Rough Template

The format of this piece will be something like this:

There will be great variation of character heights, of course, but this is the basic idea. Flying characters will of course be given their spot in the sky, and Dig Dug ought to be popping out of the ground. :)

The Pantheon

In creating a narrative piece put together in three images, I am going to create a "class photo"-ish sequence which displays a TON of video game characters, the oldest at the left and the most modern on the right. I am going to use screen in-game snapshots (in .png format ("pings" henceforth) that I will take myself) so that each character's composition will be their original in-game image. At the bottom of the page I will list names from left to right and year introduced as most people won't know many of the characters from early in game history, from the arcade era. The story that will be told will me multifarious; it will simultaneously detail technological advancement in the game industry (and therefore advanced artistic capabilities) and the maturing of game philosophy as the industry moved from infancy to its current state of adolescence.

I plan to accomplish this piece by editing pings so that each player character is isolated (either standing or in action, depending on the nature of the game) and I will then paste each character in place in the proper frame. I will increase the brightness of the characters in the front and dim the characters in the back to provide a sense of depth in the piece. I am not yet sure what I will do with the background. It will not be plain white, but it may be plain black or some other scene. I don't want to distract an observer's eye from the central focus of the piece (it will be busy enough) with a cluttered background. Whatever the case, I will figure it out.

I am really excited about this assignment, mainly because I love video games so much. Is that so wrong?

Lone Wolf and Cub

This poster-sized image was yet another attempt on my part to achieve simplistic design via a road strewn with ridiculous obstacles. There are four images here, one being orinigal and textual. The image of Itto Ogami and Daigoro and the background "wolf and cub atop mountain of corpses" image are both photographs I took of comic books (manga) that I own.

The most difficult part of this collage assignment was removing the context of each of the images. I can't even recall right now what exactly I did...I know I used the eraser tool (down to 1 px), the mask tool, and the magic wand tool, all of them. I also changed the levels of the Itto Ogami image in an effort to make he Daigoro appear in front of the background. The background levels have not changed, but there is a bottom-up gradient overlay that really helps to foreground the...foreground image (sigh). The art is done by Frank Miller, whose name appears in the top right, opposite the bottom-left kanji representing "Lone Wolf and Cub". Upon review, I should have brightened that up a bit to offset the wolf; as it stands, the image is top-heavy. I printed this thing out, hoping to hang it, but procrastinated and the poster has since been ruined by my cat. Good stuff.

The Black Sheep

When at first I tried this sketching assignment, I pulled up pictures of George W. Bush, a gaudy Christian cross, and piles of genocide victims, realized I was being a tool, and decided to do something a little lighter (and easier, har). I am learning slowly that working simpler and smarter is often a preferable route to the old "grindstone" method, which is at the same time tedious and degenerative to one's nervous faculties.

Anyway, this was really simple. I downloaded a picture of a family portrait circa 1890 and a digital image representative of human male musculature and put them together. I had to blur the anatomical picture, change it to black and white, and erase part of its leg and foot so as to make it appear to be standing behind and off to the right of the family. That was it. My intention is to represent a black sheep, a person cast out of this primitive nucleus for his obviously scientific and therefore godless leanings. He looks forlornly toward the center of the family, wishing he were snuggling in with the rest of them, but alas he cannot, for his ensanguined body would ruin the portrait-day clothing of those he loves.

I am happy with this image save for the fact that I didn't shrink ol' muscle man enough. He's damn tall for a 1890s frontiersman. Aside from that, I've achieved here what I set out to achieve; when I see this picture, I laugh. If no one else laughs, my heart goes out to them, but really, it's their problem, not mine.

Response to "Paul"

While this article/abridgement is an expertly written exploration of the nascense and impact of digital art on artistic convention, the only thing that really caught my attention was the degree of attention the author lent to the "hyperreal". This is true for completely subjective reasons; I consider myself something of a disciple of Dada/Surrealism on the rare occasions that I sit down with easel and brush or Photoshop and mouse. I especially appreciated reading of digital art's tendency to bring to question the border between what is real and what is not in art in terms of spatial relations and object addition and subtraction.

Keeping the above in mind, digital art, after reading this article, seems to me to be the next natural evolution of art itself. As time passes and the secrets of the Earth become fewer and fewer through advancements in science, a stronger answer than what has been offered thus far seems to be the only appropriate choice for the world's artists; that is to say that these artists will use technology against itself, for in order to counteract any absolute reality, it would seem that one would require the tools to construct an absolute surreality for balance's sake. Riding high upon this tangent, I will be especially interested in the multifarious outcomes of our age's "new media", or digital, interactive storytelling. Will we one day tell ourselves histories stories? Will our children take on a soldier's role in the French Revolution? Will they as English doctors wade through plague wards, offering their hands and lives? As reality becomes more concrete, more bold will appear art's inversely proportional relationship with "what we know".

Day One - Building

My favorite super-hero is a character from Alan Moore's bar-setting "Watchmen" series named Dr. Manhattan. It was this character and Moore's insight that for the first time opened my eyes to the difference between super-heroes and masked avengers; super-heroes have super-powers and masked avengers must rely upon the faculties with which they were born in order to preserve justice.


Short Bio

Dr. Jon Osterman was a phycisist of some sort (I don't recall accurately which field was his specialty) on an American nuclear testing base. The story (in brief) is this: He mistakenly left a watch within a particle acceleration chamber, ran in to retrieve it and the door to the chamber, which was on a non-negotiable testing schedule, closed behind him. The rest of the scientists on the base, alerted by his panicked screams and now gathered around the chamber, watched in horror as Osterman beat his fists against the door's tiny glass window while the machine, with gathering intensity, whirred to life. Suddenly, blinding white light shot from the window. When the cycle had ended and the light had faded, Osterman was gone. Each atom in his body had been accelerated to some point beyond the speed of light and had shot out in every direction, diffusing him.

To make an awesome story short, his consciousness remained and reassembled his body atom-by-atom (pssshhhh, I can do that). Now Dr. Manhattan (a name given him by the press against his will), he exists in every time period simultaneously, can manipulate matter to his will, and can travel ANYWHERE; even through the vacuum of space.

Yeah, so I like this guy. He's kinda neat. In my feeble attempt to project his universal abilities onto myself, I used almost a gajillion layers...I almost immediately discovered the "Neon Glow" transformation option, wherever it lives, and stuck with that. I think of it as an update. In the books, Manhattan is solid blue, and the forthcoming live-action film will have to do something with that...I imagine they'd make a choice similar to mine. Anyway, the hardest part of this whole thing (and naturally the most maddening) was the atomic symbol on the forehead. It's similar to Manhattan's, only without the dot in the center. This shouldn't have been difficult. There probably is a way to draw a hollow ellipse with thick sides, but I've yet to discover it. Instead I drew a solid one and messed with the properties; I checked the "Stroke" box, which gave me access to the the "outline" option I wanted, and then messed with the coloring, choosing (I think) a gradient that was really close to the colors I'd been using for the rest of the skin. The symbol's composed of two of these little circles, and I was glad to be done with it.

I went through two or three backgrounds before I settled on a computer-generated Mars landscape. I chose this one due to its presence in the series as a setting to which Manhattan retreats to think.


The items to the left of me are copies of the background made in the shape of my body. There are something like twelve of them, becoming more dense the closer they get to me in an effort to simulate "braking"; as if I came to a halt in this reality after traveling with no little alacrity through other temporal realities. Anyway, this was a mistake. I meant to copy myself and then decrease the opacity of the copy gradually to simulate the same effect, but I was happy with this new "Predator"-ish effect and kept it. lol. I actually changed my opacity to highlight my inherent transience, and was done. I spent a few hours on it.


This one took no time at all, and I'm more satisfied with it from a design perspective than the first. C'est la vie. There are only two layers. The background is a simple hand-brushed gradient and the portrait is a crop from the original, colored-pencil filtered. I altered the line weight and the other two options to come away with a flattering image of myself, har. Using the lasso I snipped myself out and (this seems to always happen) did a choppy job along the bottom. At first, I was repulsed by this. Then, I thought: Oooh, it's haggard, just like the texture of the piece; let's leave it! So I did. There isn't much else to this one.



Well, I love to read. I read ALL THE TIME. I don't have cable as is my preference. I have heroes, and they are mainly hunchbacked, arthritic or finally dead men who've ascended into immortality through pen-paper interaction. It is their thoughts and dreams that have dripped onto the canvas of my mind and lent me the tools with which I make decisions every day.

They are, clockwise: Henry Miller, Alan Moore, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Francois Rabelais. Whichever is their mortal status, I have canonized them in regard only to my level of admiration and have thought to honor them with this humble little collage.

A lot of lasso-tooling, a bunch of layers, a little design style, and there you have it. The intended symbolism lies in the contrast between the sharpness of their features and the blurring of my own; they are recognizable by their legacy, and I am not. Maybe someday. Until then, STARVE!! :)