"Dear Lucky Agent" Contest

I like the idea of a contest like this. Writers of Sci-Fi or YA can submit to a contest judged by a Literary Agent.

See Details here: "Dear Lucky Agent" Contest

The genre changes from time to time, so keep checking back.

The Big Red Button

Here is another Paper Trails comic I drew a  long time ago. This one features a Big Red Button. I love the idea of a button that has unexpected consequences.

In 2011, Pulpit Magazine published a story I wrote that includes a magic machine, operated, of course, by a Big Red Button.

It's called 'The Transcendence Machine'. The website is like time-travelling to the 1990s, so you'll have to scroll down a bit to get it.

Paper Trails #1

When I was in university, I illustrated a series of absurdist cartoons. The paper kept most of the originals, but I found a folder with some scans. I figure I will fix one up a week (maybe more frequently) and post them here.

It was called 'Paper Trails'. Enjoy the first one.

Straddling the Ephemeral

There are certain sights that pull my feet off the ground and leave me feeling like a specter in the world of the living. Most of they include things that I know I would have trouble representing visually. Like if I had my sketchbook, I could only draw the image by blowing sand across the pages.

In Canada, those sights include the first time you can see your breath, or when hoarfrost turns a skeletal tree into an icy feather duster. In Afrika it was the glowing embers shining like gems after a field fire, or just smoke. There is always a lot of thick, black smoke in Afrika.

St. Lawrence Ice Floe by Deline Lottering

While in Quebec City last winter, I remember seeing ice floes on the St. Lawrence Seaway. I remember staring at them because it was neither liquid nor solid. Standing there, the river seemed to me like a road built out of clouds. Like an earthly version of the Milky Way, snaking around the isle of Stadacona.

Light House by Julienne Lottering

In a family of visual artists, one thing we all have in common is the desperation of trying to capture those ephemeral images that somehow seem to straddle different worlds. I can already see the next series of paintings I will make. Here's a sample pic:

Gold Leaf

So, after a hiatus, during which I’ve been crazy busy with author events and workshops, I’m back for the last lap on the painting. In fact, I ran our of resin and had to wait until the hardware store could order the industrial quantity that I needed.

In that time I worked on the lungs and heart, adding gold leaf and bits of detail here and there.




The lungs needed a more organic feel, and I also added some golden veins to the heart.

With all the glare it’s hard to really get the gist of it, but there are several layers going on, and some pretty wild reflections. As my good friend Benjamin once said: “Some things are just better in person. Like side-boob.” And yeah, just like side-boob, for this painting you definitely need a good vantage point. The effect does change depending how close you get and from which angle you view it from.

CuO3

The Copper Patina Experiment

It's been about 24 hours since I sprayed the disgusting and incredibly noxious vinegar-ammonia solution onto the copper to test. And It looks like the medieval formula beats out modern chemistry. The Muriatic Acid, a pool cleaning chemical you can buy at any hardware store, has actually dissolved the top layer of copper before it started oxidizing, leaving it much cleaner looking at first, then kind of discoloured and blackish. That black patina is actually a different kind of rust happening on the copper—one that I want to avoid. The black oxide is what happens on pennies when you touch one with your grubby ball-scratching fingers.



What I want is the verdigris, the green tint. Although I now know it is possible, I have decided to avoid using a weathered copper for this painting in particular. I want the heart as shiny as possible. Next time I will try a nail polish resist with the patina I made. You could do some interesting stuff!

I poured the 2nd layer and now I'm waiting for it to cure.

The Circulatory System

So the image I want to work with is the circulatory system. I love the idea of the heart as a pump. Haloed around the pump are the lungs.

Here you can see the connections from the veins and arteries to capillaries. In my mind I see a wing. I'm really not sure why, but I'm a sucker for bending metals. These are mostly copper plate and guitar strings.

Detail of capillaries

I get a feeling this is going to be a heavy painting. with a bit more relief than any of the other resin cast paintings I've done in the past.




Here it is, sitting on the table waiting for its next coating. I always want to do it so soon, but this time I have to wait until my copper patina experiment has worked out.

The Patina

I am experimenting with different acids and oxidizing agents to see if I can give this copper plate a greenish-blue patina. Basically I'm trying to force the process of weathering which turns copper that nice Statue-of-Liberty colour into an overnight event. The right side is muriatic acid, into which the piece was dipped. It looks cleaner than the original, but maybe it takes some time.

The rest of the plate is a sprayed on agent I made from vinegar, salt and ammonia. (This is basically a medieval recipe for making malachite, a blueish tone) The mixture smells terrible, and literally put me out of the house for a few minutes as it vented, but it is looking better than the straight up acid. I'll check tomorrow and see if it is feasible or appropriate to weather the copper a bit.

The Curing Process

I separate the layers by pouring epoxy resin on top. It's a finicky process that needs to be done in a sealed room. Over the next 14 hours the hardener catalyses, giving off a bit of heat in the corner of the studio.






So now, while I'm waiting, I'm trying to catch wasps. It's the yellow jackets I'm interested in. If I can catch enough of them, I will definitely use them in the painting. I need at least 3 yellow ones. I have two so far, but I had to left one go since it was brown, not yellow. :(

Wish me luck!

The Fused Glass Experiment

At the end of the night, this is the first layer. I arranged some fused glass pieces as the first part of the composition.

Here are some close-ups of the glass. It's very smooth and flowy, which contrasts nicely with the rough epidermis I've been working on.

 You can see that I've added some gold washes as well, and the blue-black shard is impressive. It's all about shine over here in Graeme's world these days.

The right side negative space

The background almost looks like a map. I would love to do another one of these as a straight up fantasy map. So I will cast the first layer of resin tonight, which should bind everything together. It takes a long time to cure and needs a sealed room to work well.
 

My tool kit includes the beer!

The Copper Landscapes of Mars

So I've started staining the background with copper. There are some very nice unexpectant results. Yes, none of the results are having babies, much to the chagrin of their parents, yet they are results welcomed into the arms of their relieved boyfriends.

Following are some details of the coppery textures:

The background is almost done. The next step is to set upon my milk-crate of materials, which, as I mentioned, contains a magical bag filled with many spools of broken guitar strings. Perhaps a metaphor secreted away for many years. Perhaps not.

Magic beans!

Staining! Staining!

So I'm still staining away. The next picture is after a yellow stain. You can especially see it in the upper left corner. The background is still much to light, so I did another phthalo blue stain. 'Phthalo' clearly being one of the best words in the English language, by the way.

As it stands right now, with 4 stains over it, it's getting much closer to what I want.  I have the image I want to work with, but I'll keep it a secret for now, since the idea is still evolving. Like I said before, you got to keep that balance between intuition and planning.

I really like the drops of blue in the yellow area at the bottom.

The Making of a Painting: Part 1

Well, I haven't written anything here in a while. So here's to new beginnings!

PHASE 1: Organize your materials

After cleaning my brushes, I decide to give the ol' work table a good sponging. The assembled crew of ins-and-outs consists of: clay area to the left; an array of containers of various materials in states ranging from liquid to solid; 2 jars of 'sludge', which is basically a crude mixture of the residual acrylix accumulated between batches of making colours at the paint factory; the pallet and tubes on the right side of the table; a wooden board with spray colours; and the magical milk crate filled with all the metallic goodies I could scrounge, including, much to my amusement, a bag of broken guitar strings.

PHASE 2: The Sludge

The first step forward is covering up the first layer with something called 'sludge'. It's basically the run off end bits of the acrylic plastic they used as a matrix for artificial colours. So basically it's the Tim bits of the paint world. It's those coloured bits all thrown into a jar together, and sold as a sculptural medium.  It's thick, but not very cohesive—something like a foamy, butter-like texture.

I tend to work intuitively in general, but working in layers requires planning. It's like balancing between extroversion and introversion, not at all like interrupting someone at a party by saying: "Mark! Your crotch is on fire!" Nothing like that at all.

Yes, that is me throwing up the ol' devil's horns, moonlighting as the Shadow King. And yes, that is the puppy, Mala pouncing on something. She's a terror.

PHASE 3: Staining

Over the next few days, I will be staining the sludge in the primary colours. Hopefully the end result will be a much darker underpainting. I want there to be a lot of texture to support the sheets of metal I will be working with.

Check out the awesomeness above!

Kyoto Sakura

Well, it's that time of the year again...Cherry blossom time! This was the first time I saw the blossoms in Kyoto. The whole area around my apartment and my work exploded into a pale pink canopy above the street. There are whole neighbourhoods where it seems the only tree ever planted is the beloved Cherry. This year, they were whiter than I remember.

I've seen them about 5 times now, but they are still just as magical as the first time I saw them. Wow! Taking sakura pictures is addictive!


This is Kiyamachi street. It runs along a little canal and is one of the most beautiful places to see the blossoms. I think it has such a stunning effect because the trees here are right in the middle of the city.

I like the street sign here that says: "Hey son, let's run into
the middle of the road to check out the sakura!"

People tend to have picnics under the trees during spring. This is Maruyama Park and there were so many people that it was hard to find a place to sit down. The whole area was filled with drunken businessmen, tourists, and college kids skipping school. Wouldn't you?

There were a tonne of stalls selling food. This takoyaki-ya san hung his lantern in the branches. It was a good way to get free advertising.


Many women wore kimonos. This was also common in Kanazawa. But the designs in Kyoto take the cake!
After eating some delicious Japanese junk food in the park, I left to go to Nijo Palace to see nighttime blossoms. Nijo Palace is one of Kyoto's many world heritage sites. The illumination was incredible. You can't capture the magic on film...or digitally, even...But I tried! Here are my two best attempts.

The people are so small beneath the ancient trees. It's hard to imagine Japan's first Shogun also walked in the same garden so many years ago.

Everyone had their cameras out. It was irresistible.

The shrine of good humour!

yes, his junk is hanging out

It's a little know shrine in Kyoto, which shares real estate with some kind of noodle shop, but the Shrine of Good Humour is a popular place to visit for pranksters, funnymen, and others seeking the holy grail of gags, puns, and punchlines. The pantsing god, seems like a 'punny' acronym for the panting dog, but he is, in fact, the mascot for the shrine.


The shrine itself is actually comedy size as well. Shrines usually have large torii gates at the entrance, but this shrine has tiny wee things leading to a miniature matchbox building inside a little niche in the corner of the shop. It is a real shrine and people pray for a good sense of humour, and then make a joke.

I tried making a twitter joke: 100 characters of less. "Two men walk into a bar...Ouch."

As in all religions, if your prayers are answered (in this case with a hillarious punchline, a la business man in a suit slipping on a banana, or a cat fail), then you bring a votive plaque to show your appreciation.

I couldn't read them, but one lady is watering her garden with breast-milk

The shrine in renowned for turning greasy dullards into comedic supermen. And this can be seen in the large amount of dirty jokes painted on the votives.

If you have a good twitter joke, please leave it in the comments. Mine was kinda lame, but I was under pressure. There was a big nerd behind me that wanted a transformance into a Charlie Sheen-type winning machine!

98% Grey Book Launch

Well, my book is now available at www.98percentgrey.com as well as on Amazon.com!

The launch was a great success with about 50 people showing up.



Here's the excerpt I read:

"A violent act leaves deep tracks, like knuckle-prints on a sandbag. Above her closet, she wrote “This too shall pass…” She repainted her room in a pastel green, a pale jade. Pantone™ 324. She then employed a gold marker once used in a homegrown bookbinding operation to scrawl enormous French curves and daffodils along the edges of the green field. The room changed to a meadow, to an Art Nouveau altier en plein air. And above the door “This too shall pass” in her own variation of a hand drawn Garamond.

She had owned the house for about 2 years now. It was actually sold through a police auction. The basement area, where Marci has domesticated, was once the crime-den of an ecstasy production ring. It was the laboratory—what the chemists-cum-gangsters called ‘the Pit’. It was an old house in the Annex area of the city, in a neighbourhood of beautiful gardens and ancient, wooden Victorian houses. There was no way one would assume a pharma-criminal ring was producing MDMA in a basement next to old widows and city-council members. Marci’s old associate first discovered the massive auction. It included all kinds of science apparatus, furniture (in particular a mahogany desk circa 1816 which he had his eyes on), as well as holdings all over the city. Marci acquired the house on Euclid Street mainly because the inheritance from her mother allowed her a large wager. It was a difficult time for her and, I suppose, she needed something concrete to pour her feelings of loss into. The house had been her saviour.

A week after she bought it, she moved in with a weapon-rack of brushes, rollers, paints, and palet-knives. The building was a chemically altered, deteriorating zombie, and Marci had to operate. She started at the heart, the lab in the basement, and worked her way up. Initially, she painted what would be her future room, a deep red. It was crimson, a velour close to Pantone™ 202 or 222. She then decided it was not deep enough. It needed more. A profundity which matched her sadness: a deep, pure blue.

She found the muffle-furnace on her second day of living in the house. It was hidden behind a stack of drywall sheets. Marci saw this as a sign. She would build the blue from scratch. It became her process, her catharsis.

She decided to make ultramarine, the deepest and most permanent of the blues, and easy enough to make from scratch.

(Ingredients needed: Clay,
Fine, soft white sand
Charcoal,
Sulphur.)

The baking started on the 6th evening. She watched the white clay heat, turn green, then red. It was an alchemical process that burned inside the oven and inside her heart. She watched it shift, transform and magically settle on a pure blue. The colour of the sky and water, of all things natural and emotional combined, heated into a brick the size of a deck of cards.

On the 7th day, everything was silent. The oven had finished and when Marci, in a spotless white apron complete with long gloves and a doctor’s mask, tried to look inside it, she could not see through the window. There was an opaque blue blocking her view. When she opened the furnace, a fine blue mist escaped and filled the room. Momentarily, Marci was enveloped in the blue of her mother’s death. Staring through the cloud of mourning was like looking into the evening sky, beyond which she could barely make out the fuzzy outline of the muffle-furnace with its own deep cavity on the other side.

And when the dust settled, she was covered in a blue film and she found the ultramarine sitting in a blue-coloured vault, where malign chemicals were once baked into designer drugs.

She removed it with a pair of tongs, careful beyond necessity, as if she was birthing it, the blue, her twin from the feeling of loss itself. After placing it onto the table, she crushed a corner of the brick and spontaneously started weeping, as if she had committed some crime against this brick she had just given life. You see, Marci had grown incredibly attached to the clay during the making of this colour. It had transformed inside the oven and grown inside her mind overnight, becoming a living essence. And the moment she broke the corner of the small, powdery rectangle, she felt she had hurt it, caused it to suffer. Immediately, manically even, she mixed the powdered blue with oil and dripping tears, made it transparent: a thin blue glaze. She rubbed this nurtured blue all over her crimson wall, daubing it with tissues, covering the red in the depth of the heavens. It deepened, opened up space and felt somehow alive. She had breathed life into the walls, made it a womb. When it dried, she knew this would be her bedroom. The terminus of her emotional system, where she could sleep, live, heal."

Good video that inspired me

I know I haven't blogged for a while. I'm busy doing MRIs for research and finishing my book. It's so close to the end.

I saw this video and had to post it. It inspired me so maybe I'll start blogging again.

Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries from Rory O'Sullivan and Simon Bruyn on Vimeo.

98% Grey

I am writing a book. I guess that is one of the main reasons I stopped blogging. It is taking an enormous amount of time.

But I know it is unfair to cut everyone off, seeing how I am a notoriously bad emailer. I will publish some excerpts on lottering dot com for those who are interested.

Just know they are kind of raw. I mean, I am uploading parts I like but they haven't been edited fully. Any comments are welcome. There should be no need to read chronologically, but I am posting the excerpts in the order that they appear in the book.

repause

I have decided to stop blogging temporarily. It may not come as a surprise to you, since posts have gradually petered off anyways. I am far to busy these days and my schedule has changed enough to make it very difficult to find time.

I will use this blog to post only some extraordinary events from time to time...But who knows? Maybe it will come back zombie-like one day in the future. So be ready and know your zombie escape route!