#love how the feather texture and lighting is rendered in here <3 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

spamzineglasgow · 6 years ago

Text

(REVIEW) Not your minute turns from the blueprint: Body Work, by Tom Betteridge (SAD Press, 2018)

Denise Bonetti <[email protected]> Mon, 10 Dec 2018, 20:21 to maria.spamzine Hey Maria, Hope life’s good :) I’m just writing to see you if you’ve read Tom B’s new Body Work? There’s a paper I should be writing, but have been reading and rereading that pamphlet instead, or more like dipping in and out really, cause it's so beautifully layered and expanding that you can only take so much at a time. Don’t you think Tom’s poetry has this strange earworm quality to it? (I think he’d like the annelid comparison.) The way he choreographs words (I don’t want to use the word 'images’) makes its way into my brain and never wants to leave. He draws these, like, lateral paths of meaning so clearly that the weeds never grow back.Tom Raworth has this bit in 'Writers / Riders / Rioters' that goes:

the present is surrounded with the ringing of ings which words have moss on the northside

like, words naturally arrange themselves into a system of semantic habit, which is so stable and stale that makes them grow moss, but also so rich and vibrant when it's exploited productively. Obviously this is Raworth so it probably also means the opposite of this and so much more, but it kinda makes me want to say that the present (poem) makes the ringing of ings deviate so well that the moss can never grow again. I’d say that his poems behave like sophisticated lines in the sand, but they're more like brutal carvings on a rock. He had a couple poems in Blackbox Manifold ages ago (I think) and there was this one bit

‘nerve truffled plume lead pickled breast’

I think about all the time (especially when I cook). It’s so smooth. Why can I not stop thinking about it. It’s cause it’s so shameless, it wants it all - the feather-light and the corpse-heavy, never perturbed, so lucid. It plays at tasting good, but it tastes of an unrealistically blank texture. A-ha! Anyway the new pamphlet is gr8, if you haven’t read it yet look at the first poem pls - ‘OCCAM OCEAN’ (sounds like an anagram or palindrome)

It all dwells in systematic abstraction but flies so close to materiality, like a mosquito buzzing around the ear ('Not your minute turns from the blueprint'). I love that ‘plate’ in the first phrase, too: it behaves like an adjective but feels nothing like it. I can't help but think it's the subject of the sentence in a parallel universe that's created by scrambling syntax. It makes me think this is the way language should always work, and that we're the fkn idiots living in the parallel universe in which syntax is scrambled in ordered to be as boring as possible. Idk - it's late and I need to go back to writing boring essay syntax 'bound to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Lemme know ur thoughts you smart queen D xxx

Maria Sledmere <[email protected]> Wed, 12 Dec 2018, 17:30 to denise.spamzine

Dearest Denise,

Life is good thanks. I'm sitting in the attic of the law building and I can hear the construction work going on and every time I leave I look out at the skyline and slivers of infrastructural alteration. I was walking along the road earlier because the pavement was closed off for construction and cba crossing and the high-vis guy was like, 'you'll not see Christmas walking on the road like that', but I guess I misheard him saying something else because I was really engrossed in this old Slowdive album, so I just smiled sweetly. Anyway, that got me thinking back to the question of erasure, which I think is pretty vital to Body Work.Have been carrying this pamphlet in my bag for so long that the cover has started to peel and revealing speckles of white underneath, like the text itself is ready to reveal itself, and yes I was thinking Barthes and strip-tease and paratextual enticement.

So I had to google the word annelid and now can't get the phrase 'segmented worm' out of my ear/head/throat (gross!). I was thinking about what sort of stains are on the cover of this book, you know, with Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir's gouache/pencil work. A stain is one thing stuck to another. Gouache is a funny kinda substance that is half watery gauze, half binding, thick, gummy akin to acrylic. Wet, it will easily smudge. My thumb keeps bleeding where the skin thins, hardens, peels and sloughs off. Tom's poems are kinda mucilaginous in parts (v. insecty, molluscky, sap emission; but also they have a crispness and precision, like cuts of leaf). Things that smudge or fall in flakes. Bodies are maybe whatever we leave behind. I didn't want to mention Hookworms the band because of the singer's sexual abuse scandal BUT it seems significant that a group named after an earworm/type of parasitic larvae would have a song called 'Negative Space'. Like what we eat into in the process of making, existing, remixing. Is language a rash, the result of these parasitic inf(l)ections?

I've been to a couple of reading groups on microbiomes lately, and we were thinking through this idea of how acknowledging your bodily composition in terms of myriad genes and organisms challenges conventional, bounded notions of 'self'. What kinds of affects does this produce? There's a weirdness to that, in Mark Fisher's sense of the weird as 'that which does not belong', that which 'brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the "homely" (even as its negation)'. Fisher suggests that the form most conducive to rendering the weird might be montage. So I was thinking about how montage involves splicings, gaps, juxtapositions, cuts and suddenness. I mean you open the very first poem of Body Work, 'Occam Ocean', and see that its prose-poetic paragraph compacting is split in the middle by the juncture of line break and indent. And ofc the title recalling Occam's razor, the philosophic principle by which in the case of two explanations for an occurrence, it's best to go with the one that requires least speculation. Razor things down and erase speculation? What are we left with, more of the Rreal? Lately I've been hankering for cleaner prose, crisp lines, simpler solutions. The Anthropocene is all of a goddamn tangle. Do I want to follow the myriad threads or just cut cut cut -- who gets to do that?

Did you ever cut a worm in two as a kid?

Okay so I love how 'Occam Ocean' might promise, title-wise, this clean prosaic expanse (like the oxymoron of expanding ocean and occam's, which requires surely a condensing), but what we get is clustering, motion, shiver, containment. The sensual trash magickk of P. Manson! The little syncope of this thing or that, the 'maple neck', vibrating canes, 'chambered breath bowed into the driest soundboard'. These aren't like 'Latour litanies' because they are not like concrete OOO segments of things; idk, they are more about processes and mutable assemblages, emphasis on action and change, sometimes transmission, things inside things. Lynn Margulis and symbiogenesis. How things interact, communicate up close; all of a mutable, prose-poetic swallow. It's actually an incredible intimate pamphlet, don't you think? I feel inside a thing inside a thing inside a thing. I feel a vague ecological sorrow, which gnaws at introspective tendency. The clue to that, you might see, is the cutaway phrase, 'emo Chord' in 'String Growth'.

'Collapse all tears allowing echo retreat'; these lyric lines of 'Glissando' expression, smoothing and shimmering over cuts and junctures: a slide between notes. I used to play trombone and I wish I cld articulate linguistically what kinds of lip vibration occur when you attempt a glissando and feel it slide down your arm muscle but then also through your chest as you try to sustain a sound. It's maybe the way you glide through a scattered poem, with your eye, which is different ofc to the spikier way you'd have to read it aloud, stuck on the vowels. Stuttering. I would love to hear Nat Raha perform these poems, because she does such wonderful things with punctuation and bodily performance, a kind of grammar of breath and cough and click. Reading over the more field erasure poems like 'O--NE' and 'String Growth', it's easy to say something like ~vibrant materialism~ here, but as usual I reach for Steven Connor on noise. Return to the ear, which is 'vulnerable' and 'resembles the skin in being the organ of exposure and reception'. I love what Connor says about Levinas' perspective on 'the awareness of the vacant anonymity of being, of an abstract, encompassing sense that "there is"' being 'an experience of noise'. <3 Acknowledging that breath in the void, that is not nothing but a sparkling something, entails a sense of noise. I am here in the attic of the law building, listening to construction, the type of my fingers on the keys. Someone is murmuring of their distress. What is the difference between living and existing, and being and nothing?

Karen Barad:

'Suppose we had a finely tuned, ultrasensitive instrument that we could use to zoom in on and tune in to the nuances and subtleties of nothingness. But what would it mean to zoom in on nothingness, to look and listen with ever-increasing sensitivity and acuity, to move to finer and finer scales of detail of...?'

When she asks, 'What is the measure of nothingness?' I think surely it is a bodily measure, as everything is: 'bound', as Tom puts it, 'to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Of course 'what follows' recalls Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', where he's just out the shower and watching his cat watching his phallus, etc. What kinds of dislocation occur. But I mean in all that grandeur of encounter, there's still anthropocentricism. Tom gives you this cinematic CUT, like the instructive 'keen SNAP' that occurs in 'Occam Ocean' to dramatise 'Still, pondsnails whir and blindly source [...] a working leaf shutter'. Soever the language enacts the slurs of the snails up close. We look for the answer to the question of ellipsis, the more to follow [what follows]: inevitable, a question. Sometimes Tom is writing about silence ('then silence confronts an earful underhand') but the music of his language does all the noise, so we just can't have nothingness: there is always a vibrational residue that speaks of something in miniature, atomic, happening.

Ofc with the ear again I am thinking of the ear at the start of Lynch's Blue Velvet and how it's covered in rasping wee insects whose hum is a sort of white noise of trauma that runs through Lumberton's suburban idyllicism.

And so what happens next is I flip open to the following page of Body Work and there is 'String Growth', one of Tom's sprawling erasure poems, which for more than a split-second resembles hundreds of crawling, shimmering ants. I actually think my earliest childhood memory is of looking down at my bare feet on the patio of our old house in Hertfordshire and seeing red ants run over my toes. Then looking up to a greying, English sky. Constantly struck by the cinematic image of that, its splicing out of time: the vividness of insects on human flesh, then milky smog of skyward nothingness. 'String Growth', the accompanying notes to Body Work tell me, is an erasure poem of the Chordoma Foundation's 'Understanding Chordoma' information page.

Erasure can expose sequences of nightmare at work in the lexis and syntax of the text on which it parasitically feeds. I am scared to go on the Chordoma Foundation's website, for fear that just reading or saying the word 'tumour' will activate some kind of malignant growth in my body. And so something of the word chord as a sonorous relation between materials (bodily, textual; textural, cellular). Chordomas are tumours often located in the spine and so I find myself looking for the undulating shape of a spine in the scatter-text of Tom's poem. My eyes cascade down textual spines. Why is it sometimes I otherwise latch upon a 'keystone' word which then extends with adjacent resonance? Musical abnormalities accumulate. Thought swells.

And yea I wonder how this fits into what you say about the poems being 'so smooth'. Like Lynch's waxen silicone ear. Because even though fragmentation makes me think of bits and jaggedness etc, there's this sheen of aestheticism to Tom's work that makes me think of gloopiness, fullness, thereness but also the glaze of potential nothingness. Like in Barad's sense, or miniaturised ecological window shopping - a la Morton's Romantic consumerism? Or do we get into the things themselves? What are your thoughts on the question of recalcitrance? Maybe cos he named a previous pamphlet Pedicure I've just got varnish on my mind. Things an insect might stick to, and be amberized in. Mm.

'[...] Phosphorus crystals may be white, red, burgundyor alight as urine passes'

I keep a stone of citrine under my pillow sometimes. It is supposed to alleviate nightmares and 'manifest abundance'. It is the colour of a rich, dehydrated piss and sometimes when I come back to bed after peeing in the night I think it's some kind of organ lain on my bedsheets, hopped out of my body, and I have to stop my heart and breathe. Is that syncope?

On the <topic of piss>, isn't there a sort of caustic quality, even to the smoothness? Like it is working at making a brittleness of its sheen? And that is what poetry is, cracking the veneer of language or something? Punctuational insects dwelling in splits and fissures? It is nice and cool in Tom's poetry, a place for thinning the self and dwelling. Even though the lexis is so rich and dense, it still seems slender somehow; there's a suppleness. Tease threads of your silk(worm).

Was thinking about what Lisa Robertson says about 'commodiousness' in poetry and what kinds of space there are for the reader here, because I don't think there is much space at all, in the conventional humanly readerly sense. Maybe what I mean by (straw man: Romantic) lyric, which requires something of declarative expansiveness? The density and clutter of specialist language in Body Work makes me feel like a worm, trying to hook my way lusciously into a line: 'espalier's / strains unfinished by the scarp trellis' ('Body Work'), 'rooted to a middle-ground / no more than motion defibrillates'. And I become a parasite on the body of the text, which is a parasite on the body, which is made up of millions of (para)sites. Para ofc meaning side by side, which made me think of Haraway's sympoeisis (making-with) but also, admittedly, Limmy's madeup psychic show, Paraside (lalalol what you were saying about the scrambling parallel universe maybe, is that a lalaLacian Real which necessitates ululation, stammering? Complex remixing musicality of language throughout Body Work as summoning?). Going back to my incidental Slowdive reference earlier, maybe there's a shoegaze thing here, like setting up these 'noise-worlds' which shimmer indiscriminately behind/inside/through the semiotic oscillations of lyric? Is shoegaze a form of sonic gouache? Well it is certainly an ontic form of seduction, where I can't pick out the instruments of expression but I look for them hungrily in the haze. And the idea that transmission between worlds (the living/dead, human/nonhuman) might require a strain of humour (like haha but also meant in the sense of bodily humours?). For instance, shoegaze is decidedly not a humorous genre, but it sort of works on bodily humours, sometimes giving me the bends, or the blurry spaced-out feeling of having one's pleasure receptor's caressed by sound. Was wondering how YOU experienced the space and physicality of the poems -- was there anything u found FUNNY or sufficiently sultry as to produce a long and gorgeous sigh?

Mm and aren't there these tasty, cute moments of wow like 'tropic glut' ('O--NE') and 'prism arousal' ('Body Work') and 'clamour to emboss' ('Sapling').

Come to think of it, there are quite a lot of trees in Body Work, at the very least between 'Sapling' and 'Copsing', but also resonance in 'Awning', 'Annual' (which mentions 'yield', 'Thicket', 'sky-light muddle' etc) and 'Georgel' (georgics, idk?). Something about sprawl and thread: like the action of branches as arboreal mirror for threads of viruses, threads of code?

Side note: Can a person in a crowd of people experience canopy-shyness? Emily Berry has this lovely poem about crying and canopies and language.

Ways to dwell in inertia, violence, suspense ('Poem for July') as a 'clearing' within the pamphlet? Body Work as a title seems to combine two distinct fields: car repair and alternative medicine (hence mention of plants, cancers and crystals). The question of holistic approach, therapeutics, restoration. The sheen of metal, the sheen of health. O wise one of la letteratura del contemporaneo, pray tell your thoughts on possible Ballardian comparisons? Like obv v. different but I was struck by something to do with the cut-up structures of The Atrocity Exhibition and the way erasure works in Tom's work (probably in a more precise, attentive way, like the specialist's collage of tiny skins and digits, as opposed to grander themes of mediation that explode all over Ballard's work? -- generalising for the sake of interest obv).

Longing for a 'carvery [of] / uncommoning / rave'. Some kind of party you'd give up your skin for (is skin mere synecdoche of identity here?). Maybe the rave is what you were saying about scrambling.

Anyway, I hope your essay is going well. I must go read Hillis Miller's thoughts on Ariadne's thread, maybe make a tea. I've been getting these headaches lately, dawn to dusk & beyond, like the kind you get after being swimming (chlorine headache) or after crying (hormone headache). Pressurisation. I wonder if I have a parasite in my brain? So tonite I will probs lie awake, sleepless, listening for tinnitus :(

With warmth, Maria xxxxxxx

p.s.

Of course, by the time I get to the end of rereading I realise that it's only white marks being revealed underneath because literal holes have appeared in the Body Work cover, like some kind of fungus has been eating away at the book, performing another erasure.

Denise Bonetti <[email protected]> Fri, 1 Feb, 12:15 to maria.spamzine Dear Maria, Once again my legendary inability to reply to personal emails within a reasonable 1-month window manifests itself. Invoke my Scorpio moon (?) etc. I love it when people are like 'RIGHT - enough Facebook for me, email me if you want to talk etc', because that sounds like a nightmare to me. Long live IM! Long live the short form! (quite rich coming from someone whose job at the moment, I guess, is to churn out a dissertation?)

But then you know what I was thinking - someone like Clark Coolidge, for example, can get away with long form, intense long form. Not only get away, but own that long form. That long form I'm into. Clark Coolidge drown me in words and I'm fine with it, because he never dilutes, there's never any stagnation, you know what I mean, he just goes and goes and goes and you're like !!? YES!! HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS!? He just never runs out of steam. And I'm thinking of Coolidge because you mentioned crystals as agents in Tom B. (cf. The Crystal Text, how would the crystal speak etc), and of course because both Tom B. and Clark C. are just doing mad things with language, bold things and exciting things... They are like scientists you're friends with but who (maybe) don't like to talk about their work, then one day they decide to let into their basement lab where they've been secretly working on the most complex, organic, project for years, and they're like, don't freak out, here it is:

(Sorry for terrible quality [#postinternet] First is Tom B., second is Clark C.) Body Work looks quite controlled in form, visually speaking, with its vaguely justified lines, BIG symmetrical margins.. even the scattered pages look orderly! Like the bit of 'STRING WORTH' you sent. Which going back to your erasure thing, it makes me feel like Tom B. is giving us an OXO cube of his writing, all concentrated and delicious. But then my response is - show us more!!! Which rarely happens because I am scared of long form. And email. And dissertations. I also LOVE what you said about how Body Work combines car repair and alternative medicine!! That is absolutely spot on. Like the material, pragmatic tinkering motions of his writing, the referral to structures and the intention of like, see how far we can bend them and push them, but then it is never as dry as that! Very sweet motor oil. It's very kind poetry... generous! (A word that my friend Phoebe used to describe a certain type of poetry at a party last week and I thought, very interesting). Linguistically generous because it offers so many networks of reading, but then also.. approachable? As approachable as experimental poetry of this kind can be. I'm sure like, DANIEL would not think this is approachable lol (#COYBIG #romance). Which, fair enough. But if you're a nerd for this kind of poetry, then yeah. Like this bit from 'ANNUAL'??

*Cries!!! This is like you said, healing!! I feel looked after! 'Stomach prefers sound to day-to-day camphor'!!! Honestly what is this! So touching, so simple!

(Btw, I started experimenting with aromatherapy in my tiny room lol, do you know how to stop the water from boiling in the oil burner??)

Thanks for sending such interesting ideas over, I have to shoot to a seminar ! PPS: I saw Steven Connor in the English library yesterday (Oliver pointed at him silently like !!!!!!!!!!) so I kind of followed him to see what his approach to book browsing is.. very natural-looking and orderly? Surprised. Love the guy. *bubble sounds*

Lots of love Maria ‘let’s see where the spirits take us’ ur the best

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Maria Sledmere <[email protected]> 6 Feb 2019, 23:19 to denise.spamzine Dear Denise,

Makes so much sense to map your message sensibilities onto your taste in poetry! I am so torn between the percolated richness of the email, its classic deferral (omg hun I owe you a million emails!) through a sort of quantum dimension of procrastination, and in opposition the sugar rush nowness of IM. I am such a frantic typist that often I send the wrong messages or cross my wires or just gush too much, so email is probably a safe option for me. There is all too much blue in my Messenger windows...Temptation of x's and endless emojis. But such a beauty to IM and texts out of context, like I wonder how many people read your probs too late 4 a snog now :'((( as micro-fictions, versus poems. I have a whole folder of screenshots on my computer from things that happened on Facebook that I have no memory of. Something about the Romantic fragment, accumulating ruin.

(btw) I feel like these extracts also shed light upon Body Work somehow. Biodegradables versus hard minerals and synthetic matter. Inner/outer. Flush. Tbh I think the middle one was from you?

Yes the dissertation, the dissertation as labour; it's like you have to find your scaffold first. Sometimes I feel like the scaffold in that wonderful Sophie Collins poem, 'Healers', and I write and don't notice myself and suddenly I'm so there, but the scaffold is secretly taking her bolt pins out the more I write around her. You can only be so respectful to your scaffold when she's so in the way. Gemini problems?Duality; structure/content. What is it Tom McCarthy says: 'structure is content, geometry is everything'. I want to be a wee fractal in a sequence of massive refraction. Is that how it works? Back to scaffolds, maybe we need to find the kindest mode of dismantling, and that's when you work into a form or something. And then also the more organic structures! So for CC it's the whole crystal thing, and working out of crystal logic. And then you just go and go and it's wonderful, much extravagant fractality, almost like poetry as virus, replicate replicate, grow, change. Mm, it's so good. My friend Kirsty did this mad poem about a tree, I couldn't tell if it was a story or poem, it was just branching out in a way that seemed hungry, necessary, spreading its roots. She said she wrote it in a rush! As if trees could rush! I like to think she inhabited a concentrated moment of becoming-tree, like she was a myriad in the roots or leaves. I don't think it could have happened without the tree, you know? But also the tree was almost entirely absent, it was like a ghost of form. Maybe I forgot how it goes. The lines looked like branches or something. Can you have long-form concrete? Concrete I guess by necessity is long-form. It takes a lot of energy to make. People are building houses out of mycelium instead, which is rad. Talking of roots and that, I just wrote 26k words on ecopoetics & t h r e a d s over the past fortnight and it was kind of that process, like letting a sort of tapestry take hold and I was maybe just one more thread, I was hardly doing the weaving, everything was moving around me and I wanted to wriggle into more and more gaps. Becoming-thread, perhaps. The next step is to slack and cut, which is exciting. Where to even start?

Your description of the complex, organic project is so gorgeous. Poems slow-cooked in a lab with tender organic care. My two scientist PhD pals are always gramming these beautiful pictures of crystals they're growing or mad wave patterns on screens. And we go for lunch and I'm like what you doing this afternoon and they're like, Oh just shooting photons. And is that much different from spending your afternoon writing poems? (Yes, they'd groan). I'm just chasing bits of light. Reading Tom B's work it's this whole precision thing, the actual inhabitation of process as such, so you see the energy buzz between things. I don't mean to say simply this is atomic poetry or poetry as tool analysis. It's more a betweening.

Isn't it super difficult to write non-anthropocentrically and really inhabit micro-relationality and also sound interesting and sexy in the way Claire Colebrook (she has that great essay in Tom Cohen's Telemorphosis) describes as 'sexual indifference', i.e. that threat to heteronormative reproduction that 'has always been warded off precisely because it opens the human organism to mutation, production, lines of descent and annihilation beyond that of its own intentionality'? Well anyway Body Work really works this way for me, it's like a poetics of sexual indifference that is nevertheless charged with desire you can't really predict, it's something in the frisson between objects and lines and coils of form. I think of crystal charge, iPhone battery (mine's always dying, Gemini trait 100%), engines. Neat miniaturisations of entropy, surge, spike and flux. When the 'I' comes in I'm like hey, what flow are you? It's actually so satisfying to quote these poems as fragments btw, they can do so much on their own as much as in poems and pamphlets, I wonder if that goes back to the accessibility thing. Like the absolute charm of a line as auto-affection:

This bit is from 'Temper' and I go back to my point about the flush/fluster! Globe of air/your *bubble sounds*. Isn't everything held so neatly, and yet it never feels neat, it just feels sharp and sparking, this 'technical glossy finish' like a really nice car, the body paint of a poem, its prosody so tightly held it feels more surface, a selection of hues and textures. And the erotics of the text or at the very least its pleasure is the shift between bodies, synecdoche, yes you could say bodies without organs but things in themselves are also important. Maybe another poet who does this is Sylvia Legris, she writes these apparently impersonal poems filled to the seams with specialist lexis (you have to have like twelve tabs open per poem to get it), but there's an affirmative humour and energy that feels v much a personal sensibility, a deliberated skewing of world that splices the poet's agency among items, artefacts, language. I mean how nice are these poemsshe published in Granta. I feel like I want cutlery to read them with, if that makes sense. Maybe a scalpel, for the succulence. The appearance of an ear again!

And then the beautiful metallurgy of this line from Tom, like somebody pierced my ears with perfect silver and it let all the demons out:

I am worried about what a certain seizure would look like. When we talk about vitality is it a willing naivety towards matter qua matter, as if we could just step out of correlationism? Such thoughts for 11pm of a Wednesday night. I can't help but think of the body image that Elizabeth Grosz describes in Volatile Bodies, kind of riffing off Paul Schilder: 'What psychoanalytic theory makes clear is that the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical, physiological, and neurological levels'. And yeah, cool, what about the nonhuman body also? Has anyone done a really good psychoanalysis of the object. Parsed its psychic striations (traumatic or pleasurable residues of every microbial, huh?). In fact, what about the psychodynamic model of actual icebergs? Time we started literalising the matter of metaphors, absenting 'real cultural / medium' and filling with meltwater, fire and flow. Maybe it comes down to a bead of ink, the 'intimate concentrate' which is Lucozade, hangover piss, sick pH levels. So yeah, Body Work for me is this totally seductiveintersubjective space which actually works out pretty visceral states, sometimes disembodying me into a more fractal, mineral or bacterial being. I could start talking Kathryn Yusoff and geomorphism too, but maybe enough strata for one email? Plus I'm mixing my metaphors, I'm sure, mostly because I'm still morphing, dissolving inside those lines. I think I ate too many OXO cubes.

As for your oil burner boiling, sounds like you have an overactive candle? Maybe try a cooler tealight, nestle it to the back a little to redirect the strength of the flame? I like rosemary oil for remembrance, cranberry for comfort, ginger for energy. That line about resin is so nice. I was in Crianlarich at the weekend and my friend Patrick found this massive log and he carried it for so long that you could smell the resin on his skin, it was amazing. I keep thinking about the word 'pitch' and lush tree-ness, and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and poetry you can chew like new molasses, prior to melt. Is that how it works?

Somebody is smashing glass into a bin in my garden and probably I should just close the pamphlet...

...but it's like a delicious pdf that gives infinities...

Yours in multiples & cherryish flusters,

Maria xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxox

#review #tom betteridge #body work #Sad Press #reviews

1 note · View note

retoucherdark-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Photoshop Tutorial

Plenty of people have inquired how exactly I really do lots of my characterizations and peculiar aliens, and so I thought I would finally sit back and write a new tutorial.

I presumed a pleasure image to concentrate on is my face-off image for the Alien Nation 3 competition.

To begin with, I thought I d explain a bit about my strategy. I do a lot of modification layers, curing brush combined with a little liquefy, and cloning. My theory with characters is I try to leave as a number of the pixels. What I attempt to accomplish is create them a color that is different. I scarcely hotel to doing some other paint pops that are destructive.

First things first, I did not have the full concept in your mind once I started this image, and sometimes what the alien had been about to appear to be. In reality, I even plan for this to function as Tom Cruise for almost just about any reason other than that I enjoy the high end photo retoucher intense look in his head and it turned out to be a resolution record to govern without needing to work around .jpeg artifacts.

That said it evolved to some ridiculous goof on Mr. Cruise that wound up having a fantastic reaction from the Republicans thus, go figure!

Let us start...

Mr. Storm has too much hair to generate a persuasive alien, therefore, enables take it off!

Start by cloning out of the middle of the eyebrow outside developing a digital bald-cap.

Remember it doesn't fundamentally matter how far how to wash that your cloning is. It we'll fix it.

(Hint ) I sporadically un-check the aligned button towards the very top once I find an excellent subject of eyebrow which pits to function as a standard skin feel.

After roughing into a new mind contour from the eyebrow outside, then replicate in the gray backdrop from the surface, in creating a new border for the form of the mind.

Following Tom's new eyebrow is glistening and it could still look somewhat like a demanding patchwork of both skin-tones and feel.

Establish the magnitude of the healing brush into something moderate like 20 pixels or so and get started targeting the obvious of one's lousy trademark marks. Clone from the middle of the forehead. (preferably from the unaffected parts ) Magically up on letting upward out of each brush stroke, it's going to set the feel you've set merely there, and then auto color-correct it into to coincide with the nearby pixels! (obtained Id love that curing brush! ) )

Time and energy to eradicate a few of the pesky facial features...

To begin with, let's keep on with the rubber stamp tool and demanding from the removals of Tom's eyebrows in addition to his nose. Once those are all gone, I want to get rid of the piece of stubble and feel on his brow to acquire a complete smoother face.

Measure 4: Much like measure two we are likely to go straight back during these areas with the healing brush and find yourself a beautiful mixture of skin-tone and feel. (for all those wondering why that can be really just a two-step procedure involving the rubber stamp and also the healing brush, then the reply is relatively straightforward. I've gotten a better result from regions of the facial skin having a closest to my result color. Like that once the healing brush does its magical color-correction into the nearby pixels that you don't have any lingering color from the initial pixels inhabiting that place )

Time and energy to get started making his face a little more alien...

I decided I needed to bisect his head having a slit which travels the course of his head in addition to alter the functionality of the mouth.

To accomplish so I generated a new modification layer setting it into degrees.

At the degrees dialog box that I took in the low right white triangle to the middle of the histogram. This left the high lights of how the image rip-off.

Today every time a flat's modification coating is inserted into an image it creates a new clean white coating mask. Target this mask from the layers dialogue box and then invert it shifting. (Command/or Control Id )

Your image should look as if you inserted the degrees adjustment layer. You are all set to begin painting. Then I placed two vertical lines, then one on both sides of the lip of the mouth area.

(that is precisely what the coating mask appears like if you've completed painting )

Today I wish to provide these lines somewhat of thickness. Therefore, I will bring a layer style to the alteration coating.

Either tap into a negative subject of the coating in the coating's pouch or click onto the layer and select Blending Options from the menu that arises to match a coating style.

Here are the configurations that I've selected:

Fundamentally I only noodled up until the light also matched it gave the illusion of thickness into the traces of the facial skin.

I want to provide the traces some modeling to signify there are arteries at the borders of the trails. Therefore went to bring another alteration layer with levels. Now my guideline to be able not to adjust their color. The means to get this done would be to take away the difference of the color I am attempting to incorporate. Therefore that I can take away blue and green, in cases like this, I need a wash.

From the RGB slider that I shoot out high lights together with the underside white arrow taken towards the middle. And that I take out mid tones by slipping the gray shaft to the best. I am the green histogram and choose out green from the high lights, (underside white arrow, then go on into the left) I then do the same with all the gloomy. Even though I take more blue out to compel at the color into more of the opposed to your red. Reach fine from the dialogue box and then aim the mask at the modification layer and invert it.

Today, we're prepared to paint with all the reddish color correction. Make use of a soft border brush 20 30 pixels in size and gently color in approximately every one the traces of the facial skin. Im by applying this particular color correction to begin a number of the bone workaround the eyes together with to generate several shadow locations.

That is a measure that's going to become replicated again and again! I tend to possess heaps of modification layers every serving a color-correction which advertisements or remove from the coating before it. If things get somewhat tricky. .Sorry!

I initially thought I would desire this alien to become aquatic, and so I started down the trail of bright coloring to produce him fish just such as (apparently at any time after I decided to change directions somewhat ).

We are going to accomplish a little shading with a turquoise green tone.

I need this alien to possess a wrinkled feel to his head, rather than glue within a feeling will use my same procedure just like the former modification layers and go to town along with my Wacom tablet computer and stick to the contours of his head and begin to introduce some intriguing shapes and lines that'll start to shape the personality.

With this modification layer Im color adjusting to your rusty orange tone.

Continuing the simulating of the facial skin, I make a dark reddish color correction and get started painting squiggles all around the face area. You'd be amazed how effective that is when warmed on while inside the quantities that are ideal. I discovered this method called figure eights with the way of a make. (They do that kind of item to find skin blotchiness for good special effects makeups, and so I figured why not check it out for virtual blushes, huh?)

Fundamentally what I do will work in tight nit spots with varying amounts of pressure in my pill computer.

Eliminate a couple of other pesky body parts.

Only at that point, I started getting an adequate idea of the way I needed the final piece to check and that I chose people ears to go!

A great deal more color!

I inserted red into the slits of the head to produce them stand out more.

A little cardiovascular work. I included a few darkish veins.

Produce a glowing whitish, yellowish adjustment coating and then sew the mask to paint having a huge feathered brush. Do the shadow areas using a dark brownish color correction focusing into the shadow and light regions of the face being careful not to place shadows where they don't belong.

Another highlight color-correction that time around stained with a 10-pixel brush to essentially make textured lines around the base of the eyes and also at the borders of the lips.

Another dark color-correction to create a few colored stripes and wrinkles to the lips and forehead, creating shining lines into the face area.

Another accent color-correction to put twist specular hi-lights on the newly generated wrinkles.

Full color to a light green. I made the decision now I wasn't going to help keep him. Therefore, a muted coloration was generated by me and then also did a coating mask to sweep it.

I followed up this with a dark reddish color to generate darkly shaded sections of the head and put in comparison to the bone restructuring.

His face appeared too high now, and I am a sucker for older StarTrek type extraterrestrial beings, therefore that I thought I'd opt for a beautiful seen Trill-like pattern (if you watched STNG or even DS9 the mention is eloquent.)

I wanted to possess stains which were trimmed having a darker color and also maintain a lighter color at the middle. I Command/Control-clicked onto the layer mask for the stains color-correction loading its coating mask. I then produced a new adjustment layer which brightened the last one building an outside stroke to my stains and a green tone.

My idea once I began directing this alien to get a peculiar form of species was I would displace Tom's eyes. It looked interesting nonetheless it rendered him unrecognizable. And that I picked the intense look in his eyes which steered me to the image since the origin from the first location. I merely shifted to reddish to the color of the eyes.

Now I had been happy with the cryptic face, and I chose to proceed and produce a scene outside of it.

Therefore I spared my multi-layered color-correction alien and then piled all of my layers together and blended them that I might work somewhat faster (things get somewhat slow with this numerous layers!).

After consolidating the layers that I stored this for a new version and proceeded on into the upcoming few information.

With hardly any modification I watched this as a rubber mask that was lost that was perfect to place to the dining table facing the newly revealed alien.

Then I moved to Liquefy.

I flexed and warped the facial skin area into squish it and also make it seem like churns up rubberized putting onto a desk.

Then, also that I understand in this time sef mccullough, this could shock you...I inserted a modification layer!

I started using a darkish color and gently slit in certain huge wrinkles to signify the folds of the mask.

Then I emphasized those traces with another modification layer.

Then I went over the new springs using a sizable brushed dark color-correction to smooth out things a little.

Another glowing color correction to get things to appears shiny.

And a super-dark color correction to the shadow.

I packed most this up into friends, replicated it and then merged the copy bunch.

Then put the mask onto its side and left a dark gray solid to be a symbol of a desktop for it to lay.

Then following some more Google hunts for several Scleral lenses, some spirit gum glue, and a few sponges for application of the adhesive, I put all together using some vertical blurring to the flopped reflections onto the desk... Done!

1 note · View note

entergamingxp · 5 years ago

Text

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst still offers an open-world city like no other • Eurogamer.net

Years ago, EA’s building in the UK was a Foster and Partners number in Chertsey. And it had a handful of interesting features. There was a moat. There were ducks involved, or maybe swans. The front of the structure came off (on purpose) and leaked (not on purpose). From the air the whole thing looked a bit like the letter E. Electronic!

Inside it was pure Bond lair, of course, this being the era which also gave us the doomy concrete spinal excavation of Westminster Tube Station, my favourite building in London because I am a massive child, loose in the world with nothing in my skull but feathers. (Westminster Tube is definitely Bond, but definitely also Brosnan Bond.) Anyway, EA’s place: with oddly angled windows ensuring you never knew which direction the automatic blinds were going to descend from, skeletal staircases and lots of dark surfaces. You can see it for yourself in films like Inception and TV shows like Jekyll. Anything with a touch of horror or unease. The Bond people never actually used it, I gather. The heights were not quite right for it to be truly deathly, but it did a good job of being Deathly Junior. A mausoleum built to the specs of a condominium. EA doesn’t live there any more.

I’ve spent the last few days in another collision of EA and architecture, though. And again, although Foster and Partners were not involved, it’s also disquieting and abstractly villainous and filled with odd features. A lot of people might argue that it leaks, too, or at least that it is not quite fit for purpose. No matter. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is finally on Steam and I have been running and jumping, diving and swooping across its squeaky world. I’m in love.

To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings

Emad has already made the case that this game is politically and socially a lot more interesting and progressive than most video game sequels. If you only read one piece on Mirror’s Edge today, re-read his! Meanwhile, I’m going to look purely at the game’s landscape – how it affects the game’s atmosphere and how it shapes the feeling of play.

Remember when they announced a sequel to Mirror’s Edge, the pristine parkour-heavy action game from Dice, all shot through with wiry energy and surprising heft, and they said it was going to be open-world this time? I remember thinking: that’s going to have to be a very different kind of open world. The first game was emphatically not open-world, and it’s hard to see how it would have worked in that way. Instead, each level was a sort of white-box Rubik’s Snake of urban design, gloriously sunny and bleached outside, the surfaces somehow chalky, and chalk is just the remains of the dead isn’t it? And then, muddly and fussy and a bit of a migraine indoors.

These places were great, if you ask me. I even liked getting lost in office buildings with the hint button pointing me mindlessly at my own feet when I really needed an exit. But it wasn’t for everyone, which is a phrase that must not delight an outfit like EA. And the idea of exploding these spaces outwards, retaining their intricacy while allowing them to become open-world areas fit for exploration and repeated journeys and multiple purposes – I can imagine the kind of headaches this design would cause. The first Mirror’s Edge bristled with places that gave the careful impression that they connected to other places. But that’s very different to places that actually do connect.

Anyway, the genius of Catalyst – and it is genius; despite the understandably chilly reception the game got, I find it intermittently more than thrilling – is that its open spaces do connect, but also still give the impression that there are yet deeper connections that cannot be accessed. Rooftops, alleyways and ladders! Ducts and open-air business suites, that indoor-outdoor lifestyle everyone’s after in the Valley. All of this. Drainpipes, server boxes, cooling fans that you learn to pause so you can move through them. This is the City of Glass, all but devoid of life and with a skyline that looks like it’ s made from guesswork renders of next-gen consoles. This is a city of paths and routes, but as the name suggests, it’s also a city of surfaces.

What I mean is that I’m dazzled by the sheer number of times I find myself looking through a surface that’s in front of me. There are windows, obviously, giving me views of sterile workspaces or endless iterations of corporate artwork. But then there are vents with slatted surfaces giving a glimmer of what’s beyond. And the floors! You never saw such floors. There are times when you look down and see through the floor, through grills or thin metal rattle-punched with holes, through squeaky clear stuff that is neither glass nor plastic but seems to have been imported from J.J. Abram’s Enterprise. Look down into rooms you maybe can or cannot access. Additional crawlspaces that may or may not be meant for your use.

Then look up. Again, oppressively bleached surfaces and clear light rule in this city. The city is the story here – so cold and unkind and heavy-handed. But the further you go, the more you find missions in which you leave the city itself behind and below with little warning and find yourself climbing through the innards of giant computers. Perhaps the point is that the city itself is a computer, with electrons moving about with more agency than the humans. Certainly more at home with these straight lines and sharp turns than the rare people you sometimes glimpse, looking down through a glass ceiling somewhere, all of them trapped in rooms that don’t seem to have any obvious entrances or exits.

What does this place allow for? It’s surprisingly entertaining really. It looks like an afternoon at the dentist but it encourages zip and flow. The best mission has you going up a skyscraper to remove something rather crucial to its design at the top. It’s the point in the game where you learn the fast-turn move that you may have neglected to buy up until now because it looked like a faff. Suddenly all the things you can do with your move-set link together because of that fast-turn. It reminds me in full pelt of Burnout Paradise, actually, that sense of carving a perfect channel through a world that rushes around you but magically never connects when you most fear it’s going to. Pipes, used for climbing, are suddenly there to allow you to do quick quarter circle moves. The red items of runner vision line up so beautifully that you can forget that this is another game about rebellion delivered by means of following a line from the start to the finish. A rush.

And when you do hit the ground, it’s worth something. I love the moment of impact when you’re left jarred and shaking and looking at your hands on the beautifully rendered floor, and glimpsing all those possible places beneath it. They’re necessary, these heavy stops. They are the weighted price you pay that makes all that gliding and dashing feel fair, feel real. They’re the bill being settled. And they too are built into the city.

Images like this are a bit of a reminder that EA didn’t know how to market this one in a world where they clearly feared everyone else was playing Assassin’s Creed.

Meanwhile, when the flow breaks, this game is the closest thing I have ever encountered to those dreams where you have to do something simple but can’t. For me it’s always dialling a phone number, prodding in the wrong buttons, deleting, starting over, unable to stumble through the area code. It seems like a cold place, even an annoying place. But in between missions I’m finding the City of Glass is surprisingly fun to sweep around and collect doodads in and do the side-stuff. It’s fun to get lost, to get stuck in those nightmare loops. It’s fun just to race about this jumble, always moving up and down, a city defined by a control scheme which really only wants you to think about whether to move up or down in the first place.

And weirdly it keeps reminding me of real locations, much more than a lot of other video game cities ever do. Maybe it’s a narrowing of specifics, but a scattering of specifics. San Andreas is Los Angeles and only Los Angeles. Crackdown 3 is pure cold-filtered Croydon with no added sugar. The emptiness of the City of Glass makes me remember ancient weekends exploring the deserted City in London, or one night, long ago, when a girlfriend and I followed a single dancing trail of white house paint that had been dribbled along miles of the South Bank. But it doesn’t stay in London. It’s fun to wander through the City of Glass and ponder the possible influences, in fact. I wonder about the things that the invisible designers (who seem to lurk, as open-world designers always do, high overhead, peering down, not entirely benevolent) have read that I may have read too, like an old Lloyd Wright Jr plan to turn Bunker Hill in Los Angeles into a kind of book-end necropolis, a giant walled space where different modes of transport were separated out on tracks of different heights and different widths. To be surrounded by traffic menageries that you sensed but would never fully see. That’s very Mirror’s Edge.

What this city has that is all its own, though, and I think that this will be my lingering memory of this game, is those layers upon layers: not-glass, not-grill, not-plastic, all of them slides giving glimpses of the worlds trapped beneath them. And over it all this singular texture that I now realise unites everything while leaving everything subtly unreadable. This gloss. Slick and squeaky – visual and aural noise.

Everything in the city has been coated in this stuff, this gloss, so you will never really know what it is. Plastic, concrete, foam? The rudiments of materials are always beautifully done. But then there is always a sense of a micro-layer on top, a kandy-ing. And like so much else here, I kind of love it.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/mirrors-edge-catalyst-still-offers-an-open-world-city-like-no-other-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mirrors-edge-catalyst-still-offers-an-open-world-city-like-no-other-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

0 notes

derneue3-blog · 7 years ago

Text

7 Tips for Incorporating Texture in Your Illustrations

Looking for ways to add visual interest to your illustrations? Follow along as these pros share their favorite tips for using creative textures.

In this digital age, handcrafted imagery is a rarity, but image-buyers continue to crave designs that seem homemade and tangible. This year, Shutterstock named Digital Crafts as one of the top emerging trends in illustration. The Digital Crafts movement combines the convenience and efficiency of modern technology with the tactile, authentic mood we associate with traditional art forms like embroidery, origami, or even watercolor painting. The difference between a mediocre image and a great one can come down to one thing: the textures.

By successfully tapping into this trend, leading illustrators and vector artists produce images that seem timeless and cutting-edge at the same time. But creating two dimensional designs with a textured look is a challenge. Often, it means thinking outside the box by combining totally different methods or even inventing a whole new technique. We asked seven top illustrators from the Shutterstock collection to share the secrets behind some of their most successful images. Read on to see how they've updated fine craftsmanship for the 21st century.

1. “I add small, intentional defects and imperfections to emulate the look of manually cut elements.”

wacomka

Image by wacomka.

What's the story behind this illustration?

As a designer, I always pay attention to unique, handmade things. On my wedding day, there was a wall decorated with big, oversized, handmade paper flowers. I later decided to incorporate this feeling into my 3D graphics. Adding the paper texture was a simple and elegant way to make my botanical digital designs look like real handmade paper craft. There are a lot of 3D renders of paper flowers in my portfolio. I like to play with shapes and colors, applying textures and arranging flowers into different compositions.

Image by wacomka.

Pro Tip:

When modeling 3D elements, such as paper flowers, I prefer not to create mathematically precise or symmetrical shapes. I add small, intentional defects and imperfections to emulate the look of manually cut elements. It works perfectly with the texture of real paper.

2. “Find something that fascinates you, apart from drawing, and incorporate it into your work.”

Sopelkin

Image by Sopelkin.

What's the story behind this illustration?

I have always been inspired by painting, and embroidery is tangible painting on fabric. It is diligent work that requires a lot of patience, and I could not allow myself to devote the time to this activity. The other day, it occurred to me to draw embroidery in vector. It was exciting, and I was satisfied with the result. I began to embroider more using Adobe Illustrator. I like that my vectors are similar to embroidered paintings or watercolor sketches; I think there is a soul in my electronic works.

Image by Sopelkin.

Pro Tip:

Look for something that inspires you in real life. Find something that fascinates you, apart from drawing, and incorporate it into your work. The result will be twice as interesting.

Instagram

3. “My trick is drawing lots of strokes with a liner on paper and then photographing and tracing it. It is rather laborious, but I like the result.”

mamita (Marina Vorontsova)

Image by mamita (Marina Vorontsova).

What's the story behind this illustration?

This pattern was created from drawings that I initially rejected. I planned to throw them away because I didn't like them very much. This often happens. After a while, I look at them with fresh eyes. This time, I decided to revive these old works. I slightly modified them in Photoshop and created a pattern from the individual details. It turned out a little boring, but I remembered the coloring of Chinese and Japanese lacquer miniatures and decided to apply it here. With the help of gold, black, and red colors, it became more expressive. Now it is one of my bestselling works. Such stories teach us not to stop halfway but to carry everything out from beginning to end.

mamita (Marina Vorontsova).

Pictured: [1] mamita (Marina Vorontsova). [2] mamita (Marina Vorontsova). [3] mamita (Marina Vorontsova).

Pro Tip:

My drawings are all handmade. My trick is drawing lots of strokes with a liner on paper and then photographing and tracing it. It is rather laborious, but I like the result. In the past, I looked for a way to reduce the time needed to create an illustration. I applied readymade textures to my drawings and used scripts, but the automatic texture is poorly controlled, so I wasn't comfortable with it.

The handmade nature of my work may give the impression that I am stuck in the last century. Today, artificial intelligence writes poetry, makes music, paints, and so much more. But there is a charm to drawings made by hand on paper. There is a soul and a trace of personality. I adore the artists who use new technologies, and I admire their achievements, but the work of the old masters is more inspiring to me.

4. “When I make textured elements on paper, I usually make them larger than I expect them to be in the final image because it allows me to save more details when scanning.”

Ms Moloko (Nadezhda Shikina)

Image by Ms Moloko (Nadezhda Shikina).

What's the story behind this illustration?

In this pattern, I wanted to play with a combination of floral and geometric elements. I decided to make the geometrical elements more relaxed to give the pattern a more natural, casual look, as if somebody had drawn the stripes with a paintbrush. In order to do that, I used a handmade textured brush stroke, which I scanned and edited a little bit digitally.

Image by Ms Moloko (Nadezhda Shikina).

Pro Tip:

Often the shapes and lines of vector art are regular, perfectly precise, and clean to give the impression of a geometrically ideal image. That's great, but sometimes we want images that seem a bit more tactile and handmade. I look for ways to combine digital and traditional art in one image. When I make textured elements on paper, I usually make them larger than I expect them to be in the final image because it allows me to save more details when scanning. It's also a good idea to have a collection of simple textured shapes and strokes to use as additional elements in the future. You can use them later to make more complex objects or to create digital brushes.

5. “When you use a very dense pattern, you always run the risk of getting a rather flat and uninteresting image, so I play with the contrasts created by direct lighting, and I focus only on one area.”

Gualtiero Boffi

Image by Gualtiero Boffi.

What's the story behind this illustration?

I have always liked the different effects that carbon fiber can create. According to the lighting, the image itself can change radically. It can be opaque or extremely shiny, and it can change if you simply move the light or the observation point. It's very versatile, and in this case, I wanted to create an image that had a modern atmosphere that recalled the sci-fi style typical of video games. In this case, I could not resist the addition of the glowing light strip!

Gualtiero Boffi.

Pictured: [1] Gualtiero Boffi. [2] Gualtiero Boffi.

Pro Tip:

When you use a very dense pattern, you always run the risk of getting a rather flat and uninteresting image, so I play with the contrasts created by direct lighting, and I focus only on one area. In the image above, I created a hexagonal grid to break the homogeneity of the carbon fiber. I wanted to play with different levels of depth to accentuate the three-dimensionality.

6. “One of my favorite tools is the Blend tool, which is great if you want to create a repetitive texture (like for feathers), engraved elements, or precise hand-drawn details.”

mashakotcur

Image by mashakotcur.

What's the story behind this illustration?

This is one of my best-selling illustrations on Shutterstock. I live in a small, forested village. Near my house is a big meadow with a lot of wildflowers. Almost every summer morning, I drink coffee and go walk there with my Canon. One morning, I noticed a lot of small butterflies on the grass with wide open wings after the rain. They couldn't fly away, as their wings were still wet, so I was able to carefully shoot them on my camera. The tulips from the illustration are from my small garden. The idea was to create something pretty and fresh but at the same time nostalgic and vintage-inspired.

mashakotcur.

Pictured: [1] mashakotcur. [2] mashakotcur.

Pro Tip:

Pay attention to small details and textures for a realistic, lively look. I love to mix different textures from real source materials. One of my favorite tools is the Blend tool, which is great if you want to create a repetitive texture (like for feathers), engraved elements, or precise hand-drawn details. You can also create your own customized tools. For me, it was a bit of a problem finding good brushes for vector drawing in Adobe Illustrator, but I thought, “Hey! If I can't find what I need, why not create it?” I took real brushes, pens, and inks, and I made a few basic strokes on paper and then shot them. I edited the resulting image and traced it in vector to create my own brushes. Now I use them again and again in all kinds of different illustrations.

Instagram

7. “Textures are everywhere around us: wood, paper, fabric, leaves, grass, flowers, stones, etc. Just look around and pay attention to everything.”

Le Panda (Elena Efremova)

Image by Le Panda (Elena Efremova).

What's the story behind this illustration?

In this illustration, I mixed textures from different parts of the world. The texture of the tree I photographed was on an old door in Provence, France. The ornament was from the time I studied how to paint with henna in India on the island of Diu. I drew the flowers in a blooming park in Moscow in the spring. The result is a mixture of styles and textures.

Image by Le Panda (Elena Efremova).

Pro Tip:

Do not be afraid to play. Textures are everywhere around us: wood, paper, fabric, leaves, grass, flowers, stones, etc. Just look around and pay attention to everything. Mixing different textures is interesting and fun, like a game.

Instagram

Top Image by Le Panda (Elena Efremova).

The post 7 Tips for Incorporating Texture in Your Illustrations appeared first on The Shutterstock Blog.

0 notes

russellthornton · 8 years ago

Text

Cunnilingus Techniques: Secrets to Make Her Cum with Your Tongue

If you’ve wanted to go from beginner to pro in oral sex, you have to spiff up your cunnilingus techniques. Wait until you wow your partner.

When it comes to receiving satisfying oral sex, there can be quite the gender disparity. While men can get off easily with a mouth wrapped around their parts, there have been many instances where women lay bored and frustrated while their partner, tongue numb, thinks they’re doing a great job despite the moans ending. Girls know a good oral orgasm can be mind-blowing when it happens. But for guys, the road is a tough one to tread. It’s time to brush up on the cunnilingus techniques.

So how do you perform the perfect oral sex on a woman? Sadly, there is no shortcut formula to eating her to an explosive orgasm.

The female genitalia register pleasure in different ways depending on the person. However, these are some general ideas on how to “map” her pleasure pathways. They help you give her the cunnilingus to scream for without wearing your tongue to dehydration.

Quick Tips

#1 Prepare for a long oral session. Even if you managed to give your partner an oral orgasm before, it is practically impossible for you to replicate the exact conditions of the moment you gave her the orgasm.

Female orgasms happen after she releases that build-up of sexual tension from your lip work. This “build-up” tends to be a long process. There’s no shortcut around it. Therefore prepare yourself by keeping your stamina going and adopting a comfortable position in order to avoid getting a stiff neck when it’s underway. [Read: Female confessions: The feeling of oral sex for women]

#2 Tongue switch. Your tongue is the one which usually does most of the work here. Prolonged use renders it dry and numb. This happens due to the saliva evaporating making flesh contact rough, ultimately wearing down the muscles that allows you to control the tongue. One way to ease this problem is by switching between the top and bottom surfaces of the tongue.

The top gives that bumpy texture from the papillae which women love while the obverse side has a smooth slick surface which allows easier sliding action. Alternating between the two surfaces allows you to last longer during cunnilingus.

#3 Blindfolds. Blindfolds help minimize external stimuli making her less distracted from your chomping face and more focused on the sensations coming from her lady parts. [Read: Blindfold sex: 14 sensual ways to use blindfolds in bed]

#4 Get into a comfy position. In order to last longer and to maintain flesh to flesh contact at all times, get into a position which puts less stress on your neck since your head constantly moves and bobs about. Usually, guys prefer the lying down on the stomach position while the female partner lies on the back as she’s being eaten.

However, some say sitting down on the floor while the partner lies on the edge of the bed is more comfortable. Since we’re pretty much used to this position more than lying down on the stomach.

#5 Mind her reaction. If you think about it, performing cunnilingus is like picking a lock. You’re basically blind and your only clue is by listening to the sounds the lock makes.

In the same way, the only way to know if you’re doing it correctly is when she says *or moans* so. It is important to pay attention to how she reacts to what you are doing.

There are a lot of ways to give her oral and some techniques result in a variety of reactions. If you do something that makes her silent as a grave, stop and move your tongue another way. Keep switching until you find that sweet spot that would make her moan and beg for more until she finishes. [Read: What does a vagina feel like? 21 confessions from men]

Cunnilingus Techniques

#1 Teasing. The key to good cunnilingus is by teasing her. As mentioned, the best oral orgasm is achieved by building up that sexual tension and then assisting her into an explosive release.

Teasing requires you to stimulate her in a way that she wants for some time in order to lead her just right near the edge of orgasm then pulling her back from the brink.

This builds up the anticipation which makes her more responsive and sensitive to stimulation. Again, pay attention to her reaction. When she reaches that “breaking point” then allow her to release that tension into one big orgasm. [Read: Cunnilingus pro – 16 tips to use your tongue and blow her mind]

#2 Do not attack her clitoris directly. The clitoris is a very sensitive spot. We all know that just a tiny touch will be enough to send her knees buckling. However, focusing on this area alone leads to a boring and sometimes painful experience for her.

Moving back to teasing, it will be better if you deliberately avoid stimulating her clitoris and focus on the area near and around it. This gives her that anticipation and that “almost there” sensation which leads to a more powerful orgasm.

#3 Light touches like a feather. In addition to avoiding direct contact with her pleasure place, it also helps if you use very subtle and light touches on her lady parts.

Light touches like a graze of the tip of your tongue gives her the anticipation and tweaks her clitoris to be more sensitive in order to feel your tongue better. It’s like tricking a prey to get out of the den for the capture. [Read: 10 sexy ways to please the clitoris]

#4 Use slow, rhythmic motions. Using slow rhythmic motions allows her to savor every touch of your mouth and also allows you to conserve more stamina. The key to a rhythm is finding a pattern where she gets that pleasure. Then doing it until she wants you to do a different thing. There are many combinations to choose from such as:

– Circular motions around the clitoris – touch the area around it with your tongue except the clitoris.

– Sucking the clitoris – wrap your lips around the clit and the hood, suck upward and release like how you would suck her nipples.

– Side sweeping tongue motion – flick your tongue from side to side lightly grazing the tip of her clit.

– The up and down flick – imagine you’re playing with a light switch, turning it off and on. Now do that to her clit with your tongue. [Read: What does it feel like to be eaten out? Find out here]

#5 Stick a finger inside for good measure. Girls love that finger inside her while you nibble on her clit. But don’t get carried away and piston-pump her insides vigorously. Sometimes, just sticking your finger inside and sliding it in and out is enough.

Girls just need something to clamp their vaginas down on to when they’re spasming during cunnilingus. If you think you can keep your rhythm, stimulate her G-spot too to speed up the process. [Read: How to finger a girl: 10 fingering techniques to make her orgasm]

#6 Learn to sustain your rhythm when the time comes. One problem that arises is that the guy fails to keep his tongue in motion due to fatigue by the time she’s about to come. Remember that when you find the sweet spot, keep mashing her button until the end, and don’t even dare to stop. If you do, you’ll end up with a very frustrated girl.

The last few seconds prior to orgasm is the decisive moment so you need to endure and sustain until she finishes. This is why it helps you to get into a comfortable position, and be mindful of her reactions to know if she’s about to come or not.

[Read: How to eat a girl out – 15 secrets to make any girl scream]

Every girl is different and so is their journey to an orgasm. While there is no easy shortcut formula sure to give her an orgasm from your cunnilingus techniques at a given moment, there are things that help you know how to attack her from below.

The post Cunnilingus Techniques: Secrets to Make Her Cum with Your Tongue is the original content of LovePanky - Your Guide to Better Love and Relationships.

0 notes