Interplanetary American Hegemony

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They landed a rover the size of a humvee onto Mars. Here's to the manned missions that will hopefully pave the way to us being discovered by Vulcans. United Federation of Planets, here we come!

I wish I had something more substantial than just life drawings this week. I've been developing this one story idea out of a big pile of tag lines, but I'm having trouble balancing the right mix of humor and character development into 5 minutes. Finding that concise, crystal clear demonstration of motive is also tough going. Hell, I might just end up scrapping it all and going with Mike the Living Explosion in the end.

Do We Have a Gold Yet? No?

Until the repair people can get my laptop to function at a temperature above absolute zero, I'm back to wonderful world of open source software. Though this Ming Dynasty Thinkpad is incapable of running Photoshop in any capacity, it does GIMP like a Ferrari. 

I'm not entirely sure what Wilbur is.

GIMP, or as I like to call it, Photoshop for Freedom Fighters, has been updated to 2.8 since last I tried it. I tested the painting features by trying to paint the GIMP mascot, and tried the photo manipulation tools by pasting together a collage of pastel illustrations into Twin Peaks' Red Room. GIMP 2.8 has a more intuitive GUI compared to a year ago, but it's still got that frustrating almost-but-not-quite-Photoshop menu layout. 

Fire groove with me

I only went to one life drawing session this week because of the Olympics, but feel stupid about it since Canada's being outperformed by North Korea.

 I only got one good drawing, 20 min.

50 ft Tall Voldemort

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It has now come to pass that my laptop no longer operates at anything above arctic conditions. From wheezing cooling fans I hear seven trumpets heralding a fiery apocalypse, venting columns of billowing ash and expelling sulfurous brimstone suffused with the black souls of the damned. 

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SG1 above, along with a small selection of the cast of Twin Peaks. Heavy abuse of white borders in every direction.

Also some costume drawings. I don't even remember the last time I did life drawings to Kanye West blasting on a sound system, but it was invigorating. One 10 minute, and a few 3's and 2's.

Dawn of the Seventy-Third Day, 960 Hours Remaining

You ever wonder why the CN Tower is red at night? It's not just those blinkers for air traffic, it's an entire set of ascending spotlights, attached to the slopes of the main structure in increments. Why does that have to be red? I walk past the CN Tower on a regular basis, and every time I see it, it reminds me of some blood splattered, demonic needle gouging a hole in the sky. You know, like the kind of place where people would go to hang out, shoot the shit, and make sacrifices to The Dark One? 

 Maybe they got red floodlights on the cheap.

Above is two kinds of death on a hog! Below is my new avatar! I tried to go for a parched, syphilitic look. 

WATER.

The thermometer is reading Incandescent Solar Apocalypse right now, so I highly doubt my laptop will last long enough for me to organize my life drawings this week. I did manage to give them a black border, so it's all cinematic. They're like 5 to 20 minutes, in no particular order. Week 10-11. 

  

Trying new things, new styles. Did you know they're working construction on Spadina? Entire tram system is down. On top of that, they're also doing horizontal renovations that make it impossible to get past Dundas by car. Every trip to life drawing feels like an adventure. Who knows what will break down next?

heh

It would probably make more sense to post this on a certain book of faces. Still, this is pretty clever. Thank you, anonymous political activist. I think these are all over the system, but I found this one on the Sheppard line, far left carriage.

THIS WEEK ON IRON CHEF

THIS WEEK on The Martha Stewart Show, we take a look at an especially botched Ratatouille! God, were those vegetables chopped with a chainsaw? What is this, Cooking with Jason Voorhees? There's like half a bottle of thyme on that thing! Are we cooking or are we trying to OD on seasoning? Join us next week, where we'll hopefully be making something that doesn't actively degrade the sanctity of creation. This has been Hell's Kitchen. Don't under cook the risotto!

I'm going to use the time I have left this summer to try new media. This week, I tried actual brush and gouache, and got an entire set of brush pens. Not much else to say, it's "exploration".

This was actually an interesting exercise. These are rough drawings in pastel, 20 to 30 minutes each, based on descriptions from a random text generator. What this site did was basically cobble together a description from randomly generated information, things like body shape, anthropomorphic features, demeanor, etc. It's a nice exercise for the imagination. I now have rough color and lighting bases for at least 5 potential paintings.

Give it a try: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=deity 

Gorilla Warfare

He's basically wearing a bunch of Shoggoths.

Read this first: http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1000

You'll note the part about intelligent Bigfoot. Intelligent, BIOPUNK Bigfoot.

You have no idea how much I love this site.

I tried to go for a distinct, alien but "totally not Yuuzhan Vong" look. With a narrative this rich, I went crazy with the ideas. His armor is a network of plant-animal hybrids, with the one near his shoulder being a sort of organic comlink system, and the other on his wrist acting as a sort of melee weapon. His gun is like one of those Starship Trooper (movie version) tanker beetles, but with one pair of legs that link into a convenient grip. The leaves are a fashion statement.

pew pew.

A Friendlier Bigfoot

On a less optimistic note, while I did go to life drawing this past week, I basically got nothing good. Not enough to compile into a weekly progress sheet, at any rate. I did, however experiment with some new (not really) mediums, like...

Don't do wet media on newsprint. It rips. 30 min, mostly after pose had finished.

...Oil Pastel! I hear it's all the rage these days, and it's probably easier on the lungs than normal pastel. Oil pastel is actually water soluble, and the results end up looking a lot like watercolor. You hatch the drawing first, water it down, and then go back for details while it's still wet, so that it's easier to blend colors. Unless you want to deal with the mess of actually blending with oil pastels (not fun), blending with water almost always muddies the colors, so you always need to go back and lift up the fine lighting and color details again. What's nice about oil pastels is that they glide smoothly on paper, so it's a lot easier on the wrists.

Also some other drawings from the week. Really dry week.

HULK DRAW. 5 min.

Literally the only other presentable thing from this week. 20 min.