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.