I finished the pencil drawing for my current project, the portrait of the comic book store's little blue bungalow. This was done the old-fashioned way, with a pinpoint graphite lead on solid heavy watercolor paper. I will be drawing the penwork with two or three different kinds of ink, both in sepia and black. One of my pens is somewhat new-fangled, since it is a ballpoint gel-pen that writes in brown: the "Uni-Ball Gel Grip" made by Sanford, the wonderful corporation that is also responsible for Prismacolor colored pencils and markers, and Sharpie markers, without which I would not be able to do my job. I have been seeking for decades for a sepia brown pen that would not need messy ink refills and would not fade. This Sanford pen, which uses recent gel ink and pigment technologies, is the best I have found so far. I placed some scribbles from it on a sunny windowsill and the ink has not yet faded in two months! Therefore Sanford is the winner and I will use it to draw my architectural work. But it is still an analog device, as digital art snobs will tell me.

I'm doing the art which will appear at my show this June, inshallah. (It is important to invoke some form of divine support when talking about future art shows, concerts, etc. as anything awful can happen up to and including disasters on opening day.) But I have had an art disappointment in another area, that is, my work at Starbucks. For the last three years I have been decorating the "coffee of the week" board at a number of Starbuckses in my local area. But now the dictate has come down from Starbucks Central that the boards must be completely changed every two weeks. They must follow the designs laid out in the Starbucks manuals which are updated regularly, and they must match the graphics of what Starbucks has presented for its current advertising theme. That means that my elaborate seasonal art borders are no longer wanted. I could still do it if I came in every two weeks and put art on the board, but I don't have the time or energy to do that.

I found this out in my "home" Starbucks, where my design had been erased and the childish chalk scratches of one of the employees had replaced it. When I asked to re-do the board, she told me that I shouldn't, because the district manager was coming in to inspect on the next day and everything had to be perfect. So I fumed into my almond latte while I watched the teenage barista draw third-grade graffiti onto the board that I had professionally embellished for more than three years. The personnel at this coffee shop are almost all new; only one still remains from years past. When I complained to another unknown barista at the register that I had done art here for years, she said, "Have you ever thought of putting your art on canvas?" Thanks a lot.

My venues for "public" art are now quite diminished, as I am currently doing only small sign design and lettering at Trader Joe's. The larger pictorial art will be handled by other signmakers, who are much better at doing the themes that the management wants. For the June show, I am doing only buildings and landscapes. I hardly ever go to science fiction conventions any more, and even when I do, the science fiction fans are no longer able to buy my work, as they age and their financial and physical health deteriorate. So if I wanted to continue to do fantasy art and graphics, which I enjoy doing, where would I do such a thing? Would I fill my already overcluttered dwelling with piles of colorful, but somewhat tacky and un-serious, and un-sellable, art product? If I continue to work with conventional materials in this genre, I realized, I will be out of luck. But if I work digitally, on the powerful graphics and art programs I am currently learning, then it doesn't matter how many pictures I create. I could create thousands of them, and they would all be preserved on no more than a short stack of DVD's.

Therefore I continue to devoutly read my "Illustrator CS Bible," and bow over my Macintosh keyboard as I learn the sacred practices one by one. "Select Same Symbol Instance," says the Book. "(This command) selects all of the objects with the same Symbol Instance of the currently selected object." If this were prayer, then I would be closer to God. After all, don't prayer and religious devotion work with symbols?

I can create anything I want in the secret haven of the digital studio, and no one can tell me that it doesn't fit the corporate theme. And if I want to show them to people, well, I know there are at least fourteen of you readers out there who might be interested in seeing them. I am not just a chronicler of buildings and cornfields.

This doesn't mean that I will abandon my analog ways, though. Most of my friends in the science fiction and astronomical illustration field have gone completely digital, and their output can be splendid, but it still has a kind of impersonal sheen that no amount of fancy fractalizing can quite disguise. I think there will always be a place for the old ways, even if they are drawn with new Uni-ball Gel Grip Symbol Instantiator analog stylus devices.

Posted at 3:23 am | link