Thorn

Well, I suppose death is (very) tranquil... By the way, who else thinks Child's Play is a movie about a cute doll, named Chucky, that heroically fights oppression? An allegory of the individual versus the state. Whoever thinks otherwise must clearly have a very twisted sense of life. There's no other possible explanation. (I find Wyeth's painting exceptionally and fascinatingly creepy. I must take some time to study it to figure out how he achieved the effect.)

Thanks Jonathan! Here's my latest. I found that reading value/form through fur was quite difficult, but I think it works allright.

I don't know what constitutes "anti-life", but let's see... Dolphin - Silver, with a video by Alexander Tikhomirov. I don't normally like rap, but this is awesome. Be advised that this is not safe for work, especially not his other videos. Speaking of rap, this is another exception: https://youtu.be/gG_dA32oH44 Now, let's cut the rap and go for some experimental blues. Who can say bourbon and cigarettes are anti-Life after hearing Tom Waits? ;) https://youtu.be/NR5SHuJDlUQ?list=RDNR5SHuJDlUQ And regarding unique voices, Leonard Cohen certainly stands apart from the rest https://youtu.be/XTc3hIEPTyo One of my newfound favorites in this genre is Ben Howard (this is an excellent recording but you'll have to turn the volume up quite a bit): https://youtu.be/A__w_YFYUpA I'll get back with some heavier stuff later, and maybe some electronic music...

Thanks! Wildlife photography must be damn difficult. Like a combination of ninja-skills and photography. At least i've never managed to get close enough to get a good shot. You have a good memory - that was several years ago! For some reason, I can't recall why, I flipped the image and put on a white vignette. I'm 'Alfa' though, not 'trebor'. I have to concur with MEM. I get excited when I successfully remove red eye. I'm amazed by the work being shown here. Thank you for all the kind words! --- I made a little quick study tonight. Tried limiting the time to ~1,5 hours to practice "nailing things" more quickly. It's far from accurate, but it went better than I had expected.

I prefer the Dynamesh function in Zbrush, as the Sculptris-bridge is so unstable. Haven't tried C4D yet but lately i've been thinking of ditching Autodesk in favor of Maxon. I don't like the way Autodesk handles their applications. For example, it took until Maya 2016 for them to update the polygon modelling tools. And for some reason it seems they're forcing their applications into certain niches. Like Maya for games and animation, and 3DStudio for rendering and visualisation. Since i'd rather not use both Maya and 3DStudio (i'd rather not use 3DStudio at all since I find very clunky to work with), i'm looking for alternatives. And C4D looks interesting. Thank you! To answer your question in your PM, I have just registered on Deviantart and put up a gallery there: http://alexitq.deviantart.com/ And here's my latest piece as well: This is what I find so fun with working in digital. I was going through and testing some brushes in Photoshop. Found this one that had a pretty cool texture, so I doodled around with it, and... well, it's like a Rorschach-test or like staring at clouds - you start seeing things, and then you can start to develop them. Works in traditional media as well, but it's more cumbersome and wastes a lot of material.

That's a very good explanation of digital sculpting. Today (that video is from 2007, so there's been some development) it's become more like working with digital clay - if you want to work that way. What I mean is that you can stort from, say, a sphere and manipulate it very freely with different brushes. You can merge objects, or remove material, similar to adding slabs of clay. Or build something like an armature on which to add material and sculpt it (there are many different workflows). For example, my bust started with a sphere for the head and a cylinder for the neck. From that I created a very basic bust without features. I carved in eye-sockets, added a cylinder for the maxilla and boxes for the nose and zygmatic bone. Like this: This kind of software has been revolutionary for the games and visual effects industry. In the beginning there was polygon modelling (still in use today) where you manipulated faces, edges and vertex points to shape the object. Quite fidgety and difficult to work with a lot of detail. With subdivision-modelling you divided all the faces a number of times, to get more resolution and smoother surfaces. These surfaces were hard to manipulate though, and they demand a lot of computing power. Along comes Pixologic with their software Zbrush, that suddenly can handle millions of polygons on modest hardware. On top of that they have really nice sculpting tools and the software takes a lot of the technical work out the way, to enable artists to work more freely and focus on the artistic aspects. Suddenly artists had all this power in their hands to create amazing artwork, that could be used in production.

A fair question... he died just after shaving. ;) On a more serious note, it's a work in progress that will have a full body, clothing, hair and maybe even a beard - once finished. I got some inspiration from Norse mythology, the ring wraiths from the Lord of the Rings and Manfred Kielnhofers 'Guardians of Time' (if you haven't seen it, google it - his work is so friggin cool and creepy! ). I haven't decided yet where exactly i'll go with this, yet. It's just for fun, and sculpture is what I love the most. Thank you! I don't recall posting anything on the topic of color (though I find it a fascinating topic, so I migh very well have said something about it). Would you mind guiding me to the comment and your topic?

Yes, that's indeed sound advice. I'm not really serious about going medium format. It's too expensive and inconventient. Aesthetically though, medium formats has beautiful gradations and focus transitions. Now, i've spent the summer travelling europe with only my Sony Xperia Z3 as a camera. I'll use the photos as reference for landscape paintings, once i've digested it all. Right now i'm working on a digital sculpture, a draugr king:

Can you see the second figure? It's more distorted, not a full figure, and I don't know if it's intentional. But, it's there.

I think that one is an illustration for Age of Empires, showing the Ottoman empire in some context within the game. It's meant to be dramatic and evocative, and fit within a certain context. I think there are tons more interesting and impressive painting on his site.

Thank you! It was actually "guide light" (or whatever it's called) on the strobe that lit the girl in that image. Though the beaty dish gives rather straight light beams, which might be what gives the illusion on window light. I was lucky to have placed the light so close to her, and not using a grid as I initially intended. I liked both the D90 (some of the shots are from that camera body) and the D7000. The D7000 got rid of the softness that annyoed me with the D90, and gave better noise performance and spectral characteristics. Great camera, especially now that you can find used ones for cheap. While I don't think cameras matter that much, I think the next one will be a full frame sensor. I'd love to get a medium format camera, but it's either too expensive or too inconvinient. I love the focus transitions on bigger sensors though. Thom Hogan is a great source of information. I really like his site. Even though i'm Thorn, not Thom.

Are you saying I just got suckered into trolling? Darn it... Speaking of color blindness and greens... A couple of years ago I got a nice, green, plaid as a christmas present from my employer. I really liked it, so i've kept it around. When I had a couple of friends over they also commented on it, to which I responded: "Yeah, I like it too. And that green really goes well with the yellows and oranges..." "Green?" "Yes, the plaid." "It's not green" "Yes it is" "Nooo, it's grey!" And so on, and so forth, until I took a photo of it. Brough it into Photoshop, used the color picker, aaand; "Look, it's green!". Curious, I asked my friends at work the next day. They all agreed that it was grey. No doubt at all. I find it interesting that so many percieved that simple color wrong.

From viewing his paintings firsthand in real life. If that's true, none of them were in this exhibition. No one told us anything beforehand about the painter. That's what we actually saw. Once we noticed the lack of green, we made a game of hunting for it and surprisingly there was none to be found. Greg What color then would the emerald green in the fishermen painting be, in real life?

Thank you guys! I hope you do pick up the camera bag! I find it one of the most satisfying things in the world to just take the camera bag, and then walk or drive in some random direction - photographing anything that looks interesting.

Thank you for the warm welcome! Unofrtunately I shot the lemurs at the zoo. It would have been cool to go to Madagascar to shoot them. Although i'm not sure they would be as friendly in the wild. Being eaten by angry lemurs would be a bad way to die. ;) Speaking of which, I just noticed that Internet Explorer and Chrome display the images differently (I think IE ignores the embedded ICC-profiles). In the first lemur shot I must have gotten the versions mixed up, because there's a slightly lighter dark value in the black background that should have been edited out. There are other slight differences in Chrome. In the second lemur shot the added film graind is more visible, which it should be. And speaking of grain, here's a tip to all photographers here. Take a look at AlienSkin Exposure. It's a plugin for Photoshop that simulates real film. Works nicely if you quickly want to try different looks. But the best part, I think, is that it has "real" film grain. Why is that good, you might ask? Well, first of all. If you have larger areas with flat color or, worse, grey your image might look more lifeless and booring than you intended. With a little variation you might get more visual interest. Secondly, it looks more organic. And lastly, maybe you just want that specific look. If you ever meet someone who works in movie post-production, ask them about grain (but only if you have a lot of time to sit in for a lecture ). In the second lemur shot I wanted to go for a look that reminded of an old black and white film. Found some film stock in AlienSkin that I adjusted to my liking, and it added that grain that I think reinforces the look.

There's a whole range of greens in that image - from fairly saturated cool greens to desaturated warm greens. There are also some desaturated, warm, blues that look greenish. It's not uncommon for artists to use a limited palette and mix the colors you need. There are clear advantages to that in creating color harmonies. After reading the 75 pages here i'll have to take my hat off to Jonathan. He's convinced me to take abstract art much more seriously (maybe i´ll go and make some just for the heck of it). The funny thing is that I think representational art needs those abstractions to be great. A painting without rhytm is either dull or disorganized. Without color notes and harmonies it falls apart, just like a song falls apart if you play it on a guitar that's out of tune and missing strings. The painting also needs clear primary shapes and forms. Not to mention composition, and... well, you get the point. That really begs the question then, why cant - for example - Kandinsky's paintings read like symphonies? They do to me, many of them gay and frivolous. It's not really my kind of mysic, but I don't like "tiddlywink" either.

Craig Mullins is a legendary concept artist. He's one of the pioneers in digital art, beginning to paint digitally some time around the stone age (do you remember when MS Paint was new? He started before that...). Perhaps part of the legend is because little is known about his techniques. Unlike many others he doesn't seem to teach or promote videos on youtube. He's just got this little website, with... well, I think the correct term would be 'seriously bad-ass art'. http://www.goodbrush.com/

Nathan Fowkes is an entertainment industry artist who's worked for Disney, Dreamworks, Blizzard and many other notable houses. He also teaches drawing, painting, color and design. He's one of my favorite artists in the indudstry. His sense of color and light are among the best i've seen, which he expresses with clear, deliberate brushstrokes. You can find more here if you like him: http://www.nathanfowkes.com/

This is my favorite shot. I had just bought a new lense, Nikon's 180mm f/2,8, and went out for a walk to try it out. Mid day, bright sunlight, a lovely walk... but, well. not ideal conditions for photography. Timing, framing and lighting was off on just about every shot. Thankfully I don't suffer from puritanical delusions regarding photography. Meaning, I don't mind some heavy editing. Actually, i'd do some voodoo and sacrifice a goat if it helps. Though usually, I just stick to Photoshop. In this case, if I remember correctly, I converted it to my own pantone color scheme, overlaid a rusted metal texture and built a black and white filter in Filter Forge. I like how it turned out. I'll end this with a few shots of the worlds coolest animal. Bright sunny day again. This one took very little editing. Sometimes bright noon-day sun is the best you can get. Notice how the full spectrum light brings clarity and subtle color variations). ...or dramatic shadows. I think they were acting out some kind of play. Never got what it was about, but seemed interesting. And finally.

Here's from my first studio shoot. Met this awesome lady who runs two photo studios and models for photo shoots. It was an interesting study in all of the things that can go wrong. Still, I managed a couple of decent shots. Ironically, on the best one the flash didn't fire (that's why it's so noisy) [Note from MSK 7-24-2017: There was an ad complaint about the photo below, so it was changed to the link only.] http://i58.tinypic.com/24zhe6h.jpg Here it did fire. I used only one large beauty dish for the lighting. I like how the beauty dish gives brilliant highlights and well defined shadows. In retrospect though, I might have adjusted the position of the light to get a prettier shadow under the nose. Still, I think there's a certain beauty in simple, clear lighting. The more typical, formulaic, 3-point lighting approach often yields boredome and smoothed out forms.

Hello, I'm new here so thought i'd introduce myself a bit. Figured, what better way than to show some of my work? The short version would be something like: Scandinavian Objectivist, enforcer, lawyer, photographer and aspiring artiste. My friends would call me a dog. I say i'm wonderful. ;) I have a degree in digital graphics, but never worked with it professionally. I prefer working on my own things, when I need to, and i'm not good enough yet to pick and choose. A few years ago I took up photography as a new, fun, hobby. Bought my dads Nikon D90 and went with it. Got a new D7000 a year later. Sold everything off last summer, to go off and see the world a bit. I also needed to focus more on my drawing and painting skills. Still do. Anyhow... This is my first successful photograph. It was a real bitch to take. Imagine crawling on all fours trying to aim the camera and direct theese tiny little bugs. The don't take direction very well. With a 60mm macro lense you also have to get really, really close. All the while you have gusts of wind ruining every shot. Well, almost every shot... I wanted the lovely golden light juxtaposed with silver. It took quite a while to get the right silver grey.. And here's more of that silver My favorite color. I like how the shadows in the center of the flower adds drama, and danger... It's beautiful, but I wouldn't want to touch it. This flower would be more calm, reflective and introspective...