Peek-a-Boo
Choose curiosity, there’s nothing in the dark waiting to scare you.
I’ve been seeing more Mantid faces as of late. I’m no stranger to encountering NHI faces, some experiences have left me scratching my head because of the contrast to popular speculations. More on that another time. Meanwhile, we’ve got the “trickster gang” back over for this week’s illustration.
These guys came about essentially on their own, in a way it’s how I’m processing if guides are real. I wrote an essay about that, I still don’t really know but since writing that essay I’ve had some questionable situations during meditation and altered state work. As a result of that, that “something” is now emerging in my work.
https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/the-broadcast-theory
I want to make sure that I am clear in communicating that this illustration is not my proof or belief that some random entities are playing tricks on me. The Mantid face I’ve encountered a few times now is its own structure and not a manipulation as far as I’m aware.
This piece is meant to be more playful rather than strict documentation, I have a vehicle that fulfills the latter already. The illustration speaks of the good nature, uncertainty, and curiosity with which I aim to approach these experiences.
The pranksters casting a shadow on a wall for me to view serves two functions: underscoring the inherent trickster aspect to contact experiences and my hunch that what I’m viewing is a sort of a shadow itself. To the best of my abilities I have yet to figure out how to represent a “3D shadow” so in its substitute, and to set the tone, I went with the only way that I know how to make a shadow.
With this being a lighthearted piece of work I do not wish for it to diminish the seriousness of NHI encounters. The contact is real, the immediate contrast to waking reality is felt like a punch in the face, the seriousness of the event unfolds for a considerable amount of time well after the initial incident. Over time and with careful integration most experiencers come out of the fog more whole than when they started, I can attest to that myself.
I am positive that there will be much more serious entries (from me) on this subject in due time. Having said that, I do lean towards a more playful approach 90% of the time. Why? There’s enough fear and suffering in the world, I do not wish to add to it.
Most importantly it is incredibly difficult for me to honestly speak of dangers of such contact, I have learned that your own perception governs the basic fight or flight response.
You do not need to choose either of those, I chose curiosity.
Illustration Process Documentation
I’m still kind of playing with wood blocks but now they’re much smaller or magnetic. The overall process remains relatively unchanged:
- Select experience or theme from Field Notes, explore directions and sketch compositions.
- Build the composition, including lighting, on my workbench stage.
- Photograph with my M43 camera, tweak framing and mood.
- If needed adjust photo in Adobe Photoshop (ex: tilt shift blur effect).
- Drop in selected photo(s) into “Reverie Compendium” template in Adobe Illustrator.
- Vector work, apply noise and grain textures, adjust transparencies and blending, blur touchups and further refinement of “qualia” treatment.
- Agonize about file size during final exports.
- Completely forget about it and move on to the next.
This workflow focuses the bulk of the mental load and effort on the first half, particularly planning, sketching, and building phases. Over the years I’ve come to really loathe thinking “save that for post” because you never know what that will bring, how long it’ll take, etc. It’s a lot more important for me to nail down 80% of the final vision in those earlier stages and leave “in post” for trivial things I can live without.
Speaking of the “Reverie Compendium” template, I keep messing with it. We’re on “Rev3” of the template now. I’m not going to go back and “fix” or adjust older work to reflect the changes, this is a long-term project and doing these tweaks to the entire collection will get out of hand very quickly.
- Rev1 - Original layout, nondescript image proportions, introduced excerpt and experience data as well as categories.
- Rev2 - Reformatted image art board to 3:4 ratio.
- Rev3 - Removed borders around the image, recentered experience data and detail.
If you’ve missed these guys and their previous work, check it out here:
https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/333
To close out this edition of Reverie Compendium, here are some pictures (everyone likes pictures).
