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…
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#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…
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‘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…
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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…
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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…
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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 —…
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#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…
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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…
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“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,…
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We humans are really flubbing this new decade. It’s moving a little beyond just being insulting and enervating. Now it’s starting to hurt. Above you can see the prognosis for the next 5 days in terms of pollution where I live, juxtaposed with a close-up of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease. The…
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It’s over 10 days since my last update on this piece in progress, and it might not look like it’s that different, but I logged in over 20 hours of work on small changes. The deal is that I’m improving my skills at realism while executing this, so there are areas I keep working over…
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[I created this image and it’s free to use or share. Be my guest. Copy/paste OK!] I made this graphic about as fast as i could, just to add a little spice to an article I was going to write updating on the virus. The image was more difficult than I anticipated, and I had…
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It is precisely the things that science cannot prove about us, and which allow autonomy, independent thought and action, which define our true nature. There are two things that are objectively impossible, but subjectively undeniable. One is consciousness, and the other is free will. Science, as hard as it has tried, and is trying, can’t…
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What is postmodernism, what are its shortcomings, and how has it negatively impacted the art world and contemporary culture? [repost with updates] Every student of art needs to grapple with Postmodernism at some point, either climb aboard, reject it, or integrate it. In order to come to terms with it, one needs to be able…
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Here he is again, and more rounded out. The initial line drawing (see below) has completely disappeared, and now all the shapes are defined via shading. I made his flesh more uniformly grey green, and I’m liking the deeper orange for the irises (the eyes are definitely not done). I’m NOT done with shading, highlights,…
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[Note: I’m just calling it the “wuflu” for convenience, rather than the “Novel Coronavirus 2019”. Also made the graphic above for fun.] At this point there’s nothing I can do other than wait for the inevitable spread of the virus — if science is correct — to the city where I live. I’m too close…
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It’s no surprise that people are misinformed, dis-informed, misled, or that their priorities are skewed. We can thank the media for much of that, and our postmodern, post-truth world where subjectivity trumps truth at every turn, and narratives are more important than science. It’s also nearly impossible to get accurate information out of China, because…
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Some people make their digital paintings in very logical stages. That has tended to not be me, except on some occasion. I’m, or have been, much more the artist that just starts experimenting, sees what happens, and rides the wave in. But, uh, to get to some next level shit, sometimes an artist has to…
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[I wote this yesterday morning when the power was out. My info on the Wuhan-flu is thus a little behind in numbers, but otherwise still relevant.] Within a minute of waking up this morning the power went out. Turns out something happened to a power cable by the superstore around the corner. That might have…
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The Wuhan Coronavirus is potentially much worse than SARS. I’m fascinated by this story because I’ve lived in China for nearly five years; I live in Thailand now, and we have 8 cases of infected individuals; and I just got over a month-long bout of bronchitis so am a little sensitive about airborne communicable diseases.…
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Can you guess which one is my version? Have a look, and you can find out if you were right down below. If you don’t know already, I have a contemporary art / fine art background, and have been making digital art starting around 20 years ago. I’ve given up on the contemporary art world,…
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Suddenly I realized how ridiculous it is to expect people to care. People are too subsumed in their own lives, responsibilities, worries, and so on to be expected to even have the wherewithal to care about you or me or this or that person, or group of people. Asking people to care is like asking…
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Gotta’ love me some pollution! I’m an expat who’s lived in Asia for about 15 years, and in some of the more polluted parts. I’m also rather health conscious and trying to level up my diet and exercise regimen. I feel like I’ve got some obstacles that might be making that a bit more of…
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Broad Outlines This is intended as a useful device for a very general categorization of visual-based art. The idea is to simplify something that is already hopelessly convoluted. There are inevitably grotesque omissions, outstanding hybrids, uncategorizable outliers, and genres I don’t address (such as folk art, outsider art, and comics…). But it’s worth thinking about…
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In digital imaging, there’s always a way. All the rain drops in the pic above are fakes, courtesy of yours truly. I could have been more persnickity about it, but this was for a tutorital. I tried to figure this out last night, but there was a sticking point I couldn’t get past. After sleeping…
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On this day in 1888, which is 130 years ago, Vincent Van Gogh cut of a piece of his right ear in a bout of anguish brought on by his fight with Paul Gauguin, who was leaving Arles and their shared yellow house. Earlier in the evening Gauguin had threatened Vincent with a saber, and…
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