

 

The scene took shape pretty quickly. I threw some wings on the little girl and had her kneel on a rock, offering the firefly to the dragon. Mind you, I’m not sure why one would offer a firefly to a dragon. The dragon in this initial version is large and definitely on the menacing side, so perhaps the young lady decided it would be smart to offer whatever she had on hand.

 

Paddling around in one’s skin can get chilly, so I put some clothes on her. I chose the Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD)  from Daz because of its versatility. It’s a very basic dress, and one can do a great deal with it by modifying textures. The MFD has been around for years, so there are tons and tons of textures available, things people have created and offered for free out of the goodness of their hearts.

 

This test render shows the scene lit by the firefly she’s holding in her hand. I was experimenting with some different camera angles to see if there was something more striking than the first view I’d come up with. I like this angle quite a bit, but decided the one from the side was more striking.

The dress has a fern surface applied. One of the things I like about the MFD is the availability of free textures. One can download anything from a belly dancer’s outfit to a meat dress to a princess dress and swiftly try out different looks for one’s scene. Even if one doesn’t use a particular texture, one can get a better sense of what may work.

In this case, since I was working with a fairy, I downloaded a fern fairy texture. This one was offered by a user I know only as Chohole, who has shared many, many textures with the community.

 

Back to the original camera angle. The firefly has been replaced with a cookie, and now the scene has the moon as a backdrop. (Courtesy of the Iray Worlds SkyDome Super PAK)

Our story is beginning to come together. In the way of children since time immemorial, our fairy is offering a treat to a wild creature she wishes to befriend. Hopefully the dragon will like gingerbread!

That dress isn’t quite right, though. It was nice for previewing the fairy look. However, we’re no longer in a woodland setting. She has snowflake wings, icy white hair, and the whole scene seems quite cold. Perhaps a snowflake dress would be better?

 

This dress texture was courtesy of a lady named Trixie, whose ShareCG profile says “I’m just a ranch lady, raising cattle … this is my hobby 3D textures”. And very nice they are, too. Thank you, Trixie!

I’ve curled the dragon’s tail around so that it curves toward the fairy. That felt more balanced, plus I didn’t like having the creature’s tail lopped off by the side of the picture.

 

At this point I decided I wanted to make my own texture for the dress, one which would mimic the snowflakes on the girl’s wings. Here I’ve overlaid the lace on top of a template offered by SnowSultan. If one builds the graphic in layers in Photoshop, it’s straightforward to use the template as a guide, then turn it off, flatten the file, and save the result out as a jpeg for one’s texture.

 

Fairy with custom snowflake lace texture. I had to make several custom textures, actually. It turns out that when you’re rendering out a scene at 6300 x 5400 pixels for printing on fabric, many textures are too low resolution to look decent.

At this point I was also trying some different camera and moon positions. I do like the way we see reflected moonlight on the water in this test render.

 

However … surprise! When I placed the moon behind the girl’s head, the composition became much stronger.

That’s one of the advantages of working on a computer and being able to save a thousand different versions. You can do some experimentation apart from whatever you may have sketched out or planned.

I have no idea how this scene ends. Will the dragon accept the cookie and become her friend or will it chomp her hand? Not all fairytales have happy endings, after all.

Speaking as the mother of a twelve year old boy, I do hope the fairy’s vaccinations are current.