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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This clawed hand image was another piece of repurposed art — the hand and nails formed part of the logo for version 2.0 of Bloodletters. (This is currently version 4.0, for those of you keeping track.)

While working on the illustration for “Scratcher” I found a good picture of a tattoo gun on-line and altered it and cleaned it up a little. I was just looking for a good background to put it against, when I realized that it might look good with these other needles. I think it does.

I've had people ask me if the “finger nails” are real, or a Photoshop creation. They are real; that's the set I own. They're very, very sharp, and lot of fun to play with. (They are, of course, actually meant to be worn on the back of the fingers, but it looked neater this way for the sake of the image.) That's my own hand you see in the image, as well; I just put on the “nails” and laid my hand gently on the scanner.

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The shackled heart image was created for an entirely different story, but I think it suits the themes of “Still Life” quite well. It was composed entirely from actual objects captured by my scanner. I was a little concerned the ankle-cuff might scratch the glass of the scanner bed, but I was careful, and it worked out fine. The heart is a foam-rubber heart from a Halloween supply store that I just happened to have lying around. (As Robert Bloch said, “I have the heart of a twelve-year-old boy — in a jar on my desk.”)

The background is actually an Autumn leaf I found a couple of years ago, already dried and perfect. I haven't tampered with the color or the shape at all -- it really was heart-shaped and deep blood-red. I scanned it when I first brought it home, knowing that it wasn't going to last, knowing that I would find a use for its image in an art project someday.

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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.