I saw some black and white photographic work of Dominic Rouse, in which he somehow created disturbing surreal images working directly with negatives. His images had a very dark, possibly gothic, look. I decided to try for a similarly dark look in Photoshop. Without photos of old house, church, and castle interiors, I used a shot of our stairway and added old doors and windows (some clip art and some of my own). The first time through I worked in black and white, but found that too intimidating so I started over in color. Overall, I would call this more creepy than disturbing but I couldn't leave it alone. The tatooes were made with brushes from Obsidian Dawn, the spiders from In Obscuro, and the other grunge was done with brushes from Vered. Until I added the grunge, I almost couldn't look at this; that made it even more difficult to work on!

If I continue to work with this size image and create a faux tarot (there are so many ways to play with the word tarot) deck, this one will definitely represent wasting time on a major scale.

Journal Pages

I've been stuck working on all three of these journal pages simultaneously. For each of them, I knew what they were about, but although I felt the images expressed my feelings, I had a very hard time with the words. In the case of the mercy page, there were too many words that I needed to get out of my head, so it became maybe a little too raw for here. Whatever! The city page just flew together but I didn't know how to express what it meant to me. The words, cut from an excerpt of Architecture & Fear that I found on the internet, and just thrown into phrases that don't make a lot of sense individually, do a good job as a whole.