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This will do dual duty, introducing you to my latest

multipass Spike icon with a tutorial and also at the same time, I'll be talking about Space.

First, we have Spike!

sort of a punk rock Polish Theatre Poster Spike, who will, indeed, all fall down.

Here's

I was watching "From the Earth to the Moon" and thinking about Space, and about the things I know about space, like, say, the names of the original nine astronauts, and which missions they were on.

Behind me, on TV, there's the early Apollo missions, actually, Apollo One was just destroyed in a tragic fire; never even left the ground.

When I was in Photoshop, I tipped Spike back about 20 degrees, because I wanted him looking down more. I tipped and cropped and made this:

:: like so

I think this is what it takes, I think the destruction of Apollo One's what convinces Gus Grissom he has to retire. There's too many teams, too many missions, and in the end Gus knows he's not gonna be the guy to take those first steps on the moon. So he backs out, sighs, says, "I'm a navigator. I've got the right to know where I'm going." Good man.

Then I took Spike and overlaid a green layer atop him, in Overlay, and made him this lovely green:

:: like so

I duplicated a whole heap of the green Spikes, cloned 'em, really, cloned Green Spikes, just, around.

Took one of 'em and applied the crosshatch paintbrush effect from the effect menu. I used short, sharp strokes, with fairly low intensity. Spike ended up like so:

:: like so

I liked that a lot, except you can't see Spike really.

Neil Armstrong knows. He knows what went wrong with Apollo One -- which was, by the way, the reason Apollo One caught fire was, they were doing a plugs out test, a ground test in the module. And the module's designed for space -- it uses a lot of velcro, a lunar landing module does, and velcro's quite flammable. This ship was designed for velcro usage in an orbital situation, where there's significantly less oxygen in the atmosphere. On the ground, here, near sea level, there was a tremendous amount of oxygen -- enough for the velcro to catch fire.

Gus Grissom was sick, had to sit out that mission where his friend died. So it's not surprising he's considering retirement.

I added text. "we all fall down," appropriate for Spike, our fallen angel, demon, what have you, ain't nobody more fallen thank Spike.

I made a green stripe outside my main image, cocked it at about a 30 degree angle and painted it with some other greens. Then I applied to the green strip the same crosshatch paintbrush effect I'd used on Spike. Worked nicely, so I pasted it onto my image, and added the text: "we all fall down."

:: like so

THIS! Was the fun part. I went back to some of my early clean green Spikes (see above) and chose a section of a face, an ear, a nose, fingers, copied, desaturated (the mouth and chin) and brought back to the original image which was looking all crosshatchy as above. Pasted on the smooth, desaturated chin. The yellow, oversaturared eye and cheekbone. The peach overlaid hand. Then I took a band up the back of Spike's head, one that intersected many of the other bands, copied it out, made a red rectangle, overlaid the red rectangle atop my band section and merged down in Overlay mode.

Drew some pretty green borders and WHAM! Maybe these boys will go to space After all.