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".