.art: Cover for fiercelydreamed's "Unidentified" and noir AU

[aesc]

A couple experimental pieces, by which I mean experimental for me. One is a cover for fiercelydreamed's really, really awesome Unidentified, and the other is a draft of a cover for the noir!AU villainny and amberlynne have been interested in.







1: At some point when I was supposed to be doing something else, I wanted to see how many layers I could handle before losing my mind (answer: 215), and producing something like Rodney's "memory wall" in "Unidentified" seemed like a good way to do it. Unlike the collages I do for textures, I wanted to try something that would have an identifiable (pun intended?) subject, and with everything--at least on the board, not so for the background elements--relating to each other. Pretty much every image on the board pertains in some way to Rodney and his interests: his friends, places he might have been or should go some day, science fiction stuff, cool physics things, a photo of Johnny Cash that John probably put there at one point for purposes of antagonism.



2: I suppose this is really only noir-inspired; I tried to adapt some of my fonts (I think this is Futural) to 40s/50s-style typefaces, and the coloring is mostly monochrome to mimick the greyscale-sort of atmosphere from the classic films. If this was really properly 1940s noir, I guess it should be hand-drawn and painted, but in the absence of mad drawing skillz, I borrowed a heavily-desaturated and erased John from a Nantucket piece for a placeholder. Like the story that might eventually go with it, it's just a battered, lousy pulp paperback, complete with coffee stain and folds in the corners.

Now that I feel a bit less like I'm falling over myself, I might actually be able to do decent stuff for paintedspires, which is a happy thing.

Comments

[aesc.livejournal.com]

I see you used mostly real life photos of Joe, David, Rachel and Jason, not just screencaps of John and Rodney.

Oh yes, yes. There was absolutely no way to do this if I relied only on SGA caps; it would have looked like a wall of photos from one party :) I think Teyla is out of her uniform or Athosian clothes once in the four years of the series, Ronon twice, and John and Rodney not much more, which is nowhere near enough to do this sort of thing, so yay for Google image search \o/

I would love to see the detail in The Wall instead of the wee thing I can barely see on my screen.

Sadly, that is the image at full size :/ Photoshop was already reluctant to load the working document as it was (215 layers = very large file), and much larger would have made my computer extremely unhappy.

But I can tell you that yes, that is borg!Picard, the grey thing with holes is probably a postcard of some Wiltshire crop circles, "Live" is from some graffiti stock I had lying around, the postcard is this... very strange thing with a doodle of a girl and her little brother (the caption reads "When my brother was little I made him kiss me on the mouth and now he is gay"), and if you're talking about the swirly white things, those are just some thread stock and a photograph of some physics equations I messed around with :)

[sgafan33.livejournal.com]

All that work and you only have an image that's 700 pixels wide? Omigod!

And the thing I was wondering about is that blue photo of something that's on an angle in the center between the photos on the filmstrip.

I just realized that I don't see any photos of Carson or Laura or do I have bad eyes? Paul would be easy to find, but the person playing Laura (blanking on her name, Jaime?) might be harder to find, then you would have had to put them together instead of just using an existing photo. Are they any pictures of Kate Hewlett there? Damn the teeny tinyness of this amazing work.

[aesc.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry, my bad :) That is a hanging lightbulb (the image is flipped upside down).

Jeannie is in there, toward the center, but Carson and Laura aren't. As for that, I'm not entirely sure why. I think, in my mind, this really isn't The Wall in its entirety, that there are more places and more people, more things to look at, but for reasons of producing something that at least vaguely gestures at being designed, what's here really only hints at the real thing... and the hints ended up focusing around the four of them, and around pieces of Rodney's personality and history.

Yes, that is a crap reason :)

Damn the teeny tinyness of this amazing work.

I always tell myself I need to, you know, just work on a larger canvas and then resize (nothing is stopping you, aesc, geez), but I never listen :) Part of it may be that I have to see the entire image on screen, but working at, say, 66.7% size weirds me out for some reason. It's one of my many irrationalities.