My favorite super-hero is a character from Alan Moore's bar-setting "Watchmen" series named Dr. Manhattan. It was this character and Moore's insight that for the first time opened my eyes to the difference between super-heroes and masked avengers; super-heroes have super-powers and masked avengers must rely upon the faculties with which they were born in order to preserve justice.Short Bio
Dr. Jon Osterman was a phycisist of some sort (I don't recall accurately which field was his specialty) on an American nuclear testing base. The story (in brief) is this: He mistakenly left a watch within a particle acceleration chamber, ran in to retrieve it and the door to the chamber, which was on a non-negotiable testing schedule, closed behind him. The rest of the scientists on the base, alerted by his panicked screams and now gathered around the chamber, watched in horror as Osterman beat his fists against the door's tiny glass window while the machine, with gathering intensity, whirred to life. Suddenly, blinding white light shot from the window. When the cycle had ended and the light had faded, Osterman was gone. Each atom in his body had been accelerated to some point beyond the speed of light and had shot out in every direction, diffusing him.
To make an awesome story short, his consciousness remained and reassembled his body atom-by-atom (pssshhhh, I can do that). Now Dr. Manhattan (a name given him by the press against his will), he exists in every time period simultaneously, can manipulate matter to his will, and can travel ANYWHERE; even through the vacuum of space.
Yeah, so I like this guy. He's kinda neat. In my feeble attempt to project his universal abilities onto myself, I used almost a gajillion layers...I almost immediately discovered the "Neon Glow" transformation option, wherever it lives, and stuck with that. I think of it as an update. In the books, Manhattan is solid blue, and the forthcoming live-action film will have to do something with that...I imagine they'd make a choice similar to mine. Anyway, the hardest part of this whole thing (and naturally the most maddening) was the atomic symbol on the forehead. It's similar to Manhattan's, only without the dot in the center. This shouldn't have been difficult. There probably is a way to draw a hollow ellipse with thick sides, but I've yet to discover it. Instead I drew a solid one and messed with the properties; I checked the "Stroke" box, which gave me access to the the "outline" option I wanted, and then messed with the coloring, choosing (I think) a gradient that was really close to the colors I'd been using for the rest of the skin. The symbol's composed of two of these little circles, and I was glad to be done with it.
I went through two or three backgrounds before I settled on a computer-generated Mars landscape. I chose this one due to its presence in the series as a setting to which Manhattan retreats to think.
The items to the left of me are copies of the background made in the shape of my body. There are something like twelve of them, becoming more dense the closer they get to me in an effort to simulate "braking"; as if I came to a halt in this reality after traveling with no little alacrity through other temporal realities. Anyway, this was a mistake. I meant to copy myself and then decrease the opacity of the copy gradually to simulate the same effect, but I was happy with this new "Predator"-ish effect and kept it. lol. I actually changed my opacity to highlight my inherent transience, and was done. I spent a few hours on it.
This one took no time at all, and I'm more satisfied with it from a design perspective than the first. C'est la vie. There are only two layers. The background is a simple hand-brushed gradient and the portrait is a crop from the original, colored-pencil filtered. I altered the line weight and the other two options to come away with a flattering image of myself, har. Using the lasso I snipped myself out and (this seems to always happen) did a choppy job along the bottom. At first, I was repulsed by this. Then, I thought: Oooh, it's haggard, just like the texture of the piece; let's leave it! So I did. There isn't much else to this one.
Well, I love to read. I read ALL THE TIME. I don't have cable as is my preference. I have heroes, and they are mainly hunchbacked, arthritic or finally dead men who've ascended into immortality through pen-paper interaction. It is their thoughts and dreams that have dripped onto the canvas of my mind and lent me the tools with which I make decisions every day.They are, clockwise: Henry Miller, Alan Moore, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Francois Rabelais. Whichever is their mortal status, I have canonized them in regard only to my level of admiration and have thought to honor them with this humble little collage.
A lot of lasso-tooling, a bunch of layers, a little design style, and there you have it. The intended symbolism lies in the contrast between the sharpness of their features and the blurring of my own; they are recognizable by their legacy, and I am not. Maybe someday. Until then, STARVE!! :)
