Ah well. I still did some painting today, trying to paint hair. Ugh. After awhile it literally looks like I’m trying to mold life from the clay the gods used to make men! Blech. It’s like putty. How do you make putty in an awesome program like Photoshop?? Leave it to me…
I was trying to update my headers for here. I put up a werewolf one that I really liked, it’s kinda weird to look at but I was using it as a tester, and once I got it up well…I felt bad for the lil wolfy guy. I didn’t want to take him down!
I put one up of American Woman in her alter ego of Megyn Wolf, one of my Metrobay Comix superheroines. I really like how her lighting turned out fresh out of Poser, but I still wanted to fiddle with some of Ron’s Angel Dust. So purty.
And I did one of the newer V4/G4 DireLilith. It’s a small series I put on the Aphotic Inferno Patreon account. Here on the header, I kinda feel like it’s me saying, “Do you want classy or do you want cunt? Cuz we got them both!” Haha!
Feel free to share your thoughts <3 And stop by and see me while I’m hard at work making you hard…
So. I figured I’d try to do some learnings on Tuesdays. Hopefully it’ll become a habit!
Here’s my starting image, I forget when I even made this baby!!
I did three of them so clearly I was up to something. I called them ‘devil form’ so…guess I was feeling demonic?
I decided cuz of her pose and handbag that 1, she was going out on the town in her new form, and 2, she was posing for a pic! I found a nice night life background of city lights, and decided to learn a few things. I learned how to import a friggin 3D OBJ file – waaaaah? We can do that?? Yep, we sure can! I imported a random bridge file and couldn’t find it at first. Then realized that was because it was behind the girl, and had no texture. I gave it a texture, figured out the controls for moving an object around, scaling it, etc., and it came out well enough. I put it under her with a basic stone type texture, and realized she didn’t have a shadow…
So I used this – Cast Shadow in Photoshop Tutorial – very happy with the skill level and techniques I learned, which always end up being applied to future pics too. That’s cool, did the shadow, didn’t use the mask technique because the shadow was pretty much set to where I’d want it.
Then I did a bit of lighting. There’s this whole light room thing in Photoshop now, I gave that a whirl. In the past it’s been really bitchy with me, as in I would go into it and it would freeze the program, or no tools would show up, or I couldn’t manipulate any of the lights. Today, probably because a few years have passed, it worked out. Hoping that is because of fixes and drivers, etc.
Then I started thinking I ought to make her look a bit nicer. I did Darthhell’s method of copying parts of her skin and pasting them into new layers, then using Screen as the layer mode, then blurring them with Gaussian Blur. I wish I could make an action for that, so it would be a one click option – but each skin section on any pic I’ve worked on tends to require a different degree of the blur. I tried to focus here on her fleshy bits facing towards this unseen light I had created.
I wanted to paint her hair, and I found this – An Introduction to Painting Realistic Hair in Adobe Photoshop – but when I started reading it, I got this deja vu feeling of being in school. Oh where did the time go, *pretends to look at watch but who wears one anymore*, guess I need to head to bed! Heh, yeah, so I just left her hair as is. I know how I would do it, and I am sharing the tutorial for the hair here for future reference. But it’s not needed for this.
So here’s the final product. I was trying to make it realistic but I gave up and used my good ol’ Darthhell action. That tends to make my images look painted to a degree, but really, I am so done! I finished that comic up earlier so I’m satisfied with my efforts. Plus I used my free time wisely and did the learnings. Yay me! Hope you like this.
I JUST finished the latest episode of The Canadian Beaver, for Metrobay Comix. Here’s the cover:
“Bunny Big did something very naughty. And of course she is going to get caught! But how will Mr. Big punish his ‘darling’ wifey?”
Not too bad, if I do say so myself. The episode kinda waxed sentimental as it went on, but there’s some sweet spanking stuff in there, and of course the whole domination thing that I can’t get enough of. Where’s MY rich Mr. Big to boss ME around?? Kidding, I don’t take orders very well. Probably why so many people keep telling me to become a dom…
Anyway, that episode comes out next Tuesday, so be sure to check out MB then.
Today Darthhell and I got this letter about nudey pics on our Patreon site, bwahahaha. I was like, wtf? But it turns out that sweetie of a guy posted some hot and sexy freebies for the public, instead of reserving them just for patrons. And Patreon don’t like dat kinda free stuff, not with adult content. He fixed it though, and hopefully they’ll take a look soon and realize it’s all good.
So I’ve got about another hour and a half on the computer. I’ve loaded up an old DireLilith (that’s me!) pic of me wearing devil horns and hella hot thigh high boots. Mmm! I’m clutching a hand bag and have this weird intriguing pose going on. I think I might try to fuck around with the pic, see if I can’t learn some new techniques. I’d like to do that every Tuesday, so here’s hoping Tutorial Tuesdays become a thing! Pray for me, my lovelies!
I’ve struggled lately to update on a regular basis. Part of it is because I know this blog isn’t getting a lot of attention. I know I needed to update my social media across the board, in real life for my business as well as online arts and such. But I do miss the messiness of my old blog. I miss the pictures, I miss the posts on the side from random people saying hi. It was the only way I ever talked to Pip for example!
But this is where we’re at now, and this is what I need to work with.
I finally got Adobe installed on my laptop. That means I can do some updates and stuff sometimes, when I’ve got the baby occupied with the sandbox outside. I’m so grateful to people who resell things online! He has this lil table that has sand in it, and rocks in one side, and he can be out there for hours if I let him. Such good development for his lil brain and it gives me time to work – we have a balcony and he can’t get out or away. I tell ya, a balcony is like a bigger upgraded playpen!
So, I’ve got a live-in sitter that’s part of the family and reliable, I’ll be able to write and to do my work online more. I’m still streaming, hope you guys have tuned in to that. I’ll try harder to connect my blog to things. I said I would post more at Darknest and I need to do that. I want to be an artist people can rely on.
This is a pretty damned amazing story, so I had to share with y’all. Please visit Shudder.com for more information and to join one helluva great newsletter and horror site!
HORROR HISTORY
How We Almost Lost Nosferatu By Michel Marano
As we speak, two remakes of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent masterpiece Nosferatu are in the works, one from The Witch filmmaker Robert Eggers starring Anya Taylor-Joy and another from David Lee Fisher, director of the 2005 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remake to star Doug Jones. But this isn’t the first time Nosferatu has been at the center of two competing versions of the same story.
Almost 100 years ago, Dracula author Bram Stoker’s widow Florence Balcombe sued to have all prints of Nosferatu destroyed, and in so doing, nearly deprived horror movie fans of one of its most iconic movie monsters: Max Schreck as the gaunt, rat-like Count Orlak.
After Stoker’s death in 1912, Balcombe, who had once been courted by The Picture of Dorian Gray author Oscar Wilde, was in tough straits. In 1922, after the premiere of Nosferatu in Berlin, which had had full orchestral accompaniment and live sound effects, someone anonymously sent Balcombe a program for the lavish event. The program explicitly stated that Nosferatu was “freely adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” a thing for which Balcombe, as Stoker’s executor and financially dependent upon her late husband’s works, was not told about or paid for. Balcombe joined the British Incorporated Society of Authors, sending along the program with her check, and asked them to take legal action against Prana Films, the company that made Nosferatu, and which had been founded by German occultist Albin Grau.
The British Incorporated Society of Authors coordinated with a German attorney on Balcombe’s behalf against Prana films, which was itself on the financial rocks by the end of three years’ worth of legal wrangling. Realizing she wasn’t going to get any money from the film version of Dracula, Balcombe settled for the destruction of all prints of Nosferatu.
But, before the destruction of all the prints in Germany, several copies had been shipped to the United States, where, through a clerical error, Dracula was in the Public Domain. Nosferatu was re-released in 1929 in the States, paving the way for its rise from the dead to be iconic classic it is today.
