I’ve officially put up my first public art show, with several prints on display at Mocha Mott’s in Vineyard Haven!

I decided it might be nice to show all the pieces in one post here on my site, so people who may come here from there can more easily examine them in detail, or those who can’t make it to the cafe can take a look.

My niece strikes photoshop again

and I colored the bird.

I also wrote a draft of something that might become… more. Hopefully. If I still feel good about it later.

This is actually photoshopped. Ever so slightly. I drew this girl and I drew a pair of binoculars, they were not positioned as they are here. I saw them on the page next to each other and didn’t understand why I hadn’t drawn her looking at the binoculars. So I moved them with the power of the computer. I am a cheating hack.

There is no great story behind this image, it’s just something I drew in Savannah one day and thought there was something mysterious and interesting about it, enough to keep it around. I imagine that she is holding herself back, resisting the urge to pick up the binoculars, but she’s just about to crack and lift them to her face, and in the distance is something she knows she shouldn’t look at, something private and taboo, but she just can’t help herself.

Or birds. She could be planning to look at birds.

These couple images, along with many others in the same Somethingawful.com thread, spread relatively wide on the internet, becoming front page features on the aforementioned site, and having their image tags scraped off them to be posted by plagiarists on various other web pages. My username on those forums was caldrax and I posted several photoshops there, ranging between sloppy and funny, very authentic looking and unfunny, and sloppy and unfunny. These were a couple of the more technically adept ones, though the hilarity factor was low. I also did several potentially offensive ones, which may or may not be shared here, depending on how much I decide I care for my reputation.

The first image was the famed M.C. Escher, retouched to look like the Penguin. It was surprisingly easy to do, I simply cut and pasted in the Penguin’s face and layered on the texture used in the rest of the image to make it fit in. The source photo of the penguin already had a look of bulbousness about it, so I didn’t need to do any reshaping to match the spherical nature of the rest of the Escher image. It came out looking like it had been harder to create than it had, which is always nice.

The second image was harder to achieve, yet not as widely found to be amusing (Isn’t that always how it goes). Color is always trickier, and a lot of layering, clone tool, and various forms of trickery were used. Removing the old gigantic comb from the original Magritte (this may not be the exact image I used-there were several reproduction versions) proved to be the most difficult part, and placing the shadow was equally tricky. I was proud of the way that part ended up looking, and the wall behind it came out pretty nice as well. I must confess, however, that I was frustrated at being unable to find a batarang that looked exactly like what I was going for.

The thread inspired some really great photoshops (and some not so great ones), I recommend looking over the highlights that were later posted on Somethingawful.

These two nightmarish images were created for a 2 disc mix cd a few years back. There was no real reason for the mix except that I wanted to make one (usually the incentive is something like “impress a girl!” or “make my friends like this music by force!”) I tossed this together with a theme, as one might be able to tell from the artwork: Piano music. Not exclusively pianos, but every song on both discs featured a piano in some form or another. I know, that’s not hard to pull off, but I thought it was a nice effort. A lot of the music turned out to be spooky and weird, so I put together the spookiest, weirdest covers I could think of.

The cover to Nurse With Wound’s “Thunder Perfect Mind” had been stuck in my head, and the “Sharps” cover (top image) took heavy influence from that image. I compiled these elements in Photoshop and took used my wacom tablet to draw the “branches” gripping her hands, growing as her seat, and so on.

The other (bottom image) was derived, I believe, from some sort of nightmare I’d had a few nights prior. The shiny blurry bits that seem to fly toward the front of the image and fade behind the kid playing piano are actually CDs. My CD collection had been damaged in a recent beach-sand accident and one day I decided to dig through them and pull out all the ones that weren’t worth saving, systematically snapping them in half and throwing them in a trash can. Rather than throw them out, I thought, on this hot autumn day in Savannah, it might be interesting to solder them together into a collage. I took out a soldering iron and found that when I held 2 CDs next to each other and punched through them with the hot iron, they stuck together almost immediately. Awesome! I proceeded to make a canvas out of CDs, with the intent of later sticking on a bunch of different colored ones in a way that made an image. I snapped some pictures, one of which was used for this image, and then put the thing against my wall. Unfortunately, it proved too fragile when returning home from work the next day, closing the door behind me caused it to crumble apart before my eyes. Oh well. They ended up in the dumpster moments later. Such is life. At least they made it into SOME sort of artwork.