Puppet Silhouette

Hi there. I hope everyone had a nice vacation. I have been neglecting this blog for a while, either because I've been busy or lazy, and for that I apologize. This new blog post is one that's a month over due and that is my Silhouette Screen print.

For this piece, we had the choice to paint a non-objective piece or make a silhouette/design playing card screen print. I chose to make a screen print. For this piece, we the topic we were given was to visually convey a sense of helplessness. From there we were free to interpreted that anyway we wanted to in order to create a theme.

From the there; the theme I came up with was a visual interpretation of free will v.s fate. The puppet was made to represent people while hands were made to represent an unseen entity possibly controlling us, like puppets. People could argue in circles over this forever so I'll keep it short. The big question tied to this piece was how much does free will really count for? Are we born because of luck or by design? Are we here to fill a purpose or are we here to pass the time until our death? Do we control where our life goes or are we being lead like puppets? I know, deep stuff. To add greater emphasis to my point, the background was a stage with a red curtain. Life is a stage and we're the players (I think that's the quote).

The process was very interesting, but harder than it looks. Not enough ink and it wont print clearly. If your screen isn't secured well enough, the print will smudge. There is a whole technique to this that could mess with your work if not done right. I made a series of 12 prints using the Chinese Collage method of gluing two pieces of paper together and printing on top of them. Out of the 12 that I made, unfortunately (the ones above) only one of them came out perfect. The other three do have their flaws but are the best of the other 8.

I feel that even though some of them didn't come out as nicely as I wanted, I think it was a very nice try for my first attempt at screen printing.

Duality Portrait

Hi people. In CyberARTS we did a dual portrait in any medium of two opposite or conflicting personality traits by either using symbolism in objects of imagery etc without splitting the page in half somehow. We also had to unify the subject matter in someway and relate the image back to our own personality.

Let's start this off with the imagery, what we're seeing on page. In my piece in the sky, you can see yellow, cartoonish looking clouds and a bright sun with rays stretching across the sky...then on the ground you have grey zombies crawling themselves out of their graves. Why did I choose this kind of imagery? Because they represent parts of me that are present in my life. The sky represents the happy, pleasant personality that is sometimes typical of me, meanwhile the grey ground with the zombies emerging from their graves, makes that statement that within reason, I can't change what I think or where my mind happens to wander. When I daydream, I usually go into my own fantasy world which,incidentally is home to zombies, and vampires and so on. I also wanted to show duality in the colours I used as well. The bright yellow vs the light and dark grey. I also put the ground off kilter because I needed a way to define the ground from the sky and give the zombies more space without just spiting the page down the middle. Splitting it this way gave the portrait a diagonal composition, which seemed far more dynamic than the less favorable alternative.

The materials I used to make this were Yellow, Yellow shade, and two different cool grey Copic markers and a water colour sheet.

Now for the age old tradition of sharing cool stuff. Here is an amv I found a month ago. See you next time :)

Star Wars Hoth Graffiti Mural

Last week, I found this on google and as soon as I saw it my eyes widened lol. And people think all graffiti is bad.

Andy Warhol

Self Portrait made in 1986

Andy Warhol created his self portrait from photographic images and silk-screened them off kilter, giving it that crooked look. He used very light pinks and yellows. Which gave it a very intense feeling to it.

I liked this because Andy Warhol took something familiar and did something weird and different with it. I wont lie, it sort of looks like a huge acid trip. The portraites of Warhol slowly look like they're slowly going out of focus while the picture it's self sort of looks off kilter.

Speed Drawing Deadpool :D

This blog entry gears more toward the comic book fans(especially Deadpool fans). I found this on Youtube and I'll say it. I was amazed. The Youtube user TheWalrusZF made a drawing of Deadpool. It took him an hour and a half to complete it. I liked it so much that I'm sharing it on my blog.

I personally like this because A) I'm a Deadpool fan (In general I'm a Marvel fanboy) B) I wish I could draw like this (even though some viewers of this video think that this was traced). Bottom line, I like this because it looks very professional and the lines are strong an confident. Enjoy :P

It's Geek Pride Day :)

That's right. A day just for geeks where we reserve the right to be as geeky as we want, without consequence. This is really the first time I get to celebrate this day because last last year, I was too busy stressing out about Yearbook crap to remember. Today I wore a Hulk vs Wolverine shirt..but since I usually wear superhero shirt, I brought a comic book to school :). One of the responsibilities of a geek is that they have to specialize in something. Me for example, I'm a comic book geek :D. For anyone who cares at all for comic book movies here's a picture of the Red Skull. I personally, don't like Captain America, however I would watch this movie for two reasons: 1) I was raised on marvel. My mom and my nana conditioned me from the moment I could speak to like comics and comic book characters. So naturally, being the geek that I am will see this whether I like Cap or not. 2) Two words... HUGO WEAVING. No only was he an awesome villain in Transformers as Megatron and the Matrix Trilogy as Agent Smith, he was articulate anti-hero V from V for Vendetta. He hasn't dissapointed me yet and I'm positive he won't now. Also, the movie will likely be good. I didn't have high expectations for Thor and that movie surprised me so I think I'll give Cap a chance.

Reponse to Edward Burtynsky Film

In class, we are now starting on our photography unit and the first thing we had to do was watch a movie on Edward Burtynsky. The reason for this is because the theme of this unit is to go out and take photos in industrial setting and put together a presentation of some sort around it. Edward Burtynsky's photography is about how industrial landscapes can effect surrounding areas. We watched a documentary on his work which included the places he went to shoot his pictures.

Personally, I thought the movie was boring as a whole. I thought it was boring because there didn't seem like there was much going on. Most of the movie was just the context of some of his photography shoots and then the finished products themselves. Because this was all the movie was to me, it made it very hard to pay attention. Imagine, sitting through an hour and a half of the same boring thing. The movie was 90 minutes long so we had break it up between two periods. I will admit however, that two things in that movie did capture my interest for a bit and that was when I was watching how fast the assembly line workers assembled small machinery and when there was a picture that he shot of many many cars that look almost identical lined up in rows. I can explain why that interested me but it did. Maybe it was the weird repetition of grey that sort of captivated me.

Anyway now for the part that all of my regular readers likely enjoy the most. I was watching Sxephil yesterday and as part of a new show that he and other ppl(if I'm not mistaken) do on youtube called Sourcefed, he did a segment on Mike Relm who created audio/video remixes of videos like the Old Spice commercial for example. I looked him up on Youtube soon after and found a Scott Pilgrim vs The World remixed with How Low Can You Go by Ludacris. I thought it was cool so I am now directing it to my reader :). Side note: For those of you who don't know who sxephil is. He has a channel where he just talks about stuff that matter to him like pop culture, current events etc etc. He funny, check him out. Also check out Mike Relm and his other remixes. Enjoy the last of your long weekend and see you next week.

I've been pulling out my hair :P

Last week had been a very busy and very stressful week. The Yearbook deadline was due last friday so needless to say, my head was everywhere. I skipped like 3.5 days of 4th period to work on it and I stayed after school late all week. Friday in particular I stayed until 11 oclock :P. Most things were FTP'd on saturday morning by our other teacher, Ms.Johnson to Scantex ( our yearbook publisher). The only thing left is to tie up any and all loose ends so the entire Yearbook can be sent off to be printed by the end of this week. All in all. It's been a very busy and stressful week but I think we're almost in the clear. Hopefully, assuming nothing goes wrong between now and the YB delivery date, LCI should be seeing their yearbooks on Contact Day June 26th.

So I have been behind on my blog post. I have an outstanding blog post for both of my CyberARTS teacher. They didn't get done for two reasons: 1) I was busy with work for other classes so I sort of forgot. 2) Most likely laziness. Anyway, I been doing the Shazaam Project which I may have gotten into in an earlier blog post but is a project in which art students make things depending on that years theme. Last year we did T-Shirts and this year we're doing murals about the perception of our school. I won't show what I have so far( I want it to be a surprise) however today I spent six hours on this part of my project which is a vector tracing of my school in Adobe Illustrator CS4. This took six hours and consist of 51 layer excluding the picture I traced this from.

Presenting...The Rib Chair

My class and I did a project where we had to make a chair that exudes our personality in someway. I made The Rib Chair.

Conceptually, I wanted to make the Rib Chair resemble the human ribcage a bit to kind of give it the weird gothic look to it. Part of it's design was originally based upon an earlier design that I was thinking of in the beginning which was meant to be reminiscent of Dr. Evil's chair from Austin Powers. I think this exudes my personality because I like creepy, gothic stuff, I like office chairs with wheels that spin and of coarse chairs sooo comfortable that you could fall sound asleep in them.

I was really behind in this project so I was one of the last ones to finish it however I put in a lot of time after school to finish. Piece of advice, if you're going to use the glue gun, any mistake in terms of placement need to be corrected immediately. I found this out the hard way when one of the chairs legs were slightly off. Something else that went a bit wrong with this was the seamless white tape didn't work out too well for me. It started to peel and it didn't bend as well as I'd hoped it would. What I did like with this project though was that I got to work with the circle cutter and the straight cutter. The straight cutter took a bit of practice before I could make perfect circles that weren't dented. I also got to work with foamcore which was a medium that I never used before. Overall, my one regrete for this project is that I wish I had more time to make it better.

Video on Trial 2: Back with a Vengeance

I have returned with a new video to punish and a new video to reward with my admiration(because that is worth soooooo much). Anyway, the 2 videos on trial today is Change by Deftones and Saint Veronica by Billy Talent.

Case#1: Let's start with the good video today. Saint Veronica by Billy Talent was a good video. The song was about a girl named Veronica who found her mother's pills and went into a coma. I like this video because although it doesn't match word-for-word with the song, it's still relevant because the events of the video could be what she's experiencing in her coma, like it's just a really messed up dream that she's having where she and her family are living rag-dolls. At the end of the video, one Veronica's threads get caught on a nail as she was running away from her family. She then unravels and possibly dies. I liked the look of this video because for whatever reason, it reminded my of the Village or Strangers...even though The Plot of the Village had so much more potential to be a seriously awesome move but failed because it was an M. Night Shyamalan film. Anyway, I find this innocent of being a well executed video with a REAL story behind it *cough* Drake *cough*. 8/10

Case#2: The the bad video :/. This video made me sad because I had high hopes for this video because I thought the song was awesome..however I was clearly wrong. Change by Deftones was an awesome song before the video however watching this video ruined the song a little for me. In this video the shots are mundaine and don't look like they have at all..anything to with the song. In the song its self was good. How I imagined it, I thought of someone changing before your eyes and becoming a much colder person than from when you met them. In the video, it was the band playing at some party with lots of booze and hardcore drugs and animal masks for whatever reason. This video was a huge disapointment and I find it guilty of being a poorly executed mess. 4/10.

Anyway that's if for now. If you want to feel what an eye seizure feels like, go to Burningmeh's blog and look at his video on trial blog post where he review Bon Jovi's Have a Nice Day. *sigh* Honestly Bon Jovi, nobody likes you that much. >.<

Trip to the Tim Burton Exibit

Last Thursday, my class and I visited the Tim Burton Exhibit. We saw lots of his early work as well as authentic props and costumes from movies like Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Mars Attack. Unfortunately, I was unable to take any photos of the exhibit but I saw some really interesting stuff like the Martians from Mars Attack, the Catwoman costume from Batman Returns and the Batman cowl from Batman, a prototype model of Oogie Boogie. It was very fun. From there we spent like 2 hours walking around downtown doing absolutely nothing.

How to Zombie-fy yourself on Photoshop

I found a cool tutorial on how to Zombie-fy yourself in photoshop. I just wanted to share it with you guys. I thought it looked kind of cool :)

My sketch-up practice

I had like 10 minutes with Google Sketch-up. It basically served as an experiment to see what we could do during lunch. I think I have work to do. I tried to make a chair....didn't quite work.

If only :/

This is just a short little blog post for tech. Something that I sort of heard through the grape vine is because Square Enix will not be getting around to a Final Fantasy VII remake anytime soon both pre-earthquake and post-earthquake, I heard that fans of the game are in the process of re-making it themselves. I saw footage of it a year ago so I can't find it this second, but who wouldn't get annoyed after seeing this? If you have played Crisis Core, the graphics are similar to this. Anyway if and when I find it I will update this post, but for now enjoy tease as you see what could've been.

Romanticism Dry-Point Print.

I'm back!!! Right off the bat this has been a very busy week. For one, there is lots of Yearbook stuff to do, I had a presentation about furniture designers this week, I have to make a custom chair out of foam and that's just off the top of my head. There is most likely more to do that I am just not remembering. But anyway, on to the main event. Before the break, my class and I were in the middle of the Romanticism unit. For those who don't know what Romanticism is, it was an art movement that commonly based their themes off of myth, literature, legend etc. It stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical correctness and rebellion against social conventions. We had a choice of two mediums to do our projects in, Dry Point Print and a Collage. I chose dry point print. Now without any further a due, let us get to my Artist statement.

So this is the very first one I made. I call it Inferno. The concept of this print was based off of the first part of Divine Comedy called Inferno by Dante Alighieri. This print shows main character Dante stuck in the 9th and final layer of hell(which is described as icy instead of fiery) reaching for a door which is supposed to be the exit out of hell into Purgatory. This was the very first one that I created and I think it turned out the best technically. I feel like I used a lot of leading lines to point to the prints intended focal point which was the door. I wanted to emphasise the door as the focal point by making the door the biggest thing in the foreground.

After my first print, I then started to use colour in my prints. The colour helped people tell if it was ice or stalagmites. In this print I more wanted to stick to darker colours because in the print proceeding this one, I used lighter colours that did not show up well on the paper. In this particular print, I tried to make it so the focal point wasn't the entire door but the doorknob. I would say that the colour that stood out the most in this print was the the blue of the ice. It had a very cold, icy look to it.

The intent for my final print was to try some odd colouration for the ice. I layered blue and red on top of each other so they would blend together. Parts of the ice were more red then blue and vise versa. This time, I made the door the focal point by making it the brightest object on the print. To make sure that it show, I mixed a bright yellow together with a dull yellow. It worked really well because the door still looks very bright but it is still visible on the page.

Side note: I know people noticed who that dude is in the background, well that's the devil. There's a whole story for that.

Unfortunately there were mistake in the print that were there when I etched the plate. The lines were uneven, there were smudges on the plate that I couldn't see which printed on to the paper with the image. The ink is also faint on certain parts of the images. That could be because of 2 reasons. 1) The etch lines were too shallow, so they didn't hold the ink properly. OR 2) I wiped too much of the ink out. Anyway, I thought that this was a successful project. I got to work the printer which was cool and I made an cool piece. It wasn't perfect, but it was still pretty awesome. If you're interested in the Divine Comedy story and want the full scoop, check out the link.

Happy March Break!!!

So it looks like I will not be having a March Break this year. As much as I would like to be playing video games or sleeping in or whatever, I will be tied up with other obligations...or at the very least that's how it looks right now. Anyway, since I will not be blogging at all next week, I just wanted to share a video I saw today as well as wish you all an awesome March Break.

Ones that worked.

Our very first CyberARTS assignment was to make cropping of pastel drawings that we all made that also had somekind of composition. From there we made big Pastel Pieces, Big guestural, abstact painting and then a smaller painting that emphesizes a specific part of the cropping. As seen below are the cropping, pastel and the small painting.

So, below you will find my pastel drawing. That I think turned out the best looking as it had a great use of value and it just visually looked bolder. Personally I think Pastels are messy but I'm proud of how this turned out. The last pastel piece I did didn't go over so well so I'm actually really proud this. One thing with Pastels though is you can't really erase any mistakes that you make. You have to some how make it perposeful.

The small painting turned out ok, I don't think it turned out as successful as my pastel. I would've thought that given that the smaller painting was more detailed oriented. To do something kind of interesting I added texture to the paint on the brush and the background.

CyberARTS Video on Trial: The Good and The Horrible

This is CyberARTS: Video on Trial. Where we dissect "the good" and the "just horrible" of music videos chosen...by me.

Case#1: The first video that I pick to be cut to ribbions was The Best I Ever Had by Drake. Don't get me wrong, I liked the song, but I just don't think at all that the video matched the subject matter. The lyrics show that he's talking about his girlfriend yet somehow that translates to a girls basketball game...ok sure. A follow-up to the first point that I made is the fact that because the video doesn't match the song, there's no cohearent story present in the video, therefore, it felt like visual choices made for the video were not there for artistic vision. I find Best I Ever Had guilty of of having no artistic vision, and making a mis-matched music video which has nothing to do with the song.

Case#2: This would be an example of a good music video...or at the very least good compared to the previous video. Grenade by Bruno Mars was a good video because it followed a cohearent story, the video matched the song's subject matter and lastly, what you're seeing in the video is there to make a point. I find Grenade innocent on the ground of having a proper artistic vision.

That's all for this week see you soon.

Update!!!!

So this is more or less a quick update. I had been doing a project for CyberARTS where I had to remix a movie or videogame trailer into a different theme. I chose to make Prototype into a horror movie. I finished it early last week but it won't be posted until next week. Like I always do here's something extra. It's called Taste of Pain. It's a Naruto timing-based amv. Have a awsome long weekend and see you next week.

Prototype the Horror Movie Remix

I'm back!!!! That's right as promised I come baring a new project. For CyberARTS we had to take a video game or movie trailer and remix it to fit a different mood by using different music and sound effects. The video game I chose to remix originally was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed as an action "movie" but that was too hard to remix so I went with Prototype. I turned it into a horror movie :D. It took scenes from Prototype and Prototype 2 and put them together in my trailer. Unfortunately, I could not get rid of the Machinima watermarks on the trailers so you should be able to see where I edited. Without any further a due...here is my trailer.











So the story behind my trailer is New York City in a state of crisis when a mysterious virus has has infected a sizable number of it's population. However one stands out among the rest, Alex Mercer, the first infected. Unlike the rest of the infected, he gained mutant powers from the virus and proceeded to murder and consume the remaining populace. The army are the only ones who have a prayer of stopping him, but how can you fight an enemy...who can be anybody?

*Dun,dun,duuuuun*


So the song I chose was Night of the Wolf by Nox Arcana for that whole suspenseful feeling to it. I ripped the original track and put it through Audacity. From there I had to edit a 4 minute song to a little over a minute and 30 seconds.As I said before I could not get rid of the watermarks so you probably noticed where I made my cuts, however you would only really notice where I put parts of Prototype 2 in. In actuality I made many cuts to the trailer and rearranged clips to make them work. For the most part, I was very prepared during this assignment. Before we really started, I had my trailer picked out, my audio edited down and the sound effect I thought I would need downloaded. The only thing that I didn't quite account for was one of my trailers being downloaded in a file format that was different from the rest and couldn't be imported properly so I had to convert it to an mov file.



Something that I wanted to do to the character was I wanted to de-humanize him. In the game, Alex Mercer was trying to get revenge on the military for what they did to him while meanwhile trying to get his memories back. The fact that he wants to know what happened to him, and protect those closest to him from the government if a human goal. What if I took that away from him? What if I took that desire to be human away from him and just made him a terrorist? The fact that the military is having difficulty with him not only isn't a surprise but it gives a sense of hopelessness. Btw, did you catch my "coming soon" voice over? oh yea..that was me :D.



That's it for this week. Be on the lookout for the trailers of my other CyberBUDDIES (trademark) see you guys later :D

Also, If the quality of the trailer on my blog was crappy, then I'm sorry. Here's the link for the trailer on youtube.

Basic Audacity w/ a little something extra ;)

Welcome to my first formal CyberARTS blog entry. Wanna be let in on a secret?....If you're reading this, you are a part of history as you are reading my very first CyberARTS tutorial entry. Today, I will show you how to do basic editing in Audacity with the tools I commonly use. Just know, that I just recently got this program installed on my computer so I dont know how to use some tools. I'm filling you in on what I know.

First, take a look at the tools you have at your disposal. On your top left side you have your pause button,play button,stop button, skip to start,skip to end and record button. On the centre left side you have your tool bar which has your selection tool,envelope tool, your draw tool, zoom tool,time shift tool and multi-tool mode. On your bottom right you have your edit toolbar which has your undo and re-do buttons, your zoom in,zoom out,fit selection and fit project buttons. On you centre right side you have your cut,copy,paste,trim and silence buttons. For this tutorial in question, you will be using your selection tool and cut tool. Any other tools in use will be named later on.

First you import whatever audio file you're looking to edit.In this case I chose Zetsubou Billy by Maximum The Hormone. To import you could either drag in the file to the grey space underneth the tools or you can import the file by going into File>Import>Audio. After waiting a couple of seconds your file should import. Depending on what you're doing with this audio you're going to make a few snips from the audio.Use the selection tool and drag it across the area you want to cut out. You can press the play button to make sure you highlighted to correct section you want out. After that, press the cut button to remove the highlighted footage. On the flip side of that, you while the part of the file is highlighted and cut you can paste the cut out file ant the playhead.From there make nessesary cuts to make your audio track sound good and polished.

The opposite effect of the cut tool is the trim tool.

With the Trim Tool, Instead of the highlighted part being cut out, the trim tool cuts out everything else around the selected segment.

After you're done with editing your audio file, go into File>Export. The export file window should appear. Select where you would like to export your file to, come up with a name for it then press save. It will then take you to the edit metadata what gives you the option of including information like artist name,track title,album cover etc. The one thing out of your choices that are not optional is the encoded by section. Now unless you have Lame or some other encoder you can't go any further. If you downloaded Audacity from its site then it will notify you that you need Lame to encode MP3s. If you do have an encoder,congrats!!! It should take a few seconds to encode and export. You should be done :D.

Now for the something extra. Here is a fight from Super Mario Bros Z. If you don't know what it is, think Super Mario World meets Sonic the Hedgehog meets Dragon Ball Z. It was all created with Adobe Flash by Alvinartwork. The fights are pretty actiony and dynamic and I think you'll like it :D. Another thing I would like to share is a Naruto amv. It's well time and it's just all around pretty. The last thing is the X-Men: First Class trailer. Whether you're in favour of it or not here it is. Enjoy and see you guys next week.

Resistance is futile

I have returned. Now all of you are subject to my whims...jk. In my spare time, I like to play video games like Star Wars for example, I like to draw, read comics etc. Originally, in grade 8 I didn't think I would make it into CyberARTS so to spare myself the rejection i never tried but on Parents Night, my mom and Ms. Silverman encouraged me to try in grade 9 so I could join my year 2 group in grade 10. Now, 2 years later, here I am. As far as where I want to go next after CyberARTS..I'm still kind of undecided. I'm open to learning different things but as far as my strengths and weaknesses are in

the tech portion, I could use more practice in Photoshop and maybe Flash MX.

For what I want to learn about this year...I want to try flash animation again. I don't think that my typography assignment last year was as strong as it could've been. Although it's not done here's something recent that I've this year.

Invasion of the small white menace (SNOW DAY)

"Any man can handle adversity. If you truly want to test their character, give them power"--Abraham Lincoln

I think it's a very true and under rated phrase. Proof of how true these words are is the current state of Egypt. But that's not the point...I just wanted to share my new favourite quotation. I also wanted to say that semester 2 will be starting tomorrow which means CyberARTS will be starting on Friday :D. I also have something planed for it but anything can happen between now and a couple months from now that could change my mind. Anyway I'm not feeling very talkative today so I'm gonna go eat, but first, I just wanted to share a few things that I found on youtube. First was the Sucker Punch trailer and the other was the Star Wars: Old Republic trailer :D

Enjoy....THE SITH SHALL RISE AGAIN!!!!! :P