by deciding to not post here until i complete the layout, for which i have typically grand ambitions, i've given myself the perfect excuse to not actually make a start on doing anything. however, by agreeing to edit one last edition of my beloved pelican (i.e. the magazine that ate my life), i have a perfect way to synergise my efforts and thus leverage an expedited solution to both these problems.

essentially, i've decided to give myself a visual arts project in the form of designing the cover for this edition. i've always loved drawing without really being very good at it, but over the last year i've been experimenting with drawing little cartoony kind of characters with marker pens, and then scanning these basic images and using photoshop to finish them off. the image i'm going to be trying to create is a bunch of spooky ghosts emerging from an antique vcr (chris suggested a gramophone, but i'm going with vcr) which ties into both the theme of edition 1 (unfinished business) and what this blog is all about (see post one)


1. this is the scan of my first sketch, in permanent marker. besides not being very good, the marker was a fine point, which i find tend to stick to the page, making it very hard to draw smooth, even lines. this becomes a problem when the image is viewed at hi-res


2. this is a scan of one of my second lot of sketches. i got much nicer lines by switching to whiteboard marker on art paper, but unfortunately it didn't occur to me that the art paper i was using was bigger than my scanner. nothing i can't fix in photoshop though. i also realised that instead of drawing a bunch of ghosts, it was easier to draw them separately and composite them digitally later. ultimately the plan is to use photoshop to achieve some things i couldn't have drawn by hand due to prohibitive complexity, but we'll see how things go.


3. this is a colour mock-up of the first version of the cover. i found some watercolour brushes that i really like, but didn't really experiment with them so much as just click on the page where i wanted them. i like the boldness of the colours, the crayon colouring effect and the title font, but i don't much care for the overall composition, probably because i basically just slapped things in anywhere. in the next version i'm planning to heavily rework the brush effects, make the black texturing more subtle and work in a shadow effect for the ghosts that will (hopefully) be a very translucent watercolour style wash


4. the other new thing i figured out in process is that it would be good to have lots of smaller ghosts, which i have now have about a million of. current plan is to have the main ones flying out of a pelican's mouth and smaller ones flying out of things like a gramophone (yay!), an old boot, etc.

pretty adequate stuff for someone with average artistic ability! hopefully the finished product will help make this seem like a procedural for genius and less like whatever it is right now

now for a short word on where exactly i am coming from with the name itself. the root of it all is sony's betamax system, which was an ill-fated rival of VHS. the beta part of the name came from the way the tape spooled in the cassette, which looked like the greek letter beta. betamax tanked because it couldn't compete with VHS for recording time, even though it arguably produced a better quality picture.

the iota bit comes from me choosing a different letter from the greek alphabet. in english iota means "a very small amount", and this meaning arose from the Council of Nicaea, where a bunch of catholic types banged their heads together over various elements of the bible, most controversially whether the holy trinity literally meant that jesus was part of god. there was two conflicting greek translations of scripture, one with the word 'homoousios' would mean that jesus was of the same substance, while the other 'homoiousios', would mean that Jesus was of similar substance. this whole theological debate, which eventually lead to the backers of similar being excommunicated and branded as heretics all came back to one iota of difference.

so, for me the name is supposed to evoke dead technology and tiny but significant differences