Winding River

Life is a winding river flowing through the events of our life and the river's course, its bends, and forks are like the decisions we make and also the ones we are compelled to make by external forces outside our control.

You see, metaphor is a very powerful method of depiction, indeed.

The presentation of symbols in illustration is a natural method, and it is used in more drawings than I can count. It has been used in paintings since the medium was invented. I suppose initial paintings were quite literal: pictures of animals that were hunted and the tribe and their weapons. But one iconic form appears: the outline of a human hand. This is the artist's signature and simple metaphor for "I painted this", usually done in berry juice. The hand is a symbol, a relic, of the artist himself or herself.

In a recent blog entry, Back to Drawing, I introduced a concept sketch of a banner which, laden with symbology, was a metaphor for a singular event. In this post, I present two more banners that also further the concept of metaphor in illustration.

Here is the first banner, the winding river. In the sky are the Pleiades, also known as the seven sisters (although eight are shown: what do you make of that?).

I have used a digital woodcut technique for this banner, as it is my style of late, and I also employed a technique of colored chiaroscuro for suggesting distance.

The river cuts deep channels through the rock, suggesting that, downstream, greater and greater effects are made as the river gains volume from the tributaries and momentum from its rush from the mountains. In this way our works gain momentum and have greater and greater effects through the course of our lives.

My symbolic suggestion is that the stars have some influence on the path of the river, and thus of life. The seven sisters are known for their ability to impart divine knowledge and wisdom. The wisdom that governs our works.

A river's flow is known and set, and rarely changes over the course of a hundred years. The lay of the land it flows through will determine its course, like the situation our lives occur in and also the examples set for us which can influence our own acts in life.

But sometimes a river meets a point where the terrain shifts suddenly, and the course is altered in an abrupt free fall. This is the subject of the second banner.

Ah, the waterfall. When something comes down as a result of the force of gravity, it always reminds me of an avalanche. Because I have survived one.

This notion of a river rushing and going over the edge is a powerful one. I have shown the waterfall with the steps leading up to it: a dangerous and tenuous set of stairs leading to the top. At the top, are railings so you can see the rushing river as it plunges.

It reminds me of Vernal falls in Yosemite. I have been to the top and I have seen the rushing river. The rock slopes to the river are a channel cut deep, with slopes that make them quite dangerous. Since the rock is wet, they can be slippery and people have been known to circumvent the railing so they could be photographed in a dangerous position, and then subsequently fall into the rushing river where they were simply and hopelessly carried over the edge to fall over 300 feet to their inevitable death.

The waterfall is the symbol of life out of control. Events which you cannot control force your life into a specific direction. The path seems implacable, cut deeply into rock. The forces that drag you along are unstoppable.

I have placed the moon in the dark sky to light the scene.

Using the digital woodcut technique, I employ lines of black against white or white against black. Then I sculpt them into channels that taper, by working from one end in white and the other end in black.

Here is a close-up of the first banner, done at a high resolution.

I find it interesting to create three-dimensional forms using this kind of shading. I then employ a gel layer to add the color. Usually its just a color-by-numbers kind of approach, using Digital Airbrush. But this time, I used Just Add Water to create a continuum of color in the river, and also in the hills in the foreground. It does resemble scratchboard-watercolor, a favorite look.

The gel layer allows me to rework the color without affecting the black-and-white shading layer, of course.

Actually one layer you don't see is the sketch layer that lays underneath. It contains the original sketch, which I shade over to create the image.

Here is the sketch for the Pleiades banner. My sketch is a rough indication of what I want, but I worked on a layer directly on top of the sketch to flesh out the banner.

As you can see, the river might have been drawn as a winding road, but I thought a river to be better because of the inevitable draw of gravity as the metaphorical force of destiny on our lives.

I added the small tributary (shown in the close-up above) as another allusion to the metaphor of decisions and their effect on the course of causality.

Someday, I might put a tassel onto the banner.

Oh, and I forgot my chop marks! ;-)

Creativity and Painter, Part 4

Painter 5 was a bit of a transition for the core team. John Derry and I were no longer really in charge of the taglines and the copy. But we totally rose to the occasion when it came to the UI and the features. John and I redid the UI to cut down on screen real estate, which required endless work. I implemented a whole host of new brushes.

I could go on and on about the new brushes. When Tom Hedges and Bob Lansdon created the first version of watercolors for Painter 2.0, To added an ability to allocate more than just 32 bits per pixel to either the canvas or even a layer above the canvas. As time went on, we used this feature more and more. For the new water droplet and liquid metal brushes in Painter 5, we allocated another 32 bits per pixel and made it a floating point height field. As we added items to the height field, it could be thresholded, and height-compensated to make it look like there was surface tension, and then rendered into the main 32-bits of the layer, which had the RGB color and an 8-bit alpha mask.

There was plenty of work to do, with these and many other new features. My friend Udo Gauss came out to Aptos during this time frame and I showed him a metaballs implementation, the basis for these new layers. We talked endlessly about how it might be of use to Painter users.

John and I, meanwhile, worked on a monogram-style logotype for Painter 5. John was keen on using a human hand as a primary image, because one of the basic things about Painter is that you use your hands to make art, and Painter is just an amplifier for your talent as a mark-maker and an artist.

Above, you can see an interlocking logo form for Painter 5, with a P and a 5 intertwined that I drew. I got this idea by looking at the royal interlocking monogram chiseled into Danish King Christian IV's sarcophagus in the Roskilde cathedral.

John's take, shown to left, is a 5-pointed star, the numeral 5 overlaying a pentagon. I think the brickwork is another bit of charm in this one. His attention to detail goes on and on. For a quick sketch, it's not bad.

To the right is another example of a joint work page from a notebook. Almost all of the numerals are John's work. The seven-cube design is my work, it looks like.

The really interesting symbol on the page is a 5 with a small p inside it. I think this might have been used in a coin he saw once, perhaps a five pence coin from England.

In the top right, several 5's are shown with varying degrees of thin-line styling, perhaps similar to letters from the Art Deco or Art Nouveau eras. Some of them even have serifs.

I really like the squat 5 in the lower right, with its bold line. This shows the endless doodling we did that often produced interesting results, and sometimes ended up in ad copy, splash screens, and other graphic work we produced.

For every genuine idea we had, really only a small percentage of them actually got into actual use. I think it is often that way with designers in search of a good logotype. I have been to design houses, in particular Landor Associates in San Francisco, and I totally respect their work and the attention to detail and the perception of their client's customers.

With Painter 5, we were trying to think up something to do with the paint can. With Painter 3, we used the paint can in the posters, and the tagline Pour It On was used. With Painter 4, the can was done in mosaics.

To the left is a sheet of John's ideas for the logotype and for the paint can itself. It is really no great wonder that we didn't use the cloudy thunderbolt paint can.

In the upper right you can see John's take on the interlocking monogram concept. Both of us vetoed it. Some of his stylings to the left show a P5 logo with the top of the 5 missing, so it resembles Pb, the atomic symbol for lead.

Umm, no.

John returns to the squat 5 concept again at the bottom. I still like it, but I'm not sure how it can serve with Painter.

So, the question got raised: exactly what was the best symbol for 5? Was there a symbol that meant the most to artists? We decided to sketch out a few and see what stuck in our minds.

To the right is a sketch I did that summarized what I thought might work from a standpoint of straight symbolism. I also drew a few clumsy numbers out as well.

The first and most useful was the human hand. Once again, the mark-making instrument, the center of the artist's expression, was used.

A 5-pointed star also has sticking power. Though, I pointed out, it also symbolizes glitz and fame. Not necessarily good for Painter.

A pentagon wasn't too bad a symbol. But it had military significance, especially since a pentagonal building houses the department of defense here in the US.

A pentagram was an occult symbol. Neither John nor I was necessarily wild about going down that particular path.

The Roman V for 5 was a good, ancient reference to the numeral 5. Very old-time. Maybe.

The dodecahedron was a bit abstruse for the Painter audience, but I had to put it in. In the end, the human hand was chosen as the symbol.

Here is a sketch I did with several references to the number 5, and in many forms. Annotations were applied to it, because we were thinking of using it as an ad design.

Ok, it looks dumb.

When we did an ad design for Painter 5, I actually did the ad myself. It was a hand, with fingers spread, the fingers were on fire, and the numeral 5 was done in liquid metal in the palm.

This was a reference to a scene from my youth where my dad showed us kids the element Mercury. I actually had some in my hand. Had I known it was terribly poisonous, I wouldn't have done that.

The ad, when done, had a kind of illuminati look to it. It was actually my hand, too. Crazy. The ad ran in lots of magazines, but I don't have a copy to show you, I'm afraid. Update: I found it! The artwork for the Painter 5 ad piece with the hand and the burning fingers and the liquid metal 5 can be found in this blog post toward the end.

The work on a monogram something we found to be quite fun, and very much pure design work.

Here, my sketches for monograms are shown to the right. The can is present, with a radiant brilliance coming out of it. Beveled pentagonal tiles are in front of it.

The Albrecht Dürer monogram is alluded to (though he did it with the D below the mid-line of the A).

I did a little John Derry monogram in the middle.

I have no idea what the M5 monograms were getting at. But we had lots of fun in the process.

In the end, we used a brush stroke version of the numeral 5, to match the Painter brush logo.