A Fable

"Once upon a time there lived a girl. She slept in a lovely little cottage made of gingerbread and candy. She was always asleep. One morning she woke up, and the candy had mold on it. Her father blew her a kiss and the house fell down. She realized she was lost. She found herself walking down a crowded street, but the people were made of paper, like paper dolls. She blew everyone a kiss goodbye, and watched as they blew away."

(My So-Called Life, "The Substitute")

"You Rock!" a.k.a. FedCon Signatures

Since the flatmate and the Final-Episode-Avoider have already covered lots of the last FedCon-Event (plus, I kinda lack time for it) I'll stick to putting just a few comments on how my works were recieved.

First one was Mark Sheppard signing my "Backup"-Galactica from last year. "Great Work!" I felt a little sorry that I hadn't have the time to do a more special work for him and couldn't give him a copy. Especially since he was in a talkative mood and told me that he was in Berlin once and what he did there and stuff.

Richard Hatch seemed to be a little confused by the motive. (The one I did last year for him and Jamie Bamber). He started to sign it without a word and stopped midway through, reading the taglines he was signing on. He probably thought it was an illegal bootleg copy of a real comic book and didn't want to embarass me ;).

I don't really know whether Edward James Olmos liked his picture. He accepted his copy but didn't seem too overly impressed. Not sure whether he kept it. At least he wrote a complete novel ;).

Michael Hogan seemed more impressed. Olmos "warned" the fans in his panel the day before that Hogan never accepted Tigh being a Cylon and doesn't like it to be called one. So, uhm... yeah. Look at the right ;). "I'm very sorry for that headline... but you know how tabloids are... I'll give you your own copy to tear apart, if you like." He laughed and gratefully put his copy away. Maybe this one really liked his present.

When my work - wrapped in a neat wallpaper - was shown at his panel later on, fans shouted at him to turn around. "Hah, I signed one of those!" he remembered :). Thanks to the Final-Episode-Avoider for the following snapshots.


As you can see, the Callis one was shown as well (in fact, I've seen all three BSG-ones at the panels, thanks to the tech-guys), though he didn't see it on the screen. Nonetheless, he's the one responsible for the title of this post - he seemed really impressed by my work (resulting in his words on his signature - I never got a thank you on one of those before ;) ). "I will take that home with me, that's some great work - thank you very much!" PRIDE! :)

Getting his signature was quite an adventure by the way. Due to our lots of acquaintances even in the Con-Staff we knew that Callis would be gone on Sunday so we tried really hard to get his signature on Saturday. Trial one failed epicly when he had to leave for his photo-session 6 frakkin' people in the line before us. After one hour of waiting. Hmpfzt. Trial two was much easier because we were granted an exceptional visit to the official autograph session later on (as all "only-James-Callis-signature-Collectors" were). Lucky us, lots of fans didn't know and missed his signature.

Last one was Summer Glau, who still fought with a mean cold. She signed my work a little tired but seemed honestly surprised when I told her that's my work. So I'm too good now, my work isn't recognized as such anymore... ;). I gave her a copy, but I'm not sure whether she kept it.

As soon as I can decide about some neat gallery tool, I'll put HQ-Versions without the signatures there. Maybe even the whole panorama which was greatly enhanced due to the new background the Final-Episode-Avoider made for me. Thanks alot :).

Before someone asks: I copied the signatures from the prints into the digital works for better quality. Since Summer's was very hard to scan I had to trace her writing digitally - it's a little spidery now, the original isn't.

Pieces of Art (30): Phew!

Done. Don't mind the black bars, that's just for the desktop-wallpaper-format. Only few additions (Cover-Text, maybe flip the positions of Tigh and Adama... ) left; the main-work is finished. The tweaking is scheduled for the Easter Holidays, the complete art will be seen on FedCon 18 (and later on here). If I manage to find some way to print these.... ;)

And yes, I do know that River doesn't quite fit into the picture. I'll figure something out ;).

Pieces of Art (29): The Old Man

Two down, two to go.

It somehow confirmes my humble drawing-skills that the following occured in the process: I started penciling The Old Man without the wrinkles, therefore the drawing bearing not so much resemblance to him - but to Hotdog.... huh. You could think the actors playing Adama and Hotdog are kinda related... ;

I'm very satisfied with the work and the inking went noticeably faster. I grow accustomed to my Wacom :)

Like a Prayer

As you may or may not know, I consider myself an agnostic (though I'm not sure I really am, so maybe I'm a Meta-Agnostic...) and there are days I am really glad about that:

Information Age Prayer provides a service for the forgetful religious person to read prayers in their name. With their computer via voice synthesizing (actually it's the computers of the company, NOT the personal computer of the subscriber as I thought first). So, if you don't have time to pray for yourselves, you can subscribe for a fee and somewhere a prayer is read for you by a computer.

Huh. Let's read the FAQ:

"Are the prayers meaningless, will subscribing really make a difference?
(being exactly the very first question I had) As with all prayer, the final results are up to God as everything follows His will. We make no claims regarding the efficacy of the service, however it is our opinion that the omniscient God hears the prayers when they are voiced, as He hears everything on this Earth. The omniscient God knows exactly who has subscribed and who each prayer is from when their name is displayed on screen and their prayer voiced. He is also aware of all donations to charity from each subscriber and we can surely make a difference in these charities supported."

Huh. Honestly, if I were God.... I mean, C'MON! That's cheating! I would strike every wanna-be-follower with lightning who thinks he can get off that easy! Isn't the point of praying that you sacrifice some thoughts and time to your God? Maybe that's just me, but if I were religious I would feel deeply insulted when some soulless machine speaks with god in my name. (As a SciFi-Geek I'm pretty amazed by the way.... all kinds of cool stuff come in mind... mechanical gods, Deus Ex Machina, robots with their own religion....).

And it get's even better:

"If your children don't pray anymore sign them up for one of the many daily prayers available for each religion (click categories at the left). You may also want to have a prayer said for them directly. The prayer for children is the cheapest Information Age Prayer service at only $1.99 a Month. Pray for a child here."

Ha! Everything's gonna be fine for Junior. He doesn't pray, he doesn't believe... but hey, a machine prays for him! Because I paid someone to do that! Phew, NOW God will think totally different about that black sheep...

Pfff. I don't know who I pity more: The developers, The clients, or God. Probably the latter one. If you exist, God, I just spent twenty minutes defending the good old ways of praying. Keep that in mind on Judgement day :).

Moments of Claire-ity (1): Shopgirl

I kinda made some oath two weeks ago, to watch all of Claire Danes' movies. Today I'm in quotation-mode, so don't expect a big review ;).

"Are you the kind of person that takes time to get to know, and then when you get to know them - they're fabulous?"

"Shopgirl" is a very nice piece about love and desire. Mirabelle (Danes) is a young artist working as a shopgirl. Her life seems empty, so she tries to start a relationship: First with the very unexperienced and annoying Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), later on with the 60-year-old millionaire Ray (Steve Martin, who wrote the script based on his own novella). I cannot really describe which direction the movie takes without spoiling to much, so I just use another quote from Roger Ebert's review:

One of the things you cannot do in this life is impose conditions on love. Another impossibility is to expect another's heart to accommodate your own desires and needs. You may think that cleverness, power or money will work on your behalf, but eventually you will end up feeling the way you really feel, and so will the other person, and there is no argument more useless than the one that begins with the words "But I thought we had an agreement."

"Shopgirl" seems to have no real "moral" or "message", it's just a portrait of how life is - and it's a well written and well played portrait, especially by Claire.

Pieces of Art (28): Gone Digital

Okay, I did it. I did it two weeks ago and bought the Wacom Intuos3 A5 Wide Screen Graphic Tablet. Pretty expensive (though not as much as the homepage suggests), pretty cool, pretty useful, pretty needs getting used to. First results on the left, a digitally inked and colored River.

Nothing new on the coloring front, I just relied on my old process of lots of layers. Went much faster than with the mouse, just as I hoped. In fact, I was much much faster with the coloring than with the inking. It took ages to "draw" over the pencils with the pen. It was pretty hard to draw lines on the tablet while looking at the screen, because you just see indirectly what you're drawing. Got faster at the end, I'm optimistic to master that when working on the next projects (being the pre-mentioned already finished pencils of Adama, Tyrol and Baltar). Hopefully I'll learn to draw convex curves with that, 'cause I can't turn the tablet like I used to do with the paper...

Anyway, the digital ink has very great advantages, illustrated below. I can experiment more - if you compare the inked face with the penciled one you see the difference. Details I couldn't have drawn with a fineliner plus the priceless ability to erase (yeah, my pen has an eraser at the back, just turn around and erase... :) ), enabling me to loosen myself from the pencils and just rework in the inking process. Well, let's see how Adama's face will turn out - since it's just a portrait the pencils themselves are more detailed and I can work on a deeper level...