First "milestone" on FA after a long seven months, my gallery has finally seen 1000 pageviews. Which is kind of an achievement when one's gallery isn't dominated by pr0n :) . Many artists intending to commemorate such milestones miss them because their pageviews mount so quickly, but not mine--actually they remained pretty much stagnant while I ground this piece out over two days . I just had a feeling that the second "mudwalk" series was going to push that figure over the bar, so I figured I'd have a "thousand hit" pic ready to go. That's why I also wrote up this desc a few days early, (check the date on the pic) as it usually takes me a a half hour or so to pontificate about all the little stuff that someday I hope will serve as fodder for geeky debates over the motivations of the characters 9_9.

(note: As it turned out, the count inched over the mark before the aforementioned series was posted. I was just about to go to work this morning at 999 hits, then I checked messages one more time and there it went )

Technical:
This pic marks the most extensive use of photographic textures I've done to date, as the platform and safety strip were both clipped from photographs. However the original photo was both vertically-oriented and looking down the length of the platform, not horizontal and looking across as called for in this pic, so the samples had to be extensivley resized, rotated, distorted and perspective-stretched to make them look sort-of right in this image. Oh, and the concrete and safety strip are seperate pieces butted against one another and made to fit--they do not overlap at all. How's that for a feat, huh?.

Extensive magic-wanding and lasso-selecting was also involved to insert the textures, as Micrografx Picture Publisher doesn't have layers in the traditional PhotoShop sense* (I still don't understand jargon like "set blah to multiply and blah blah blah" ), but it does allow you to turn selections into floating objects that can be stacked and rearranged like layers.

Everything else is hand-drawn, including the subway train (a NYCTA R-142 for those transit buffs out there), which was motion-blurred on the reduced size image, a process that was its own time sink since at the point I decided to do it, the image was already antialiased by having been reduced to about one-quarter the original size, so the selection couldn't be totally exact. I could have done it to the full-sized 3300x2552 image (I do keep them archived for future modifications), but it was late and I took a gamble that it would come out ok on the smaller pic. For the NY transit buffs out there, the color strip below the number plate is a fictionalized nod to FA.

The inking on this pic is a combination--I inked Tanya here with a pointed-tip brush, and used Microns for the subway train. Once again, the Staples Printing Paper (in the orange wrapper) proved its worth as the brush inking required absolutely no touch-up after 300dpi scanning--all the lines were as sharp as if they had been converted from a vector-traced file. The Microns, (which I think may be starting to dry out) were another story, and in fact made up the bulk of the digital cleanup needed before coloring (and most of the remaining jaggies went away when I resized the pic so the worth of that time is still debatable)

(*At least Version 8, the one I use, doesn't have them--MPP made it to version 10 before Corel acquired Micrografx and discontinued the Picture Publisher line. I don't know if PS-style layers made it into verisions after mine)

Project ID# 78