Shooshie

I'm Shooshie, and my tile is the Post-Industrial Angel. I don't know why, but the instant I saw my three borders I pictured her, and she was somehow working an apparatus that could be the cause of change in the mosiac or in our world. She should be a wise innocent, like a Mona Lisa, who accepts what she has to do, and does it with sadness but resolution. I'm happy that I was able to create pretty much my first impression, though I refined it as I saw it develop. This was my first full-blown use of Photoshop 7, so there were delays as I learned some of the features, leaving no time to clean up things like shadows in the curtains, and some of the background. I last used Photoshop 3.x (slow to upgrade), so there was a learning curve.

There are about 11 objects made from copies of the same triangular grouping in Adobe Illustrator.

When I made the first triangular extension for Lori's sun graphic, it required about12 triangles, overlaid and shaded to produce a continuous extension from the existing sun pattern. Rather than make each group separately, I used the same one again and again, only altering the colors in the layers, the length and the rotation. Then I began deforming these patterns and thus made other objects for the picture. The spiral handle, the distant flare, the melted rods, the musical instruments, and the long wall behind the water were all morphed from copies of the same group. I found that the more I used it, the more the picture held together. It's like a motif in a symphony or a repeated pattern in a song or poem. It kind of rhymes.

The girl was modeled from several pictures, because I could not find any posed the way I wanted. So, I cut them up and put them back together, then drew over them with the paintbrush, cloning tool, blur tool, and healing brush. Once you lay out the shape with a raw color, the rest falls in place with shadows, hues, and shades. The face, too, started out real, but by the time I was done there was nothing left of the original. The only traces of graphics that I did not create are parts of the hair and the flying hawk.

The dress started with some painted marks, then an added layer effect. The patterns on the dress were created with the eraser, which interacted with the layer effects to produce those patterns. I thought that was kinda cool. You can look at a sequence of pictures illustrating the creation of my "Post Industrial Angel" at this site.

Shooshie lives in the Lakewood area of Dallas, Texas, where he freelances as a writer and as a music arranger, director, and recording engineer. Raised on an East Texas on a horse farm, he grew tired of shovels and hay and went to music school where he got advanced degrees. After playing music for a living, he went into management, arranging, and directing, He enjoys writing as a contrast between his long-term engagements as a music director and arranger for touring performing arts concerts and shows. Shooshie, wife Karen, son Clifton, and daughter Bronwen take to the concrete for inline skating as an activity they can all enjoy outdoors on the many trails, parks, and public areas of Dallas and other cities they travel to. Shooshie has divided his time for the past decade between Dallas, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, where his musical jobs take him. has grown to love the Southwest as his real home; the scenery is like no other place on earth. He works and plays on Macintosh computers, which he started with in 1984, correctly anticipating that it would change the world of music.

Shooshie has many creative interests, which he tries to limit to writing poetry, painting and drawing, playing piano, family time with his kids and loved ones, reading, skating, hiking, traveling, and walking the dogs. You can see some of his paintings at:

http://homepage.mac.com/shoosh

Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. Copyrights are held by the individual artists.