mbarrick | Entries tagged with gothic bc

Above are two exposures of my friend Isaac, a.k.a. DJ Pandemonium, doing his thing at 560 Club last month, shot by another friend and fellow photographer, Michael Dicus.

The first exposure, with no flash, the lights on the DJ decks and in the background look great, but we can't see Isaac at all. In the second one, with the flash, Isaac is well exposed, but we lose all the interesting stuff around him.

Michael was kind enough to upload these shots to my website, Gothic BC and I wanted something for the opening shot of the gallery for the night and decided an combination of these two shots would work. Enter the magic of Photoshop.

( see the magic )

Here is a better photograph pf the finished painting. It's a shame that the photograph never quite does justice to the real thing. There are simply unphotographable nuances like the difference between carbon black (which is flat and dense and very, very black) and mars black (which is rich and warm and slightly glossy.) There are subtle stripes on Tessa's shirt (the girl in front with her head in her hands) that absolutely pop on the canvas, but are all but invisible here.

I finished the painting tonight. There is some glare on Anna's hair (second from the left) in the last frame. I'll take a better picture of it tomorrow. For now, enjoy the time-lapse.

Current Mood: accomplished

At this point I'm somewhere around 24-26 hours into this, and I am pretty damned happy with it so far. Of all stupid thnigs, the olives on Rheanna's drink were a lot more challenging than I was expecting (and what the hell is she drinking?). Squid's impossible dress is up next....

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Ð“Ñ€Ð°Ð¶Ð´Ð°Ð½ÑÐºÐ°Ñ ÐžÐ±Ð¾Ñ€Ð¾Ð½Ð° - ÐÐµÐ±Ð¾ ÐºÐ°Ðº ÐºÐ¾Ñ„Ðµ

Between being sick and working on some photography projects I haven't had as much time to work on this the last few weeks as I would have liked, but it is coming along.

And for the people who are seeing this via my feed to Facebook - this is actually an animated GIF. Click "view original post" to see it.

The new painting is coming along nicely. Even though I work in acrylic, I tried something more traditional oil-like approach with the skin tones - building them up in thin, semi-transparent layers. Acrylic has this stigma of being somehow a lesser medium than oil. It's a strange prejudice, considering acrylic doesn't yellow or crack with age like oil. I suspect that is really has to do with two things: 1.) that it has only been around since the 1950's and the post-war anti-mimetic and ultimately anti-painting course of late Modernism and Post-Modernism means there are very few well-known painters who work in acrylic (photorealist Chuck Close would be an exception), and 2.) because it cleans up with water it is an easy medium to get started with so there are a lot of bad acrylic paintings out there.

At this point I'd estimate that I've got about ten to twelve hours of actual painting in on this. It's ironic that my photography, which was meant to just provide source material for paintings, now occupies so much of my time that I don't actually find a lot of time to paint. Being sick didn't help either. Each key frame in the animation represents about an hour and a half worth of work.

( 1.8 MB animated GIF )

I've started a new painting based on a photo uploaded to Gothic BC by my fellow photographer Mykl Diekiss.

All my paintings start out as a few feeble pencil lines like this to guide the composition. Most of the detail that will be most challenging isn't drawn in. There's no point to doing that since the necessary underpainting would obliterate the details that will only re-emerge as the more finished layers get added. This is probably my most ambitious painting to date, and at the moment I'm not at all certain how I am going to handle the mesh and fishnet on Rheanna (first figure from the left) or the pattern in Sara's (second figure from the right) dress. Trying to keep Sara's wickedly foreshortened hand from looking like a freakish claw is going to be a challenge, too.

I imagine there will be some cussing and at least one proclamation of my complete inability to paint in the course of this (if it was too easy I wouldn't learn anything, nor would I be proud of it at the end.)

Another "Gothified" Mucha for Gothic BC. This one was considerably more work than the first one since the source image was a very small, very heavily compressed JPEG. The original I started with was a little smaller than this and the finished product is four times larger than this. In order to deal with the nasty compression artifacts the entire image was essentially redrawn / repainted.

I'll be putting this on some Zazzle gear tomorrow evening and maybe offering up a version without the logo for prints.

( What I started with )

I meant to post this a while ago. I originally did this for the Decadence posters and flyers for the Gothic BC 10th anniversary party. I liked it enough that I did another version based on the complete piece to put on T-Shirts at Zazzle.com.

Brilliant Dreams #1
September 1989

Click the image for the a PDF version, 412 KB

Featuring my own terrible poetry, mostly typewritten (remember typewriters?) markup on an old copy of the Buy & Sell, and my co-editor Sara's failure to grasp booklet page ordering so the page numbers are all wrong. Other contributors were my art-school comrades and members of my army of pen-pals from the glorious days before e-mail and Crackbook took all the fun out of correspondence.

In a way these 'zines were the precursors to Gothic BC.

Cross-posted from my blog on Gothic BC

The Scream - Siouxsie and the Banshees

What you see here is my now thirty year old original 1978 Polydor U.K. pressing of Siouxsie and the Banshee's "The Scream," arguably the first "Gothic" album, though the word was yet to be applied. There are apocryphal stories (including the alt.gothic FAQ) that Siouxsie Sioux first used the term herself in describing the direction of the band, but it would be at least another year before the word "Gothic" would be used in print to describe any band, and several more years before the term really started to stick.

At the time, though, this would have been called punk and punk is how I came to it. Already a fan of the Sex Pistols, I'd read that Sid Vicious played once as drummer for band called "Siouxsie and the Banshees" and I was curious to hear them. Of course no one in Duncan knew who the Sex Pistols were, let alone Siouxsie and the Banshees. And there was no public Internet, period. I was still a few years away from trading mixed tapes with pen-pals. "Brave New Waves" on the CBC was also years away. The only recourse was pilgrimage to the "big city" - Victoria.

I purchased this used sometime in late 1979 from "Lyle's Place" (the price tag is still on the front, $5.95) on Yates Street in Victoria, most likely while out with my dad to see some awful movie at the Odeon that would never play in the cinema in Duncan. I would have been 12.

This is it. This is the beginning. This is the undifferentiated stem cell from which all goth music split. And what's most remarkable is even now, thirty years later there is nary a song on this album that wouldn't fly on the dancefloor at Sanctuary right now in 2008.

First off, happy new year, blah, blah, blah, [insert navel-gazing year-in-review/big-plans-for-2008 post here]. There, that's done.

At the moment I'm working on some post-relaunch tweaks for Gothic BC and was looking at the logs. In between the people who think I get up at 6:00 a.m. after getting in from the club at 5:00 a.m. and am going to magically download and catalogue 400 photos off my camera, weed through them for the 150 or so worth posting, processes them, and have them posted on the site by 6:15 a.m. (reality: I got up about an hour ago and the camera is still in the bag) who are already scouring the site for last night's pictures, there are a gazillion hits from someone crawling the site for video content with a VEOH client.

This is uncool. First off, there is no video content on Gothic BC, nor will there be for some time to come, if ever. Secondly, as I understand it VEOH is effectively a P2P service which would mean I could potentially have dozens of these clients crawling the site effectively amounting to, given my limited bandwidth, a DDoS attack. No thanks.

Apache rewrite module to the rescue:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} veoh [NC] RewriteRule .* http://www.veoh.com/ [F,L]

( Translation for those that don't speak Apache )

Of course, the "nice" thing to do would be to issue a "503 forbidden" response and just let the request die, but what VEOH is doing isn't nice. They are using a distributed network to download video off other people's sites, thereby decontextualising it from authors, who in the case of video-bloggers may be relying on the page context to serve up their advertising or other content that represents their income stream. VEOH then presents the content on their own page, with their own advertising, and makes their own money that the authors of the video content never see one red cent of. They deserve to be hoisted on their own petard.

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Page Summary

Making One Picture from Two Exposures
Club #3 - A Better Photo of the Finished Painting
Club #3 - Finished
Trucking Along on the Latest Painting
Painting Progress
Painting Progress
I'm Probably Going to Regret This
Another Gothified Mucha
Gothified Mucha Redux
Brilliant Dreams #1
Would you believe it's been 30 years?
Go Crawl Yourself

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Page generated Jan. 26th, 2026 10:37 am

Michael R. Barrick

(a.k.a Atratus)

Entries tagged with gothic bc

Making One Picture from Two Exposures

Club #3 - A Better Photo of the Finished Painting

Club #3 - Finished

Trucking Along on the Latest Painting

Painting Progress

Painting Progress

I'm Probably Going to Regret This

Another Gothified Mucha

Gothified Mucha Redux

Brilliant Dreams #1

Would you believe it's been 30 years?

Go Crawl Yourself