Last time I showed the making of one of a painting I made, it was terrible. I had to redo the damn thing like three times. Here, I present you all two other digital works that I made quite a while ago now, of outdoor scenes in summer and fall respectively:
And here's a little GIF file showing the step-by-step (unfortunately though I forgot a few times to save and take a snapshot, so it begins when I already laid down a bunch of stuff):
This one took a lot longer, and if you look closely comparing the two, at least I already had bought myself a Wacom tablet when I began painting this one. However, it still took much longer since the amount of detail was much much larger.
Information might seem unwieldy, ugly, sterile and unreadable if there's tons of it and we don't know how to tackle it. Data crunching is a hard, arduous task and so is data mining. While that might be true, it also might be true that they are labours that are becoming increasingly important as technology becomes more powerful and all that jingodingo. So, what can we do with cumbersome spreadsheets and gigabytes of 'raw data'? We can either sift through it and try to represent it in the old-fashioned ways or try to hook up our visual interest, making it visually understandable and therefore something we can relate to on a more primal level. We need to since there's just so much information out there and it keeps multiplying at exponential rates (for more about this, an article called Jumping Jesus sheds more light).
Here we have David McCandless (from the site Information is Beautiful), talking to us about his passion of data, and how to make it actually fun:
Another approach he hasn't touched in the video is a bit more artistic; Seed Magazine has a slideshow called ''The Age of Impossible Numbers''. Can you guess how many containers pass through American ports every 12 hours? You might be really surprised by the answer, and how it looks!
Back in April when it was still summer here in Chile and life was coming back to normal after February's massive quake, I remember seeing a mosquito-like insect on a wall. I associated it with horses due to its rather strange shape and although it wasn't much like a mosquito I began wondering what a horsequito would look like. So I had this:
Yeah... so in the description I jokingly mentioned its natural predator, the Lion Spider. And here I am now, several months later with my Splion (for the lack of a better name). It was even tougher to conceive since spiders and lions share almost nothing in common anatomically. Spiders have 2 body sections while lions, uh... I'd say 3 although the difference between abdomen and 'butt' doesn't mean anything in vertebrates, does it? :3
So, here are a few sketches (I got rid of the roughest unfortunately) with roughies of the idea:
As the sketches above show, I wasn't entirely sure where the hell the legs would go (again, spiders have abdomens that don't have legs and then they have thoraxes with legs), because the way a spider's legs kinda 'spread' outwards while a lion's legs jut below the body and are parallel. So it's just experimenting while the final design was a mixture. And well, the final (although far from perfect work) is this:
It looks a whole lot better than Horsequito (a million times!) but I'm not perfectly happy with it. That irritates me. Argh!
''Space art?'', you say. ''Yes, of course! Art about planets n' stars n' black holes and loads of crazy stuff we don't actually know much about!'' I answer, my eyes as bright as fictitious constellations. ''Pfft, you don't need talent to draw stars, just paint white dots on a canvas and you'll get there!'' I suddenly darken up, and in a distant and redshifting manner I utter: ''It takes a lot more than that, even for simple stuff like star fields, mofo.''
Although I gotta say that realistic planets are even harder to create, but it's not that hard. This really nice tutorial by the awesome Greg Martin(what a kickass website he has!) leads us into the basics of making realistic and beautiful star fields in Photoshop. Although it's true to some extent that it's all about ''painting stars at random'', this guy shows an excellent way of creating stars without painting them individually, and without the use of crappy starfield generators. Intuition at the helm!
So, did it work? I haven't had time to fully flesh out something, but my first attempt was okay. This is it: ...Yeah, it's alright. Not posting this in DeviantArt.
However, I want to understand eventually how these beauties are made:
Radiate by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART I've been trying around different painting programs and so far my two favourite are Paint Tool SAI and Corel Painter X. Paint Tool is simple yet versatile and fast, while Painter X is quite realistic and if used properly can be quite powerful. Here's a progress animation on how I painted this thing: (you'll notice I started three times, I tried in Corel twice and gave up, then went to SAI and I felt it was better to start there. However, I changed my approach and started with a black and white thing first.)
Beware: it begins okay and gets ugly from there. Making art can sometimes be like making sausages, it's ugly, specially when you are just learning how to.
