If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.) — the popular app FaceApp — then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like…
Read More
[This is a re-post of an article from two-years ago which I’d forgotten I’d written, but rediscovered while looking for one of the images in it. I defend the notion of the spiritual in art in a hardball, rational and reasoned, fashion with no reliance on superstition, religion, or any variety of feel-good, wish-washy, wishful…
Read More
If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.) — the popular app FaceApp — then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like…
Read More
SFAU #33 was based on #30, as you can see in this morph. I’m hoping sharing morph pairs helps people get into the series, though usually I’ll share them on IG rather than here. Just a little thing I can do to help people get into my work. That’s all. Unless you’re interested in some…
Read More
If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.) — the popular app FaceApp — then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like…
Read More
An examination of Michael Kerbow’s dinosaur paintings in his “Late Capitalism” series.
Read More
I Photo-shopped these anti-lock-down protest signs. If you missed part 1, clickity-clack, or see it again at the bottom of this post. I explained a bit how I changed the signs in the previous post, so I’ll spare you the redundancy, but I’ll just give just a wee kiss of politics this time, not enough…
Read More
Whole lotta’ Photoshop goin’ on here, folks. Above you can see a few different techniques I used to change the signs. In the upper left sign, I cut and past their written letters to make new words and the opposite meaning. Bottom left sign I approximated their font to add more text. And in the…
Read More
If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.) — the popular app Faceapp — then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like…
Read More
I’m not accepted as a blue-chip artist, and there’s every indication I never will be. ~ Robert Williams. The best thing about Robert Willams is his paintings, but he’s also a likable fellow if you aren’t predisposed to dislike his type as much as the blue-chip art world turns its nose up at his art.…
Read More
AMERICANS TAKE VIRUS IN OWN HANDS Vigilante American citizens have taken it upon themselves to conduct a radical medical experiment. They are bypassing quarantine measures put in place to combat the SARS-CoV- 2 virus (COVID 19 is the resulting disease), standing up for their civil liberties, and believe that upwards of 99% of the…
Read More
The protests continue to rage in America, with freedom-loving individuals fighting the evil overlords in order to ruin the quarantine and help insure the virus spreads as widely as possible. People on the other side of the debate can’t protest in the street themselves because that would mean spreading the virus. What we can do…
Read More
Why aren’t they wearing masks? And what are they getting at? Protests regarding lock-down are a tad unfair because the people who believe in quarantine can’t gather in groups to do their own protests. What can they do to argue their side? I guess they can make humorous photo-manipulations from their homes. If that wasn’t…
Read More
An obscure artist was discovered, and quickly shelved. These days most people in the established art world see art through the lens of politics, social issues, obtuse philosophy, rarefied art theory, and radical ideology. It took outsider, underground types of artists, cartoonists, and collectors — the variety the contemporary art cognoscenti turn their noses up…
Read More
“There is no covid-19” ~ David Icke These days we all have to deal with conspiracy wackos, some merely eccentric, and then there’s the ones that call you “sheeple”, tell you that you “believe everything your government tells you”, and “you don’t know the truth”. We learn to avoid certain topics: the shape of the…
Read More
I am the least constant, most confused person outside my safe rectangle of canvas. Safe because it is mine, my world, my rules, my flat Earth. ~ Steven Beercock. Seeing his work is like finding your uncle’s paintings in a shed; then noticing how weird they are and how eccentric he is; and then slowly…
Read More
In my last post I shared a method for brainstorming ideas for creatures, and my theme was bat people. I’d made 9 thumbnail sketches, which you can see again below. I combined these to make 7 new variants, and then narrowed it down to the following four: I’d decided that the bat people I saw…
Read More
I’m working on developing a bat-person for the next of my more illustrational images, like my Ant Man. Normally, at least up until recently, I’d only do one drawing, and just have at it until I was finished. There’d be tons of editing, tweaking it out, and learning from mistakes, trial and error. But I’d…
Read More
Poor Mr. Bat. This was intended as a quick experiment in my ongoing exploration of digital impasto. To my knowledge I have the unique, and completely unrecognized distinction of being a pioneer in achieving digital impasto effects. I’ve used several different programs and combinations thereof to accomplish the results, and it’s usually not in a…
Read More
Finally completed, and it was as much of a battle creating him as he looks like he’s a veteran of. I used lots of new techniques which I’ve learned from professional illustrators, and incorporated into my own arsenal of digital and painting techniques. This is as far as I could take the image with my…
Read More
#21 – Dr. Cataract #21 is the twenty-fifth portrait in a series of 31 self-portraits as other versions of myself in different lives. This one took a sci-fi direction. The result is a unique, surrealist, sci-fi, mutrant man, perhaps a victim of his own medical or scientific experiments gone awry. I made this one shortly…
Read More
‘It is my bad luck that this happened to me.’ No, you should rather say: ‘It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.’ ~ Marcus Aurelius, before AD 180. [Note: I made the imagery for…
Read More
I lived in China for about 4.5 years, and when I turned 45 there I realized that one in every ten days of my life I’d awoken in China. I lived in small cities by Chinese standards, and there were so few other Westerners in those cities that I knew them all, and could count…
Read More
More thoughts after days of ruminating on this topic, and various challenges to my arguments on my blog and elsewhere. Note that if you disagree with me, or have in the past, that’s perfectly fine. I’m more interested in understanding reality than I am in being right. If I were to suddenly switch my pro-free…
Read More
What a difference rim lighting can make in a hyper-realist image. This is the first time I’ve really attempted this technique, and it took a lot of tinkering to get a result I was satisfied with. Rim lighting is a technique illustrators and other artists borrow from cinema. You have your main light source —…
Read More
#22 – The End Came Swiftly A sci-fi digital impasto painting reinterpreting the end of The War of the Worlds, when the Martian ships fall because of exposure to the bacteria in the Earth’s atmosphere. The image falls between representation, traditional oil painting, and abstraction. The atmosphere, textures, composition, and feel are more important…
Read More
In the continued creation of a hyper-realistic monster, I reached the stage where one overlays textures onto the body. For my fellow Photoshop nerds, you take a picture of a texture, put it on its own layer, lower the opacity to around 30%, and tweak out the exposure so the texture looks like it’s on…
Read More
“I want to be a machine.” ~ Andy Warhol [Repost: updated with edits. The topic of free will has come up a lot lately, and my pro-free-will stance and my belief in anthropogenic global warming are the topics where I get the most devil’s advocates and friendly challenges. This article is one of my classics,…
Read More
Recent Comments