Season's Greetings! |
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Card
Two is also drawn
in ink on art paper. And again it was offset printed at ERS,
but we found a nice green paper stock, instead of the white
letter paper we'd gone with the previous year. You can
probably sense that the images and layout were worked out
ahead of time, a cover and inside message, as it's more
polished than the first one. The synth and tape machine are
also rather stylized, as I knew that the image would be
reduced to 50% size, where small fussy details would get
lost (the above one was drawn at actual size).
It was a surprise to
see these cards again, after many years. Not too bad, and
certainly we could have used one for more than a single year
as we did. The "Peace" card is not too homemade looking,
being trimmed of unimportant details that I tend to put into
my initial art attempts and music (am no minimalist). Let's
praise the ever-noble blue
pencil -- where would I
be without an eraser? (Today it's more often a Delete key...
;^) The ink here was as awful to edit as before. This time I
just used some whiteout, and scissors and rubber cement to
assemble and refine the elements. A nice thing about offset
printing is that usually these manipulations become
invisible on the final printing. (In a few more years
everything
will be done via computer, and few of you will have any idea
what I'm talking about here!)
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Card
Three is a lot more
recent that the above two. I assembled it from scanned
photographs and pencil drawings, then refined and assembled
it using PhotoShop on my Mac. The idea for the card, the
word "Eat" being constructed out of a group shot from above
of the four fuzzy critters is something I'd thought up about
10 years earlier. Like a young child's primer. But back then
with no computer to build the refined letter out of
individual elements, it would have been an impossible
challenge to do live in front of the camera. I tried a few
times and gave up.
It was only after
learning to use PhotoShop that it occurred to me that here
might be a way to put this idea into motion a LOT more
carefully and easily than I first expected. I made a few
pencil sketches, and then took out my old Topcon Super-D 35
mm camera and three floodlights. It was late October when I
first tried to pose the three cats and doggie while they
were eating away happily (they usually ate together this
way, although never in exact E-figuration). I climbed up on
a tall stool and looked down on each of them, taking two 36
exposure rolls in all of the four of them one at a time.
After printing, I discovered some poses were not quite
right, and made a second pass, another roll. These came out
perfect for the purposes.
Three frames were made
sans critters, of the empty floor nicely lighted with the
floods. Also I took shots of the individual bowls, with and
without food inside, for supplementary raw materials. These
all went together in stages, as each image had to be rotated
and scaled to match the others, and a lot of retouching and
subtle Wacom tablet work ensued. The actual shadows had to
be manipulated in many places, or new ones painted in, and
there was a lot of trial and error to get a natural look.
That's Heather on the left, and top down are: Nago, Pica,
and Subi. The candle was a scanned drawing, colored and
enhanced in PS.
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The inside of the card
seemed an amusing way to "cap" the cover's joke in like
fashion. I got the idea before taking the raw photos, and
planned accordingly. This page was assembled in B&W, but
the critter shots are variations on the same four components
used on the cover, for consistency's sake. Also, after all
the hard work to trace and isolate them originally, it was
more reasonable to try to get extra mileage, as only the
rotation, positions and shadows would need to be
changed.
Sadly, this turned out
to be the final year that I could have pulled this off with
a clean conscience. Heather had died before the next Xmas,
and Pica shortly afterwards. Then I lost Nago in mid-'98. As
I post this page, only old, curmudgeonly Subi is still here,
an endearing slow moving friend I love very much. Perhaps
now that I can do a much better printing job with the Epson
I'll recycle these images again eventually. Or I may try the
idea again with the newer brood (but a smaller doggie will
make it harder). When I first sent the cards out I had to
make the cover reproductions as wallet-size snapshots of the
computer monitor, which was none too thrilling -- feh!
Amazing watching the tools develop, while prices fall, over
the years in both music/audio and image making, isn't
it?!
That's the story for
the moment. Hope you got a smile or two from your
browse!
--Wendy Carlos
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Wendy Carlos Xmas
cards