{"id":412,"date":"2007-01-23T15:12:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-23T21:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/?p=412"},"modified":"2007-01-23T15:12:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-23T21:12:00","slug":"2007-01-23-illustration-friday-super-hero-anagram-o-her-purse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/2007-01-23-illustration-friday-super-hero-anagram-o-her-purse\/","title":{"rendered":"2007-01-23 Illustration Friday &#8212; Super Hero (anagram) O Her Purse"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\">.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }<\/style>\n<div class=\"flickr-frame\">\t<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/royblumenthal\/367282827\/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/122\/367282827_f041782719.jpg?w=605\" class=\"flickr-photo\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><br \/>\t<span class=\"flickr-caption\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/royblumenthal\/367282827\/\">2007-01-23 Illustration Friday &#8212; Super Hero (anagram) O Her Purse<\/a>, originally uploaded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/royblumenthal\/\">royblumenthal<\/a>.<\/span><\/div>\n<p class=\"flickr-yourcomment\">\tI reallly really reallllly didn&#8217;t want to do a Super Hero for this week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.illustrationfriday.com\/\">Illustration Friday<\/a> topic: &#8216;Super Hero&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>My solution came pretty quickly. I decided to do a manual anagram of the letters, and the one that satisfied me intellectually was this one: &#8216;O! Her purse!&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>The next challenge was working out how to illustrate that.<\/p>\n<p>So I did what any self-respecting new-media-liberal does. I turned to the Creative Commons. Using the beta version of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wynia.org\/experiments\/phpflickr\/interesting.php?\">Flickr Foto Finder<\/a>, I looked for images that I may use commercially and that I may alter. (&#8216;Commercially&#8217;, cos I&#8217;m now offering art prints of my paintings for sale &#8212; email me if you&#8217;re keen, and &#8216;alter&#8217;, cos I mostly take liberties with the works I use as inspiration.)<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s how I came up with a pretty funny photo of a woman with a little dog in her purse. It&#8217;s by a gal with a pretty funny profile. Her name is &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/malingering\">Malingering<\/a>&#8216; (aka Irreverent). The photo is titled: &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/68845396@N00\/210432518\">at least it&#8217;s not a pink pup purse<\/a>&#8216; .<\/p>\n<p>For me, the presence of the dog is what made this pic such a &#8216;YESSSSSS!&#8217; for me. It kinda links in to the super hero theme, cos it&#8217;s about this little innocuous animal who THINKS he&#8217;s a super hero. And his leggie babe owner probably regards him in the same light.<\/p>\n<p>I opted to use a completely different style to my normal mode.<\/p>\n<p>In this one, I did very loose line drawings as the top layer, then immediately set them to a low opacity, so that I could start blocking in colour without paying too much attention to the line. I decided before starting that this one would have no line art in the final.<\/p>\n<p>I then started working from background through to foreground, making everything pretty messy and shoddy and inaccurate. I used only the roller tool and eraser for this entire picture.<\/p>\n<p>Each colour got a new layer. And each colour was sliced back with the eraser set to the thinnest possible width. Kind of like a needle scraping away at a piece of scraperboard.<\/p>\n<p>I ended up with about twenty or thirty layers, which I only merged down when I was happy with my look.<\/p>\n<p>The little messy bits of erasings are left in on purpose. I wanted this pic to show my process, to have evidence of being worked. And more than that, to give it the sense that it actually WAS handmade. I kinda WANT people to know that this isn&#8217;t some sort of computerised conversion of a photo into an artwork thing. It&#8217;s actually my eye, my judgement, my brushstrokes.<\/p>\n<p>I changed the composition to suit my needs. And I&#8217;ve used the background to lead us directly to the woman&#8217;s face. I wanted this because her face is in a dominant position at the confluence of a horizontal fifth, and a vertical third.<\/p>\n<p>But the real hero of the piece is the crazy super hero dog in the purse. Which is why he&#8217;s a straight drop down the woman&#8217;s arm, down in the middle of the pic. This is NOT a great place for him to be in traditional composition. Which is why I strengthened the lines leading to the woman&#8217;s face.<\/p>\n<p>Im not sure if I&#8217;m making sense here. What I&#8217;m TRYING to say is that the compositional WEAKNESS of the dog&#8217;s placement BECOMES the punchline, thanks to the strength of the woman&#8217;s face in conjunction with the title of the piece. (That&#8217;s also why the skirt and purse are so much darker than anything else on the page.  To make sure that dog can&#8217;t be missed.)<\/p>\n<p><i>As usual, I painted this in a coffee shop (this time, my usual local haunt, the Mugg &amp; Bean in Cresta), on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc, using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ambientdesign.com\/artrage.html\">ArtRage 2.2<\/a>. A gorgeous lass I&#8217;ve dated a few times asked me whether or not I get paid to mention the hardware and software I drive. The answer is no. I do not receive ANY remuneration, or favours, or anything else from Toshiba or Ambient Design. I&#8217;m a paying customer. And I just love the products. And I&#8217;m keen to let people into my process. So I disclose stuff. Thanks for asking, Sandi!<\/i><\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Roy Blumenthal is a writer, director, artist, and <a href=\"http:\/\/snipurl.com\/visualfacilitator\">visual facilitator<\/a>. Hire him to make pictures of your meetings or workshops.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2007-01-23 Illustration Friday &#8212; Super Hero (anagram) O Her Purse, originally uploaded by royblumenthal. I reallly really reallllly didn&#8217;t want to do a Super Hero for this week&#8217;s Illustration Friday topic: &#8216;Super Hero&#8217;. My solution came pretty quickly. I decided &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/2007-01-23-illustration-friday-super-hero-anagram-o-her-purse\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">2007-01-23 Illustration Friday &#8212; Super Hero (anagram) O Her Purse<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p521FP-6E","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}