Gothic Roots - Terror

I've uploaded an undercurrent to my Gothic Roots series: Terror. There's 44 pages in this, and they will be published twice daily until done. 

You can also read the original Gothic Roots Mainstream first if you wish.

I was never sure what to call these. They are a collection of images, appropriated and matched to a narrative to produce an effect. Montage? Narrative comic?Anyway, it's a form of art, and it was important at the time I created these that only "found on the internet" artworks and photos were used in them (credit given when known). I guess perhaps one of the things for that was that for the most part, these images are already in our collective consciousnesses.

Part of the process was playing around with the images and using HTML for various effects. Both images above were originally made using HTML with transparent GIFs against a fading background and formatted text. The new version is derived from screenshots of the originals.

Anyway, this is part of my art-play day. Later I hope to do some comics scripting and draw a couple of pages (at least).

Clepsydrae

I was researching water clocks for Tales of the Galli and came across this quoute (at The Water Clock):

Clepsydrae were expensive of course; accurate mechanical work was never cheap until modern times. Cunning craftsmen spent their time upon costly decorations, and these water-clocks became triumphs of the jeweler's art, a gift for kings. Therefore, like the sun-dial, they drifted into Rome--that vast maelstrom of the ancient world. Imagine a great walled city of low flat-roofed buildings, with fronts and porches of great columns, a town mostly of stone and much of it of marble, gleaming white under the bright Italian sun, the streets thronged with men in tunics and togas and here and there some person of importance driving by, standing erect in his chariot drawn by four horses harnessed abreast. And statues everywhere, in the streets and about the buildings and in cool courtyards and gardens among green leaves. The ancients thought of sculpture as an outdoor thing, and where we have one statue in the streets or public places of our cities, they had a hundred. We treasure the remains of them as artistic wonders in our museums, but they put them indoors and out as common ornaments, and lived among them. [my highlight]

Golly - now here's someone in awe/in love with those times!