Beyond the realms of Arcana

Kind reader Nekromantis requested:

I'd like you to draw a dreamlike landscape inside the mind and some kind of ethereal gates (or perhaps two rune-carved monolith stones with space between) showing a glimpse of grandeur/weird/horrific on the other side. A passage to subconsciousness or arcana if you like.

I can't in good conscience put my pen to the paper to describe what life after the transcendence of the material plane would be. In the light may your imagination always find shapes of hope and wonder.


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Tell me what to draw more!

The experiment has given fruit. But it's not enough fruit for my fruit salad. Give me more ideas. Below the jump are the posting instructions as before. I await thine wisdom.



1. Suggestions can be as impressionistic or descriptive as you want. From 'a persistent but unspeakable desire struggles to make itself manifest' to 'the biggest robot ever!!!' to 'the only book a very lonely man would have' to 'a lion'. Write me an one-liner, write me a paragraph, write me a book, whatever you want.

2. You may supply as many ideas as you want but,

3. can only work on one idea a week I can only work on two or three ideas in the next two weeks. If I didn't pick yours it's either because it didn't resonate or because something else came along that did more so. Feel free to repost it next week but don't take offense if I don't explain why I didn't pick your idea.

4. The image must be self-contained. Though implicit storytelling is not just allowed but recommended, no sequential stuff, i.e. I won't draw your comic. Unless you pay me handsomely.

5. The end result will be posted here. If you want a print-friendly version you may ask for it and I'll e-mail you a sizable, well-adjusted scan of the picture for you to print out. If you're feeling generous you may tip me as you wish.

If you want the actual original piece of paper you could pay-pal me the shipping costs plus any small patronage you desire and I'll mail it to you. If the instigator of the idea doesn't want the image, anyone else may request it.

6. As I hope is clear by the above, there are no strings attached. The one with the idea owes me nothing and I owe them nothing in return. I might take you up on your idea, I might not. You might like what I come up with, you might not. You could request the finished piece but you could not. This is just a community-building endeavor, not a professional partnership of any type.


So, here we go again. Post ideas in the comment-space. If you know a friend that would enjoy telling an artist what to draw, inform them of this little experiment.





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F. Nietzsche gazes into you

I couldn't ink it so I pixelled it!

Steps and such at Pixelation.
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A Love Like Blood

(Click on image to download the mix)

Did I tell you about mixtapes? I love making mixtapes, or, as it where, mix-cds. Seriously, anyone that's spent more than a dozen hours with me probably has one or more cds with meticulously planned playlists on them.

Pieces of plastic are kinda out though. For the last few years I've been mostly making mp3 mixes, and predominantly of the Heavy Metal persuasion. But there's one person whom doesn't understand the internet very well, for whom I still make mix-cds for. He's my dad.

He must have a dozen mixes of mine, most themed around moods or historical periods in popular music and properly all geared towards the vain attempt to 'explain Heavy Metal' to him. Well, after ten years of trying, I think my dad gets it pretty well. He probably can't name you more than two genres of metal -although he seems to enjoy dropping "death metal, the metal of death" on me some times. I get why it tickles him, it's a pretty funny yet severe name for a music genre. Also he says "Heavy Metal" and never "metal" to me, so I've taught him well. Anyway, he may not know more than two genres or more than five metal bands by name but he sure as hell can explain to you the Romanticist onset of the genre, its lust for transcendence, its stochastic morbidity, so I'm pretty proud to say he's paid attention, and therefore through my fascination for it, understood me better too. Most dads wouldn't bother.

But that doesn't mean I'm all 'mission accomplished!' about it. I still write him new ones twice a year or so. I've written him proto-metal late sixties to early seventies only mixes (he liked most of it), I've written him genre-specific epic metal mixtapes (he liked Warlord and Virgin Steele), I've written him pot purris of 'religious music' going from J.S. Bach to My Dying Bride to Gregorian Chants to Thomas De Luis Victoria to Lordian Guard to Arvo Pert to Black motherfucking Sabbath (tremendous success). The works. I know he listens to them in the car on the way to work and back, as well as on the long treks he likes to undertake to various foreign countries (my dad is cool). I don't know how much he enjoys them really, he has low tolerances for noise and dissonance so I try to avoid anything more aggressive than Metallica, most of the time. And perhaps he's being a kind liar when he says he's into it, just so we keep communicating like this, but I take it as a good sign that he does anyway.

So I'm posting this here mostly because it's decidedly not-metal. Here's the playlist.

Sisters of Mercy - Dominion / Mother Russia
The Cure - One Hundred Years
Cocteau Twins - Wax & Wane
Husker Du - Pink turns to Blue
Killing Joke - Love like Blood
Talking Heads - The Overload
Dead Can Dance - Advent
Daemonia Nymphe - Ida's Dactyls
Fields of the Nephilim - Last Exit For the Lost
Bauhaus - All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

For anyone well-versed in dark wave, post-punk and gothic rock this compilation is laughably basic but that's just as well because my dad isn't. Actually my dad introduced me to half the stuff on here in some capacity, I heard loose The Cure, Talking Heads or Bauhaus tracks on *his* meticulously archived mix-tapes (and yes, they were tapes, numbered chronologically and with funny "I don't really know English" misspellings of band names, like 'The Beatles' became 'The Beatls' which span two decades of pop music). That's where I first heard Rainbow's 'Stargazer' and look what damage *that* did! He has some odd vinyl too, the wonderful Dead Can Dance 'Gardens of Delight' foldout, Pink Floyd's 'Meddle' and hilariously, the first Russian-sang Kruiz record that he got in his travels to the USSR. That record blew my mind, I had only heard little power metal until then (Helloween's Walls of Jericho exclusively, actually) and it was at least that good, only in a crazy moon-language.

But my dad never followed bands and genres, he just liked some songs and put them on tape, he doesn't remember The Cure, twenty years later. So when he asked me to write him a compilation that's based on 'melancholy' I thought 'I've your your melancholy right here, buddy'. Nothing more nostalgic than half-remembering One Hundred Years, (365 days x 20 years) = 7,300 days later.

(If you're asking yourself why would my dad want a melancholic mix in the dawn of a beautiful summer then I can only answer that that's my strongest proof that I'm his biological progeny.)

You can download the mix by clicking in the header image, it also has a high-res scan of the handmade cover I made for it (another tradition with me and mix-cds). Below are liner notes for the songs, if you like that sort of thing:

Sisters of Mercy

I thought it was apt to start here. I considered starting with The Doors, some Bowie and Joy Division but there wouldn't be enough time to get up to Fields of the Nephilim then (I'm something of a stickler for at least a semblance of historical continuity). That's a great way to start a record any way you cut it. I love the audacity of mr. Eldrich for putting two songs in the space of one, using the same drum machine beat all the while. I think the Mother Russia chorus will also tickle my dad, whom remains something of a Marxist-Leninist.

The Cure

You know, my threshold for morbidity in music is very high, I listen to a lot of extreme metal, Doom especially. But somehow this song is at least as effective as the more earnest metalhead attempts at 'death summoning music'.

"Caressing an old man
And painting a lifeless face
Just a piece of new meat in a clean room
The soldiers close in under a yellow moon
All shadows and deliverance
Under a black flag
A hundred years of blood
Crimson"

Also I enjoy how the drum machine beat is almost at the same tempo and feel as the Sisters song above. And look what I did then!

Cocteau Twins

More drum machine goodness! To be frank I don't go for most Cocteau Twins material, it's too sickly sweet for my tastes (yup, I'm a metalhead alright). But that first record, Garlands, has a very malevolent atmosphere for me even though Elizabeth Frazer is doing what Elizabeth Frazer does. It took me a while to realize why this song has the effect it has on me, it's the bass-lines. The guitar wash is vaguely chromatic with a metallic sheen, it holds no emotion for me. But the bass line is resolutely minor key and driving a mood that is commented on by Frazer, her usually nonsensical lyrics making just enough sense here, and darkly so:

"Carrying prose
Broke my real friend
The devil might steady
We wax and wane

Licking alms
The devil might steady
Rattling we'll taste
We wax and we wane"

Once this bassist was out, I was out too.

Husker Du

This is a horrifying pop song if you pay attention to it. Zen Arcade is one of my favorite records outside my usual metallic scope. I've approached it at different periods of my life, in different angles and it always leaves me richer for the attempt. I don't want to go into the lyrics of this one, they're - I hope - revealing enough for anyone that'd care to read them.

Killing Joke

Oh boy, romantic period Killing Joke. Some people hate what they were doing in the 80's and I must say I prefer 'Revelations' and 'Fire Dances' to either their early sludgy dance-punk and their latter paranoiac post-metal. But they never really put out awful records regardless of their stylistic drift over time. If I had to take only a few bands' worth of discographies with me on a desert island, after King Crimson, Fates Warning and Magma, Killing Joke would be my final choice. I really like the lyric here, it's very hopeful in its drama. 'When self-preservation rules the day no more'. My favorite thing about this song (and this period of Killing Joke generally) is how distinctively clear the work every instrumentalist is doing is. No instrument is encroaching on the space of the others and they all contribute to a simple but beautiful whole. It takes real inspiration and a lot of hard work (not to mention a smart sound engineer) for a band to sound so together.

Talking Heads

Rumor has it mr. David Byrne wrote this song inspired by what Joy Division could have been. He had been reading about them but had not yet heard them and he sat down with that inspiration and gave us "The Overload". Afterwards when he eventually heard Joy Division he exclaimed some disappointment at how 'rocky' they were. And although I disagree with his assessment (I have never felt disappointment in Joy Division, only disappointment along with Joy Division) it's pretty startling how his interpretation of the idea of 'rock dirge' is so effective. I have not heard much else that, while so sedate, has such a powerful emotional impact in me. Barring Skepticism, probably.

Dead Can Dance

After the quintessential downer that is 'The Overload' I had to pick things up ever slightly here. This is such a beautiful early song by Dead Can Dance. Here is the lyric in its entirety:

"In the hour of darkness
when our worlds collide
assailed by madness
that has plagued our lives,

On the point of departure
on the eve of despair
the recourse to reason
seems to make no sense at all

The light of hope
Shines in your eyes
Dementia has gone
Purged from inside

Throughout our wand'rings
In a land of lies
We fell from God's grace
Into a sea of storms.

In the self-revelation
Celebration of love
These bold four virtues
W seem to've left behind

Lay bare your heart
Induce the will of love
T restore what little faith
That you may have lost

As morning brings rebirth
A new day will dawn
T ease our troubled minds

Turn away on your side
and dream of days to come"

Also note I chose a Dead Can Dance song without Lisa Gerrard singing. It's not that I don't like her (or Elizabeth Frazer for that matter), it's just that I prefer my dark wave to have lyrics that make sense.

Daemonia Nymphe

This is a Greek outfit attempting to recreate in some degree the ethos and atmosphere of archaic Greek music. As we have very little historical record of how they composed and how their music sounded, it can be said that such approximations are at best inspired by the idea of Ancient Greek art than directly related to them. Nonetheless I find Daemonia Nymphe to be extremely effective in conjuring a specific mood, a prosperous meeting between Dionysus and Apollo. May we worship autumn and spring, together.

Fields of the Nephilim

When I said there's no Heavy Metal in this compilation, I lied, didn't I? Fields of the Nephilim are categorized as 'gothic rock' but from my point of view, they're a full-fledged metal band that happens to have taken their cue from the Sisters of Mercy concept instead of Motorhead. I know this point of view would be upsetting for a lot of goths and I don't really mean to bring something they love into the fold of something they hate (and do the goths hate Heavy Metal, let me tell you). I do not mean to say that it is because Fields of the Nephilim are a HM band in disguise that they are good (if anything 'metal in disguise' makes things worse). Fields of the Nephilim are good, no, great, because their spell works regardless what particular subculture the listener belongs in. During attentive listening, they enforce a world-sense that is hazy, but contemplative, lurid but energetic. There aren't many gothic rock or metal bands that can achieve this mood, and the Fields go even further from there. This song is their crowning opus in my opinion and it is not for its lyric or melodic sense. There is a sense of movement here, of a progression towards the vast unfathomable. The only disappointment is when the song ends but it is one I allow for because, for Fields of the Nephilim to attempt to describe what happens after the telos of this movement would be presumptuous. What human has moved beyond death and can come back and tell us what it is like?

Bauhaus

And then of those that can speak of the persistent ennui far before the end is reached, what they'd say is often marked by eating sarcasm and gratuous nonsense. One tries so hard to understand,

"All we ever wanted was everything
All we ever got was cold

Get up, eat jelly
Sandwich bars, and barbed wire
Squash every week into a day

The sound of drums is calling
The sound of the drum has called
Flash of youth shoot out of darkness

Factorytown

Oh, to be the cream"

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The artist deliberates

Reader and friend JesusGun said:

What if Nietzsche, except of philoshoper, was an artist too, and would have done a self-portrait? How would this self-portrait would be like?

Do I ink or do I let it be?


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Iphigenia's Sacrifice

This is the final image. I hope Casey likes it and if they want it they can leave me a message. If somebody else wants it, they can leave me a message too. Simple like that, sometimes.

I'll probably forego inking the ZX dragon one, I'd rather get to the second round of ideas. That'll be monday.

I killed two markers to get this one done, I must go and buy new equipment!
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If you wonder why I ink

Work in progress, of course. Click for bigger.

I get a real zen effect from inking, especially over tight pencils that don't leave much to improvisation. There's still artistic choices to make but they're few and far apart, mostly it's minute decisions about how to represent a texture or a surface and most of that's down to practice and subconscious whim. I can let my mind wonder and sort stuff out (and there's been some stuff to sort out the past week) while my hands keep active. It's good therapy. I've missed inking by hand.


I won't be erasing the pencil work beneath this after I'm done inking. It's very rarely that I let both hang together but for this piece I think it'll suit it. Usually I prefer to clean erase the final inks so that I can look at my professional and sharply inked result and pat myself on the back. But as I said there's been stuff I had to sort out in my mind the last few days and I think it's fitting that I let everything show this time. Art should reflect the emotional context around its creation. A sacrifice's not exactly something to be neat about anyway, right?

Look at the marble stone surface, that textural embellishment, one could say, is meaningless and for a comic artist that must give priority to storytelling structure and composition foremost, perhaps even superfluous (as it it might distract the eye from the relevant action). Resting in an uneasy place between fine art pretension and nitty-gritty comic craftsmanship, that sort of inking flourish has come to define my approach. It's a representation of my inner workings I suspect, every time I try to simplify my linework I feel empty inside. Every time I try to go the extra step and do proper chiaroscuro I feel inadequate and as if I'll never finish a single drawing, ever. Sometimes friends and readers comment on all the little crosshatching stuff that's going on in my drawings and remark to the effect that they'd never have the patience to do that themselves. At those times all I can think about is some other people I'm aware of who do more with simple black and white than I could ever hope to. There's degrees of patience, guys.

Some people are blessed with great determination. I've met artists who have been honing their draftsmanship with the drive of a single-cell organism. For as long as they remember being alive, they've been drawing. There's seventeen year olds on deviantart that can represent reality in their drawings ten times better than I ever could hope to. Going around on the internet browsing fine art sites is a humbling experience for most people hovering in that middle space between confident abstraction and full-on rendering mastery.

Comic artists often excuse their shortcomings by saying they focus on storytelling and/or characterization and perhaps that's true some of the time. For me, if I were to be frank, I never had the patience to be a fine artist. I've never spent more than twenty hours on a single piece of art (more like ten hours on average) and I can't see myself changing in the future. I didn't choose comics as a medium because they serve my strengths, comics chose me because it's the only thing I was capable of doing with my talents, peculiarities and temperament.

Sure, I can spend a year making a comic (I just did. It took about 900 hours of work, that's about three solid hours of drawing per day) but it's a variable loop: Idea, rough pencils, tighter pencils, inking, lettering, attachment to the storyline, go at the beginning and repeat until done. It suits me because I'm never stuck doing the exact same thing for longer than 10 hours or so. I record music in the same way, I'll compose rough segments, put down some guitar tracks, then do some drum sequencing, then some orchestration and keyboard work, then some guitars again, then some vocals, then add or change a compositional part, then pester other members to do their vocals or bass lines or whatnot, it's never a grind.

As I grow older and thankfully advance in my effort to accept myself for what I am, I'm more and more okay with that I'll never be a real fine artist and that I'll need to keep rotating my efforts in my various areas of interest if I want to get things done. I'm frankly not exactly sure how that'll pan out in my professional life, but at least in my own head I feel more and more comfortable being a jack of all trades and master of none. Society constantly pressures for specialization. An artist I knew once said 'specialization is for ants'. Perhaps that's too harsh but I'll take from that that specialization doesn't have to be for everyone.

What do you do, reader? How does it reflect on your attention span? Does it fulfill your desires or have you come to terms it never will completely? Do you spend more than ten hours a day toiling at a particular thing regularly? How's that like? Which are the zen aspects of your craft or work and which are the brain-hurty ones?
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You told me what to draw!

And I drew it.

The two ideas are "I request an alternate cover to ZX, in the style of pulpy fantasy novel covers and Frazetta in general, wherein ZX is battling a dragon." by Mr. Sterling and "Iphigenia being sacrificed" by Casey.

Click and click again for bigger and better.

These are just pencils though, you have to decide which of the two I should ink this week!

Also! Also! Please, kind readers, do not read too much into the selection of the first two comments for drawing. It will not be a recurring effect. I kinda started the ZX dragon one the moment I got my first comment because I was scared that I wouldn't get any more and then the Iphigenia idea was too good to pass up so I started that the day after. Next time I'll be more patient.

But you people kept posting wonderful ideas and I kinda want to draw them all. So! I will (kinda). I'll do pencil sketches, at least, for a couple of more ideas from your first suggestion thread. Then, when we have the second suggestion thread, I'll get results from that and pencil more and post all the penciled ideas together to choose which one to ink. The idea is to make a repository of pencil sketches so there's always more to ink if I feel like it and I'm never out of wonderful reader-submitted ideas.

So, make your choice for this week, if you have further ideas-for-pencil-sketches, never hesitate. I keep a little notebook with the best ones, I won't forget.

It was refreshing to do more labored pencil work, I must say. It's been a while. Doing the ZX pencils was completely different to this because there was practically no shading, just contours and space definition. I did all the shading in the inks, digitally, but here I can't afford to mess around I'll need to know where my lights are well before I put ink to paper, there's no undo.

For the Iphigenia picture, I tried to capture her self-sacrifice, the reticence of the priest and the stoic resolution of her father, Agamemnon, in the distance.

For the ZX versus the dragon picture I was mainly going for a good composition and trying to think where I'll put the pulp-fantasy wordage in the top left corner. The unfinished pencil parts in the background is just cloud shapes that I was pretty certain I could do straight in ink.





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This summer you get to tell me what to draw.

Have you ever seen some arrogant artist work and thought "Well. . . that's nice, I wonder what'd come of it if I were telling him what to draw, though." ? Well, here's your chance.

For the past year I made a comic that was and is intensely personal to me. I didn't rely on much external direction. I knew why I was doing what I was doing and I carried my plan to completion. The book will be published eventually and I won't have to worry about it anymore. That chapter is then, done.

But during this process I've felt that the communicational and inter-personal aspect of craft (and not art) making was neglected and that aspect was and I intend it to still be, a large part of this blog. I did my thing up in my wizard tower (more like my small bedroom but you get my point) and the rest of the world turned. Now I want to engage with you readers in more of a dialogue.

What I am going to do is open the forum for suggestions. I want to get back to inking by hand this summer just to keep my chops up so I want to produce one large-scale a4 black and white drawing each week. I do not want to start another ambitious project, so this is my vacation. You get to make suggestions in the comments of what you'd like to see drawn and if they strike me as evocative, I'll take them on. I'll be posting progress reports (pencil work, then preliminary ink work, then finalized inks) during this time and I'll be taking suggestions and feedback and discussing my progress with the instigator (and everyone else) as I go (to the degree that there is interest, of course). I'll do this for the next 3 months, - actual vacation time excluded, of course.

Below the jump are format for idea suggestions and assorted notes for how it'll work.


1. Suggestions can be as impressionistic or descriptive as you want. From 'the feeling one gets after a great time with friends, as one sees them get in their car and go, leaving one alone' to 'a kick-ass dragon eating villagers' to 'a peculiarly sinister telephone' to 'the loneliest tree'. Write me an one-liner, write me a paragraph, write me a book, whatever you want.

2. You may supply as many ideas as you want but,

3. I can only work on one idea a week (unless the piece is small in which case we'll start again mid-week). If I didn't pick yours it's either because it didn't resonate or because something else came along that did more so. Feel free to repost it next week but don't take offense if I don't explain why I didn't pick your idea.

4. The image must be self-contained. Though implicit storytelling is not just allowed but recommended, no sequential stuff, i.e. I won't draw your comic :P

5. The end result will be posted here. If you want a print-friendly version you may ask for it and I'll e-mail you a sizable, well-adjusted scan of the picture for you to print out. If you're feeling generous you may tip me as you wish.

If you want the actual original piece of paper you could pay-pal me the shipping costs plus any small patronage you desire and I'll mail it to you. If the instigator of the idea doesn't want the image, anyone else may request it.

6. As I hope is clear by the above, there are no strings attached. The one with the idea owes me nothing and I owe them nothing in return. I might take you up on your idea, I might not. You might like what I come up with, you might not. You could request the finished piece but you could not. This is just a community-building endeavor, not a professional partnership of any type.


So, here we go. Post ideas in the comment-space. If you know a friend that would enjoy telling an artist what to draw, inform them of this little experiment.
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Futurity and Human Depressions

Click on image (or here) to time-travel to a Primitive Future.



In the case you like looking at lines up-close click here.

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SotC fanart finished :: You can buy it if you like

The size is A4 (21 x 29.7 cm or 8.27 x 11.69 inches), it's inked on the paper with a 0.1 pigment marker (it was enjoyable to return to non-digital inking for it). It has a blemish on the top left part which has been whited out (you can thank black thing stepping on it with his dirty pawsies for that). If you buy it I can write a dedication on it besides my signature. The reciever's parcel will include the original and a level-corrected photocopy. The price for it is What Though Wilt + Postal Expenses. Reader Sergio below wills 5 dollars+postal and to him it shall go in the case of no further interest. The reader and friend little percussionist derrida retorts with a striking left hook of 10 euros. Sergio strikes back with a savage one-two of 11 euros! Man, being a human e-bay is kinda fun. Sergio, little percussionist derrida throws the glove at you (isn't it a little late for that?) by exclaiming "we shan't go 1 euro to 1 euro here, I bid 15!". Oh these post-modernists!

I'll close the 'auction' as it were in a couple of days. Closed and sold :)

It's a beautiful day today outside in Greece.

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Shadow of the Colossus fanart

I might ink this too.


I played through Shadow of the Colossus at my friend Nick's house. It makes a terrific co-op game, passing the controller every other Colossus. On my down-time I drew this. The game's terrific, the atmosphere and emotional resonance. The ending left something to be desired, though.

So yes, I might ink this. If anyone wants to buy it, I'm considering a 'pay what you will + postage fees' for anywhere in the world so if you have a soft spot for Shadow of the Colossus or like the drawing enough or both, drop me a comment. If there's multiple takers I'll go with the highest offer because I'm not insane. I'm also open for a colored version, I have something in mind. Let's give it a week before plans are set.

p.s. have a nice month!

-Helm


EDIT:

I started already



EDIT2:

more inking



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