Here is the final work for the inlay of Kimara Sajn’s “Life Stories” album: the Dadaist Magician flying on his winged fish ship and spreading the magic words to unveil a mysterious world of future and uncertain to the grandkids.

As I said befor in former posts, the figure of the magician is based on a photograph of Dadaist poet Hugo Ball dressed up as a Magician at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, 1916. I have reproduced the original blue, scarlet and golden colors, same as they were described by the poet: “‘My legs were covered by a sort of bright blue cardboard column that made part of my body look like an obelisk. Over this, I was wearing an enormous gold cardboard collar lined with scarlet paper, attached around my neck so as to allow me to flap it like a pair of wings by raising and lowering my elbows. The costumed was topped off with a magician’s hat, a very tall, blue-and-white striped cylinder.”

To create the spell sentence, “Deep Child Sleep Now Your Book“, I did a sort of fun Dadaist experiment: I made a selection of words from each lyrics in the album, then I put them into the random picker software that I use to pick winners for my giveaways, and did a random selection of 6 words and mixed them all together. It’s pure mumbo-jumbo but it keep the Dadaist spirit alive and the words still contain the spirit of the album.

Very often, people ask me what kind of Photoshop filter effects I use on my digital paintings. The truth is that I don’t use any of them, except for some blur adjustments on the converted vector images to recover the original analog look when they get a little harsh. But apart from this, all you can see is painting and some glow effects.

I keep every segment of my vector drawing in a different layer. For instance, the original vector drawing of the Magician on the ship that I showed in a former post, it’s made of more than 20 layers. Then, in Photoshop, I make layer groups and I usually make about 5 to 8 layers of paint for each layer. I paint using the same technique as in canvas painting, layer by layer with different colors and brushes until I obtain the effect that I need. The figure of the Magician on the ship ended up having more than a 100 layers of paint and you must be thinking it’s crazy… But, believe me, it used to be more crazy in my old days of oil painting when I needed to wait one day for each layer to get dry!