The Death of Dr. Armitage-textured wallpaper

This bastard's been wanting to get out of my head since October, and I finally got around to doing it.

Allow me to introduce you to Dr. Armitage. No, not the Lovecraftian one...and yet, yes, the Lovecraftian one. It's complicated. He is a character that came up in a short story that was available during the 2013 Samhain event in the MMO The Secret World (which you should totally go play if you like horror and humor and thoughtful quests and ridiculously amazing story and writing and characterization and--I could go on and on). While the event probably won't be around again until this October, if you don't mind spoilers you can read the story at the bottom of this page, in the "Other Information" section. The text on the image is a quote from it (sans the name of the character he's speaking to), as a sampling and temptation. I highly recommend reading the story, anyway, so you might gain a bit of insight as to how he is and isn't Henry Armitage, and get a sampling of the writing quality in TSW. In the game this, all the lore you can pick up, and lots of other bits here and there were written by Scrivnomancer...who also has a book and some anthology contributions, if you find yourself wanting to read more but hesitant to play TSW to get at it.

When I read this particular story I was fascinated by the mental image of how his fingernails would look, and had it in mind to try getting it down on paper...but, fortunately, the urge waited long enough for me to have bought Mischief, so he exists in the most freeing format I know of for drawn images. Unfortunately, I suppose I may have played precisely into his hand, given that Mischief stores images mathematically and, well, if you'll recall from his story:

He existed as a legion of fractals dancing on impossible curves.

You could absolutely use Mischief to draw doubly mathematical fractals of inconceivable depth, and the freely-drawn pseudo-vectors of the program could certainly qualify as "impossible curves" to some...

If I go mad, you'll all know why.





Technical info (and rambling): This was drawn in Mischief, a fancy little art program that is the closest I've found to feeling like I was actually drawing with pencil and paper, but with magic digital erasers (and some other shiny brushes). You can also zoom in pretty much forever, and not lose any quality, since all those pen strokes that feel oh-so-natural are rendered in what is essentially a vector format. The canvas also happens to be infinite, so you can zoom in or out as far as you want (this is demonstrated very well during the video in the previous link). If I saw fit, I could zoom in on each drop of ink and draw another character or scene. I'm hoping they figure a way to upload explorable canvases at some point, so people can zoom in and find things themselves, rather than having to post a video or a separate file for each zoomed-in piece. Also, the program itself is only taking up 4 mb of space on my 'puter; the Mischief file for this piece is 2.5 mb, the png is 1 mb, while the photoshop file is 11 mb. I also have yet to deal with lag, no matter how far I zoom in or how many brushstrokes I make it take note of.

I must add, it's not a total replacement for everything yet--as amazing as it is, it's still fairly new and lacks some features that a lot of digital artists have grown used to (fill, layer styles, and adding text, to name a few), but it does have layers and some pretty good stock brushes, you don't have to deal with one layer per chunk of color like other vector programs, and you can export your drawing in photoshop format if you find you need to make adjustments. (I did that to add the gradient and text, but everything else was purely Mischief.) Unfortunately, you can only currently import jpg files, so you won't be able to retain the zooming ability because it can't convert raster back to vector. If you want to add something to an image you've altered in photoshop you'll have to open the original Mischief file, do your thing, and then transfer it to photoshop and re-do the adjustments. A potential hassle, but I think it's absolutely worth it for how enjoyable and freeing it is for drawing...and it's only $65! (Sure, there's cheaper stuff out there, but this is infinite scaling with the ease of painting you can't really get anywhere else, so...) You can also try it out with a 15-day free trial that (if I recall correctly) resets when they add big updates, so you can have plenty of time to check out new stuff! So, essentially, color me excited about drawing beautiful pseudo-vectors in a comfortable environment that was pretty cheap for a drawing program that I swear they aren't paying me to say all this, I just love it a lot. Same goes for the rambling up there about TSW and Scriv--they just play precisely on the things I love.

Oh nooo lazy copy-pasta. But most of it still stands--all I did was remember that layer blending styles are a thing in photoshop, and wanted to see if any of them would give back the paper texture that the gradient swallowed up. The gradient had also made it less obvious that the coloring of Dr. A was of varying transparencies--the darker areas are just more opaque. It worked okay in helping to draw attention to his teeth and nails* since everything was darker, but I also wanted him to look like he was on paper. So, I putzed around with stuff, and the only one that did anything was overlay...but hot DAMN did it do something. It's still nice and dark (I hate bright screens), but now you can see the texture through Dr. A, the far side of the gradient strengthens the texture into something unsettling and more than just paper, the white still stands out--even more so, actually, since I changed the color of the text so it wouldn't draw attention quite so intensely--and the ink dripping from his nails is easier to see. All in all, a very pleasing result from a very slight change, so I had to share it.

*If it wasn't obvious, the primary inspiration and intent for this image is that I wanted to visualize the sentences:

Each fingernail was a platinum fountain pen nib bleeding black ink. All I could see was the gleam of those claws and that grin.

Plain black gradient version here, textless version available here. If you want a different size, just the paper background (no gradient), blood instead of ink, etc., feel free to send me a note. It's all pretty much ready and waiting, I just don't know if there's enough interest to warrant saving and posting them.

Also, look at what I found out I could do! www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Hc7U… It's a replay of the process, because Mischief saves all your history, even if you close the file!