Idea 2 Pulp Cover, Tales of High Adventure

Posted by Clay Lewis

My second idea is a cover for a pulp anthology comic book entitled Tales of High Adventure.

I have some reference and a Color Thumbnail. trying to get some things worked out.

Double Detective cover
The woman is the figure that interests me.

I did a basic overlay of her and then started to tweak it. I need to take some shots of a model to nail it down. I took my other reference shots from House on Sorority Row for Dr. Surgeon.

The 'helpful' doctor from HoSR

Love this scene, hes all blue and purple and the background is green and weird. This is actually at a dance at the titular sorority house.

I added a third figure in the back, the guy in the tube, filling with gas! No reference for this, just drew it, supposed to have a light source on him from above inside the tube! Will maybe change the color depending on fit with rest of composition.

All the main figures, the RED woman is a draw over of the Detective pulp cover and the GREEN is the way I want to go

So still need to work on the Woman figure but most of the parts are there. I thought I’d put her in a red dress but could easily change that. Pulp is all about big loud colors and I’m trying to keep true to that.

When it all started

Posted by Clay Lewis

The doctors I have been to all ask the same question, “Why did you get a blood clot?” besides the obvious answer of “You’re the fucking doctor, you tell me!” it really is a long sorted tale, that started in the fall of 1992. That is the year I graduated high school and was about a month from starting college at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. My friend Todd Cox and I were driving around downtown in his car and we pulled up to some girls we knew form school and they asked us what we were doing. We said nothing, wasting gas and they said why don’t we go with them to take their friend home. We agreed, pulled over and parked and hopped in their car.

We drove down O street on our way to drop one of the girls off. I remember passing 40th and O’ thinking I live just down that street and literally the next thing I can recall is a blurry white light and a woman talking to me.

About 8 blocks from my last memory we ran a stop sign and were hit by a Blazer. Honda Civic vs Blazer. No contest! We LOST! the Blazer struck the car on the back passenger side. We flipped, rolled into someones front yard and laid on its side. Everyone piled out of the car except for me. I was unconscious. Of course I found all this out later from people filling me in when they would visit me in the hospital.

The back seat of the car had Anna, Todd and I, in that order from left to right. The blazer hit us and crushed the car in nearly halfway, the girls told me when they went to the junk yard and looked at it. Where I was sitting physically didn’t exist after the accident. The car was on its side my side up. Todd told me I was leaning on him unconscious, with blood streaming down my face dripping on to him. He had nightmares about it for a few weeks afterward.  After a moment or two, I came to mumbled something and pulled my leg free of the front seat, it had gotten wedged there, right above the ankle, and passed out again.

When the ambulance came Genny rode with me to the hospital, and hers was the woman’s voice I recalled hearing, although, at the time I couldn’t identify it. Her voice and another woman’s, the girl driving, and then my mother were the first voices I heard. I only recognized my mother’s voice. At this point all I could see was a blurry white light.

My mom talked to me in that soothing reassuring mom voice one that had been reinforced with comforting tones for years working as a nurse and PA. I told her “mom, I think we were in an accident and …and…and I lost my glasses!” I blurted that out and started crying!! Loosing my glasses was always a huge deal, we were poor and they were super expensive, so apparently that was on my mind. When i said that my mom started laughing and said “No hon, they aren’t lost I got em right here. One of the girls picked them up.” and everything was wonderful. That was likely due to the fact I had been shot full of morphine.

So, the impact broke my right femur, into what they call a butterfly facture, two different angled breaks in the bone, that resemble a butterfly on the Xray. I had a rod place in the femur which I kept in for four years. The most vivid moment was the following day when they set my leg. They had to immobilize it until the surgery. This entailed them PUSHING a pin, which looks like a thinnish knitting needle through the bone about two inches below my knee. They gave me shots to deadened the area and had my mom hold my hands so i wouldn’t hit them while they were doing it. That remains a brilliantly strange sensation to this day. The exact spots they did it had no feeling but I could feel my joints at the knee and ankle moving and pressure on them from the doc forcing this thing through my bone! There was this initial instinct of “OMG punch this guy in the head! Hes hurting you!!!” but it was all fine. Instinct vs intellect.

Two week after I came home from the hospital I was limping around the house and one day i noticed every time I stood up my foot turned purple. My mom, yep we gotta go to the hospital, you probably have a blood clot. It didn’t hurt at all, just turned color. The ultra sound tech started high on my inner thigh and worked his way down my leg until he found the culprit. Hiding in my lower calf was a clot. I was admitted to the hospital and was given blood thinners and they check my blood every 15 minutes for the first 12 hours or something. I remember burse coming in during the night and barely woke up when they stuck me.

92 = blood clot
2003 = cat bite on calf that got so infected I got woozy and nearly fell down, tooth paste like pus oozed out the wound!
2005 = fell off my bike and crushed my right foot, 8 -9 months before I was back to 100%
2007 = minor sprained ankle
Dec 19, 2009 = playing with neighbors kids, stepped off the curb wrong waiting for a car to go by and sprained my ankle. Next day flew back to NE. Two days after that took a 12 hours car ride to MN. Four days in hospice caring for my mom. 8 hour car ride back to NE. 3 days caring for mom in hospice. next week doing funeral stuff. Fly home to AZ.
March 23rd got to emergency room leg filled with pain, hard to breath. One ultra sound later = right leg is clotted (the entire thing). One chest scan later = Bi-lateral embolism with right saddle embolism.

When people ask, how’d this happen, its a loaded question and goes back years and years! I hoping they perfect cyborg legs soon, I have a feeling I’m going to need one!

Idea one

Posted by Clay Lewis

My first idea is one inspired by the Camelot Mythology and in particular a scene from the movie Excalibur. Huzzah! Its of a quest knight coming upon a tree that Mordred has used to display the corpses of the knights he had slain. The villain!, this would be a forest scene under full moon light, maybe its visible in the scene, the Knight, on horseback is holding aloft a torch revealing the grizzly scene, as the bodies are hung in the tree broken and contorted. I thought perhaps there could be a menacing character hidden in the tree branches or something as well.

Light sources would be the Moon, the torch and I wanted another light perhaps from a nearby pond? too Hokey? or just Hokey enough?

here are some reference pics

a knight on horse back, with armor!
tree o death!
more tree of death
Percival down

Site freaking out.

Posted by Clay Lewis

So I had been styling this site with fair amount of ease and then it came time to put my posts into some sort of organization. Thats when things came unhinged. The theme I was using, Thematic, wasn’t going to easily allow me to make my pages into blog -like displays. You can, and I had in the past, cheated this by replacing the header navs “Pages” navigation buttons with “Categories” navigation.

Pages are more for static pages like About Us or Contact while Categories are labels applied to Posts. By linking a page to display a category of posts it creates the illusion of separate blogs. So now the Capstone Page displays all the posts in the Capstone category, as well as they are display on the Home page (along with all other posts). Its the same thing only different, and better.

Thematic theme was not displaying the contents of the posts, only the title of the posts when I made them display a given Category. One would have to click on the post to actually view it. Thats far to cumbersome! I also could not figure out the PHP they used, its much different than the other themes I had used in the past.

The navigation is all set, but now I have to go back and re-style everything as the CSS is totally different than the Thematic CSS! What a day!

Painting is hard

Posted by Clay Lewis

I find myself stuck a lot of times. I like to think I can draw OK but painting, for me, is really awkward. It is like I think backwards from what I should be thinking. Where do dark marks go? I’m not drawing with paint, I am trying to paint with paint. Those are not the same thing…at all. So thats something stuck in my head. I found watercolor a bit easier, although a bit maddening. Perhaps it was because I was so acutely aware of the fact I was going to fuck it up at any moment, so I proceeded with care? I know not.

All that remains as a constant is, I need to do it more.

What a bloody mess

Posted by Clay Lewis

Blood clots are a real pain and can often be fatal, as in my case, I think I died a bit. I’m not really sure I can or will be the person I was prior. Thats for more reasons than just the clots though. It is a weird relationship they have with me, them and I. Are they a curse? are they a warning? Are they the universe telling me what I need? I’m a big believer in listening to the world around you and it will show you what you seek. What do you do when it starts screaming DIE FUCKER DIE!

The worst day in my life

Posted by Clay Lewis

Many people don’t really have a worst day in their life. They don’t have a need for that category, or if they do it often times consists of a day the got dumped, fired, had a flat got stung by a bee and their dog shit everywhere, ate it and vomited the shit-vomit onto their favorite pillow or pair of shoes. I suppose I was no different up to a certain time in my life. Those worst days were something you could share with friends over drinks and laugh about and say “Man that fucking sucked!” but then, it really finally happens. You actually have the worst day in your life, and its something that you won’t ever laugh about, it won’t trigger any sense of nostalgia, it will only engender a sickening pain in the pit of your stomach and wish you had not stumbled upon the thought.

This post is not my worst day in my life. Its actually about the day that held that title for nearly three long years, until finally it was replaced by a day that in all honesty was truly terrifying. This day is about my mother’s 60th birthday.

I had talked to my step-dad Paul and hatched a scheme to fly out to Minnesota and surprise my mom for her 60th birthday. My grandparents and aunt had planned to be there and I thought it would be really nice to come out and surprise her. My wife and I bought our tickets, rented a car and were on our way north to Angora MN from Minneapolis. We rain into some rain and for the life of us couldnt get the wind shield wipers to do anything but lazily streak across the windshield barely giving us room to see. Most cars we had driven you simply push up on the wiper arm on the steering column and there they go. This car didnt work like that and we fiddled with the arm for about half an hour. We were laughing about how crazy it would be if we wrecked and no one would know where we were! then finally almost by accident my wife knocked the arm down and the wipers kicked in! “Seriously!” we yelled. Thats all it was? Down not up? we laughed about and vowed not to tell any how stupid we had been. Four hours later we arrived at my moms place.

My mom and step-dad live on 80 acres of forested land in northern Minnesota with a little stream that meanders across the front of the property. We drove  over the little bridge and up to the garage. By that time the dogs, four of them, all started barking, alerting everyone to our presence. Everyone came out and everyone was very surprised, especially my mom. This was a great time, we all hugged each other and Paul, Erica and I congratulated one another on our ability to keep a secret and pull off something so good!

We all went inside and thats when we sat my mom down for her second big surprise. her birthday gift! We thought it would be nice for mom to be able to keep a journal or do some writing and cruise the internet so we had bought her a nice laptop. Mom and Paul would usually hang out downstairs in the family room which was connected to their bedroom. The computer room was upstairs, so we thought we could hook up some wireless and make the laptop into something she could use all the time. When she opened it she was blown away. “This is for me? I get this? For me?” yup, all for you mom. The only downside is that mom wasn’t very tech savy, so we set out to show her what to do.

We plugged in the laptop and fired it up and we sat on the couch, Erica and I on either side. Erica was walking her through how to find Word, so she could journal or whatever. She seemed very interested in doing that. So we opened a word doc and off she went, making her first of what we hoped would be cathartic musings about life, her experiences and stuff. Instead she wrote something very different.

My mom was a nurse and then physician assistant for over twenty years and she set about,  in a very professional, detached and clinical fashion, writing a list of things to do for her when she became so ill she could no longer speak, nonverbal. I suppose this was on her mind as recently she and my sister had decided that they would do hospice care for her at Melissa’s house. This was not exactly what I had in mind, perhaps Hello World! would have been better or some reminiscence about sledding as a child or jumping onto her sister from the top bunk when she was seven. But no. No this was different. This was straight forward, direct, follows these instructions: Make sure I am warm, a blanket, cap and mittens may be necessary, I get cold very easily. She wrote in an almost outline form. Erica helped her indent and make bulleted lists for Music: Melissa Etheridge, and others and at this point I’m just starting to wither inside.

Then mom starts getting really graphic. I’ll need to keep moist as the chemo will dry me out and make my tender extremities and possibly blister and that could cause a lot of problems, so thats my hand, feet lips and labia. Yes. My mother just informed us that when her cancer gets so bad that she can no longer speak we will need to make sure she has mittens, cds and someone is moistening her labia with Vaseline, so as to avoid chemo induced blistering which could lead to infections and so on and so forth. At this point  Erica and both leaning back a bit and look at each other.

At this point we had been sharing glances, reassuring one another approvingly, glad we could be helping mom get into using the computer. but this glance we shared now, this was different. This was a “Holy Shit this is the fucking most brutally real thing in the universe, are you going to throw up? look” and as Erica looked at me she could see I had tears starting to well up and I just felt crushed. All the happy big surpriseyness good times feeling had jsut been crushed out of me. I forced a smile and looked back to my mom who was trucking on her list of Hospice Care for Linda items.

The moment when you realize that all the monsters that have ever been dreamed, all the fictional horrors ever written about can’t, for a moment, hold a candle to the utter brutal terror of reality. That this moment is someone’s truth. That life had brought them to this moment, to be forced to think in these terms, to mentally be building this list over and over again: Hospice Care for Linda, until you can finally share it with your loved ones and everyone becomes starkly aware of the road that leads in front of them. no grand illusions, no sunsets or moving musical scores, just harsh, brutal, reality.

That was the Worst day in my life, up until January 5th 2010. All save that for another time.

Updating site!

Posted by Clay Lewis

As you might be able to tell, I’m in the middle of updating the look and some of the functions of this site as well as adding for posts, like this one. I’ve been in somewhat of a vacuum creatively and been picking up some good books to break me out of that. I’ll post a bit about them later.
For now about the site. I shopped around for a good WordPress theme to use and then modify. I went with a minimalist theme called THEMATIC. It was not exactly what I thought it would be, but good enough and it really has a strong base and best of all the documentation for it is good. There are many that have used it before me. You install Thematic, then create a Child Theme from it. pretty straight forward CSS manipulation. Im turning it slowly into what I want. I’m pretty much in the middle of it with placeholders holding whats to come. Its been a bit adhoc designing though. I didnt start with a Design Document or PSD mock up. Im just going from stream of consciousness and on-hand availability of graphics.

I’m also working of the same thing for the Official Moon Mission Filfy site. I found a pretty nice theme called Comic Press, which WILL use an existing design, what is up on the current site is being used as the base. I’m hopeful it will go smoothly implementing the design. its a bit different and built for a Weekly Web Comic. So that should be up and implemented soon.

While I’m working this I realized this would be a great project for Web Design class. You are more or less working on CSS and you get exposure to HTML, Javascript and PHP. The best part is that at the end of it you have your own functioning website and a way to interact with it. This would also provide a base for Senior Capstone and give students the opportunity to be building onto their portfolio as they progress, instead of all at once. This would rely on instructors encouraging learners to continue to use the site once its created., maybe a few extra credit points for using it to display works in progress or to hold presentations and what not. These sorts of skill are becoming increasingly important for designers of all walks of life.