Ever Had a Bologna and Potato Chip Sandwich?

Moving House

2010-04-29T17:09:00.001-07:00

I've decided to switch to a new google account, so my blog is coming with me. Not that I update very often, but I like to think I'm going to come into this wonder habit of blogging. Weirder things have happened. In any case, my new blog is at laurenscanvas.blogspot.com

Aramii Pherra

2010-02-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

I really need to get into the habit of writing these things. Someone should tell me how they manage it.

ANYWAY. A few updates. Recently on Aramii.com, my first "Ami" was released. It's called the Pherra and so far is very popular. I based it on Herons and Egrets, and is meant to be a Pheonix-like creature. I was also the artist who did all the markings. I then made a little mini-pherra pet item to add in.

I'm very proud to see how much the users on Aramii like this new species. I'm now in the process of making the next one, though I won't way what it is until it's actually released. Suffice to say that this one is going to be different from all the others and I'm excited to see it realized.

Aramii

2009-08-19T13:55:00.001-07:00

So I've joined a new site that gets my creative juices flowing. It's called Aramii, and it's a virtual pet breeding site. There's all these little creatures called Amis, and each of them has a few of 10 different kinds of markings, and anything can be any color you want. It's all done with hex codes, which you can actually see on the Ami's pages. You breed the Amis together and the markings and colors mix and fade depending on the parents. It's in beta right now, and it needs a lot of art, so I've volunteered for the job since I think it has a lot of promise. It's also super fun to draw for.

I got started in Aramii making money by creating adoptable baby Aramiis. So far I've got 3:

Labeau

Lapire

Peregrin

The Labeau needs work. It was the first one I did, when I intended them to be kind of sketchy. But then the Lapire and Peregrin ones were done and they're nice and clean. So my next priority is to clean up the Labeaus.

Anyway, now I've been asked to do artwork for the site officially. The owner of the site, Mariko, can't pay me in real currency yet, but maybe someday. For now, she's paying me in the site's currency. I don't mind because all this is really fun to do and I need the practice. Besides, it's a nice little resume builder.

Also, someone on the site asked me to design a tribal tattoo for them in exchange for the pup of some valuable custom made Amis. They wanted a wolf, bear or pheonix. I've only got the wolf done.

Finally a direction

2009-07-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to crack down and actually make myself blog, in an effort to market myself. Therefore, from now on I'm going to do my darndest to update at least once a week.
The majority of posts will be about the art I've done during the week, and something I've been meaning to start doing as a sort of draw to my blog and my website.
Using my 3D modeling abilities I'm going to start making Papercraft! These will be announced here on the blog, and downloadable from my new website. We'll see how popular they get.

As for the work I've done this week, I've completely redone my website, http://www.laurens-canvas.com. I've got to finish the other pages, such as the contact page and the extras page. There is already a link to my blog there. Along with this, I've created a logo for myself, involving my two great passions. Dinosaurs and Fishies, who constantly do battle in my head for dominance.

It's Alive!

2009-05-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

Novism Graffiti was a great success! So many people enjoyed playing with our project. I think that it's important that people enjoy themselves when they experience art. It shouldn't be work. The only real hitch with it was that I had to change the settings on the program every day for some reason. The 2nd day we didn't get into the show in time for me to get the settings all ready before people started coming in, so that was a bummer. I had to leave it be with the red and orange not working because someone important wanted to try, who was then disappointed that they couldn't get it to work, because they wanted to use red and orange. I fixed it after they left though. If I had only been able to set up sooner...

I'm happy with how it turned out. I managed to get a lot of screen shots of everyone's pieces, though the outlines for them are on my teammate's computer. So everyone'll just have to guess what these pictures are supposed to be. They actually look pretty cool without the outlines, and a lot of people mentioned this. So I don't actually mind that I don't have them.

The other projects were successful as well. Though I was skeptic about the Lightning one, there's was really cool. You had to sit in a room with a simulated thunderstorm going on, and hit a drum in order to stop it. So you ended up making the thunder, instead of the lightning. I believe they intended for it to be frightening, which it wasn't. But that doesn't mean it wasn't successful. The picture overlay project was neat. I had no idea what they were really going to do, but I'd never seen anything like it.
They basically changed the shadow of anyone's hand that was in the box into a picture of something related to the background image. It was pretty neat.
I sadly didn't get to try the College Experience, since there was always a line outside it and I got distracted and forgot until the next time I looked and saw a line.
The cool fractal image project was impressive. I actually have no idea how they managed it. But it was fun to play with all the same.
The Colors project was fun to play on, even though I don't really know what it was about.
I think the Singing in the Rain project would have been more successful had it been in the same room with the rest of us. It was out in the hall, so many people didn't notice it. But it was definately the fanciest looking, with the motion sensing umbrella and everything.

It was fun, I'm glad I got to take part in it.

This is kind of neat actually

2009-04-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

Progress on the Wii-Graffiti project is going smoothly. We're not calling it Wiifitti anymore though, since we decided to remove the wii part from it and instead just do as the L.A.S.E.R. Tag people meant for their software, and use a laser. Only we're adding our own twists to it. Instead of graffiti, we plan on making a sort of large digital, projected, movable coloring book. The general plan is to use two projectors, one for the painting program, and one for an outline that other people can try to color in. It's my hope to see people enjoying this project for the interactivity.

We've decided to call it Novism Graffiti, meaning that it's a way for non-artists and people who don't have the guts to do real graffiti, to try it just the same in a completely harmless, removable way.

Though the software provides easy to understand instructions we are having some setbacks. We have no way to set the camera the way they say we should, so I'm a little worried about how much white the program is going to see and then paint. The tracking settings are hard to do too. Every different lighting scenario causes a different effect on the laser, and it takes time to change the settings to fit that.

Still, I believe we can do this. I'm pretty excited to get this working properly. We got it set up in a really dark room, but the projector was too far away so it couldn't see the red dot of the laser very well. So it didn't produce optimum results. But I think once we're able to set up our own projectors this will work golden.

My heart hurts as though a thousand knives blahblahblah

2009-04-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

I've never really liked poetry. Perhaps I'm just callous, and not understanding of other people's more emotional sides. Perhaps I just don't know how to express myself. Perhaps I don't understand it, or maybe I just can't be bothered to read a bunch of rhymes or rythmes that either make no sense or make me want to gag. I'm sure there's good poetry out there. I confess to loving Doctor Seuss, who I suppose was a kind of poet. There were some other funnier poem books I enjoyed when I was in 4th grade or so. But then came high school, and the sort of black dribble that came out of my co-goths mouths and was written in their notebooks made me wish I was blind and deaf. I haven't liked poetry ever since.

I'm sorry to say I'm even less impressed by this hyper-poetry stuff. At least my friends in high school wrote things that made some sort of sense when you put the words together. The majority of the stuff I've found makes no sense at all. The ones that pick random words from a generator obviously can't help themselves. But a lot of the other ones, their authors having actually tried to write this stuff, still are completely inane.

There are some good parts I suppose. Everything has good parts. I'm intrigued by the idea of hyperlinking within the poem, to another poem. The whole tree-like effect is unique and I applaud whoever thought of it. Another is the use of random shapes or some other visual, though these are often as unnecessary as much of the text, at least it gives me something to look at while my brain slowly turns to goop. But I wonder about these things. Poems using these methods become more about the gimmick than the writing. People looking at them are drawn in by the novel ideas, not the thoughts and emotions put into the writing. Is this what their authors meant for the readers to experience?

Trying to herd cats

2009-04-08T16:55:00.000-07:00

So many choices!
Every person in class had to come up with a suggestion for the final project in Cyberarts class. Only a few in the end were chosen, to be one of the 7 or 8 pieces done in the end for the show.

Mine was a project I called "If I Could Turn Back Time" in which people would be able to manipulate some sort of interface in a room, which would in turn change what time it was in a panoramic video being projected on the walls around the user. My piece did make it to round 3, but didn't get chosen in the end.

There were a lot of other good project ideas as well. There were quite a few involving the wii, and a couple about emotions, and an above average amount that dealt with weather. We spent the entire class choosing which we liked, 3 times. I could've chosen the one I wanted to be in the first time.

The lightning project was incredibly popular, I'm pretty sure everyone put their little dot sticker on there at one point or another, I personally wasn't that interested in it. Instead, I liked the one that dealt with using the wii to create graffiti. It just so happened the week earlier we had been asked to write a short report on a digital artwork or exhibition and I had done mine on a project called L.A.S.E.R. Tag, which was a setup used to use a laser and a projector to write light graffiti on the sides of skyscrapers. My interest was piqued, creating and immediately projecting art that anyone could do sounded interesting, and I thought I might be able to do that with the wii graffiti project. So that's the one I chose.

Problem was, it turned out that the only other people who wanted to do this project as well were also art students. No computer science people to be had. The professors tried to move someone into our group, but he wouldn't be moved. Luckily, thanks to my research on L.A.S.E.R. Tag, I found out that the software they had developed was open source, and downloadable to Mac and PC. The RA for the class has also decided to give us help where we need it technically.

I'm pretty excited about this. At the very least we can use it to do what Graffiti Research Lab did with L.A.S.E.R. Tag. I'm hoping we can expand on it though, at the moment we're thinking about using it to make a giant projected coloring book.

Sexist Pigdogs!

2009-04-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

Though I've always been aware of feminism, I've never really considered myself a feminist. I think I just didn't want the word associated with me, given the certain undertones that come along with it. It's only recently I've realized that most people, including myself, are actually at least somewhat feminist. At least they think they are, and they believe women should have equal rights. Women have made a lot of headway. Most of the biggest concerns, like voting and how we're treated are, are now in a pretty good state. Now it's just background things that need catching up as well. Women are still paid less and given fewer opportunities than men to move up in the world, as well as the fact that we're often looked upon as weaker and not as smart. But like I said, these things are catching up. Slowly women are getting equal pay and opportunities, and sneaking into places that used to be "Boys only".

Cyber feminism is just a new way to get across the line, and I'm happy for those girls who want to wave the flag for us. Feminism shouldn't have the same underlining that it used to, because the way it's done is different now.

I'm a barbie....girl?

2009-03-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have some interesting pictures of this particular class. We split up into groups and each group was given some bread, a CD some random little screws and such and a chunk of a barbie doll which we were all supposed to make an interpretation of the words we had on a scrap of paper given to us (all of the words were things like robot, cyborg, android etc).

I actually thought this was a fun project to do. As an art student, I enjoy classes with a much more hands-on approach to lectures, and I doubt I'm alone in this opinion. I was surprised at all the ways everyone was able to put together their little sculptures given the materials. The bread especially. Most everyone figured out it's use as a sort of clay like substance. I was aware of it from when I was little and my sister and I made bread gum by squishing it into cubes with our fingers.

Not trying to boast or anything though, my group's piece was totally the best one. It looked like a record player with a barbie arm and bread for brains. Totally awesome. All the different ideas about the whole robot concept surprised me. I have a pretty straight forward idea towards the whole genre, what with mechanical people/animals and so on, but there were some good ideas. I mean, ours was just a hand that replicated and built more hands. So it was kind of like those machines that manufacture cars, those are robots. I never really think about those when I think of robots though. It's pretty interesting to think about.

Back on Track

2009-02-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

In the end, I made the pinata, but I decided it was too raunchy to show in class. Luckily, I was also helping my group with the box project (including going to group meeting etc), so they let me back in. We're going to break the pinata at a later date, perhaps at one of my roommates birthdays.

I thought in the end the box thing was cute, though still not as awesome as a pinata would have been. The class thought that there wasn't really enough participation for everyone, and on that I could agree. It might have been fun if we had chosen really out there topics to try to figure out. Like eating a sandwich on the moon or something, rather than easy to guess locations like playing soccer on the drill field at VT.

There were a lot of other good projects as well. I especially liked the campfire setup, that was completely awesome. They really worked hard for it.

Deviation

2009-02-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

So our next project is something called "All Senses but Sight". Fairly straightforward, sight can't be involved in the project. My new group came up with a lot of ideas, in varying amounts of crazy and I was impressed by most of them. The one I enjoyed the most was an idea about a pinata, which for whatever reason smelled and of course had tasty objects inside (or maybe not tasty. One idea I had for it was to put rotten eggs in, which would cover both taste and smell since I'm fairly certain that rotten eggs are one of those smells you can taste). However, my group decided not to do that one and to do the (to me, not quite as impressive) box-o-senses, in which someone with a blindfold must dig through the box and smell/taste/feel their way into figuring out "where they are". I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I do like it. But it's just not nearly as thrilling as a pinata.

So this is where I seceded from the union.

I'm doing my own project now, the pinata. The only real ultimatum my group gave me is that they would like it to be a penis pinata from Spencers. I'm fine with that, whacking on a huge paper penis with a stick sounds like something anybody can get into. Actually, my mom called me while I was still asleep this morning, and I told her about this project of mine. Being my mother, she thought it was hilarious and gave me a very good idea. "Fill it with condoms" she said. I had only thought about filling it with white candy, so this was a new and glorious idea. Condoms are expensive though, so I think I'll still cut it with candy. Actually the only idea that I'm hung up on is the sound piece. I know that hitting the pinata will make sound, but that's not fun enough. I'm going to see if I can find some sort of moaning thing, or maybe some guy yelling in pain. It's up in the air. I'm pretty excited to see the final result.

Someday we'll all be auto-tuned, and have our own CDs

2009-02-21T18:52:00.000-08:00

Now this is kinda neat. I can see a certain amount of fun being had by making random bits of music. I wonder just how many pieces of technology can actually make sound, though they may not be initially designed for those purposes. If one of those bands with the wiimotes attached to their guitars floats into a town nearby, I might actually be inclined to see them. I'm especially intrigued by auto-tuners. I should get one for my sister, who's a singer. I want to see what she'd sound like.

Besides, if all my news came like this, I might actually know what's going on.

Dancing Robots maybe? I don't know.

2009-02-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

I've never really liked performance art in the traditional sense. I think it's just because I don't understand it very well, and so I can't appreciate it. I mean, I've been to the occasional ballet or opera, but I've never been thrilled by the concept. This feeling (or lack there of) is even more apparent when it comes to the newer forms of perfomance art in which the purpose isn't to be pretty and tell some sort of romantic story to the tunes of a beautiful symphony. The modern performance artists make their works kind of like modern conceptual artists. It's not meant to be pretty, it's meant to convey ideas and beliefs.

I think that's why I don't really tune in to it. I'm more of a "Art should be pretty" sort of person. It's not that I don't understand those people who want to put their souls and theories on human behavior or what have you into their art, it's just that I don't care as much as they do, and so I have trouble paying attention, and thusly have trouble figuring out whatever it is that they're trying to convey with their pieces. I can see the coolness of playing tennis in the dark, but I can't see what ever message they're trying to get in by doing it. I can understand the purpose of having people come up and slowly cut away at your clothes but I can't get into the feeling of it.

The Adventure Continues...

2009-02-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

Once again I found myself asked to keep track of my activities in blog form for a class. I'm already a little behind, so here's me trying to make up for it.

My first go at Cyber Art class was to get into a group and do some circuit bending. That is, changing wires around in some sort of sound making electrical device so it makes different sounds. The concept was kinda cool but since I have absolutely no idea how to even look at the insides of these things people call "e-leck-tron-icks" I was completely lost the whole way through. This lead to my teammates leaving me behind with "Congratulations on opening up that child's calculator/cash register and figuring out the beeping noise". For the rest of the project I was just left to my own devices while they added nobs and buttons to a light up learning toy. It was kinda nice having all the work done for me, but I would have liked to be a little included. The toy gave me migraines though, so...not great for me. It was pretty and did what it was supposed to though. The nob they attached increased or decreased the speed of the lights and sounds. I'm not sure what the button did...

Of Video Games and Copyrights

2008-11-19T20:22:00.000-08:00

Online Multilayer Games: A Virtual Space for Intellectual Property Debates
Sara M Grimes:

• Canadian
• PhD Candidate with the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University
• Founder of the ACT Games Lab

• Researches the “legal and ethical dimensions of children’s evolving relationship with new media technologies, the rationalization of children’s play within commercialized technological systems, and the political economy of digital games”

• http://www.actlab.org/?page_id=26
• http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/

Copyright law has changed very little since it’s creation, and any changes enacted are usually to the benefit of the large corporations who own the copyrights.

Even with the creation of digital media whose creation and duplication is not to the detriment of the original copyright holder
Copyright law is still based on finite commodities, such as books or toys

Major corporations continually work to change copyright law to their benefit, and limit the right of others to public works

Software created today would be subject to 95 years of copyright, and as such is permanently copyrighted due to the advance of technology making the software obsolete before the copyright ever expires

Corporations are trying to take advantage of people playing games by enforcing copyright law and stripping players of the time and effort that they have put into a game.
Examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTEA
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/

The same copyright laws apply to online videogames, though the laws do not take into account user participation

End User License Agreements usually state that any activity taking place in the virtual world is owned solely by the copyright holder.
But that definition is becoming increasingly less viable as the worth of virtual property is called into question.

In online games more than anything else most of the value of playing comes from interacting with other people, so much so that it has become one of the main selling points of such games.
If this is a selling point, are these other users the property of the copyright holding corporation? Does their use of the software and the game world generate unique content that the corporation can then exploit?

If this is indeed user-generated content, is it really right for it to be owned by the corporation or do the users in fact own it themselves, having created the environment and the experience of the game? Many online games fail because they don’t have enough players to create a unique experience.
Example: If you make guitars and sell them, do you own all the music that is ever played on those guitars?

On the other hand, if the corporations were to give in to the users and sacrifice their copyrights, than it would undermine their business model. And after all, without the corporation, there would be no game at all, since they maintain the servers, and support to keep the game running, not to mention the actual creation of the game in the first place.

At the same time, users put in hours and hours of their own time to develop their own content and characters, whether through direct interaction or through other means, such as customizing a character, modding and actual creation of new content

Modding is said to actually increase the life of a video game for around 6-24 months of playtime. Modding is user created content that enhances the functions already available in the video game. These users create mods for free, and do so at the benefit of the corporation. They add value to the game that the users who create the mods never see.

Forums and Fansites also contribute to the value of the games through support and advertising

Many large video game companies such as EA and Blizzard, actively encourage the creation of web forums, fansites and mods, but provide no rewards or incentives to do so. They reap the rewards of other people’s works for free, but then do not allow the users to financially benefit from their work.

Since such effort is put into these games, they become much more than the data that makes them up, thus giving the virtual world a real world value

Virtual content is now so valuable that governments have had to step in on cases of hacking and unjust game practices
In South Korea, the police “actively prosecute people who hack games, and a they give more weight to cases in which valuable game items are destroyed or transferred” (Castronova, 2003)
Also: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2008/10/31/real-taxes-for-real-money-made-by-online-game-players/
“State involvement is rationalized by the fact that in-game assets take time to acquire or build, can be observably bought and sold on real-world markets, and that layers are manifestly distressed by the ‘unfair’ loss or theft of their game items” (Castronova, 2003)

A lot of the weight behind the importance of in-game items is provided by an economy that is created purely by the users of the game. Though this is generated within the framework created by the corporation, the framework would be useless without the input of the users, and thus the users have a stake in the value of the product.
See: Analogy about the guitar

In almost all games, the primary purpose is to generate wealth in order to acquire more virtual possessions. Thus the game is created with the acquisition of new items in mind, except that the users, once they have these items in their possession, they are then denied any real world value that those items may have because of copyright and the end user license agreement.
That is to say, should items that people have worked for, and in many cases spent real world money for, have a real-world market value even though they are virtual? We know that there is a market for these items, as witnessed by websites devoted to selling virtual money and online game accounts and characters for real money.
http://www.wowgoldtm.com/
http://www.mmobay.net/

The main issue in contention here is: Who actually owns this virtual content? Is it the industry that originally created it, or the user who spent their valuable time and money to create wealth within the environment?
Who owns the environment? The industry, who again created the environment or the users who gave it life and form?

However, “…no matter how vividly layers identify with their avatars or treasure their special, customized swords, the swords, chairs, princesses and dungeons of EverQuest are first and foremost strings and strings of computer code”
We must keep in mind that the users are still just players in a game. The game was actually created by a professional team of designers and scripters. Ultimately, the content made by the users is secondary to the content created by the original creators. The programmers actually worked on the game, the players just play it and happen to make a difference.

Further Readings
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/04/creative_common.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A_n1zLi06c&feature=related

This space for sale

2008-11-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

After reading Will There be Condeminiums in Data Space by Bill Viola, Jonathan asks "At the very end of the article, Bill actually mentions for the first time the title of his article, and answers the question with a, "...there will be condominiums in data space (it has already begun with cable TV)."What exactly do you think he means by this statement, and do you think we will ever reach the point where we are "living" in condominiums in data space?"

If a condeminium is a personal space that reflects our personal views, than a personal website, blog or facebook/myspace account could be considered a condeminium on the internet. If you think more literally, there are actually condos the online game Second Life. You can actually purchase a virtual plot of land and built a virtual apartment. I suppose in the future it could be possible for people to actually plug into the internet Matrix style, and live in their virtual apartments. That might be kind of cool actually.

As for his statement about cable TV, I have no idea. Perhaps ads are what he's concentrating on?

and now we take a break from our scheduled program...

2008-11-11T12:18:00.001-08:00

I thought I'd take a break from my confusing ramblings to post some stuff I've been working on. Before I posted some pictures of a shark I was working on for a little animated short. As an update, I can now say that animating is not my bag, though modeling is. As such, I've decided to make a book. It might be a children's book, but it might not be. The models still look childish, but some of them are kind of creepy. So maybe I'll make it one of those artish books that looks like a children's book but it has some sort of propaganda belief that I feel needs to be displayed.

Thing is, I don't really have those kinds of ideals.

I'm not sure whether I want it to have words of not. Words would mean writing, which anyone who reads this blog can probably tell is not my strong point, as I tend to ramble and lose track of my thoughts without even much of a distraction besides a small bump in the rails. My professor thinks I could try even making it a sort of slideshow DVD that plays the story out, which I think is a peachy keen idea.

One of these days I'll write out my thoughts for a story, which again doesn't sound very children's book-y so I might change it if I go that route.

I'm too sexy...

2008-11-11T11:46:00.000-08:00

In answer to Sabrina's question "Is it our responsibility to enact these changes on what is presented by the media? What can we do to force these changes?", that is if we are responsible for changing the media and shifting it away from the plastic, thin, tan, beautiful norms of today, I say both yes and no. If not us, than who else? Obviously Hollywood will not, since beautiful makes money. But values are malleable, and people are easy to sway. If it's important to change, than people will change. At the moment, tall, skinny and tan are in, but that wasn't always the case. In the 16-1700s, it was better for women to be plumper, because it meant they were better for carrying children. Right now, health is important, and being tall, thin, tan, and perfect are marks of good health, but that is changing with the views of perfection being too perfect, and perfection too rare. Even now normalcy is becoming the new perfection. I think all we need to do is wait, and keep our minds open for the next trend.

The Future is here!

2008-11-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

In my ongoing struggle to keep blogging, I have logged on from work so I may actually get something done.

A couple weeks ago, my professor posted an article about Steve Mann, the Cyborg. Now, I get lost whenever politics come into play, so I'm going to ignore that part of the article and comment on the technology and function of Mr. Mann. If I want to think outside the box, then I'd think anyone with any sort of unorganic part of them would be a cyborg. This means people with prosthetic limbs, pace-makers, replacement hearts and the like could all be considered cyborgs in my book. Similarly, scifi movies always make cyborgs as people who have lost some sort of part in their body and replaced those parts with mechanical ones. What I like about Steve Mann is that he is replacing non-essential parts just to make his world better. I myself would love a pair of glasses that turns ads into some sort of relaxing image. Cyborgs obviously aren't very far off if you think of it in little ways. You don't need to be half machine to be one. It's just that the transformation as far as history and the passing of time is concerned, doesn't think of people as cyborgs. They probably never will be thought of in that way. Perhaps in the future when people really are half machine, they still won't be thought of as cyborgs, just as people who needed a little extra help in/on their bodies.

Slacker

2008-10-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit behind in working on my blog. As is usual with my little mini-hobbies I picked it up with zeal and now a few weeks later thoughts of blogging have fallen out of my brain like lemmings off a cliff. But for the sake of my grades (and perhaps to have a nice place to show people what it is exactly that I do) here I am trying to slog through another blog post.

The topic of this one is actually on Bladerunner, and it's predictions for the future. I've never actually seen all of the movie. We started watching it in class, but the day we were going to finish I was on a plane going to California, so I don't feel too bad about not seeing the ending. I tried googling though, and that seemed to have worked marvelously. Apparently a lot of people have thought about this apparently prophetic movie. For sure, the very setting of Bladerunner can be recognizable today. Go to any city at night, preferably to some sort of alleyway, and bring a picture from a screen of Bladerunner, and you'll wonder to yourself if you havent been magically transported to 2019, and if it's really Harrison Ford standing behind you with a gun.

Blizzcon

2008-10-13T18:06:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had the pleasure of going out to Anaheim California for Blizzcon '08. Of course, this means I'm probably a WoW player, and I am. I'm a huge Blizzard fan, and I even threw my portfolio at them in a probably vain hope that they'll give me a little call. While I was there I met up with a bunch of my guildies in WoW (some 15 to 20 of us went! Party!)

Now, I live on the east coast, which means my vacation had to start two days early. Wednesday (after taking a midterm, no less) I drove 6 hours to Norfolk International Airport. Thursday my flight left, and I got to Anaheim Thursday afternoon. My first surprise after checking in and heading down to the convention center was just how many people were coming to Blizzcon. The line to pick up our badges stretched out of the building, down the street, then back in again and into another huge convention hall where it wound around quite a few times. It actually didn't take too long to get through, an hour and a half maybe. Also, while we were waiting several people came in with blowup swords to have mock sword fights, or carrying banners for the Horde which is my WoW team so I was cheering for them with the rest (Nerdy, I know. But you can't really stop when you're surrounded by so many others)

The opening ceremonies on Friday were just what I thought they were. The CEO of Blizzard came out and talked to us, gave us a few announcements. Diablo 3 is getting another playable class, the Wizard, which from my experimentation this weekend is totally awesome. After some lunch, myself and a couple friends decided it was time to go to the store. This was what I spent my Friday doing. 5 hours later I stepped out of the store with a very nice messenger bag and a beautiful cinematic artbook. I was just in time to see the costume contest with the rest of my buddies. 2 of them were actually taking part, which is awesome. Once the contests were through, we all met up at Joe's Crab shack, where we basically took over the place. Two words, Shark Bite. We went back to the Hilton bar afterwards. After that, the Days Inn for me, because $60 is so much less than $150.

The next day was basically spent confirming my thoughts that I need to go home and install my old copies of Starcraft and Diablo 2. I played their sequels, which are so very very fun, but I never beat their predicessors because I'm lame like that. I'm especially excited about Starcraft 2, which is good because everyone who went to Blizzcon is getting a beta key. The closing ceremonies were great. Despite the fact that I'm not a big Metal fan, I really enjoyed Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, which is a band made up of people that work at Blizzard. The lead singer is also the lead Art Director. After them Video Games Live played. I love those people. Video Games Live is a full symphony and chior that play just video game music. I really hope they make a CD with the Wrath of the Lich King stuff on it because I'd be on that like lice on so many of the nerds I was spending time with this weekend. Afterwards, we went to the Hilton again, but we decided that spending $6 on a beer was rediculous. So we ordered Pizza, went to 7-eleven and bought some 6packs and went up to the 5th floor community patio where we wiled away the hours until finally it was time to part.

My next day was spent with my brother, since he lives in LA and my flight was at 10:45pm. There's nothing much to describe, except that my brother has the most comfortable chair in history and putting people on a flight for 5 hours in seats made of cement is the same as torture.

Anyway, I have a lot of pictures, which I shall now place here because I can't figure out where else they should go.

Duh-nuh

2008-10-01T14:33:00.001-07:00

So I've decided (with the help of one of my Professors) that instead of making an animated short, I'm going to do a children's book or a flip book or something to do with stills instead of actual animation. The reason for this is that I'm not huge on actually animating. What I really like to do is modeling, and that is the job I'd eventually like to get. Since this is the case, it seems sort of a waste to spend a ton of time animating, and having less cool models because of it.

I'm still going to do the same theme, which is going to be some sort of underwater thing involving an octopus though, so no need to break a sweat over that. This week I've mostly finished one of the models in Maya, the shark. I've imported it to Zbrush for texturing and tweaking and so far I'm stoked with the results. He's far from finished, since I want to add in more details (he doesn't have gills!) but I really like the textures so far. I've never actually done this sort of thing, with Zbrush in particular, but I absolutely love how it's working and I'm going to need to pick up a copy for myself.

Art and Science

2008-09-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

Because the whole world is out to get my generally uninformed and badly thought out opinion, Melissa in my class asked during her tutorial on Billy Kluver:
In reference to the Pavilion, Klüver states that “the ability of the contemporary artist to participate in a project of this scale is an outstanding achievement and radically expands the social possibilities of art.” (quoted in Noah Wardrip-Fruin, p. 226)
Q: How does the new media artist expand the social possibilities of art and science?

The way I see it, New media art is can be thought of as anything created by any person through a means that isn't thought of as traditional art. That is, not painting or sculpture or anything like that unless it has a neat video attachment or a speaker behind it. Generally, everything else falls under the category of Technology, which is a science in itself. So by using this argument, obviously the answer comes down to something close to New media artists in themselves being kind of like scientists, by creating new technologies (maybe without much purpose other than being flashy, but that's not the point) or finding new ways of using old technologies. By working together with other scientists, or in Kluver's case engineers, everyone involved can help expand the minds of everyone else who experiences these artworks and may even help bring around new and useful purposes for technology and science.

I hope that makes sense. I can't seem to tell whether it's convoluted or whether I just rambled on so that it just looks like I can form well rounded arguments.

We're all Sheep

2008-09-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

Finally, after the whole summer I've actually managed to make a little movie about my main project last semester. I had actually thought that these files were lost and deleted from the computers in class. Luckily, they had been saved for me on the main administrator computer.

Last semester I helped make a video game on the Xbox 360 for a class. I was a fairly simple little capture the flag game, with sheep as the main characters running around grabbing little orbs and bringing them back to their base. The cool bit was that the sheep would reset every 10 seconds or so, then you'd play a new one and the old sheep you played would go along the path you used the past 10 seconds. You had 5 sheep in total, and the person with the most points at the end wins. I designed the sheep. Another bit was it had a neat level creator, but I had almost no part in that. I'm trying to get the computer science people that did the programming to help me get it on my 360 at home, but they disappeared after the class ;( There was also the most adorable opening movie they made as a surprise for us, and I'd like to get a copy of that too.

The Mechanics of Reproduction

2008-09-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

Hah. Title sounds a lot more interesting than the post is going to be. For his assignment in our class, Alex asked "Has mechanical reproduction changed the way we view arts authenticity as well as the value we place on the original?"

The value of actual art pieces has always been high. Reproducing only makes the actual piece more valued as it becomes more widely known and accepted. The only way our values may have gone down is that the common public now has a chance to view these pieces, thus making them less like "Godlike creations of the imaginative artist" and more a pretty picture you could put in a nice frame and place above your couch in the living room. I think these posters and reproductions are the ones placed at a lower value though, while the actual works of art are still placed high on their pedestals.

Jellyfish

2008-09-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

I've been super into jellyfish and octopi lately. I'm making a 3D short featuring an octopus for my senior studio project. I even made a race of jellyfish in Spore, which are beating up other races on their little planet (though for a while there it was touch and go. Someone made some giant lizard with rocks on it's back, and those were brutal).

Anyway, as I was sitting around in my friends dorm chatting and doing nothing in particular, I sketched out this Portugese Man o' War in Corel Painter X. I love this program. If someone had any practice in photoshop painting, they wouldn't have any trouble picking up this program. The only major difference is all the options for painting and less options for anything else. It doesn't have the versatility of Photoshop, but for paintings it's top notch.

Zbrush

2008-09-08T06:33:00.001-07:00

I started a new class this semester dealing in digital sculpting using a new program called Zbrush. It's a lot like Modo or Mudbox, if anyone has ever used that. Basically, it lets you paint in the 3D almost. It's like molding a ball of clay on the computer. I thought I'd post my first projects, which were to make a couple of alien seeds.

Due to the nature of how you work with this program, it's very easy to create very natural looking organic shapes. I haven't experimented much with non-organics but it's probably a much more complicated matter. There are many different "brushes" to choose from, and though the layout of the tools at your disposal is kind of unintuitive, it's not hard to at least remember where everything is. There are sliders for just about any option you could think of, and many that you wouldn't and probably never will.

Having worked with Maya rather a lot, one of the things I was most impressed by in this program was the paint tools. Painting in Maya is a huge drag, since you have to work with UVs, which are never very fun. Though you can paint directly on objects it's a sort of touch and go thing you don't really want to mess with in any incredible amount of detail. However, using Zbrush, you're given a large variety of options and brushes. You may have to go over the areas more than once when you paint over the wrong bits by accident, and if the area that you are painting is too thin you often face the problem of painting both sides of a plane. But if you come at it with a good amount of creativity, you can come through with a very nice looking object.

I do have a couple gripes, which I mostly can't talk about but am assured they're being worked on. But overall, as a 3D digital artist I really enjoy this program. It's incredibly satisfying to be able to just pick up something like this and come out after one or two tries with something that looks pretty amazing. It didn't even take that much time to do. A few hours on each. Even nicer is that I can lower the resolution and import these into Maya to be animated or whatever, and vice versa I can import a Maya object into this and work better details into it.

Overall I will quite enjoy using this (or something like it, I've never actually used Modo or Mudbox, but would be interested in trying either. I'll make sure to upload anything I make, we're trying to make faces next which should be an interesting challenge.

On Metropolis

2008-09-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

At the end of the movie Metropolis, our main man states in a big ol text screen that “The mediator between brain and hands must be the heart”.

It's not the most mysterious of quotes. Without compassion there can't be a relationship between any two or more people. Obviously, in the setting for Metropolis, the big man has no compassion for the little man. He doesn't know or care about what the lower class has to go through, and they rebel. The same goes for any society, and has been mirrored in history multiple times. This obviously cuts said society off at the ankles, and after toppling over, gives the head some time for reflection while it grows it's legs back.

I live!

2008-08-28T13:14:00.001-07:00

After two years of never even looking at blogspot, I've decided to renew this blog for use in a class. Maybe I'll form a new habit.

Update! Zomg! 12/16/06

2006-12-15T22:09:00.000-08:00

It's not like I havent been doing any art at all. I've been doing a lot actually. It's just that most of it is in non-digital media, which is difficult at the moment to turn into some sort of digital media. Once I get back to school, I'll be able to go to the little storage room I've been keeping my 3D pieces, and take pictures of them. There's a couple of them that I really like.

Now that I'm on Christmas break, I'm hoping to get some more stuff done. I owe a lot of people pictures for various things. For now, the only update I have is that I've finished that druid piece work in progress, and submitted it to the Blizzard fanart section to see how that goes xD

I like how it turned out. The colors especially. I opted to get rid of a lot of the lineart details. Kinda thought they detracted when the colors were so light. The background with the rocks and stuff is only so-so. But as far as my backgrounds go it's pretty much a success.

I have some copies of my Maya projects this year. One of them I'm going to work some more on, because I like it and want to animate it. The other one is a fictional animated logo I made ;D It spins. Ooooh. Though, someone was kind enough to let me know that it spins in the wrong direction. Oops.

I'm pretty excited about my maya class, and I really like the program. I'll probably download the demo of it from the maya site, and then I can render things at the render farm at school. That way I can actually animate the other project that I'm proud of. Which was the first one in the class. We were supposed to come up with something that would help us in the apocalypse of our choice. I chose the "Water World" type of apocalypse, only that there are pirates that drive around actual islands, with the use of perpetual potion generators to run them. My artsiness however, turned my technology into some sort of flower thing. But I really like how it turned out. All that's left is the actual animating of it, which shouldn't be too difficult.

Sorry if these videos actually make this blog hard to load ;x I tried to make them small. I'll try to update more often now XD Not likely.

10/23/06

2006-10-22T23:29:00.000-07:00

Nothing spectacular going on lately. I work a lot so I dont have a lot of time. My parents just bought motorcycles, and I cant wait to have pictures of them riding on them. Also, my brother asked me to read something at his wedding. I really cant wait to see him get married. I love his fiance. Kelly is such a cool person. Truthfully, we'd never really have hung out under different circumstances, we're totally different personalities. But she's such a cool person, and I can't wait to have her in the family. Lee tells me he may even try to come over here for Christmas. He seems to have wanted us to come visit, and we were planning on it for a while. I don't remember why we decided not to. I think it pretty much came down to money, and that we couldnt afford all four of us to go to Colorado, and we didnt wanna be split up for Christmas. I hope he can come over. We havent been together for Christmas in years.

I have made some progress in my druid piece. And I'm hoping in days to come I'll have some sketches of some pieces I want to do in the future.

I changed my main colors to overlay, to see what they would look like, and I liked the effect. But I havent really chosen yet.

Zomg! First Post

2006-10-18T21:55:00.000-07:00

This'll be my first post (of hopefully many, I have an abyssmal track record with these things.) This blog will be primarily used for art stuff. I plan to try drawing every day, and posting scribbles and doodles and even finished pieces here. As well as updates on WIPs.

A World of Warcraft fanart I've been toying with for a couple days. It started out as a random doodle in my sculpture class. I'm working on fixing it up so I can then color it ;3

My second sketch today was made on a whimsy as I was trying to think of what I would make for a Burning Man project. I want to make a skeleton werewolf...which obviously wont be detailed like this...but I wanted to draw it.