Art 38

On Saturday* we went to a local Chinese New Year celebration. It was quite small, just a few stalls with food, lacquerware and pottery, calligraphy. Had a very good atmosphere, though. I wanted to stay a bit longer than we did - there was to be a mahjong demonstration that I wanted to watch. My companions were getting hungry, though, so we left for some Chinese take-out...
*-Saturday the 12th - it's taken me awhile to complete this post!

I really enjoyed looking at the pots on display. There were some beautiful mother-of-pearl inlaid ones, with a dragon on one side and a peacock on the other. There was also a lacquered pot with an eggshell inlay. For some reason that really impressed me, I guess because I'd never heard of (or even considered) the use of broken eggshells in art. Soo I did a little bit of looking around online, and found a nice explanatory article and some beautiful examples of eggshell lacquerware.

Meanwhile, I've added another quadrilateral type-1 koch snowflake to the set I'm working on. It's more inspired by the fractal than an actual example. I'm not entirely sure the design is even fractal in and of itself, but I think it might be.

Also, I made a few sketches a couple weekends ago:

I quite like how this turned out, mostly because it's my first okay inking.
Aside from that, I'm not entirely happy with the hair, or the feet.
She's wearing a faceplate, because she's in spaaaace.

Some alien/robot things. Just playing around.

Also! I've finally started a test piece in the Wings3D program. It's a cat. I'm familiar with cats.

Annd I think that's about it for now. Oh wait! I also have a cunning plan regarding an old shiel pack* and some not-yet-made-handbags. The canvas is all grimy with machine oil and miscellaneous grime at the moment, so the next stage is to cut it in quarters and take it to the laundry.
*-I can't find "shiel pack" anywhere online. It's kind of a large garden waste bag, made of canvas. I think cattle feed might also comes in shiel packs, but I'm not sure. I'm not even sure that's the proper name, but it's what's written on the label.

And and and, as a sort of for-fun side project, I've been drawing on a kitten-decorated bag someone gave me a couple Xmases ago. What am I drawing? Fine attire!

Gentlemen kitties.

Art 36

So! I've been working a little more on that texture thing for Second Life. For the undersea grotto door. Yesss. I don't know where to put the trident. And of course it has to have a trident.

An older version can be seen in this post. Still very rough, of course.










Still, still, still working on the cryptomnesia piece (just over 300 pieces left to import), and also on those quadrilateral Koch snowflakes. I keep forgetting to take a photo of my repaired handbag!

Art 35

2011 has begun, yaay! And if you add all the digits together, you get 4. I like 4.

I actually made New Years' resolutions this year. Amazing. One of them is to try and get a little more serious about making artwork (as far as resolutions go, that's an inevitable one for me). Also promoting it a little more... That is, trying to stay more active with my deviantart account. :s Yes, that is thus far the reach of my ambition! I have a print account on deviantart, and I'd like to make more of the stuff that's on my computer into prints. And then buy a bunch of samples to show around.

Also I'd really really like to focus more on the making of comics... I think I'll cover a couple walls of my room with old comic books, just so it's always at the peripheral of my attention. That may mean removing the staples - gasp! I have a nice collection of pictures on my wall at the moment, things I've cut out and stuck up. Hm.

Last year(!) I was thinking a little bit about fractals, and the images they can generate. Maths isn't one of my skill sets, so the algorithms used to generate fractals are a bit beyond me, but I find the images pretty fascinating. One in particular I like - the Koch snowflake.

The first four iterations. To learn more about it, click on the link in the last paragraph.

I wanted to do some sort of colourific thing with this, but I couldn't find an equilateral triangle "grid" on my computer, so I decided to play with the quadrilateral type 1 variant instead, which, being quadrilateral, uses squares instead. Hooray! So I'm doing it in Paint, pixel by pixel.

Restrictions on size and what not mean the edge of my quad-t1 kochies (hehe) isn't infinite, but I can reluctantly accept that. As it is, each picture is effectively 1.55 metres square. With that I can get 8 iterations - the 9th iteration would be smaller than one pixel. 1/9th smaller, to be precise. :)

Well, enough of that for now. I've also started work on a wood-carving project, using the now-defunct Xmas tree. I stripped it of branches, and now I'm stripping it of bark. The plan was to make a staff, but it's a bit short, so I'll make a sort of rod, or sceptre-like thing. It's still quite sappy, will have to figure out how to treat it before I start the actual carving. I had no idea until tonight what to carve into it, but now, inspired by my previous art-specific post, I think maybe fish. I like this idea, and will ponder it more.

So, that's two new projects started, without any of the old ones being finished! Ah well. Such is my mode of operation, generally.

In other news, I am indeed still working on the cryptomnesia piece. There are about 500 snips left to import into the gimp file. Also I'm still repairing my handbag... Actually I've finished the actual repairing, and the sewing on of pockets. Now I "just" need to sew the inside to the outside. When it's all nice and complete I may take a photo.