Another overdue post on my ignored blog page!
Not much to say today, aside from a few pieces of art. I’m so behind on all of my schoolwork…Spring Break was anything but the productive week that I had intended it to be…
As an apology for my laziness, I give you a naked girl with wings.
I love em. I can’t live without them. Really.
It’s a bad sign when you’re not going out on Thursdays and Fridays anymore, but your still pulling at least one or two full nights of work every week
So alcohol and WoW have been pushed downwards on the list of priorities, sad as it is. Maya labs and figure drawing have been kicking my ass like it’s their job.
Photoshop lab in the works:
Really lazy lately, alot of WoW. Speaking of WoW, Issue 10 of the DC/Wildstorm comic comes out tomorrow, and I will be snatching it up from the local comic book store ASAP. I’m still really sad that they switched pencilers, as the first 7 where drawn by a French artist by the name of Ludo Lullabi, who has one of the coolest hybrid manga/american comics styles that I’ve ever seen, and is my favorite contemporary comic book artist. The inkers and colorers where also top notch, using hard, dark lines and edges very sparingly, thus keeping the artwork bright and colorful, but at the same time perfectly preserving Lullabi’s impeccable linework.
The new artist is certainly good, but the art from issues 8 and on just lack the stylistic impact as the first seven issues, and, in my opinion, is simply to heavy on the dark lines and has too much flat coloring to it.
Anyways, small art dump from the sketchbook. And no, i haven’t finished coloring the linework from the previous post. >.>
I like it
My Paladin, Darkmuse.
Update: 7/27
The inking hath begun. Stormherald is going to be such a bitch to draw -_-;
I’ve been playing way to much WoW for my own good…It doesn’t help that a good friend of mine transferred onto my server in order to do arenas. I guess I’ll try to get something meaningful done before school starts again, but the drive for a higher arena rating has me not giving a sh!t
We farmed a very unfortunate (most likely a random “10 game a week” ) 5v5 group for 9 games, a total of around 60 points or so. We kept getting them again and again, each time focusing on a poor hapless fury warrior named “Minator”, to the point that they stopped trying, started /crying, /dancing, and walking around with us on their mounts in the last four matches. Poor guys…we appreciated the points though.
Funny thing is, our team was similarly composed, with two geared people carrying a friend of theirs and I for this week. Now we’re walking around looking pimped up with a 10 to 1 w/l ratio and a 1637 rating. Good game.
Art update coming soon
Really great post and a really good lecture over at RandomC. It’s a lecture by a law professor about user created content and the contribution to creativity amongst youth, as well as the effects of rapidly evolving and prevalent technology that allows people to edit music and video.
Check out the video and post here
I made a pretty long winded and rambling comment as well. Watch the lecture and read the original post before reading this. Heres the text:
Great find, I thought the lecture was really insightful and fast paced. I love how he used a really avant-garde “rant” from John Phillip Sousa as one of the bases for his thesis.
One thing I wish he had addressed, however, is how the original content in his examples where acquired in the first place, i.e. was it legitimately bought as a DVD/CD and ripped, or was it obtained illegal through, for example, a file sharing program or as a torrent? I want to assume that when Prof. Lessig talked about the “revival of our vocal chords” he means doing so by using original content, such as songs and videos, that where obtained through legal means, but I wish he would have been more specific. Maybe he just didn’t want to deal directly with things like file sharing and stealing original content, as it wasn’t the point of his lecture, which I don’t think anyone could really blame him for.
This also stuck out at me when he was making the social commentary about how the “instinct” created by new technology can only be criminalized, driven underground, and a form of piracy, etc. Illegal downloads of music, movies and video games are already in this state, but these are obviously not forms of creativity.
Also, I thought his point about achieving balance through competition was just brilliant. I’ve never been in the music industry, but it seems that the music industry, especially record labels and the RIAA, feel threatened by the internet and file sharing as much due to the fact that it gives artists the ability to distribute content without their vast distribution infrastructure as due to the fact that it is a medium that facilitates piracy. If artists could eliminate the “middleman”, as they say and as Lessig seems to hint at, the amount of income going to the artists themselves would increase dramatically, possibly to the point that they will not have to try to squeeze every cent they possibly can from end users, viewers, and listeners. This applies very much to the television and movie industries as well, with the prevalence of internet TV and such.
Response to Natrone:
“it’s okay to protect your cash cow but not by killing all the other cows on the pasture so that all the grass can only be eaten by your cow.”
Lol and bravo.I haven’t the slightest idea what that Nico Nico thing is, but I did read the article about the take-down. I’ll agree that it’s pretty ridiculous given the nature of what they wanted taken down, but I really don’t understand why they where threatened by this content in the first place. Then again, I’ve never seen the content so I can’t really say much about it. As far as fans complaining about the loss of a source of this free entertainment, the users who made the videos are technically doing it for free, so the issue of entitlement would probably depend on 1.) whether or not said users bought the original content through legal means and 2.) if the viewers themselves have or will have contributed in some way to the creators of the ORIGINAL content portrayed in the user created content. That gets really really muddy, in a legal sense.
The scope of copyright law seems to get really sticky when it comes to reinterpreting content and distributing it. I honestly think for now that artists should try to embrace new technology as a means to distribute their work, start cutting out record companies from the equation, and just crossing their fingers in hopes that user generated content will bring them more good then bad. Maybe in the future purchased content will come with some sort of key that is required to view user created content containing the original content? *shudder*
Response to Lelanger:
The lecture did seem a little bit elitist, maybe he was referring to the “kids” of the audience members, who would most likely come from a middle to upper socio-economic class? Still, I think that the realm of being “creative” and “contributing” does and will always correlate very closely to socio-economic class, but if that where to change or if the real and scope where to expand, their would have to be social change, not change in the copyright laws. I don’t think that was one of his points, though.Response to blind_assassin:
Judging the quality and creativity of things like this is very subjective, and I think thing will rarely be quiet as black and white as the examples you give. But yeah, I’d like it as well if everything user generated was intelligent, well thought out, and unique, and I’m getting pretty sick of hearing “In the End” to every death scene in every Anime ever while looking for AMVs. Still, wouldn’t the more creative content simply be more popular and get more attention than the mashing of “5 minutes of Naruto clips and…Linkin Park”? It seems like competition could do this area good as well.
Really interesting points and some good debate.
So I completely failed at making ramen last night.
I normally use the 3 minute brick ramen, due to the fact that I can buy it in bulk and it’s dirt cheap. Here’s the process I normally go through for a bowl of ramen: After the water comes to a boil, I’ll pop in the chunk of noodles and set my oven timer to 3 minutes and 20 seconds. After the mandatory 2 minutes of cooking and stirring the noodles, I’ll have a 20 second window in which to rip open the sauce and garnish packets and dump them into the pot before having to wait one more minute for the flavoring to cook. I feel that this method of cooking captures the essence and true experience of instant noodles, and is far superior to opening the sauce packets while the water is boiling or while the noodles are cooking.
Now, normally I can make this window with my eyes closed, but this time, something went terribly, terribly wrong. The exact details of what happened are still a bit hazy to me, but I do know that I ended up with grease and pieces of dried vegetables all over my hand, and had to add another 30 seconds to the timer.
Truly, truly horrifying.
Another sketch done last night in the moleskine:
I think her eyes are a bit too big >_< All in all, not too bad, I had to reference my anatomy book a bit for the breasts since I kept messing up on them for some reason.
Finally broke in my new moleskine sketchbook. I had a smaller version of the one I have now (this one is about 5″ by 8″) and had a lot of trouble with it, but with the larger one I find theres much more breathing room. Although I get pretty annoyed at the Moleskine company itself, as these notebooks aren’t as good as they could be, it’s still quite a nice notebook.
Since this was the first page of a new notebook, I put some time into it. I think the hair is a little bit too big, but all in all I’m happy with it. Around 3 hours with all of the structure and rendering. No reference, purely an exercise in construction:
Apologies for the scanning, the settings are still a bit off
Also, big thanks to my friend Andres for giving me his old scanner, drawing board, and a really nice 18×24 art pad carrying case. I wish him a safe trip back home to Ecuador!
Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh Fuck OH FUCK
http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/
I’ve been too drunk the last few days to have actually taken time and watched the trailers for this, but it looks like big Dizzle, Lord of Terror is back in action
Now that Blizzard has recouped from the loss of half of the original Diablo 2 team and scoffed at the pure mediocrity that is Hellgate London, it’s good to see a fresh perspective of the universe I once loved, played, farmed, and botted through.
Any hardcore readers of slashdot and other tech blogs will probably know this already, but it’s news to me.
Apparently, by the end of this month, Microsoft will no longer be shipping retail copies of Windows XP, and will be forbidding aftermarket OEMs from pre-installing it on their hardware. What does this mean?
It means that, unless you have your old XP discs still with you, the OS will be slowly phased out in the coming months (more or less, read the article for more details)
If you don’t have any XP discs or some sort of an imaged backup of the OS and are planning to buy or build a new rig or laptop after this month, you most likely will be forced to “upgrade” to the newer Windows Vista.
This wouldn’t such bad news had Vista been well designed and free of numerous security flaws, memory leaks, and a myriad of other issues. It’s bad enough that Microsoft is trying to gain a monopoly on the home/home office OS market by not offering a version of DX10 for XP (although considering the set lifespan of it’s operating systems it may not be completely malicious) but now it’s more or less forcing a shitty OS on it’s end users.
I’ve always used windows just because it’s what we always had, and I never had any problems with any version of the OS from 95 up to XP, but for the time being I’m seriously considering switching to Linux.
