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…
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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…
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An examination of Michael Kerbow’s dinosaur paintings in his “Late Capitalism” series.
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Lots of people hate conceptual art. It’s really quite remarkable, and possibly unfortunate. Ostensibly, artists make art to engage, entertain, and inform people, in which case hatred is an extreme response. Though it does occur to me that the kind of art that is most disliked might be the variety that tries to “challenge” the…
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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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If you know how to use brushes in Photoshop, this one’s ready to go. It’s just something I stumbled on while experimenting with all the different options and capacities of Photoshop’s extremely powerful brush machine. Making custom brushes is now part of my arsenal of available techniques, and it’s phenomenal what you can do with…
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