Three self portraits at work

 

Portraits of Marcus

 

Here is a cartoon that I think best expresses my relationship with my friend Marcus:

You may note that I have turned him into a cartoon character, but that's not all. We have given him the full portrait treatment here today! He will be a muppet and Dr. Seuss illustrations as well.

And so with that here are some portraits of Marcus, including a few discussions related to yesterday's post:

I visit the Scholomance

 

I went out for dinner with my friend Marcus the other night. This is something we do a few times a year, though after I am living in France it may happen less frequently. Presumably if we do manage to continue to do so in the future the meals will be better.

Naturally I took pictures of Marcus so that I can make various cartoons and portraits of him (more on that in another post). Curiously Marcus had a request. He wanted me to make a version of cartoon me in The Scholomance.

Somehow I did not manage to get why he wanted a cartoon of me in The Scholomance. He wasn't keeping that a secret or anything. I think I just somehow neglected to ask. My mind had immediately gone spinning off into the curious project.

For those of you who have missed it, The Scholomance is a fantasy trilogy by Naomi Novik. It's the best one since Lord of the Rings, as far as I'm concerned at least. The books mainly take place in a kind of grim, magic High School without teachers. This is a horrible, monster infested place made of grimy metal and set hanging into a void of nothingness. It is terribly dangerous, deadly even, but safer than the outside world which is fantastically deadly for adolescent magical youth. The school is a bleak, dangerous, desperate place that nevertheless is a little world that gives these kids a chance to make it to adulthood.

This rough description is not the main thing for me to tell you just why this trilogy is such a masterpiece. Surely I have done that already in clerkmanifesto a couple times in the past. This sketch is merely to give you the setting of the following pictures into which I have cast myself.

Ideally you would read The Scholomance Trilogy first, then check out my pictures. But you can probably also take them as they are if you want.

As to Marcus's request, assuming he's out there? 

Here you are.

Impressionist studies

 

Over the past couple of weeks I have accumulated several unique series and themed collections of photographs to assemble into individual posts here on clerkmanifesto. Some of these are continuations of previous styles (like "Seuss" style) now working with new photographs, some are portrait studies of friends run through various interpretations and expressions, some are in the vein of experiments, and some involve new themes or approaches. Trying to begin to organize these collections caused me to come across the series I am featuring today. The truth is I lost these briefly. I have done so much photo work since I made these that I had half forgotten they existed, even though they are surely less than two weeks old. These are photographs taken of portions of Impressionist paintings, some of them among the most famous of that art style, all of them put through a series of reinterpretations.

I have been taking images and reworking them with filters and AI's since the time when these kinds of tools were, frankly, not very good. My excitement for this wizardry has occasionally clouded my judgement and I often find when digging through photos from two or three or four years ago that the effect I used is actually detrimental to my photograph to the point where I often wish I had the original photo from before I messed with it. So now when I am amazed with the sheer magic of what I can do in these images, my enthusiasm is tempered a little knowing I have been humbled in the past. Nevertheless, the reaction I get from other people suggests these tools are magic to more than just me, and the current power of these tools is sufficiently striking that it seems worth sharing here.

With that said, here is a selection of paintings. As a rule we will start with the original picture, usually taken with mixed results from a photo of a page in a book, with me desperately trying to catch a clear image without too much reflection from the page and library lighting. Then you will see a realistic version of the painting- the painting turned into a photographic image. Third, you will see a muppet felted version of the painting, followed last by the Dr. Seuss image version.