In the past week, I've produced three pieces I'm extremely happy with, using a technique which is not very much like drawing, in the traditional sense, but not really like anything else I've tried, either.

I like playing with contrast, and high-contrast images, a lot. I like stripping out as much data (color, midtones) as I can from an image, because I think that stark black-and-white is very pretty, and it's something that characterizes a lot of the art I like. Tim Bradstreet and Mike Mignola, while their styles differ, both use a lot of black and a lot of contrast, and that's one of the things I really dig.

So, what I did was, rather than starting out with a white space, and scribbling over it with black, like I did on "Vermingham Bridge," was to do the opposite: I created a black silhouette of the figure, and then laid the white over that. With the James Dean picture, my original intent was to include one or two intermediate gray levels, but I liked the way it looked when I just had the black silhouette with the white highlights, so I stopped there.

"Crying On The Outside" was a piece I originally conceived for a t-shirt design, and after the impromptu photo shoot, I had a few pictures I wasn't totally happy with, because I really didn't have the proper space, or the proper lights, or even a really great camera. I still don't have a really great camera, but it does okay, all things considered. So I had these pictures I took, and I tried a few things with them, but was never satisfied. So after "Too Fast, Too Young," I thought I'd take another crack at doing something with one of those shots. Drawing in the bits I want to keep, and discarding the details I don't want, makes high-contrast b/w images that are much more satisfying than what I can get in Photoshop just by screwing around with filters, which is mostly what I had been doing up until sometime this year. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Actually making use of that pen tablet and fricking DRAWING WITH IT is much better.

"This Won't Hurt A Bit" was another picture that I took that I wanted to mono up, but couldn't get anything good out of it the lazy way. Feeling like I was on a roll after "Crying..." I decided to give Amber (the girl in the picture) the line-tool-and-paint-bucket treatment, and I'm extremely happy with the way it came out overall. I'm not 100% pleased with the eyes, but eyes are tricky, and I'm glad I went back to having pupils in the eyes instead of the flat white eyes I had in there for a while. Unlike the previous two, which are a bit more portrait-like, I had to deal with the face, the hand, and the torso as separate elements, each in its own layer until it came drawing time.

I use a combination of the Brightness/Contrast adjustment and the Stamp filter, sometimes in conjunction with the Unsharp Mask, to get the highlights and shadows to separate the way I want. In "This Won't..." the white uniform, and the huge difference in the depth of field between the hand and the face, made treating the whole picture with a single filter pretty much impossible. If the uniform looked okay, and not just a flat white blotch, then the face and the hand were totally black. If the face or the hand looked okay... Well, you get the idea. So I had to cut 'em up. I'm an old fart, and thinking in layers is still pretty new to me. I want the technology to do it for me (lazy again)! I know, it doesn't work that way. I'm learning. Aren't you proud of me?