For our second project we created a self portrait that portrayed some form of duality in our own personalities. For this project we were allowed to use any medium or size of project. The concept of my piece was that since I play rugby I have to have a bigger, stronger looking exterior but also have a certain mental state while playing. Off the field though I am a completely different person and I'm just the skinny, goofy kid. I showed this in my art by having a skinny character of myself putting on armor that is to large for him standing next to a shield and sword which are just as big. I put myself on a giant pile of gold coins to unify the character and the weapons and to also create a diagonal composition.

If I could change one thing with this piece it would be to add colour to it because I think it would create a much more interesting to look at work of art. If I could have only coloured one part of the entire piece it would have been the pile of coins. I think this would have made the piece stand out more as well as unify the piece through one easy step.

Overall I am pleased with this piece and I am happy that it is finally complete. This piece took me a while first because I was gone at a school camp trip, then because of a constant workload from all classes which culminated in me getting sick from being really stressed, but in the end it all worked out and I am done and not that stressed.

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud is a German born artist. Born in Berlin and the Grandson of the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. His early work was meticulously painted, he was often described as a Realist or even a Superrealist. During the late 1950's his handling became broader. I chose his self-portrait because I like the detail as well as the thickness that he applies the paint. I think the way he defines the wrinkles in his face.

Reflection

1985 (150kb); Oil on canvas, 56.2 x 51.2 cm; Private collection

Uncharted 2 + Google Sketchup

In this video Robh Ruppel, Art Director of Naughty Dog explains how he and his co-workers created the 2009 Game of the Year with a free 3D program called Google Sketchup. It was used mainly in the developmental stages of creating the game. IT was a great tool for them because they could make design choices in the third dimension they could speed up the process and make it mor eflexible since they are already in the third dimension. Robh Ruppel can believes that the futur eof concept art is going more three dimensional, because even though you can show an amazing drawing the real design comes in working in the third dimension.

Minecraft

Minecraft is a new game that is currently in beta but will be released 11/11/11. Currently it is in patch 1.6.6 and moving forward with bug fixes and new additions constantly. The creator, Marcus "Notch" Persson wanted to create a game "that was simple yet dynamic and that has a lot of potential to turn into a really great game"
As of right now the game is just an open sandbox indie game without a plot but has still made an estimated $33 Million as of April 2011. For the future of the game Notch wants to add in multiple ways to play the game. For example he wants to add an adventure mode, a survival mode and a building mode. Each mode for a different type of player.

The game is written with java script and is under development by a Swedish gaming company named Mojang. Originally Notch started creating this game by himself but felt once the game fully kicked off he had to spend time managing the website and other things instead of focusing on the game. This is why he created the company. He originally only hired four people, but has since expanded to a much larger staff.

Edward Burtynsky

Recently in class we watched a film on Edward Burtynsky who is a Canadian photographer. We watched his acclaimed award winning documentary Manufactured Landscapes which displays his breathe-taking photography and shows you how man has altered the earth through industry. I felt the film was very good because it showed me things on our planet that I couldn't have even believed existed. The most interesting thing I saw in the movie would have to have been the giant ships being disassembled for their metal.

To talk a little more about the actual artist Edward Burtynsky he was born in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1955 of Ukranian heritage. He says that he links his early exposure to industrialization from his home town to the development of his photography. His works are currently being exhibited in solo and exhibitions across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. Some of Burtynsky's distinctions include the TED prize, The Flying Elephant Fellowship, and the Roloff Beny Book award. He was also awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Canada and has four honorary doctorate degrees.

Paintball Art

On Friday I went paint balling with a bunch of my friends and after watching people target practice on one of the building inside I started to wonder if someone ever tried to do a painting with a paintball gun.

It didn't take long to find a video of someone doing exactly what I pictured on youtube. His name is David Ballinger and from his statement he sounds like a very interesting person. He believes that there is no such thing as failure in his art and always strives to do better. He uses many different mediums in his works. Recently he has been getting into Op Art to combine two images. One you see from far away, and the other is recognizable from up close.

Here are the two videos of his paintball art.

To see more of his work check out his Gallery

Luminescent Lines

While working on a project for my class I wanted to create some interesting glowing lines, but I had absolutely no idea how. After cycling through tutorials I found from google I found a really good one. In the tutorial it gives you very detailed step by step instructions allowing almost anyone with any photoshop experience to complete it. For anyone interested in this great tutorial here is the link.

Samwise

Ok, I admit it, I used to play WoW. After searching for a while on the main site I found all the concept artists personal site. Each artist has their own page showing their personal, Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo work. My personal favourite of the eight artists is Samwise.

Mountain Giant Concept Art

He is my favourite of the artists because he has a

variety of work for each game and even his "sketches" are top notch. He is Blizzard main concept artist for World of Warcraft though. He designed all the races and factions emblems. Some of his art is very beautiful and some of it is very gory. I like his art because it is very detailed and almost all of his pieces have that epic feeling.

Mountain Giant from World of Warcraft

The picture to the left is a Mountain Giant for the Warcraft universe. This giant was used in Warcraft III and WoW. I love how he made the giant look likes a little island habitat for birds and how the blue background looks almost like the water and sky. I also like how the rocks that form its body are all chipped and make the giant look like it just stepped out from being part of a mountain.

I find it very cool the translation between concept art to game because many things are almost seamless. I am amazed how someone could turn a 2d drawing into a 3d animated image. I think it would be very cool to have a group of people trying to make your art into a monster, NPC, or even a playable character in the most popular MMORPG game ever.

I hope one day I can work for a gaming corporation like Blizzard and work on something I enjoy. Be it as a concept artist animator or designer.

Chair Design

Our latest project in art class was designing a personalized chair. The chair had to be both artistic, and functional. It also had to exude our personality. I believe my chair is all of the above and it exudes my interests as well as my personality. I believe this chair is artistic because of it's strong geometric shapes and use of line. This chair would also be very functional as a dining room chair or as a throne. I believe it would be a functional as traditional dining room chair because of its size and look. The chair would be 5' 4" tall and 2' wide. It would also fit under most dining room tables since its arm rests sit at just above 3'. This chair shows my interests because it would be made of wood and be held together by various different joints. This shows my interests because I love woodworking and sitting.This chair exudes my personality because it is sturdy, and looks symmetrical at the first glance but when you look closer you can see the backrest is a little of showing how my chair and I are kind of quirky.

Making of Thor & Loki: Blood Brothers

Above is a video showing how marvel studios turned one of their famous comic mini-series into an animated mini-series. It shows how they go through the steps of rough animatic, character separation, lipsync pass, 2D animation, smoke effects, and the final colour correct. This process creates a hybrid animation utilizing very detailed comic art and 3D animation to create a final piece that looks very different from more standard animations.

League of Legends Art Spotlight

Recently, I have been playing a free strategy game called League of Legends. In the game you chose from a variety of champions with specific skills and fight other players. Almost every other week the company that makes the game releases a new champion.

Above is an art spotlight showing one of the companies artists creating their newest champion. The entire drawing is done in Photoshop CS5. The artist is incredibly skilled with the program to be able to get an end product like he did. The video is time-lapsed because it obviously took much longer than six and a half minutes to draw this.

I tried to do a drawing like this in class but without a really good tablet, a lot of practise, and an actual idea of what you are going to draw it is very challenging.

Video on Trial

The first video I am going to show is Rebecca Black's Friday. This is an example of a very bad music video because of the terrible green screen, the fact that 13 year olds are driving, and the weird calendar scene with the semi flipping pages.

The second video I am going to show, which I believe is an example is Shad's Rose Garden. I think this video is great because it is one shot and very creatively shot. I like how the beginning of the video is reversed and still displays the content of the song. I also liked how at half way the play it back the right way.

Collage

For this project we had to create a romanticism inspired piece of art. The romantic era was often inspired by greek and roman mythology, but instead for my piece I chose to base mine on norse mythology to personalize it. To make this collage I first ripped a large sheet of pure black to create the lightning effect. To create this effect I ripped the paper towards me so that it showed the paper creating a lightning look. Afterwards I used multiple different cut outs to create Thor. Some of the things I used to create him were the fitting for a ruby necklace, a fridge, a necklace chain, a rock, and some other weird things. After I had all the pieces, actually laying it out and glueing everything it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be because of certain things layering over others.

Contrast, and drama are all important words used to describe romanticism. I believe my piece shows all three of these. Contrast is shown through the white lightning placed against a pure black background. I also feel it is also very dramatic because of the content, not many people can subjugate lightning at will. Overall I am very satisfied with this collage and look forward to telling you about my next project.

Viewfinder

For our last project we had to find a cropping from a sheet of four different massive pastels we did earlier in the class. We had to choose from multiple different types of compositions; the golden mean, the golden triangle, diagonal or a L composition. For my cropping I found an interesting group of lines creating a L composition. After we found our cropping we had to draw it in two different mediums and have three different sizes.

My first attempt to resize my cropping was done with chalk pastel on a really big sheet of newsprint. I like this piece more than the other two because although chalk pastel is and always will be my nemesis, I believe it portrays the original colour, scale, and composition the best. I feel like if I had done this pastel on a smaller sheet of newsprint it may have looked better because I like to work on a smaller scale.

For my next piece I decided to pick my acrylic painting on a small canvas board. I feel this piece stayed true to the composition, but I slacked on having the right variety of colour and the scale is a little off compared to the small cropping. I like this piece though because I feel my lines are much more confident compared to my pastel and my large acrylic piece. I look forward to painting in the future and feel my painting skills have excelled immensely.

Magagascar Recut

For my most recent project I had to change a movies theme by creating a new movie trailer with content from either the movie trailer or the movie itself. For my project I chose to do Madagascar 2 Escape to Africa and change it from a comedy into a National Geographic documentary. I chose to do this because at first I couldn't think of an idea but saw a lot of people changing movies drastically like from a Disney movie into a horror film or a horror film into a romance, so I decided to not change mine as severely.

Here is the original trailer to Madagascar 2 Escape to Africa.

This is my recut trailer of Madagascar 2 Escape to Africa with clips taken from the movie.

I feel the music I used fit perfectly as it was from Lion King and needed no editing to fit the clips I used. I used some sound effects that I found on youtube or the ones found in iLife and iMovie. One of the challenges I found while working on this project was figuring out a way to get the National Geographic logo in the bottom right of the video. I tried using an image but the middle was not transparent so I had to look for another alternative, afterwards I found a font where the O looks very similar to the logo. The font I used is called Gears of Peace. In the end I am very happy with the finished project and am looking forward to posting and telling you about my final project.

Kevan C

Greetings, you know me from Yearbook class last semester. I enjoy doing work but often do not get work done in class. I joined Cyberarts in Grade 9 and have continued with it till now. I like the computer half of Cyberarts more than the visual art half because I am better at it. I am experienced in all Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4, Indesign CS4, Flash CS4 and Dreamweaver. I do not enjoy blogging but I will do it if I must.