At least until after the election, folks. The political atmosphere has been in the red for months, and as election time gets closer, it’s likely to spill over into an eruption of anger and lashing out. Well, that’s if the last election is anything to go by. And there are still people I’ve had no…
Read More
Got carried away with the tutorials. Let me just show you what the instructor’s piece looked like next to mine. The reason my canvas is square is he had us make them 1080 by 1080, and I went with the challenge. The reason his is no longer square here is … you got me. I…
Read More
This donut is made from pure math. I fashioned this donut in Blender by following along with a famous tutorial series by Blender Guru. So, no credit goes to me for conceiving it. All I did was what I was told to do by the tutorial, and I managed to get through it, along with…
Read More
The Enterprise has finally left on its maiden voyage into space, where it’s zooming along at warp speed 6. And that just reveals that I’ve been watching some Star Trek TS on Netflix above and beyond what was necessary to get screen shots of the ship at various angles. Above you can see the model,…
Read More
Thought I’d knock this out in a day as practice, but I never intended to do the small lights, logos, lettering, or any of the more intense details. But once I stuck my toe in, I sunk waist deep, and then soon I was up to my eyeballs. In the end I took it as…
Read More
Reflections in water — perhaps my very favorite visual phenomenon — are possible to create out of the computational ether in Blender. I didn’t need a clincher to persuade me that working in 3D might be the next avenue of my artistic exploration. I’d already said that Blender is God’s free gift to visual artists,…
Read More
If you missed the introduction of the tree orb in my last post, here’s a gallery: I kinda’ surprised myself here. I didn’t intend to create these images, or make a sequence out of them. I just woke up this morning and wanted to try combining a few different Blender files I’d produced. After rendering…
Read More
Taking a break from the Enterprise, and having fun with Blender. Here’s a rusty, traveling, metal, tree orb with circular glass on both sides. An amazing thing about working this way — and I’m just doing somewhat rudimentary experiments here — is how many images I can generate. I made the orb in a tutorial,…
Read More
I’ve been adding a bunch of little lights. It hasn’t been easy, at all. I won’t bore you with the process, but there’s gotta’ be a better way of doing it than the two methods I use. Nevertheless it’s good practice doing it the crude way. The main disc is DONE! All the little lights,…
Read More
Russel called me names, and I hit him. Hit him in the gut. What did he call you? Brown eyes. I’m sure you’ve heard about Jane Eliot’s infamous Blue eyes/Brown eyes Experiment, hearkening back to a time when we were permitted as a society to conduct social experiments on students for the greater good of…
Read More
OK, it was a day and a half. Enough to burn my skin on one day — despite applying a generous amount of thick, white, sunscreen — and wear a baseball cap in the Andaman sea the next to protect my delicate nose. By some inexplicable miracle, Thailand has been spared the worse of COVID-19,…
Read More
Making the star ship Enterprise in Blender.
Read More
Taking a break from my tutorials and practicing the fledgling skills I’ve picked up so far. Can I pull off the enterprise? I THINK I can. Worth a try. First thing was finding some blueprints. I cut them out in Photoshop, and then arranged them in Blender. They form a hollow rectangle, but it doesn’t…
Read More
Above is a mech I made in Blender (v2.83.3). This was fun and compulsive, much like playing a mech war computer game I got into recently, before cutting myself off for wasting too much time on it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the program, and this creation was my version of a beginner tutorial…
Read More
Everything I was taught as a child was good is now bad.
America is bad. The pilgrims are bad. The founding fathers are bad. Cowboys are bad. Christianity is bad. Christopher Columbus is bad. The police are bad. The free market is bad. White people are bad. Men are bad. The nuclear family is bad. Heterosexuality is bad. Individuality is bad. Independence is bad. Rational thought is bad.
In the art world painting is bad. Originality is bad. The old masters are bad. Skill is bad. Beauty is bad.
Read More
The alien required a flying saucer in the background. If you missed my last post, I’m just doing some practice using beginner techniques in Blender. I do a tutorial or two, take a break, and apply what I’ve learned. It’s a good combo. Instead of getting sick of doing tuts, after messing around on my…
Read More
Took a break from the rank beginner tutorials to have some fun being creative with the basic building blocks. I’m always going to make aliens, and I’ve been doing it for more than a quarter century. Aliens, robots, cyborgs, and monsters. Green is also my favorite color. I’ve always loved ’em. This one’s greeting us,…
Read More
Blender is a completely FREE powerhouse of a digital sculpting and animating program. It downloads and installs so fast it’s a miracle. That lets you know that somehow, this software that can do so much — you can even make animated movies with it — is lean and clean. For me the biggest blessing is…
Read More
We live in a time of extraordinary moralizing. You may have noticed a no-holds-barred competition to see who is the most morally pure, and who isn’t, either by birthright or by belief. There’s always some of that going on. When I was growing up it issued from the religious right. Nancy Reagan famously advised to…
Read More
And that’s about as far as I could take her. if you’ve followed the development of this piece on my blog you know it was an exercise in technique, and based loosely on a tutorial. It’s evolved into something a bit more, and I’d consider it part of my portfolio. Along the way I discovered…
Read More
These days everything is controversial and there’s little certainty about anything. Take for example the endless battles over what constitutes a healthy diet [consider Jordan Peterson and his daughter only consume beef, salt, and water]. A big part of this is, I suspect, because somewhere along the line people stopped believing that it is essential…
Read More
Museum Curator forced to resign
over “toxic white supremacist beliefs”!
A little something different today. One of my hobbies when I’m more settled is keeping fish and plants. Plants I’m not so good at, and I am perpetually overwatering or underwatering them, and when they start to suffer and I look up what’s wrong with them, it’s always that I’m over or under watering: one…
Read More
I’m not that big of a fan of photo-bashing. That’s a technique where you take photos and superimpose them on your digital painting in order to achieve textural effects. It can be a cheap cheat that looks cheesy, or it can be a sophisticated process that when done right can really add something. Here I’ve…
Read More
Last month I made a pact with myself to not write or comment publicly about things which are happening in the world right now. Part of my rationale was to spare myself getting involved in the toxic miasma, both in terms of time, energy, and mental well-being. But there’s something darker lurking. It is not…
Read More
She’s coming along. Since my last post I’ve painted some large branches in the middle background, and some lighting and shading. There’s lots more to do, including adding texture to the branches to make them more convincing. Near the end I paint over whatever I want, and however I want, but right now I’m working…
Read More
It’s a bit muted right now because I haven’t added any lighting or shading. There’s only a line drawing, with flat color under it. I made it more complex by varying the colors of the sticks that make up our stick figure. That helps to delineate which sticks or branches are which. Incidentally, the ability…
Read More
This is another exercise in lighting, shading, modeling, anatomy, perspective, work-flow, and when working from the imagination. I also intended it as a work of art, but working within certain parameters, and with a given objective in mind. My followers know I like to compare digital painting to MMA, in which case in order to…
Read More
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Recent Comments