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Archive for 2017

How to make masks in Daz Studio/Iray

Wednesday, December 13th, 2017

This is a quick note for people who use Daz Studio, in case they’re looking for a simple, lazy method for creating masks in Iray.

This question came up for me when I was watching Val Cameron’s Fantasy Art Master videos. He does quite a bit of work in post, rather than hassling over getting everything just the way he wants it in the 3D package. To do that, he frequently uses a mask to isolate whatever element he’s interested in.

However, in the videos I saw, he was using 3Delight rather than Iray. That raised the question of how to make masks in Iray. Perhaps it’s common knowledge; it turned out to be fairly simple, once I messed around with it. However, when I Googled around, I didn’t find the information I needed, so I thought I’d pass it on.

Here are the steps we’re going to go through:

Delete or hide the objects we don’t want in the mask
Delete or turn off sources of light
Change background color so that it contrasts with our scene elements (may not be necessary, but it’s handy)

Here’s our starting scene. Our character, Aspen, is casually hanging out by a giant sphere, wondering why she’s been plagued by premature hair loss.

We want to isolate the character and the sphere from the background. This is a simple scene so there aren’t many extra elements. However, I do need to turn off the floor.

Here we are with the floor turned off.

We now want to remove or turn off all light sources. I confess that I find this much less straightforward in Daz than in other packages I’ve used, such as Blender. Illumination can come not only from obvious lights in the scene, but from light-emitting planes, sky domes, camera head lamps, and the environment.

Note that if you want to emphasize some aspect of the scene in post, you can light it as desired and proceed with making your mask.

I’m still in perspective mode, so I’m going to create a camera, select it, then turn off its headlamp.

By the way – click on the images if you need to see them larger. I need to go revise the style sheet to make that obvious and, um, I’ll get around to that sometime. Yeah. I’ll revamp the site any day now. Probably over Christmas break, when I’m revising my latest novel, creating new artwork, and replacing the ugly-arsed light over the kitchen sink.

The environment is another possible source of illumination in this scene. To address that, I’m going to turn the environment intensity down to zero.

Looks like I was successful in turning off all sources of illumination. Unfortunately, I can’t see a silhouette of my scene. That may not be important as far as the render – the scene should render out against a transparent background regardless. However, it’s nice to be able to double check our setup.

To address that, I’m going to change the background color of my viewport from black to white.

Now I can see my figures silhouetted against a white background.

When I render this out, my scene is silhouetted against a transparent background. I save it as a png in order to retain transparency. To make a classic black/white mask, I can pop in an appropriate background color in Photoshop.

Here’s a more complex scene, first with a transparent background then with a white background. I had to turn off quite a few light sources to isolate the desired elements. However, it was still a fairly straightforward process.

Hope this helps someone. Happy rendering!

Posted in 3D | No Comments »

Where is the story?

Tuesday, September 19th, 2017

Succulent, 38 x 32″

Here’s my latest, Succulent. It’ll be at PIQF next month. I managed to finish it just before the submission deadline, battling my sewing machine the whole way. (And have I taken my machine in for repair yet? No, I haven’t. However, I’m still whining about the fact that it’s broken despite the fact I’m now past deadline and could do something about it. It’s a good thing I’ve never claimed to be wholly logical.)

It was interesting. By interesting, I mean that I really hate doing work at the last minute and I’ll do almost anything to avoid ending up in that situation. However, I had a firm commitment for another piece that HAD to be done by a certain date – for a top-secret exhibit, natch – so this one had to be postponed for awhile.

Most of my recent work has been 3D-based. Succulent is a little different, although it’s still based on the output of a computer.

Back in 2009, I saw a plant about the size of my hand and absentmindedly took a photo of it. I think I was at Balboa Park in San Diego at the time; the place is covered with plants.

That photo had a nice abstract quality that has fascinated me over the years. I finally sat down with it and ran it through some custom Photoshop filters to increase saturation and simulate a watercolor effect. I had the resulting image printed onto fabric at Spoonflower, then did the usual batting and stitching and muttering that transforms such things into art quilts.

This piece used thirty-three colors of thread. I have no idea how that compares to my usual work; it isn’t something I normally focus on. My philosophy is that you use however much thread and however many colors you need to, and it usually isn’t worth dwelling on. I always use a lot of thread, but I don’t deserve a freaking medal for using up an entire manufacturing plant’s worth of polyester. When people look at a piece, it either speaks to them or it doesn’t.

However, occasionally – very occasionally – it is interesting. In this case, it’s a reminder of the complexity that can dwell beneath apparent simplicity. When I look at the quilt, I’m surprised at the fact that the design was able to bear up under so many different hues. Perhaps it’s because the shapes are so simple and bold.

Now I’m dwelling in the land of “what’s next”? My usual work mode is telling stories, either visually or with words. Succulent was a bit of a departure from that. It’s a pretty piece, with its play of light and color, but there isn’t much of a story there other than “look closer and pay attention to the world around you”.

I don’t know which story I want to tell next. This happens after every project, and I hate it every time. It doesn’t help that I can hear that Chuck Close quote in my ears, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

In the meantime, I’ve been taking an online course on fantasy artwork and making things like this:

A winged naked guy is hanging out on a cloud bank. He’s naked because … let me think about this … there’s no laundromat nearby. He tried hauling a washer up there, but it kept falling through the clouds, plus there was no real water supply to plumb it up to. Try not to dwell on the other sanitary implications of that situation.

When he wants to go on a date, he flies down to Target and buys a nine-pack of tighty whities. Not that he needs to, because there’s nothing up front to hide. No geometry, if you get my drift. Which, I guess, really makes dating pointless … having 2.4 flying kids and a flying dog isn’t in this guy’s future unless he adopts. Never mind. Forget I mentioned it.

How many times have you seen images similar to this, with a naked dude or a scantily clad woman hanging out by a cloud bank? Yep. A lot. That’s why I won’t be taking this image any further and making a quilt out of it. That is, unless I get desperate and can’t think of anything better or more original. Then I’ll make up a nonsense story about how the idea came to me in a dream.

This image wasn’t too hard to put together, but the filthy little non-secret about 3D/CGI is that if you work in that medium, you’re going to be fiddling around. Always. Always. Always. I have never had a project that didn’t have at least some minor issue. I’ll want a different texture on one of the models, or the lighting isn’t quite right, or something will outright go to pot and I’ll have to figure it out. I’m a perverse creature and I enjoy that process, but I know some folks don’t.

Here, for example, we have one of the early surface designs for Game Over. I thought my little plastic polar bear should have a little plastic scarf. However, it looked awful. Delete.

In this snippet of a scene, a bare-chested hottie was groping away at a willing female. Later I discovered that the hottie was so enthusiastic his fingers were jammed right through the woman’s belly. I wish I’d inspected the scene more closely before poking the render button.

I was trying to come up with a new hottie. (I don’t remember whether this one is a stock character or something I modified.)

That thing on his head was supposed to be hair. Unfortunately, the hair texture didn’t get applied to it, so it looks more like a shower cap. Perhaps that’s why he appears so unhappy.

I thought that creating a realistic velvet texture for one of my scenes would be AWESOME. Too bad it looked like a green porcupine. There was another one that looked like mottled decay. Wish I’d saved a picture of it. On second thought, perhaps it’s best that I didn’t.

An early version of the surface design for Gusher. Gosh, wouldn’t it be swell if oil really spewed out of that oil well? It should be straightforward to simulate with particle effects, right?

Whoopsy. That took a few iterations to fix.

Lately I’ve been toying with idea of a series inspired by the paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. You know the ones … the paintings where he has chicks hanging out on uncomfortable marble furniture by the water, waiting for dudes to come home on fancy-looking boats.

That should be straightforward to whip up, right?

Oh dear. Her legs are poking straight through her dress. Gee whiz, I can’t fix that in the software I was using. That means I’ll have to take the woman and her dress into a different piece of software.

Or … hold on! Change of plan! Instead of her wearing a Hellenistic dress, what if she has on a vaguely apocalyptic outfit? Think “Mad Max Visits the Mediterranean”. And, um, she’ll be waving a gun around. She hasn’t had her coffee yet and she’s annoyed about the guys on that ship in the background cruising around in her bay. When they clamber up to her marble gazebo, she’ll shoot them all.

Or not.

None of this is working for me. Guess I’ll go make some more naked guys with wings. Maybe that’ll be my new series. Naked Guys with Wings. It’ll be a gender swapped version of Victoria’s Secret angels.

Posted in 3D, New Work, Shows | No Comments »

Current Publications

Friday, September 8th, 2017

Current Publications. I think that may be one of the most insanely dull titles for a post I’ve ever come up with, if not the dullest. That’s a shame, because I’m quite excited about the work and exhibits documented.

Once or twice a year, I sit down to make sure the information on this site is current. While I have a goal of documenting works as I create them, that often doesn’t happen. Some projects have fairly stiff limitations on when work can be made public and, well, by the time that date rolls around, I’m on to the next thing.

Thus, it’s nice to see a cross-section of the work I’ve been doing over the past couple of years committed to print. It’s also nice to be reminded that I’m a part of a global team effort with other artists, creating work that celebrates, cautions, and entertains.

Machine Quilting Unlimited

The September/October edition of Machine Quilting Unlimited has a nice six-page spread on the development of my artwork, Do Dragons Like Cookies?

I created the quilt’s surface design using 3D/CGI, a technique that lets one create and move digital objects to create a scene. It’s been one of my loves for about 25 years, and makes a nice change of pace from painting or other digital techniques. It isn’t at all common in the quilting world, so I hope readers will enjoy the article.

The article came about in a very serendipitous fashion. Publishing a piece on my 3D work had been on my to-do list for the year, and I was delighted when the opportunity to work with MQU appeared. They were lovely people to work with, and I’m very excited to see the article in print.

MQU can be found at bookstores, fabric stores, and online at https://machinequilting.mqumag.com.

The quilt itself will be at IQF Houston this fall, for those who are in the area and wish to see it in person.

Fly Me to the Moon

This book documents a traveling exhibit of quilts commemorating humans’ voyage to the moon. It’s one of Susanne Miller Jones’ efforts; during the past few years, she’s spearheaded several exhibits covering nice, meaty topics.

I have one piece in this exhibit, celebrating the moment when Apollo 8 broke free of the Earth and took three men, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, into orbit around the moon. This marked the first time humans had made that voyage; it also demonstrated the viability of traveling to the moon.

The book is due to be released September 28. It can be purchased from Amazon and various other book retailers.

A current exhibition schedule and photos of the exhibit quilts can be seen at https://www.flymetothemoon.gallery.

One recent display venue was Webster Presbyterian in Houston, which some informally refer to as the “NASA Church”. Various members of the congregation were and are involved with the space program, and shared memories sparked by the artwork: http://www.websterpresby.org/VisualArts

I was touched to see my piece augmented by remembrances by Jerry Carr who, among many other things, was Commander of Skylab 4.

Quilting Arts Magazine

The October/November edition of Quilting Arts Magazine contains a selection of quilts from the HerStory exhibit, another of Susanne Miller Jones’ efforts. One of mine, celebrating the life and work of physicist and laureate Maria Goeppert-Mayer, is in the magazine.

Quilting Arts can be purchased at bookstores, fabric stores, or online: https://www.interweave.com/store/quilting-arts-october-november-2017-print-edition

The HerStory exhibit is just beginning its travels. A portion of it will be debuting at IQF Houston this fall. That will have another of my quilts, an homage to the artist Mary Blair. Susanne keeps an updated tour schedule on her website: http://www.susannemjones.com/herstory-exhibit-schedule/

Threads of Resistance

It’s funny how one’s attitudes can change over time. I grew up in a household in which the only news consumed was that broadcast in the evening on the television, lines read by a serious-faced white male broadcaster. Beyond mocking the county commissioner for re-graveling the roads only during election years, politics weren’t discussed much at home. My father sometimes declared that he was politically independent, neither a Democrat nor a Republican, yet if pressed, I doubt he could list many instances when he voted as a Democrat, if there were any at all.

I was unclear on what any of it meant, other than picking up on an “us versus them” mentality more suitable for sports teams. The first time I went to vote as an adult, it was a horrible shock. I was ill-prepared and I didn’t recognize most of the names or issues on the sample ballot. That spurred an endless cycle of having to research every blasted issue every blasted election year.

One thing I learned along the way is that politics matters. It can be annoying, confusing, tedious, and inspire one to new heights of cynicism, but it really matters. Politics affects issues both minor and major.

Among other things, it affects whether citizens have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink, and whether people of different colors are allowed to drink that water from the same fountain. It affects how well the firefighters and police are paid in one’s town and whether they have adequate equipment. It determines how we treat people who don’t look like us or speak our language, but have resources we want. When there’s a tragedy or a disaster, such as a hurricane hitting a city, it affects whether there’s a government-based aid organization ready to help.

Politics is a reflection of a society’s values and priorities. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of people dividing themselves up into different groups so they can hoot and jeer with a sports team mentality.

As we grow older and have kids and grandkids, our thoughts may turn to the situation we’re leaving behind for them. That, too, is impacted by politics. Will there be unspoiled national parks? Will issues such as global climate change be faced and addressed in a responsible manner, or will elected officials continue to avoid the issue or outright deny that it exists? Will citizens continue to have some degree of free speech? Will journalists be harassed or tossed in jail when they attempt to report truths to the populace? Will we treat refugees from other countries with compassion or with contempt?

After witnessing the behavior of the Trump administration for seven months, I have very grave concerns. So do many other artists. That is, in a nutshell, is the drive behind the Threads of Resistance exhibit.

More than 550 pieces were submitted to this exhibit, expressing concerns about the actions and policies of the Trump administration. Sixty-three were accepted into the traveling exhibit; I’m proud to have two of mine included.

The catalog shows the works which were accepted into the traveling exhibit. It can be purchased at Amazon and various other book retailers.

All of the submitted pieces, plus an exhibit schedule, can be seen here: http://threadsofresistance.org/schedule.html

I encourage people to go have a look at the exhibit and consider the issues. They have broad, long-lasting, very serious consequences that transcend political affiliation.

Posted in Publications | No Comments »

Above

Monday, May 29th, 2017

Above. 24.5 x 45”

Here’s my newest work, Above. It’s so named because it reminded my husband of a view of a landscape as seen while floating in the sky. This is shades of the video for “And She Was” by the Talking Heads.

My internet friend Quinn McDonald has written eloquently about how recent events have affected people’s creativity. Amusingly enough, I’m having the opposite experience. I’m turning out tons of work. Unfortunately, much of it has a depressed, apocalyptic tone or, like this piece, is executed on the fly while listening to Terry Gross’s calming tones on NPR.

I don’t know what inspired me to create Above. Maybe there wasn’t any inspiration, save using some excess materials that were cluttering up the corners of my workroom. It truly is a Frankensteinian creation, comprised of chunks of old bed sheet, fabric scraps too small and irregular to piece together, and a bag of exotic yarn ends. Happily, although it’s quite a bit different than my usual work, it’s already been claimed.

When I do a piece of work like this that’s crazy, with bits of this and that salvaged and thrown in in no particular manner, I think of my maternal grandmother. Perhaps the work is something of a tribute to her.

My mother and I lived with her parents for a time after she divorced my father. In my memories, they were humorless people and not particularly warm. Both of them were poisoned by a particular strain of southern Christianity that embraced hatred and stupidity. It’s a strain that believes that questions come from Satan, one should regard reading materials other than the Bible with deep suspicion, and that “n—— aren’t human and should go back to Africa”. The philosophy is far more focussed on relishing the punishment of unbelievers and their eternal roasting in hell than it is following the teachings of Jesus.

Given all that, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that we weren’t close. Perhaps it’s difficult to be warm or affectionate when the core of one’s life is a philosophy that’s focussed on hatred and judgement. Or perhaps having a daughter and her child land in their household put them under a strain and they resented it. Still, they took in my mother and me, and I do appreciate it. They were never cruel to me. There was a roof over my head and food on the table at every meal. This, despite the fact that I must have gotten on their nerves.

I was a genius at conjuring up mischief. My grandmother had fragrant white roses planted out in front of the house. I would rip the roses off the bushes and shake them around, purely for the pleasure of seeing the petals fall down like snow. I would also pull unripe peaches off their trees and scrape away the fuzz with a fingernail, because the fact there was fuzz on a fruit fascinated me. These actions weren’t well received. Still, my grandparents weren’t cruel to me. There were sharp words but they didn’t yell or paddle me, despite my returning to that rose bush over and over again.

My grandmother was a quilter. Both of my grandmothers were, actually. That was simply what one did in their era, particularly if one was of a particular social class. They gardened and canned, they sewed clothes for their families, and they hoarded the leftover fabric scraps to piece together quilts to keep their families warm. In my memories, my paternal grandmother’s works were pieced quilts that followed a pattern. I don’t remember much about my maternal grandmother’s work, other than the crazy quilt.

That crazy quilt was a glorious thing, patched together out of salvaged scraps of cotton, jersey, and velveteen. It didn’t contain any fancy stitching or other embellishment, but it didn’t need it. The assortment of fabric types and colors and textures was sufficient to elevate it to the status of art.

I doubt that my grandmother intended it to be a work of art, because art wasn’t part of her universe. In her world, a picture of praying hands or of a long-haired, suspiciously Caucasian Jesus was sufficient art for a household. I’m sure she simply viewed the quilt as a frugal means of staying warm. It was art though, and quite marvelous. I loved every inch of it.

I spent hours with that quilt. It was my solace. My parents couldn’t simply agree that they didn’t get along and seek a divorce, you see. There were religious considerations plus my father was determined to stay in the marriage because, I think, of me. I understand and appreciate that, but it really was quite awful. My mother was paranoid schizophrenic and my father just plain hates women, so there had to be beatings and kidnappings and all manner of other nightmarish bullshit before they split up. So many things happened. So many. Life was out of control. But after the divorce, the quilt was there.

I used to take that quilt, wad it up, and explore its topology. I’d do that by the hour, when I wasn’t intent on destroying my grandmother’s roses. I’d use marbles for the activity, pretending they were tiny human spelunkers. They’d run through the caves and canyons in the quilt. I’d try to understand how the manner in which I’d wadded up the quilt led to certain formations, then I’d wad it up a different way and try to understand that.

Eventually the living circumstances changed. My mother and I moved out, urged on by my grandfather’s bellows of “Pack your duds and get out!”, a subtle hint that we’d worn out our welcome. Much of that period is a haze. There was a multitude of different schools, a rotating cast of boyfriends for my mother, and worn, cracked apartments that smelled odd. I’d let myself in after school and sit up into the night watching Mannix or Hawaii Five-O or Ironsides while my mother slept for whatever menial job she was attempting to hold down. Her life was hell. She had few job skills and the mental illness made life frightening. Each time she got a new job, there’d be a honeymoon period, then her co-workers would be “out to get her” or (in her mind) even kill her.

She’d have “spells” of depression or paranoia. I’d try to reason her out of them, not realizing that there was something organically wrong that kept her mind from functioning properly. Something as simple as a word scratched out on a piece of paper could become a plot in which people were trying to deceive her. Sometimes she’d turn on me with a sly, chilling smile on her face, and tell me that I was trying to hide things from her but she could see through it. She was going to leave me an inheritance when she died someday. I wouldn’t try to hurt her, would I? I wouldn’t try to get that money sooner?

I was only in the third or fourth grade. I couldn’t keep up with how quickly her mind could warp facts to fit a delusion. We’d spend hours talking. I’d about have her convinced that her coworkers really weren’t carrying razor blades in their shoes so they could kill her, then I’d make a mistake, she’d seize on it, and we’d be right back where we started. It was exhausting and about as fruitful as chatting with the Mississippi River and asking it to not form oxbow lakes after an earthquake. Still, she tried. Life was terrifying for her, but she kept trying.

The summer before fifth grade, I moved in with my father and his second wife. That proved to be its own story. I never really saw my mother’s side of the family after that. I barely saw my mother.

My grandmother passed away at the age of 93. I know only a few bare facts about her life, but I still have the memory of that crazy quilt. She raised a bunch of kids, she housed me for awhile, and she made a marvelous quilt. She did the best she could with what she had. I respect her for those things. When I look at my own work, I think of her.

Posted in New Work, Ponderings | 2 Comments »

Tidbits

Sunday, May 14th, 2017

Thought this was fun. I made this with some pretty minor variants to a Photoshop filter I found in the Filter Forge library, “Little Swimmers”. The filter was made by a user known as geekatplay. Nice filter; good of the person to make it available on the library.

I’ve mentioned the Threads of Resistance exhibit a couple of times. It’s an exhibit created “to protest the Trump administration’s actions and policies”. The exhibit is in the jurying process, but they’ve posted the submitted works and artist’s statements, which is a classy touch.

The group received over 500 submissions to the exhibit, which is a massive, impressive outpouring of work and concern. I have no idea what percentage of those will be in the exhibit, but posting them online lets all of the artists’ voices be heard.

I’m working. I guess that’s an understatement. I’ll probably wait to post about most of it until it’s done, but this is fun:

That’s a portion of a texture map that’s getting applied to a 3D model of a guy’s body:

It’s been fun, or at least interesting, learning how to make scars. I won’t go on a rant about diffuse maps versus displacement maps versus blah blah blah. Let’s just say that my little scheme to find a free photo of a scar and use that to build a skin texture didn’t pan out. Yes, there are stock photos of scars. I am also too cheap to use them.

The “good” news is that there are plenty of scars on my own body and, if I can keep from gagging when I glimpse my pot belly, I can even use them as references. So this hunk is going to get covered with an assortment of scars from my C-section, appendectomy, and gall bladder surgeries. He may end up with a “dashing” C-section scar across his face, masquerading as a dueling or battle wound. Shhh. Don’t tell.

Posted in 3D | No Comments »

Do Dragons Like Cookies?

Tuesday, April 4th, 2017

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.

Posted in 3D, New Work | 6 Comments »

This and That

Thursday, March 2nd, 2017

Tentative title: Do Dragons Like Cookies? (click image to embiggen)

This is the surface design for the newest quilt-in-progress, AKA the latest thing I’m griping about. And gripe I shall. When I stitch, those snowflake wings and the lace dress on the girl are going to give me fits unless I use what I call The Devil’s Thread: clear polyester monofilament.

Yeah, I finally tried that stuff. I used some on Gusher, in the area with balls and cups and such. I feel like it was a devil’s bargain. Yes, I preserved the fine shading of the cups and styrofoam containers and I didn’t have to do fifty thousand thread changes. On the other hand, the texture of the thread itself is yuck, like something I’d cut out of a vacuum cleaner roller with a utility knife. It glistens. It doesn’t have the same soul as the thread I normally use. I know it’s irrational, but I’m terrified that it’s going to spring loose from the quilt and attack someone.

If I’m going to spend weeks or months hunched over a sewing machine, I want the end result to have some poetry to it, even if the quilt depicts a drowning polar bear or an automaton crapping out plastic cups. There needs to be a good reason I chose to make a quilt rather than printing the same design out on flags to sell at a roadside stand. The stitch needs to contribute to the design. Ideally it would be essential. I’m not so sure I’m accomplishing that with The Devil’s Thread.

Anyhow … on to the surface design of the fabric. This is a 3D rendering. If you’ve followed my work in the past, you may be familiar with the process. Create geometry on a computer, barf some textures on it, set up fake light sources, and let the computer figure out what that might look like in real life. If you look at the wireframe, you can see that the scene is extremely simple.

This time I used some purchased assets (3D models) and posed them rather than making everything myself. The little girl is the Skyler model from Daz and the dragon is the Millennium SubDragon LE. I posed them in the Iray Worlds SkyDome.

Much like using The Devil’s Thread, using purchased models is something I wouldn’t have done once upon a time. Instead I would have laboriously spent days creating every blasted model myself, and I would have made sure that everyone around me was miserable while I did it. I also would have bragged about it afterward, and when the thing hung in a gallery, no one would have understood or cared.

Using the Daz assets was nice. I hate to admit that, because I think some of their marketing verges on pedophilia, and there are a couple of things on their site that I find obscenely racist. (Note the afro-wearing gorilla shown in one of the shots for this product. Seriously. Do we really need to go there?)

That said, sometimes it’s nice to grab a pre-made model and get on with it. Daz has a lot of models. Often they’re pretty darned cheap, especially if you consider the labor that goes into them. (Afro-wearing gorillas notwithstanding.)

Look at the lace on that dress. I thought I was being real clever when I created that texture. “Oh, it’ll match the snowflakes her wings are made out of,” I told myself, “It’ll be pretty! Visual poetry!” Yeah, it matches. It’s pretty. It’s also going to be horrible to stitch. Either I use The Devil’s Thread on it to hide mistakes or I spend the next two months hunched over it while I stitch with a magnifying glass.

Stay tuned.

In other non-news, I dyed my hair blue.

Sometimes I hear people complain, and justifiably so, about becoming “invisible” after one turns a certain age. Let me tell you, when you go around with a head full of long blue (or purple or hot pink) hair, you are no longer invisible. People smile and chat with me when my hair’s blue. I get great customer service. My kid likes it. Sure, I get the occasional stinkeye and backing away reaction too, but that’s also fine. It lets me cull out the people who are superficial.

The main reason to do something like hair dying, though, is because you enjoy it. I do. I could care less about growing fingernails and half the time I don’t remember to put on makeup, but seeing blue hair when I look in the mirror cheers me up.

Here are a couple of new works, celebrating the lives and hard work of Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Mary Blair. They’re slated for Susanne Miller Jones’ HerStory traveling exhibit, along with scads of works from other artists. It should be a good exhibit; the subject matter is juicy, and the other works I’ve seen have been creative and heartfelt.

I admire people who, to use a hackneyed phrase, “do things to make the world better”. It’s easy to plotz on one’s La-Z-Boy and complain, but quite another thing to conceive an idea and bring it to fruition.

Susanne’s doing just that. She’s conceived and spearheaded several exhibits on thought-provoking topics. That gives artists like me a venue to speak our minds, and it makes for provocative, interesting viewing. One of those exhibits, Fly Me to the Moon, is currently traveling the country.

The latest Machine Quilting Unlimited has a few of the works from Fly Me to the Moon. Yep, that’s my rocket in the second shot. Also, check out the articles about Betty Hahn’s work and on pictographic quilting, which are pretty darned cool.

Susanne is currently accepting entries for a new exhibit, OURstory: Civil Rights Stories in Fabric. Its goal is to “tell the stories of disenfranchised people and their fights for equal rights”. This is another great topic, and very timely.

The deadline is March 8, so it’s coming up pretty quickly. Fortunately, all one has to do by that date is submit an idea, not the actual quilt, so there’s plenty of time to register.

http://www.susannemjones.com/ourstory-call-for-entries/

On a related note, The Artist Circle, a group of well-known quilt artists, is accepting entries for an exhibit to “protest the Trump administration’s actions and policies”.

One only has to skim over the news to see matters of concern – climate change, fake news, education, racism, and on and on. This exhibit is an opportunity to speak out about those issues. The deadline for that is May 1.

http://threadsofresistance.blogspot.com

This thing, Gusher, is finally stitched and faced. I need to do a little inkwork on it, but I think I can call it all but done. Not a moment too soon, either. I don’t know how many years I’ve been working on it. I could look it up, but hey, why don’t I not do that? The number is probably depressing.

The fact is, I’m not one of those gracious people who writes only sweet things or gushes about how many spools of thread they’ve used or how they were inspired by a butterfly tenderly sucking the nectar from a flower. I start projects because I believe in them. Sometimes I get tired of working on them and I finish only because of sheer cussedness. This is one of those projects.

I’ll leave you with a few gratuitous shots.

My desk, or a portion of it. I also call this Still Life with Key Pad, Dust Mask, and Brain Pin.

Sometimes it’s fun to see others’ work spaces. I hadn’t realized how cluttered mine had gotten. It’s taking on a “Where’s Waldo” appearance.

My twelve year old’s shoe on the left. My shoe on the right. Having your kid outgrow you is one of those rites of passage, I guess. Bittersweet. We want our kids to grow and thrive, and it’s horrid when they don’t, but it would be nice to hold the baby he once was just a few more times.

Alright. This. (Another “click to embiggen” picture.)

I try to be a decent person. Hopefully I’m a better person than I was ten or twenty years ago, and that usually includes just walking by and not commenting if I see something that I think is nonsense.

I’m going to make an exception this time, though. This was an end cap at one of the local Michaels. It’s for “customizing” slime. Not making slime – there’s school glue, which is an ingredient for making slime, but no borax and no instructions, so I guess we aren’t actually MAKING anything, are we? We’re just taking glitter and plastic crap and mooching it inside a viscous polymer blob so we can, I don’t know, have it fall on the floor, get dirty, and throw it away?

I have clearly outlived my usefulness on this Earth.

Posted in 3D, Fun, New Work, Publications, Shows | 3 Comments »

SDA Journal

Tuesday, February 7th, 2017

Let’s see, what are the standard things I write when my work is published?

“This came in the mail today …”

“Oh, what a nice surprise! I totally forgot that I spent a week writing this article/sucked up to the editor and got my thing in the reader gallery/etc.!”

“Tee hee. Look at the little thing I whipped up. And now it’s on a pulverized slice of dead tree!”

Lord, I’m even boring myself. It’s time to revamp my schtick.

Anyway … the Winter 2016/2017 Surface Design Journal arrived. It’s very cool. This edition is their “Inaugural International Exhibition in Print”. It celebrates the SDA’s 40th anniversary with a selection of work from forty artists. I’m one of them.

It looks like the competition to be included was pretty stiff, so I’m quite gratified. The magazine’s intro article mentions that “40 artists were chosen from over 400” and that jurors had to sift through more than 1200 images.

Based on looking through the published works, I think they tried to select the most diverse range of work they could in terms of media, technique, and theme.

My piece, Game Over, is in there representing the art quilt end of things. Hopefully it will depress thousands of people. Edit: Here’s a PDF, courtesy of the kind folks at the SDA Journal.

What else is in there? A reliquary containing samples taken from a two mile deep ice core in Antarctica. A pair of needlefelted hairless cats who are hugging each other. Sculptural baskets woven from watercolor paper. A truly disturbing set of beaded hoods. Enough other artwork to make an MFA advisor gleefully rub his hands and start muttering phrases like “vegetarian fetishism” and “synthesis of zeitgeist”.

It’s art, baby!

Go here to see about getting your own copy: http://www.surfacedesign.org/journal/about-the-journal/

Posted in Publications | 1 Comment »

Thirty Infamous Views of a Gusher

Wednesday, January 18th, 2017

Yes, I totally stole the title of this post from Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. When I steal, I like to steal from the best.

While I was cleaning my hard drive, I ran across these images from the development of one of my pieces, Gusher. It’s fun looking back at the design process and some of the disasters.

See that first image, with the bold, graphic marks depicting the oil shooting out of the derrick? Yeah. Those bold marks looked okay on paper when I was sketching, but they didn’t translate well when I built the scene. Neither did the huge backdrop of garbage bags one can see in the third image. Using moody blue and gray clouds in the background didn’t, either. After looking at some photos of pollution in China, I decided a yellow would be more forboding and would provide better color contrast.

Then there was the oil. I’ll just put the words “particle system” and “simulation” out there and spare everybody details. It got ugly, comically so at times.

I did all that work just so I could print the thing out on fabric and turn it into an art quilt.

I’m still stitching the thing, using the stitching to create motion lines for the oil droplets and so forth. I don’t know that it’ll look significantly different after I’m done with the sewing, but I guess that’s part of the fun. We try things, see if they’re going in the direction we want or a direction we think is interesting, and we make adjustments.

Now … I just need to find some shows that want a quilt showing a guy gulping down oil and defecating out plastic cups.