First Post of the New Year!

Shit, it's taken me too long to update this P.O.S. Well I guess I'll just have to start out with the first things first and the resolution to follow along with it.

Not that long ago (about three weeks ago I suppose) I was privy to viewing one of those abortionate art measures that becomes all too common in poorly managed projects. Basically the Art Director wanted to get out a piece that showed the broader locale of his virtual world. The problem is if you really do it up right that is a hell of a lot of work, and the Mullins and Dusso's of the world aren't even fast enough to pull off what he wanted. So naturally the first things to go when time is tight and people aren't thinking straight is quality and taste. Queue the bad use of Photoshop paint daubs filters.

First let me throw down a challenge. Has anyone ever made a piece better with paint daubs? Suffice to say in the 13 or more years (that I can recall) that it has been living in the Photoshop menu I can't single out a single use of it that even came off as clever, let alone good. But I am young yet and I have plenty of time to be proven wrong.

Naturally the worse angels of my demeanor got the best of me recently and while trying to spruce up this blog with a bit of art for the background (which was in hindsight, a wretched idea) I decided to see if I could be a little more sly than that particular A.D. So I went and hit flickr up for a base image and really worked the crap out of a picture in PS. I've probably already said too much for this picture to be enjoyed by any purist or connoisseurs, but oh well. Some times the image is the thing, here it is, mightily touched up and ready to view.



So there you have it, hopefully there is enough soul and effort that went into that at least it isn't an utterly futile waste of time. While I have learned a good bit from the process of this I am definitely not going to revist this method in the future. Despite the fact that it is going to take a tremendous effort to do work similar to this I am going to at least take the time to construct a scene like this on my own, from scratch. I'll probably use Maya as the basis of later works and see what short cuts I can find on the way without it turning into a defacto rotoscoping job.

Even though his work is tremendous I want the new work to be dialed back a bit from reality and not end up looking like a Dylan Cole piece. My aim is different and to anyone who will follow from this point of departure I hope that I can entertain, learn and make better, more personal, more original art.