The Art of Bloodletters
This bloodstain was actually an image I created for the original 
Bloodletters logo, when the site first launched way back in June of 1999.
When I was trying to come up with a graphic to illustrate “The Leak”, I quickly realized that I already had a graphic that would be perfect.
People have asked me how I managed to create such a realistic-looking splatter in Photoshop, and truth be told, I did spend a while playing with
various filters to create one — and then grabbed a piece of paper, an eye-dropper, and some red food coloring instead! A few drops of food
coloring from the height of about three or four feet achieved the amount of “splatter” I was after. All I needed to do was scan it in,
and make the color a little darker.
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I'd had a couple of people tell me that they were really struck by the
carousel horse mentioned in “Safe
House” so I thought it was a natural motif for illustrating that
story, along with the
pictures of children. It somehow didn't look disturbing enough, until I thought to remove and blur the eyes on the black-and-white photos — and
now I can hardly stand to look at it, so I suppose it's effective.
This was the first piece that I created for version 3.0 that I didn't have any elements on-hand for. I found them all with Google's image
search — I hope I'm not violating any copyrights here by using them, but my understanding is that fair use laws allow you to use found images if
you only use a portion of the original images, and if you alter them substantially. I think I'm safe on that score.
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“Designing the Martyr” was actually a
piece I created for version 2.0 of this site, back when the site contained a gallery of my Photoshop work. (I've since decided I'd rather have the
art on this site 
complement the content, rather than having it be content in its own right.) The burning heart motif of the image went thematically well with
the secret heart motif of “Heartbeat,” so it made a natural illustration for the story, although I didn't have
the story in mind at all when I made the original image.
I should mention here that I have a simple, black-work tattoo of the burning heart logo here, on my upper left arm — I created the logo for my tattoo, and it later started turning up as a motif in my artwork and graphic design. The design signifies passion to me, passion and devotion. It's also a very spiritual symbol — you might recognize it as a stylized version of a Sacred Heart, a symbol that's always appealed to me even though I'm not Christian.
It also symbolizes mortality to me — the fact that life is a bounded, finite thing that gets used up and burnt away. The tattoo is a reminder to me to burn as bright as I can while I'm here.
