I finally finished this. There’s quite a bit I’d like to say about it. I’ll save that for another post. Lately I like to share an image when it’s done and let people get an impression before I go into detail regarding my intentions.
A few things though. This image is quite large for a digital painting. I worked on it in three parts. It can be a triptych, or a seamless image. I had to work on it in sections because even working on one third of it used about 85% of my RAM when I was using Painter. Once I put all 3 panels together in Photoshop, and made a few editing layers, I exceeded the maximum file size of 2 gigs for a PSD. So, point is I made it as large as my computer could handle it. I wanted to be able to print it out at 150 dpi 12 feet wide. Or one could go half that size at 300 dpi, which is magazine cover tight resolution, and it woudl be 6 feet wide. No, folks, it’s not just a little image on the screen of your smartphone.
I need to explain something that a lot of people don’t seem to understand. They ask why anyone would buy a print of a digital image when they can just grab the image off the web and print it themselves. Well, if you wanted to print it out large, it would look crappy if you just blew up the Jpeg you got off the internet. A professional print is made from the full-sized file. Compare a small section blown up from a jpeg like the one above, and the same section at actual pixels (not enlarged).
So, the original file has crisp detail you can’t even see in the reduced version. Unfortunately for me, I think people may not really take my art seriously until they see it printed out full-sized. Imagine this piece 12 feet wide and nearly 6 feet high.
I’m curious what people who don’t already know what this is about think, or what your impressions of it are in general. I’ll elucidate tomorrow or the next day, share more details, and make prints available.
For now, here’s one more detail (which is not full-sized).
~ Ends
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
For some inexplicable reason, and regardless of your original intention, I thought of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and that particular moment when one of the mice that have been running the Earth for ten million years offers to buy the brain off the last survivor of the planet’s destruction. In response to his feeble protests, the mouse says, “It [your brain] can always be replaced by an electronic one! A simple one should suffice.” )
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Hard to think of any other decapitated, exploding robot heads to compare with. Perhaps Kraftwerk’s Electric Cafe artworks. How about that crossed with chickens dangling and shunting along on a wire in a slaughterhouse?
Painstaking stuff technically. Reminds me of back when I used PS on my 1999 Mac with 250MB RAM and working at 200dpi for tile-printing to 9x A3 prints. It’s the layers that make the filesize. Never had a crash though. Might be different running a computer in the heat where you live.
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I’ll write more about the content soon. Right, there isn’t really anything to compare it to as an image, or really in terms of the technique (or the two put together). At least I don’t know of anyone who makes blender files into digital impasto paintings. I am in search of novelty as well as other things, but novelty in terms of visual images (which is not accepted as novelty because it is considered impossible because imagery is considered dead on arrival, in which case Prince’s appropriated Instagrams are novel.).
Thankfully computers have really improved, though Windows always keeps up so that just running it can use up more RAM than one had on ones computer altogether a decade ago. Meanwhile Firefox is using 363 megs of RAM right now, and this is the only tab I have open (and Chrome is just as bad). Digital files with pixels are huge, so I’ve always been pushing my computer to the limit. I discovered that I can’t have a web browser open and expect to work on large digital files at the same time. Ridiculous. I CAN play music on Itunes without hardly using any RAM.
I don’t think the heat really matters, but I do keep a fan on my computer to be safe.
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