slither

I just realized how much I like messing around in photoshop and just making stupid crazy stuff and exploring aesthetics without any of the pressures of usability. So, I've taken the illustration friday topic of the week, "slither" and made this,



grass photo from
illustration friday

notepad.bmp

Earlier this semester I got on a glitch art kick (which explorations for I used in my final printmaking project) and finally got into some hex editing. At first I just messed with jpgs off of google but then I really wanted to see what data files would look like translated into images. I really wanted to use a dump from a computer's active RAM but based on my googlings around that looks nearly impossible at my current level of understanding. I then tried to look for log files to translate but couldn't find any that were conceptually suitable to my project. After some deliberation I decided on taking notepad.exe (from vista) and using that. If I remember correctly this was done as a 24 bit bitmap. All I did was right a header for the image and add some zeros at the end of the file to pad the spaces so it would display, everything in between is just the hex interpretation of the program's code dumped in. At first I made it 64px tall, which was cool, but I noticed what looked like some pattern stretching in the top (ultimately, I was really hoping to find interesting visual patterns generated from patterns in the data) so I rewrote it for a width of 64px and got this beauty out of it. It looks like an actual notepad in the file! The artifact repeats at different sizes throughout the file and very closely resembles the actual notepad.exe icon. I was not expecting to find this at all, very cool. I have no idea if this is an artifact of the file's information (If the information for the icon is included in the body of the file), if this was in any way intentional, or if it is a complete coincidental anomaly, but it sure is cool. I'm definitely going to be shoving some more files into bmp form this summer and will be posting a much more expansive and probably explicative version of this post later with some of the jpg I broke too.

...back to packing.

sitStand

Time's up... so here's sit stand!
After school's out I plan to post detailing production and all the development that went in to get this fifteen second thing off the ground in the two months that it took. I'll also be posting a special edition render, so stay tuned!

Here's a full res file (~= 30MB).
emcmahil_ss4thPass.mov

still going

Progress!

I paint too pastely...

Trying to figure things out. Colors matter, values matter more.

workworkwork

working working working and then working some more.
This, is not work.

QuadFecta

The first computer animation assignments of the year: a finger point, walk, head turn, and take. These were strictly animation exercises and the model and rig were provided to us. It's my first time animating a human character, or anything with arms really.... Needless to say I learned a ton on these and feel like I'm in a much better place when it comes to understanding animation. The take was the only one I had time to fully revise, and even though it was my favorite one when I did it it still looks worlds better. It's amazing how such slight changes, small relationships, and subtle emphasis make a world of difference in the visceral experience. Currently we're working on a modeling project in NURBS and then we're going to start SIT STAND, the big assignment of the semester. I'm pretty excited for this, and so is Carson.

gold paint is fun

Here's some stuff from the past two portrait nights. I like finding a stylistic constraint/goal and working with that during those three hours. It's really nice to be able to explore these ideas over the course of multiples while at the same time being flexible and free by not being committed to a serious/legit concentration of work. For example the golden portraits were started with Scott's when I painted his beard in bronze gouache and I just kept on with it because I kept having left over paint and didn't want to waste it. I'd like to keep trying to explore different aesthetics, methods, colors, materials, and exaggerated drawing styles in particular. In the immediate future I'd like to do some stuff with soft pastels, mixed media/collage, and maybe even work with these as etchings... Gouache works pretty nicely in washes - keeps that color vibrancy up, and printmaking paper scraps are fantastic to work on, but not vellum, that stuff can not get wet; I still need to figure out what I can do with all my left over vellum.












Got some stuff from FEWS too. I'm trying to go to it just about every night for an hour as a break from work in the labs. I realized after last semester that I wasn't drawing nearly enough and was starting to lose touch with things. My observational and expressive skills have slowly shifted but I feel that my overall drawings have gotten a lot weaker as of late. I really need to pay close attention to things, get off the line again, and get back to being aware of mark making, the quality of which I've been severely neglecting...

this just in

The lastest: silly portraits and drawings of birds on a post it - soon to be an etching.

2010

Stuff actually from this year. Some sketches from open mic night and some portrait night watercolor sketches.