Thursday, October 29, 2015

More Art - Landscape and Inverse Lanscape

Still playing with the same technique I used on the trees, but this time playing with abstracted backgrounds.  I say "Landscape" but really, it is pure abstract that just suggests landscapes: layers that lay horizontally across the page.  It's a great concept for covers because it leaves nice spaces for text.

In this case, I planned to create a dark hill and a dark sky, with a lightening strike, however, because this technique is not very editable -- each brush stroke interacts with previous ones, and you kinda get what you get -- I don't know that there is room for a small building or object and the lightening.  But we'll see later on.

You see that experiment on the left. 

On the right, you see an inverted version of the image.  The colors are a "negative" of the first image, and then I flipped it around. This one also suggests a landscape, but with a different feel.



I actually like that second one better, even though it has a very mainstream/literary look (or nonfiction).  So I played with adding text.  That sky looks snowy, even if the foreground areas are brownish gold.  Like cold mountains.

So I put in a faux title ("The Pass") and made up a random author name.  Originally "Greenwin Valdez," which I like a lot, but I've decided that I want to use something like it for a pen name someday, and I don't like masquerading as another ethnic group, or using letters late in the alphabet for a last name.

I might use it myself, if I decide to write some book of Zen koans or something.  Or it might be adaptable to an ocean scape -- might work for a sea chase.

It's likely to end up in my "premade" stock for sale.

I've also done some figurative work on this (i.e. with people) but I haven't got control of the technique well enough for that yet.

See you in the funny papers.

4 comments:

Elizabeth Spann Craig said...

Oh, that's really cool. I don't think I've seen inverse landscape before. Glad you're enjoying your art!

The Daring Novelist said...

Well, "inverse" is just what I called that particular work, because that's how I created it.

Anyway, thank you! Art's a fun thing to do while listening to audiobooks in particular.

Bridget McKenna said...

I really like the subtlety of the inverse version. Nicely done!

The Daring Novelist said...

Thanks, Bridget!