Return to Sender

Hey all, I'm heading back down below the Mason Dixon line tomorrow. Which means frantic last minute packing. Also means that I'm gonna be without internet access for the next three days or so until I get to the dorms and get my computer set up again.

See you all next year.

Surreality and a Pen #1: New Beginning

Attempting to revive an old comic that I used to do in High School. May need to borrow Frankenstein's lab for this one though...

And for anyone who is interested in drawing comics, I highly recommend Scot McCloud's books, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. It is a worth while investment in your craft.

Rejoice, The Sun is Born Again

Happy/Merry holiday of your choice.

Been busy working, both at my seasonal retail gig (yay book store) and getting portfolio/cards/samples/etc ready to ship out, as well as a few other projects that need to be addressed.

That being said, it's nice to get some time off to spend with family (and new kitten, will post pics when I can get her to hold still long enough to grab them).

I decided to make things for my family this year, as opposed to buying them the same things I always get them. Was fun, and I think they'll like the artwork-slash-pictures.

On another note, it dawned on me that the various holidays that take place around the Winter Solstice, when you boil away the religious flavorings, are all about the same sorts of things. Family and friends coming together to lift everyone's spirits as the shortest night of the year is past and the warmth will return with the sun.

That and you see lights pop up over and over again.

Hanukkah and Kwanzaa use candles in their celebrations; Christmas has the Christmas tree lights (which used to be candles); Yule has the "Yule Log", or a big chunk of wood that would help to keep the hearth fire burning longer; the Humanists (a predominately secular philosophy) have a candle lighting ceremony for HumanLight, their winter time holiday.

It's always amazing how much is there when you look at the similarities between us instead of the differences.

How does the saying go, "it's always darkest before the dawn"?

Let's hope that holds true.
I for one would love to see what lies on the far side of the daybreak.

[P.S.-interpret the title as literally or metaphorically as you want, you're probably right]

Preponderance of Professional Preperations

Tomorrow I'm heading into New York to go check out Pratt and Parsons, both schools that I am considering for Graduate School. The former for Design Management and the latter for Design and Technology.

In other news, I finally have my base portfolio built, just need to add and tweak as time goes on. Now to finish up my buisness card.

[Edit]

Well damn.

I have my card finished and portfolio ready to go. I'm starting to feel like a legitimate Illustrator now (bolstered by the fact that I have a friend who has asked me to design a half-sleeve tattoo for him).

[/Edit]

Pondering Personal Potential

I'm in the process of getting my portfolio assembled and I had an epiphany.

I can do this.

Not I think I can.
Not maybe.

I can and will.
I can and will go forth and be amazing.
I can and will blow people's minds.

That being said, I know I'm never going to be able to stop learning because I've "learned it all". I'm going to have to keep learning, keep experimenting, keep growing and changing.

To do anything else is to give up. If I were to do that, I would probably be driven insane by the creative spark that is lurking somewhere in my gray matter, intimately entwined with the very essence of my soul.

That is who I am.
That is what I am.

The question now is what will I become?

The only way to know is to become it and find out.


Also, it is incredibly satisfying to see and to hold artwork that had until just moments before had existed only as information encoded onto silicone and copper with electrons.

-S.B.

Chromatic Application

Took a crack at adding color to the black and white version from before, and I think it's a pretty successful result. going to have to play around with this more and see where this takes me. I may have stumbled onto a new personal technique for generating artwork and Illustrations.



Please let me know what you think, comments and critiques are for me what spinach is for Popeye. Metaphorically speaking of course. It's be impossible to use my Wacom if I had his fore-arms.

Artificial Paradigm

A very interesting blog post by artist/illustrator James Gurney about the possible fundamental differences between humans and both our current and future artificial children.

Yesterday, when I was photographing that sketch of the security guard, my camera automatically switched over into portrait mode. Its face-detection software responded to the sketch as if it were a real face, even though it was looking at pencil scratches on paper, and the “face” was in profile.

It sent a chill down my spine because I sensed the emergence of a mind.

You can read the rest here.

Sketches

Hey all, enjoy these complimentary sketches for your viewing pleasure.

-Some random sketches in an effort to keep my artistic mojo flowing.

-Playing with possible style for a comic that I have in the works, I like where these are going.

I like the design on his shirt and may try to make some like that.

Yay for latex goth vamp. Need to work on the shiny, but I think it works pretty well as it is.

Frosty the Illustrator

Happy/Merry [insert winter holiday here].

Between finals, shipping back up north for the winter and my general laziness (which is something about myself that I really hate), there have been no posts as of late, as I'm sure you've noticed.

In any case, I'm in the process of sending out job applications to a number of companies who (hopefully) require the aid of an Illustrator, specifically me.

If anyone is interested in my services, please contact me at bordertowndirector (at) gmail (dot) com. I will respond as promptly as I can.

I'm also looking into Graduate School, ideally somewhere that has a program that will help me in pursuing a career as an Art Director. Pratt, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and Mason Gross at Rutgers are all on my list to look at.

Wish me luck, I have a feeling I'm going to need it.

Things that go BOOM

My apologies for missing last week, I've been busy working on class assignments and helping to organize a club that I helped to start up last Spring, the F.P.S. League.

We provide a place where people who want to play first person shooter games (Halo series, Call of Duty series, Left 4 Dead, and so on) can do so in a more social environment instead of being cooped up in your room.

In any case, a couple of games that I'm looking forward to:
-Halo 3: ODST - Other members of the club have copies of the game, but I have yet to play it.
-Left for Dead 2 - Part of the campaign is set in Savannah GA, where I attend school, so it'll be interesting to see how accurate the level design is.
-Starcraft 2
-Bioshock 2

TED

My apologies for the missed transmission last week, I was busy packing and moving back below the Mason-Dixon line for college.

This week I bring you TED.com, an amazing site full of fascinating and inspirational videos. If you haven't heard of it before, take a moment to go check out the site, I'll wait.

.
. .
. . .
. .
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Ok, now back to the other part of today's cerebral offering; a selection of my favorite videos thus far, although I still have many videos to still watch.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity

Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs

Adam Savage's obsessions

Tim Brown on creativity and play

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity

Emily Levine's theory of everything

Scott McCloud on comics

Enjoy these videos and please explore the rest of the site.

Be inspired.

Pass it on.

Welcome to District 9

I know it's not exactly the best of start on my "consistent Monday updates", but I bring good news to make up for it, a review of District 9.

If you're not familiar with the movie, the basic premise is this:

An alien mother ship comes to Earth and stops over Johannesburg, South Africa. After a few months the Authorities decide to go up and cut their way into the ship, making first contact with an extraterrestrial species. Instead of bright lights and an advanced species to learn from, what they find are emaciated, malnourished creatures living in squalor. In a humanitarian effort, a temporary housing camp to tend to the aliens' medical needs. What starts as a temporary site becomes a permanent militarized encampment/slum housing the Prawns, as the aliens come to be called. All of this takes place 20 years before the movie begins.

Not wanting to spoil anything for those who have yet to see the movie, that's as much as I'll say for now.

The visual effects and the CGI were top notch, with a couple of spots that I felt were a little off in terms of the quality of rendering.

What was done with the cinematography was rather interesting, with the first half or so of the movie done as though it were a documentary. There were a few times when it got a tad confusing as to whether it was still running as though it were a documentary or if it had gotten to the "invisible cameraman" that constitutes the 4th wall in cinema. A few times it seemed as though they tossed in a camera effect or technique just for the hell of it, but all in all the camera work was well done.

The designs of the prawns and their technology were well done and I will certainly be on the look out for the "Art of District 9", seriously want to see the conceptual art for this one.

The story was well written as far as I've seen, not that I'm really one to analyze it. The CGI and the designs were just too awesome for me to really spot any major flaws.

For those of you who found this "tl,dr", I'll bottom line this for you:

Go see District 9.

The Brain of Tomorrow

Hello once again dear readers and fellow Netnaughts. This week I've got the future of digital interfaces to share with you.

While reading the Open Source Sex blog by Violet Blue, I came across this post (the blog's NSFW but well worth reading if you're interested in sex and related issues) in my RSS inbox. What caught my eye, besides the rather nice picture, was the bit about the NeuroSky.

Basically the NeuroSky is a device that allows you to translate analog brainwaves into a digital signal. For the moment it looks like the headset is used mostly to determine concentration/relaxation levels, so no surfing the internet like in the Matrix or William Gibson's cyberpunk books... yet.

That being said, it's an interesting step in neuro interfacing with computers, because most devices that came before this have worked off of electronic stimolation to facial/head muscles in addition to brainwaves, like this one.

The big thing that you have to keep in mind is that muscle electical signals are much easier to read than brainwaves, so being able to focus down to the waves specifically is actually really cool.

The Neurosky is currently on sale and comes with a game to help people learn to use the device as well as some other programs that take brain activity and use a visualizer as a really cool bio-feedback system.

At the moment the programs are just around to show the possibilities of the device. There's nothing out yet that really takes advantage of the interface capabilites, but Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, had an intertesting idea up on his blog :

" [...] Imagine an online multiplayer game where you control an avatar that is a wizard in this imaginary world. So far, that sort of thing exists. Now imagine that when you encounter an enemy wizard, you do battle, Harry Potter style, with an assortment of spells. So far, I imagine this already exists too. (I'm not a gamer.)

The new part involves integrating voice recognition and the Neurosky headset with the game play. Imagine that you speak the name of your chosen spell, and the game recognizes it and raises the magic wand of your avatar. But to actually apply the spell, you have to concentrate, and the Neurosky headset picks up that brain wave and translates it into the power of your spell.

Imagine that the available spells in this online world are an elaborate form of paper-rocks-scissors, meaning that every spell has a spell it can best and one that can best it. And even those results would depend on how effectively you concentrated to empower your spell. So a weak spell with good concentration could beat a powerful spell poorly done.

And perhaps you can escape from a spell through relaxation, becoming like a vapor to avoid chains, for example. The headset would pick up relaxation brain waves too.

I probably just pissed off some game developer who is working on this exact idea in a top secret lab somewhere. Sorry."
(full post at dilbert.com/blog)

Imagine playing World of Warcraft and being able to cast spells woth your mind, or heck, eventually being able to use a neural interface to be able to interact with the environment. No keyboard or mouse required!

Personally I would love to see what would happen if you could use a neural interface with an art program like Photoshop or the like.

It'll be interesting to see what comes down the line from this, both in terms of software useing the interface, and more advacned hardware that'll evolve from the NeuroSky and similar brain-to-computer interfaces.

Lack of updates

I haven't been posting for a while because I a) have been working my butt off (Quite literally. I think I've almost dropped a pant size) and b) because I stink at regularly updating this sort of thing.

In other news I now have a LiveStream site:
Little Black Sketchbook. I'll try to post times that I'm going to be broadcasting.

That's all for now.