Wings Over the Pyre

01:40 am - Murdering the Rat Spawn

Kill Ten Rats has a banner competition in progress, one which requests shots from MMORPGs for their backgrounds.

With my recent obsession with creating icons, I'd be sorely pressed not to try and send in a few, no? (None of the following are full size. In fact, they're not even getting pushed over in the original format, with transparency so that they blend gently into whatever background colour you put them over. Moreover, the original request was for the banner without "Kill Ten Rats" imprinted over it. Fair enough.)

You know, if I keep up this level of artistic composition, I might actually be decent at it, one day.

Current Mood: creative

03:42 am - Mutant Archon Rides

In case folks were wondering what icons generally look like before I distill them down to 100 x 100 goodness. Yes, I generally start working at 900 x 900 or more before reduction. With high-resolution textures and vector text and logos ...

What, me overkill?

Current Mood: crazy

02:16 am

Art. Its in the eye of the beholder, or so I'm told.

Me, I have about as much capacity for "art" as I do for the rest of your human emotional gamut. That is to say, almost none. But I do have an affinity for the craftsman-like creation of illusion, for the trompe l'oliel that makes you stop and consider whether you're seeing things aright.

Like, for example, my recent tinkering with the artificial "model-izing" of landscapes and urban areas. My tinkering with the Vatican was actually really nice, with maybe just a hint too much blur, but it ended up really looking model-like. The landscape on the left? Not so successful. Blowing out the colours by tinkering the RGB curve is absolutely successful, its the lens blur that's far less so. Problematic, in my view. I think I need to find a way to get the lens gradient just a bit nicer, maybe a bit tighter.

On the other hand, there's the piece of artificial graffiti on the right there. The colours meld well, I scrubbed off the texture at good places so it looks worn and aged, and the brick texture comes through very nicely. I'm quite pleased with it, in fact.

Art. I'm no artist. I'm just a developing craftsman.

Oh, yes ... and then there's this:

Current Mood: creative

05:29 am - The Pope Loves Us

Bet you didn't know that the Pope was in on Horde Night. Yes, indeed, and as a reward for providing him such great pleasure every Monday night, he presented me with this scale model of the Vatican with the Horde Night logo painted carefully in the middle of the turnabout by brilliantly careful Italian craftsmen, who even went so far as to put little model people around atop it.

Well, OK, admittedly, this is the real Vatican, with the Horde Night logo painted in the middle of the street. No, really! Real Vatican, real logo!

Makes a fun background, too.

Current Mood: creative

08:10 pm - Ursula Vernon Takes Up a New Occupation

Ever wonder what it'd look like if Ursula Vernon were to have entered the art field via graffiti rather than more traditional art directions?

Well, now you can know.

The original piece is Mandrake Girl 2, which I think chopped up, refined down, and snipped slices out of in order to do the grout between the bricks as breaking through. Thank Hades I've discovered a much faster way to do that than the way I did it on the first run through with the Horde logo.

If I keep this sort of thing up, I might actually develop some skill. Terrifying.

Current Mood: creative

04:31 pm - Warcraft Wall-Mart

Whoot! We now have a neatly trimmed World of Warcraft Horde Night logo with a perfect 1600x1200 wallpaper form.

Yes, yes, I know I'm obsessive.

Current Mood: nerdy

07:43 am - Its Been a Long Time Coming

I'll bet you didn't know Monday Horde Night had been going on for easily over thirty years, long pre-dating World of Warcraft itself, did you? And yet, here we have photographic proof, with logos painted on old brick and wood slat walls clearly showing their age.

No, seriously, go ahead and open up the full-sized image and enjoy the madness of its disgustingly high resolution. Make it your wallpaper, I know I am!

See, this is what happens when you turn me loose with Photoshop CS2, a pile of tutorials, and a subscription to Layers magazine. I start getting creative, and when I get creative, people's brains start turning to mush and they boggle at what madness must've inhabited my mind to drive me to such insanity.

(Well, OK, really I just wanted to tinker with the new Vanishing Point filter and try my hand at some of the weathering effects you can end up with if you don't mind doing some artful layer masking and fiddling with transparency and the like. And, yes, I know its not a perfect screen resolution fit for wallpapers, but I'll do that after I get a few hours of sleep.

I'll bet you were expecting another Capes post. Fooled you.)

Current Mood: creative

03:48 am - Li'l Miss Spookiness

Hey, I was already tinkering around with Photoshop and Illustrator when riomccarthy posted her most recent sketch.

I'd be a fool if I didn't take up that challenge.

Maybe I should take up colouring web comics. I can't do much worse than most of the folks working these days ...

(LiveTrace and LivePaint are incredibly handy tools for dealing with hand-drawn stuff. I give it my stamp of approval.)

Current Mood: creative

03:08 am - Take the World Over

What can I say? They were daft enough to put a vanishing point mapping system into Photoshop CS2, and I'm daft enough to use Google Earth a lot. Thus, we get me putting together this sort of thing.

Crude, but it has potential.

Current Mood: creative