This whole thing started with an exercise in one-point perspective I had to draw for my 8th grade art class....in 1997. I was 12 or 13 when I drew this in colored pencil.
Then, a full decade later, I brought my art into the new millennium with a computer vectorization...with nice crisp lines and clean gradients.
...then in January 2014 I started playing with colors. I added some cool space-age laser beams and went for a warm vs. cool color scheme. I always liked the interplay of warm oranges against cool blues.
...Then, finally, I settled on a unified color scheme and made this TRON-esque tour de force in geometry, which I finally settled on a name for...
I'm sick... sick as a dog. I called off work today and did almost nothing except lay around coughing my lungs up. Except I did take this one photo of the spectacular "layered" sunset this evening.
We've had snow on the ground on and off all month, but I only got to go out in it once, and it will probably be gone again before I feel strong enough to leave the house.
I'm afraid this month has already gone by and I barely started. Sorry. :/
Maybe February will have to be my journal month instead.
Happy 2014 Blog Party to all you invisible readers!
This was a thing started by my best friend and creative partner Stephanie Ann on her World Turn'd Upside Down blog. How it works is you keep a visual "diary" or an online sketchbook of writings, photographs and artwork as much as possible during a one-month period and share it with your "bloggies" (blog buddies). This turns the internet from an anonymous networking tool into an insight into your life, outside of your blogging. I'm doing mine on my new artsy blog since it was intended for this kind of stuff, unlike my Dispatches from Company Q blog which is strictly 1860's and Civil War reenacting.
I actually do other things, you know....although I'm afraid I am an even bigger dork in real life.
Today, as I'm typing this entry...I'm sick. And it sucks, for 5 big reasons:
It's very cold out and we have lots of snow. And I wanted to go out in it.
I still want to go to work tomorrow regardless.
I'm afraid this will screw me out of another day of volunteering at my new job.
Being sick doesn't bother me as much as being unable to do anything I want and gow here I want.
I miss my BFF and I could really use a hug.
Oh...I never told you gals/fellas: I got a new volunteering job! As a tour guide. I'll give you the juicy details of this new gig as I start my blog diary.
Saturday: January 11, 2014
Fog. The creepiest, coolest, most Gothic-looking fog ever. Though it was probably foolish to do so, I ventured out in it because I had to take these photos.
...As I roamed around I thought: "Hey, today would be great for a creepy Gothic photo shoot." So I began to look for anything that appeared decaying, crumbled or ornately decorated.
...And I found myself at Rockwood mansion (An historic estate on Shipley Road very close to where I live) It looked absolutely awesome in the fog. But right as I was about to start shooting, it started to POUR. And the place began to flood. Being the only high ground in the area (as Delaware is very flat,) I moved my car to the upper parking lot and made a mad dash for the imposing Victorian Gothic mansion at the top of the hill. I found it was open.
So I knocked on the door, holding my wool jacket above my head as I got dumped on, my hair dripping...and a short, hunched over figure opened the door and said in a raspy voice: "Come in."
Sounds like a horror movie, right? Well it wasn't.
I was standing in the anteroom of a lavishly-decorated, beautiful Victorian house I once liked to visit as a small boy and had completely forgotten existed. My parents had sent me on a summer camp there when I was eight or nine....about 1993/1994. This was literally the first time I had set foot in this house in 20 years. As I gazed around me at the rich oriental carpets, the intricate bronze candle sconces, the satin damask wallpaper and the crystal gas chandelier above my head, I was filled with a childlike wonder as I instantly was 9 years old again. The hunched, Quasimodo-like figure turned out to be a very nice elderly woman with a charming Old Southern accent, dressed in some rich Victorian-era fashion. She offered me a tour of the house.
I won't give too much away....but this is a tiny glimpse of it.
The more of the house we explored, the more of it came back to me from all those years ago. I started giving her a tour of the mansion. I was identifying objects in the house and explaining details she had never even noticed. She was stunned at my knowledge of the mid to late 1800's, and I explained my Civil War reenacting. Well, by the end of the tour, she had me meet the volunteer coordinator of Rockwood estate who promptly offered me a job as a docent!
Later in that day, I also went to the Boothwyn Farmer's Market and found two things I had been really sewarching for to complete my WWII GI infantry kit: a bayonet/knife and an M-43 entrenching tool with a canvas cover.
All three items total cost me 40 bucks. If I bought these all authentic reproductions, it would cost me over 200 dollars.
The M8A1 Combat knife. This is the WWII grandfather of the "KA-BAR." The blade was a bit corroded and the handgrip was dried out, but some application of Neatsfoot oil and #0000 steel wool had it looking good as new. This could be clipped to the web belt or tucked into a boot.
And my M-1928 Haversack I ordered from At The Front finally came in the mail! I think it's the most ridiculously complicated packing system ever devised, but it's what the soldiers carried. It took me over 2 hours to figure out how to pack it.
...All in all, I'd say this day was a win. I found a new job, almost completed my WWII reenacting kit, and took awesome pictures!
Tune in next time for my next adventure, this was only January 11th....
This blog topic was triggered by a discussion I was having with one of my friends who is trying to learn website programming. I think it's a sad fact that as of about 10 years ago, suddenly all graphic designers have to be web developers.
The Rise of Flash
This was a gradual industry shift that occurred in the midst of my education; between the time I entered high school and when I graduated from college. It was in the early years of the last decade, I think somewhere around 2001-2003 or so (still can't believe that 2003 was a full decade ago. I am in denial of how old I'm getting) When websites started to evolve from the static, text- and image-based pages to the colorful, interactive and media-integrated miracles we see today.
All this started in 1998 when the FutureSplash company created "Flash," which was later bought out by Macromedia. It was a new standard in animation that didn't rely on the simple frame-by-frame graphics, like the animated GIF. (And for any of you that still use Myspace...I'm sorry. Animated GIFs are butt-ugly and a relic of the 20th century. Sparkly names and hopping bunny rabbits aren't glamorous, they're annoying and distracting.)
Using Flash, instead of drawing out an animation frame by frame and pixel by pixel, you could draw an object in its beginning and ending state, and use a "tween" animation created by specific programming language called Actionscript to tell the object what to do. This is the basis for all modern websites.
In the beginning, Flash was limited in application, and Flash objects were inserted into a page like images. Now it's possible to create an entire website structure in Flash, with trippy animations and fun little cartoony effects. An entire subculture has sprung up around Flash-created cartoons on the internet, because *supposedly* it makes animation easier than it has ever been before.
Example: The staple of our internet youth: Nyancat.
Well, I beg to differ.
Why Programming is Not My Friend
I for one, absolutely hate flash. I think by some miracle, they managed to invent something less intuitive than HTML coding. I tried to learn both HTML and Actionscript in school, and I failed miserably. Part of this could be my learning disability. I have very poor math skills, and IQ tests also determined I am bad at coding. The simple "1-2-3/A-B-C" code we learn in grade school was almost too much for me to wrap my head around. (By that code I mean A=1, B=2, C=3, etc)
I am not a math-oriented person. Numbers and complex equations make me want to cry. If you gave me a printed page of HTML code or Javascript, I'd probably look at it as if it was written in Klingon, or some occult language from an ancient Necronomicon written by an evil dark wizard. It looks like pure gibberish to me, and the more I try to understand it the more stubbornly my brain rejects it. I mean, look at the title I chose for this webpage. I Think In Pictures. Not in abstract numbers and formulas, thank you very little.
The sheer amount of work involved in coding simple animations is staggering. An entire paragraph of Actionscript will yield little more than a red rectangle that moves back and forth across the screen, turns purple and quacks like a duck when you click on it.
That was what they taught me in school. A button that quacks. Why I
would ever want to make a color-changing quack button is beyond me.
And HTML is also the bane of my existence.
I managed to learn some basic HTML by reverse-engineering other websites. By that I mean going to a webpage, clicking on "view source" and seeing all the pages of code sprawling across the screen. After many hours of careful experimentation, I discovered that by tweaking numbers in certain variables, and removing certain tags in critical locations, I could take a beautifully functioning website and turn it into a glitchy, jumbled nightmare of broken links, missing image placeholders and 404 errors. Not unlike my first portfolio webpage! (Wish I was joking but I'm not.)
I had one web-dev teacher who described the HTML side of Dreamweaver as the "Rosie O'Donnell" side. The one that's working in the background, but not to pretty to look at and hopefully able to be ignored as long as it's doing its job. It's like the guts inside of our bodies. They're squishy, slimy and gross, but as long as they do what they need to do, we can go on living without knowing what lies beneath our skin.
Looking at Flash is sort of like looking at boobs. Boobs are wonderful and perfect, beautiful to look at and fun to play with. They're round, bouncy, jiggly and gravity-defying. While scripting is like the yucky insides. The bloated sacs of fat, pulsing blood vessels and water-filled silicon implants underneath the surface that we don't need or want to know about. It's the skeleton in the closet.
Programming code is not pretty. And they won't let you get your Graphic Design Bachelor's Degree of Useless Nonpaying Liberal Arts(TM) without it.
With all the software innovations we have today, why is coding even necessary for putting together a basic webpage? Can't we just "drag and drop" predetermined snippets of code into our pages and draw the shapes with invisible arrows telling them where we want them to go? Or corner handles on boxes to let us resize a table or section to anything we want? Adobe Illustrator can do that. If Dreamweaver is capable of doing that, nobody taught me how to use it that way.
Every course I try to take in Dreamweaver; every book I read about it makes it sound like all those buttons and menus are just for show. And people still make webpages in a text editor and paste it into a browser like they've been doing since 1994. It's like "Here, son... we'll let you get your driver's license. But first, help me put your car together with these complicated instructions and exploded parts diagrams written in Japanese..."
This 9 minute short film on Youtube was created by me (well, assembled from many different sources, most of them historical). It was in response to a video contest in February 2013--10 years after the Columbia disaster-- about "Why Space Matters." It was also partly inspired by a video from Neil de Grasse Tyson about a similar subject. (Link HERE)
While it didn't win the contest and was disqualified for its length, I think this video has strung together all the footage which shows why this is the singular greatest achievement of the human race.
Space exploration is the only thing that can ensure the future of humankind. It deserves all of our effort, talent, energy and resources. The budget cuts that decapitated NASA after the retiring of the space shuttle fleet I think may have hurt our nation more in the long run than the 13-year War on Terror. We don't even realize the implications.
The process took about a week to put together. Lots of clips had to be downloaded and audio tracks and music removed, then overdubbed with my own carefully selected soundtrack. Some of the clips had to be sped up or slowed down to match the high and low points of the epic score. All of this was done on my MacBook using iMovie and no other software that didn't come packaged with my computer. I will say this: video editing is not as easy as the millions of youtubers make it appear. It takes dozens of gigabytes of storage, even with 2 gigabytes of memory my laptop was struggling and overheating. You really need a Mac Pro or a dedicated workstation for video editing, and an external hard disk for the file storage is a must. at 40 gigabytes, this video project almost killed my poor laptop.
You probably wish it was longer, but I'm afraid this is the best I can do so, sit back and enjoy.
Some of the footage used: NASA Archives, Public Domain World War II newsreels, the 1983 movie The Right Stuff
Music: "Garador's Flight" and "Ascencia" by Jo Blankenburg, "Mars" by Terry Devine-King, "Song of Heroes" by Chris Blackwell
You have no idea how hard it was to take these photos and have them all look exactly the same. It took me almost 3 years to find a perfect sunny day with no one else in the park and remember the exact spot where I stood. I missed two chances and had to wait another year to try again. It takes patience. :)
About a year ago, I was walking around in my city taking pictures of things like stained concrete, stone walls and rusty metal. Anything that looked decayed for use as "stock textures," to manipulate or alter somehow in my digital artwork later. But at the time I wasn't sure how I would use them.
Today as I was playing around with these images in Photoshop, I discovered that simply over-saturating these images creates an explosion of hidden color. The effect looks very Andy Warhol -inspired, like Pop Art. Over-saturation is a photographic term which means too much color. Usually the effect is undesirable in photography. But the subjects I chose for the photos are very plain, boring stuff, things people walk by all the time and don't notice. This almost gives a vibrant new life to the ugly parts of the city people would rather not look at. I find a certain beauty in old decaying things though. Maybe it's just me.
I like the way these turned out, some really do look like modern art paintings. Below are the before and after comparisons.
...By the way, I've read in science books that the image on the right side is more how the world looks as seen through the eyes of birds, certain insects and reptiles (and possibly dinosaurs). Their eyes have more color receptors than ours do and they can see wavelengths of light that we can't...so they can see colors we don't even have names for.
BEFORE AFTER
Drainpipe underneath an old stone bridge
Lichen-encrusted exposed rock by a hiking trail
The more you zoom in on the texture, the more abstract the photo painting becomes.
Mossy tree bark
Stone wall in a drainage ditch
Underside of a railroad bridge
Exterior of a church
Stone wall
Cracked pavement
Water-damaged tunnel ceiling underneath a bridge
Vines climbing up a concrete foundation
Door latch on an abandoned barn
Peeling paint on another old barn
A wall attacked by graffiti
Rusty basement door to an abandoned building
Who knew that so much color was hiding in plain sight?
To you creatives out there, here's what I learned from my 5 years in the field.
Anytime you have too many people involved in a creative process, the result is counterproductive. A design project should involve three people at most. The designer, the client who gave you the job, and one other person to give a second opinion. The third party should be a marketing director of the client's company, someone from your own design firm, or whoever is responsible for producing or delivering the end product. Nobody else.
Whenever a client tells me my work will be "submitted to a design board for approval" I gotta just roll my eyes. Each member of a group thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong.
If the so-called "design board" (usually made of non-designers) can make any decision, it will be a weak compromise based on your least favorite concept, or a mish-mash of elements from other people's ideas that don't work together, they'll even want to go back to an old idea you threw out when you started because you already knew it wouldn't work.
The result will be cluttered, incoherent and unsatisfying to look at. Once you get to iteration #8 or so of the concept, you realize the work you did up to that point won't mean anything and wasn't worth the effort or time you put into it. Committees are indecisive, prone to changing details at the last minute, telling you the work is done then calling you a day later asking for "one more little thing" and it never ends. It takes all the fun out of the creative process and it makes you regret ever taking the job in the first place.
A creative process should be an intimate one. Design is not a democracy, nor is it a republic of squabbling bureaucrats. Design is kind of a dictatorship. You're the artist, if you're being paid to do the job, then you should be allowed to do it.
This is my first painting of the new art odyssey. Just looking at it makes me shiver, even though I painted it outside on a warm and sunny day. Now you can see how my art takes me to other places.
Here's the photo I took of my grandmother's forest in upstate New York last winter:
The "blue twilight" effect is a cool trick I discovered by altering the white balance on my camera. We had more snow in December 2012/January 2013 than I have seen in many years. And it was very cold, below zero. It was also windy as the snow came down, so it frosted on to one side of all the trees. Walking through this forest, everything was peaceful and totally like a scene out of a fairytale. I got the snow dusting on the tree trunks with a dry fan-tipped brush and very small dabs of white paint.
...And this is the dark corner of my parents' basement that I sometimes work in. For no other reason than lack of studio space. I do what I have to do.
