The Valley of the Low Gods

More and more of this.  I'm almost done with a second book full of these.  I've painted two large panels as well, with many more of those on the way, hopefully.  I've got to get myself writing.  An event is planned for August that should be pretty goddam fantastic, if I can pull it off.  My previous story (as yet unwritten), about fancy beasts murdering each other, is going to be put together in animatic format, with music and narration.  This is going to be projected at the hostel, on a giant screen in the lobby, during an opening reception for a new art show featuring a section of the story panels framed in order.  I've got to have the thing written soon, so we can finish music, sound and layout by August 1st.  Trouble here being, I'm a lazy bastard without much day to day motivation to do anything but mope around being a lonely asshole.  Fuck.

Anyway, onward!


Bartering with the subhumans would leave even the most stalwart confused and a little unsettled.  But to track his quarry, the hunter must traffick with the untoward.  His team of hunting beasts are an integral part in his greater revenge scheme.


Harried on all sides, boltshot and bleeding, the einhorn makes its mad dash.  How will it turn out?  Not well, I'll say that much.  Once a beast gets a taste for unicorn blood, there is no turning back.


A jarring shift, but bear with me.  I'd been working on this whenever I ran out of steam elsewhere.  I still might add more to it, but I doubt it.  It's gone through a few different permutations, and I'll probably leave it be here.


Back in action.  Not much to say here.  There's one less unicorn in the wood, that's for damn sure.


The King of the Wood.  I'm pleased with this.  It's not often I do something that I just plain like, but this is one of those cases.  I'm going to reproduce it on a larger canvas soon.  Good work, Mattheis.


I'm trying to approach a newer idea within this framework.  I'm going to do a bunch of these taking place in the Valley of the Low Gods.  Here's the entrance.  More to follow, I'm sure.


I thought up this effect when I was messing up something else.  It turned out alright, using two different types of ink allows for some interesting effects.  I'm not sure what else I'm going to do with it, but it's another tool in the toolbox, I suppose.  In any case, I do like ol' volcano wolf here.


Another experiment with the same effect as above, this time with some further messing around with masking agents.  It's weird, that's all I've got to say.  Using paper cement is a little to difficult on a small scale.

And this is my most recently completed large canvas.  Nothing new, aside from the scale, really.  I'm basically just re-working old ideas with these.  I plan on having a whole bunch of them eventually, once I get the wherewithal to sit down and really work on them.  As of right now, wherewithal is one thing I do not have.

The past two nights have yielded nothing. I'm not accustomed to that, and every short dry spell I have throws me off. Doing this is the only thing I've got anymore. If the ol' parnassus drifts too far afield I'll probably just walk into the ocean.

The Hunter and the Unicorn

So again, working away.  The busier I keep myself, the longer I can keep the black dogs at bay.  But the pack grows daily, it might be time for a culling.  Onward!


Despite its simplicity, this is definitely one of my favorites.  The fur is hard to see in the scan, but the method I am experimenting with came out exactly as I'd hoped.  This creature can be seen in the background of VIII, howling into the mists behind some prancing lambs.  It turned out well.


Continuing with the fur experiment.  The forest is home to many creatures we see every day.  They just happen to be large enough to eat a school bus.


I had a very different idea for this initially.  I wanted to barrow kings to be stark white, so I experimented with masking agents and the result was bad.  So I blacked them out and rolled with it.  I like the grey shimmer around them and might use it more in future.


More cover-up.  This was a failed attempt at the one that follows.  The light rays didn't work, the figures came out poorly, so I covered everything in trees, deciding to experiment instead with more than two layers of background depth.  It worked well.  The subhumans looming around the trunks are creeping me out a bit.


And success.  Requiem for a Troglodyte.  Light rays I really enjoy.  The possibility of repeating the process.  Capital.  That barbarian (Ulf Kingraper again) I freehanded with ink, which was nerve-wracking.  Good results.


I got a sudden unicorn impulse and decided to work in another story line here.  It'll be able 7 or 8 panels long and will feature this hunter, here seen bartering with a pack of subhumans for a small pack of hunting monsters to help him.  His quarry: the elusive einhorn.


Thar she blows.  I like the proportions of this beast.  I initially experimented with making the thing a luminescent blue, but it didn't work.  It just looked like it was under water.  I noted this for future, when I actually draw something what is supposed to be underwater, but in this case it wasn't appropriate.  I also want to depict flora sprouting up where ever this thing's hooves fall, on account of unicorn magic.  Mild success.  In any case, I like it.


If we learned anything from Muybridge, it's that there is indeed a point at which a running equine has all four hooves off the ground.  The hunter looks on, admiring its speed and plotting its demise.  I should have included the heads of his hunting monsters back there, but the story hadn't coalesced yet.  I might add them for the finished product.


I definitely enjoy how a number of things here turned out.  The hunter's posture, the pool, quite successful.  In total there will be seven or eight of these, three more are currently in pencil stages.  I definitely think you have to kill a unicorn with arrows.

So there.  Progress.  The world is slowly coming together.  I wish I wasn't such a lazy bastard, maybe I could actually get some writing done.  I don't lack for projects that need finishing but I've become inured to many things, including the encroaching sense of things left unfinished.

Ziz Falters

So I've still been doing a lot of these.  My work on large panels should commence tomorrow, gods willing, but these little bastards are multiplying like unchecked guinea pigs.  Every time I turn around there is another clutch of the things meeping around my backyard.  Oddly, we did have an unchecked herd of those things in my backyard when I was a lad, but I digress.


I like this idea.  I need to do more with it, but after doing this one all subsequent attempts at working in green failed miserably, resulting in several torn up pieces of paper, several hours of frustration, and this run-on sentence.  But I'll get back to it.


After the failure of any continued use of green ink, I fell back on the old standby.  There are still a lot of ideas I haven't explored here, so I went back to it.  I don't regret it.  This one turned out well, ad inexplicably puts me in mind of a particularly unfortunate birthday party.  Stone worshiping troglodytes may have once seen a picture of a birthday cake, but this facsimile isn't going to grant any wishes, I assure you.


And then, some giants.  I wanted to try my hand at more of the little trees I did in the past, and I enjoy the effect.  I did three f these and I intend on doing more.  These monsters look like morons.  I learned at work last night that a moron is dumber than an imbecile, but not as dumb as an idiot.  On a technical scale.  I doubt this scale's veracity, considering it's source was a senile old man also insistent on my knowing all the counties surrounding Manhattan.  Baffling days.


These three look drunk.  I like them.


And this thing sort of looks like it's pooping.  If I were a giant mountain beast, I would also poop up there.


The text here turned unreadable.  But I didn't scrap it because I like everything else.  Especially the deer on the right.  Initially, the rock somewhat described what all these critters were staring at, but ah well.


Here is a lesson in what is the wrong time to apply a waterproof masking agent.  SPOILER ALERT: the answer is AFTER you've completed all the water-based things you want to put under it.  Feh!  But still.

So that's me up to now.  Lots of other ideas stewing around, including more use of the oil pastel masking trick that actually take advantage of the weird effect it creates.  And giant panels.  I've been very, very sick for the past few days.  It's clearing up, and I'm intent on getting my ass back in gear.  Things outside the scope of my own incessant scratchings aren't going so well.  My relating to other people has taken a turn.  Relationships and friendships are falling apart constantly.  Insane things, unlikely things, baffling things, they are all rearing their myriad heads and biting the shit out of what social life I had, meager though it was already.  People I know who are big into astrology tell me this is because this year is my saturn return.  I generally tell these people to disembowel themselves with a flint knife (which I am told is a typical scorpio response.  You can't win with these folks).  But it is a strange confluence of deterioration, and at very least it's clear that the gods have decided to strike me down for my hubris.  What hubris this is exactly is unclear, but that's always the way with the gods.  Bastards.