P.S. – The print is sold out, the sentiment remains.
Just wash your spoon!
Category: art
Parents stopped by. Dropped off one of my old hobbies/talents…
My parents came through Fourth of July weekend on the way up to Wyoming for their summer vacation. They brought up with them the last of my belongings that were at my childhood home. It was mostly art supplies. I don’t consider myself that creative and I certainly don’t think I have much talent. But, in my family I was always the creative one, the one with the wild ideas and the ability to convey those ideas through word or image. I took art classes through middle and high school and might have taken a quarter of figure drawing at one point in community college. Since then? I haven’t done any sort of creative work outside of the occasional writing and photography.
Sadly, the one thing that my parents forgot was my old portfolio that has all the work I did in high school/college in it. That is still sitting in a closet somewhere in the desert. At least it isn’t outside where the extreme weathers would surely ruin the paper, chalks, oils, etc…
I don’t why I didn’t pursue art further. I had time in college to take classes. I must have thought that it wasn’t worth the time to practice at something I never considered myself very good at and so couldn’t do anything with later on in life. Yes, I realize how stupid that sounds coming from someone who got their BA in Classical Civilizations. I think another reason might be that I never had any interest in pursuing the craft through digital means… I like getting my hands dirty and feeling the paper beneath my fingers; and my parents didn’t have the money or processing power (this was the mid/late 90s) to get a drawing tablet or the software then in use. So, I sunk my time into other things: poetry and photography. I miss it sometimes. Now that I have all this stuff just sitting around maybe I’ll pick it up again… Who knows?
If you would like to see some of my old creative work and new stuff as well you can check out my other blog: Fictive Funk. I’ll be posting up old sketches all this week and next!
It’s funny until you think about it
Environmentalism, in the end, isn’t about saving the planet it’s about saving Humanity.
What Beautiful Art Direction
I’m not going to get into the argument over whether video games are art or not (because that argument is dumb; if a human created it than its art…) I just wanted to mention how beautiful Outland is to look at. How I simply like to walk around the levels taking in the environment. This is a beautiful game. The artists have done an excellent job conveying through the visuals how ancient this place is, how much of an outsider your character is, how alone you the player are in this world. It’s evocative.
Watch the video below if you want to get a small idea of the visuals. Sadly, it focuses mostly on the gameplay (it is a game after all) but you might get a small idea of what I’m talking about:
I haven’t played much of the game yet. Like I said I’ve been too preoccupied with just exploring the environments and soaking in all the style the animators and artists put into the game. So maybe the game will be crappy or maybe it’ll be great. It is certainly nice to look at.
PS – click on the still images to see larger pictures, it’ll help you appreciate them more.