THE SOJOURNER FALSE

I can't exactly figure out why I couldn't upload more than one picture per post, so my apologies.  Please comment here.  I will keep adding as I work along.

I didn't title any of these anything specific, it's not that I didn't want to, just didn't really think about it.  The first picture, let's call it Close Minded, has a quote by Bob Marley.  I was going to make all of the bars the quote, but I couldn't make it look right.  If I do go back to fix it, it won't be for a while.  I enjoy making new things and if necessary will go back later to finish.  But the first thing that popped in my mind was a dreaming brain in a cage that had a keyhole on the front, and there was a man (because I am, no sexism or anything.  Calm down, ladies,) holding a very large key, as if he was going to press it through the cage and into the keyhole in the mind.  I've always loved Bob Marley, he was and is a very influential person, it is just too bad that not everyone listens to certain influences.  Another favorite quote of his that I like is "Man is a universe within himself."  This is basically my "religious" belief, more of a personal one, a play on the words of the latin saying, "Deus ex vir", meaning "The God out of The Man".  So...there's my contextualization of piece one.

Piece two, let's call it...Scarred, has a quote by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of classics such as: Fight Club, Choke, and Stranger than Fiction (not the Will Ferrell nonsense).  He is one of my favorite authors of all time...I tried looking up Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend - aka the Greatest Novel Ever) but I found nothing.  So, with his blatant sarcasm and ability to bring out the worst in the best, I chose the quote "I just don't want to die without a few scars."  I'm PRETTY sure it's from one of his books...maybe not.  He is a badass either way.  But essentially I tried doing this at the library...while watching video tutorials...tried a number of different techniques.  I tried texture, I tried 3d illusion, I tried warping the text to make the face look scarred...NONE of it seemed to work.  So I just ended up going with simplicity.  I just kept trying to freehand draw the face...it's so funky looking haha.  But it does represent at the least the vein and style that I draw, if not the best representation.  I've always thought the scar running down the eye is the baddest thing anyone could have, and I just watched 300, so I figure that's what I would do with it, plus I've made a painting doing that before...thought I might as well go for it.

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."  Isn't it?  Entitled...Withinstability.  Interpret that how you want to.  Philip K. Dick is one awesome dude, and his mind is full of some of the coolest stuff.  Or was.  I don't know if he's dead.  A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite movies of all time (haven't read the story!), and I tried to do something that looked like rotoscope at first...but you can guess how that turned out.  So INSANE popped straight into my mind, and I thought of the Spongebob episode where Mrs. Puff get's trapped in Iso and Spongebob is all of the walls...yeah.  Hence, walls yellow, was going to make the quote cover the walls and make it looked like it was scratched in, but I do not have the Illustrator know-how to do so.  I made a dreamish thought bubble above the head of the "insane dreamer", with the quote being the perimeter of said bubble.  I attempted to make the rest of the environment more dreamscape, but again, technical limitations ensued, ergo the final result is once again simplified.  This is one that I would love to go back to, as I am fascinated with the concept of the unconcious mind.

Number 4...my favorite one because I was able to get some basic things working...like Blob Brush.  And...that's it.  And I only kinda did some of the things I wanted to with Blob Brush (No custom brushes? Really?).  Maybe we could call it...Grace, Beauty, and the Horrific Cost of Both.  The quote itself, "War is a perversion of sex," is by the acclaimed storyteller Alan Moore.  If you have not heard of Alan Moore, you have heard of Watchmen and V for Vendetta...guess what?  He wrote both.  Basically everything he touches with a pen turns into gold, so check out his graphic novels - sheer ascendence.  He was also extremely intelligent, politically outspoken through his writing and transitioning, and one hell of a beard-grower.  Seriously.  Anyways, because he is another one of my favorite authors, I must support his greatness, which I hoped to envelope with this picture.  My original concept was much different, but again, Illustrator limitations.  So this is what I ended up with...LOTS OF PATHS were used to make this, blob brush, and I love the way I use the normal brush strokes to evoke emotion and imagery.  The tank is extremely vivid and proportioned in a way that you will notice it, along with the "battle" going on below, and hopefully you would think of war - this is also why I chose the font that was used.  Amongst the chaos though, the "sex" is going on between two lovers on the right side of the picture.  Sex is not always what people portray it as - violent acts of reproductive abuse that are extremely vigorous.  A lot of sex is about love, and I believe that is what Moore is trying to get at, is that war is a complete opposite of all that humans can care for in one another.  That, and I didn't want to have two people going doggystyle somewhere randomly on my image.  But really, Moore has a powerful message, and I hoped that the contrast I created between war and sex would play off of that.

Apparently you can not move images around, so my last one is at the top of the page.  I got sick of looking up quotes by authors and philosophers...stuff like that.  So I went to a couple real thinkers - hip-hop artists.  I worship some of these guys.  For that, I will call this last piece Flow.  This quote is by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien (he was in the Gorillaz song Clint Eastwood), aka Deltron 3030.  He is Ice Cube's cousin, fun fact.  Anyway, I looked up and listened to some of his songs, along with Lupe Fiasco, J Dilla, MF Doom, and Fabolous.  This quote was short, sweet, and vivid, so I'd figure I'd try to capture it within my ability.  There is A TON of paths in this picture.  That is not an understatement.  If you weighed them all, it would be a ton.  But I tried to do what I could to make the blob brush looked like you could do lighting effects with it (you can't), I didn't use any filters because most of the time they don't work too well with blob brush (they won't).  What I did like was being able to copy a set of paths, paste it, than change the opacity.  That's what I did with the guy.  I did it the hard way by coloring each one individually, instead of coloring one than pasting him at a lower opacity, but it gives it a slightly different look.  It is very sloppy, this is not intentional, you cannot constrain a brush within a path (to the best of my knowledge).  The dog...screw the pooch.  Seriously.  I won't even write about what a pain in the ass that thing was.  The paths from the doghouse were weird too.  The fence...haha well yeah...I tried doing something with moonrays and lighting and opacity...and that's how it came out.  Green = grass.  Darker color on same object = shadow.  You get the gist.


So please comment and thank you for checking out all my work!


- The Almighty Ruler of Peoples: Past, Present, and Future.