Viewing entries tagged with 'digital art'
Scribbler Too
(click here to see the large image)
Scribbler Too is quite an addictive online drawing tool. It does not draw straight lines; instead strokes connect to existing lines if they are in their influence area. Try it and you will see what I mean.
Interestingly this tool creates a new drawing experience. Instead of focusing on individual lines I drew my attention to the entire image and the relation of the lines. I was amazed at the results considering that I only used a mouse to draw (which with other drawing programs creates pretty bad scrawly images).
The influence of the lines on the brush behaviour is an interesting effect that really only works in a digital environment. Below are some more drawings that I made today.
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello
A fantastic silhouette-style steampunk animation by Antony Lucas. In terms of the visual style of the animation I really like the fusion of 2d and 'unobtrusive' 3d style. It reflects the theme of the futuristic yet nostalgic and mechanical world of Jasper Morello in an ideal way.
It's quite an inspiration for my Postgraduate studies (towards a Master of Art & Design) that I started last week. Actually the mechanical ideas blend in well with my current story idea that I've been carrying around with me since end of 2008 (and which due to an incredible lack of time is still far from complete).
Lucas' animation was nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA award in 2006.
I luckily discovered it through ARDEN, the Postgraduate Research Community of the School of Art & Design, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
I, Robot
I just came across a really nice game today: Machinarium. A little roboton a big adventure. This is a nice little point and click adventure game with very beautiful design made in Czechoslovakia.
Funny enough I could say the exact same thing about a game called Little Wheel, except that that's from Slovakia. Both are definitely worth a look. I wonder which was first.
I, Robot
I started to work on a new animation. Above is a visual test of the protagonist (see the large version). It's more than likely that the look will change completely but I somewhat like this still. It could make a good flyer as it is but the style will probably not be expressive enough for character animation.
For those who are interested in the tools: The robot above was made from scratch in the free open source software Blender, the halftone texture on the robot comes from a PyNode Script for Blender by T.K., backgrounds are put together and modified in Photoshop.
The story is complete (but I won't spoil it here). It will be a rather short animation, yet I expect it'll still take me quite a while to complete because I have a lot of stuff on my plate right now.
Guano in 3D
A couple of excerpts from a rare interview (MP3 file, 32 minutes) with independent animator Don Hertzfeldt (bitterfilms.com) on Scene Unseen Podcast.
Don Hertzfeldt on progress:
"I feel like I'm constantly learning and I think that's the key to keep making new stuff because I think the moment you think you know everything you kind of turn into an asshole and I would think the process is not as much fun any more."
Don Hertzfeldt on Computer Graphics (CG) and traditional animation:
"First of all I don't want to sound anti CG because I'm not. It's just an amazing set of tools. The cool thing about animation is you can literally do anything. It's technically speaking the purest form of film-making because you are literally working one frame at a time, sometimes working with your hands on every single frame of the picture. So you're free to do anything. Anything you can imagine you can put on film which you can never do in live action. So it's just really stupid and ironic to me that with all this amazing new technology here we can push the boundaries of cinema, we can change the language of cinema – they're trying to just get towards photo realism.
The Right Number
Chrome is the new browser developed by Google. I just tried it and well, it's really fast. It also promises to be very secure and to have a good memory usage/garbage collection model and to be better equipped for up-to-date web applications using Javascript and Ajax (such as Google Mail).
A very good (yet still very geeky) introduction to the Chrome browser was done in comic book form by Scott McCloud, better known for his awesome comic books Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. I read the first two, the last one is now on my list of books to read. He also made some online comics, based on his own suggestions in Reinventing Comics about using comics in a different medium in an appropriate way. The Right Number looks pretty good.
Shady Art from a Sunny Place
Gosh, if you are having a great time right now but you would rather be slightly depressed then go and see one of the Van Morsel/Wiseguy Productions animations. It's very interesting animated art with amazing dialogue. It sounds like audio recordings inspired by automatic writing and one wonders from what depths of the writer's unconscious it comes from. Interesting, yet deeply disturbing.
I am lucky enough to know the artist – but I won't blow his cover here. Let me just say that he lives in a town called Nelson, the most sunny place in all of New Zealand. His art can probably be best described as the opposite.
As a start I recommend Rook but there are heaps of other yet unpublished animations by Van Morsel which I hope will be available some time on YouTube or elsewhere.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Talking about sheep: By chance an electric sheep crossed my way. I have troubles to explain this myself ? I just call it a collective evolutionary open source digital genetic darvinistic artificial genome flock sheep breeding art form.
Some quotes from the website:
»Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet. It's a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms.«
»Its shape, motion, and color are specified by a genetic code, a long string of numbers. If a user sees a sheep they like, they may press the up arrow key to vote for it. Sheep that receive more votes live longer and are more likely to reproduce. These votes form a fitness function for the aesthetic evolution of the flock.«
»I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force.«
You may call it a waste of bandwidth. I find this homage to Philip K. Dick's novel »Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?« extremely interesting.
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