Creative

A couple chromed out vintage honda goldwings with their little brother the silverwing

cross-posted from: https://crystals.rest/post/36256

Needed someone for a promo introduction post and just took a swing at it

I printed and painted this Roper mini and the rocks for DnD night with my buds.

I was inspired by the Conker's Bad Fur Day boss the Great and Mighty Poo for the color scheme of the Roper.

Image Description: Pictured is a group of 4 printed and painted cone shaped rocks with a cone shaped creature in the middle that's brown with one red eye and yellow teeth. The color scheme is inspired by a boss called the Great and Mighty Poo (a giant pile of poop) from Conkers Bad Fur Day.

A box of Pocky appears

Seeing more Furry art lately, gets me inspired. Gotta get my practice up.

It's me! (mostly... I have a shorter neck than in this drawing) I drew this yesterday

I suppose, it's not too complex and the headline of The New Oil website is delivered through this vector image in a good capacity. I really like Inkscape for all my minimalistic artwork. To understand the context, refer to issue and Penpot prototype.

Making

Start

The headline is "The Beginner's Guide to Data Privacy & Cybersecurity". At first, I just tried a bare oil drop representing the logo of TNO. This drop can be easily done with Path tool and mirrored through Path Effects or manually. I placed duotone gradients on both fill and stroke in such a fashion that gradients don't mix together (almost perpendicular directions).

Semi-Finals

It was the start, but it was pretty boring. It's not memorable. You visit a landing page of TNO and you already forget what discerned it from some oil company. But TNO is not about the oil per se - it's about data and being secure in the Internet. So, it was imperative to add reference to data privacy, while being true to the title and logo. Oil drop remains there without a question (and it will play a role in the layout of section below).

New Item

How to make it without overcomplicating? The first thing that comes to mind when people mention privacy is a lock of sorts. You put your data behind a lock and open it only for certain parties. It's just a simple analogy that would pour some nice oil in the delivery.

However, adding the lock alone doesn't resemble data privacy. It would just seem as if we put the oil behind that lock, silly! We're not blocking the oil, it's not the purpose of TNO. Can this be fixed?

Binary Stream

I know it will sound awfully stock-ish, but "data" that we see in images is better represented with binary streams - 1s and 0s. I could immitate some text note with dashed lines, of course, but "data" we're talking about is not limited by plain text. It could be just any metadata that people want to secure, really.

This is nothing new, just yet another analogy on top of previous analogy that we've seen countless times while reading various articles. 0s and 1s are an artistic tool here and nobody's going to decypher them. Could use triangles or other shapes, but they aren't popular for showing data flow.

How do I combine this with aforementioned lock? I put zeros in a 3x3 grid to fill the lock base. Now it looks like a bunch of holes, but only I remember about "1", epiphany strikes. This same "1" can serve as a key hole. Of course! There must have been a hole for opening - what's the purpose of data if you can't eventually unlock it, right?

Masking

And so, we have 8 zeros and one straight line that looks like number "1" in the center. Zeros work as a translucent mask that softens the image in their place - this way, I don't need to introduce another color into mix. Key hole works as fully transparent inverse clip - you can look at it and think of it as a literal hole.

Lock itself has the gradient that, unfortunately, doesn't contrast well with the underlying oil drop. Poor design choice, isn't it? Despite that, I made a small detail that proved decisive later - gradient aligns perfectly with the gradient of drop's stroke.

Finish

After carefuly reviewing what decisions made it look cheap and underdeveloped, I came to a conclusion that the use of gradients differentiating in direction has to go away.

At the same, I needed to make the lock seem prominent. As usual, I could not afford adding another color to the mix. Even if I just used pure white or black, they would age badly with the ever changing background theme (light/dark). And that's where it clicked! Why not use the difference in transparency?

Alpha channel that can be manipulated by masking - that's the new guideline I came up with for every new stroke I make. It just looks a lot richer to me. Came as far as to remove any gradients from child objects and stamp one on a top-level object. Such is the way to avoid unnecessary repetition, DRY applied to vector graphics!

I aligned the stroke of same width from lock with the stroke from oil drop. A semi-transparent hole for the recess between shackle and base needed to be added, because of its small size combined with earlier strokes.

Everything's in place. This whole process led me understand how progressive minimalism can make image better with all the simple simple guidelines that I didn't even need to take from someone. It's about practice and challenge that you make for yourself.

In the end, image seems to fulfill the requirement for headline delivery - it helps the reader to memorize visuals and associate them with the underlying concept, what they came for.

Download

You are welcome to disassemble my work to retrace how this vector image was produced in a non-destructive fashion, meaning that all underlying paths can be extracted and shapes can be changed for more experimentation.

• Inkscape SVG

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

icons to show that your work is made by a human (and not AI)

Hi all,

I've painted some miniatures from one of my board games. It's the King of the Forest with two dogs and a bird, all grown out of the woods. I really enjoyed painting them, organic shapes and vibrant natural colours make me happy. Would love to hear what you think.

The whole crew together:

Some pictures of the miniatures by themselves:

AMA about painting miniatures, always happy to chat about that!

Made by messing around with affinity designer

cross-posted from: https://crystals.rest/post/30558

Here's the pixel test for my vtuber redesign I'm doing! Here's the animated version:

A design for a centipede themed Great Unclean One from Warhammer!

I've been watching a bunch of miniature making and have been considering getting into the hobby myself as well. This idea came to me while watching one being painted.

Ever since I played Sekiro, I've liked the Centipede aesthetic, and I thought it could be interesting to incorporate them into a Nurgle blight. My thinking was that they can control corpses and feed on the other pestilences such as rats, crows, and roaches, as well as pesky Space Marines that engage Nurgle's forces.

The weapon is modeled after a Urumi, a weapon from India that sports a highly flexible metal blade. It is wielded quite similarly to a whip. Some models had dozens of blades, but this one just has one, barbed blade meant to look like, you guessed it, a centipede. Someone on discord said it looked like a tapeworm, which is also an option!

I plan to complete this with linework and a color palllete consisting of a yellowish pink skin tone, with some purples and greens for bloating and rot, and a red and brown coloration for the centipedes! Some other fun colors for the boils and stuff.

I also plan to add some bug-inspired nurglings with antennae and pincer.

My favorite art movement is Dada. I love the philosophy, the acknowledgment of a chaotic and unpredictable world, the challenge to traditional understanding, the satire of the art economy, and the humor of it. I like taking things from the world and re-contextualizing them.

The image seen here is garbage, but garbage that interests me. It is the result of feeding a computer algorithm a number of quotes regarding Dadaism by Marcel Duchamp and asking the program to create a satire of the contemporary art market. The algorithm interpreted the Duchamp quotes, references to the plastic works of Duchamp, its own referenced data of Marcel Duchamp, probably a lot of general information regarding cubism and modernism, and the wording of my request to produce this image.

One of the most famous examples of Dada art is Untitled(Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Law of Chance) created by Jean (Hans) Arp. When I say “created” I mean that in a different way than a person may normally deliberately create art which is a reflection of themselves in some way. This piece is the result of producing a work automatically with almost no effort. He cut some paper carelessly, dropped the pieces onto the canvas, and glued them where they fell. It has no inherent meaning other than to represent randomness and chance. It is fundamentally different in nature to how almost all other art is produced which is with intention. Is he the artist, or is gravity and wind resistance the artist?

Similarly, the above image has no inherent meaning. It was produced by referencing a number of values and arranging pixels algorithmically according to its program. It’s more of a mathematical sum than a painting. In my opinion, this image was produced by me dropping cut up Duchamp quotes through an extraordinarily complex pachinko mechanism and gluing them to where they fell.

I actually produced many images, but this is the one that I personally found striking and worth keeping for my personal enjoyment. Even though the only possible intentions featured in the image are second-hand from dead artists applied without understanding, I personally find meaning in this image. I think by chance this little piece of trash has some artistic merit in my own estimation.

This is my personal interpretation of the image: The design of the gallery and perspective of the image evokes modernism, Rothko in particular. On the wall are two abstract works which also evoke “modern art” as featured in museums in general. The works, however, are ajar and vastly disparate. Is this a challenge to the sensibilities of our expectations of an art gallery? I take it more cynically, as in the foreground there is a man in a suit with a posture indicating ownership (whether he is an owner or buyer is ambiguous). I think that the canvases were arranged by this individual or someone with a similar sensibility. The classic business tactic in the arts of throwing everything at the wall to see what sells. If the non-traditional arrangement of the canvases creates a niche for a specialized segment of customer taste then this move could add to the bottom line. The man stands not as an art patron in the traditional sense, but an investor calculating the monetary value of the works with a honed expertise. He is wearing sunglasses because he’s not directly looking at the art, but through a filter (lens or profit). His face is either referencing cubism, or is an ai glitch I’ve seen many times when faces are involved in general. That it could be either supports the satire, I think. The image was thrown together without understanding, and depicts that which is thrown together without understanding. Art is just an aspect of a transaction which is taking place in a system.

I’m interested in your thoughts on this piece. Honestly I’m most interested in the reaction of artists here to this image whether positive, neutral, or extremely negative.

This figurine is made out of around 900 individually folded 3d origami pieces and took me 25 hours to design and make.

via Flickr

Alt: Line-art of the beehaw logo, drawn on a hexagonal grid. "Beehaw" is written beneath it.

I 3D printed these minis a little while ago but only just recently found time to paint them. I should be able to get to my pile of shame (unpainted minis and unassembled model kits) soon with my schedule changes.

Image description: 5 3D printed painted skeleton miniatures with red cloaks, standing on grey rocky bases, and holding various weapons including a bow, a halberd, a mace, a spear, and a sword.

EDIT: Links for the models here and here

via The Marginalian

THE WORK OF HAPPINESS by May Sarton

"I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the expanding ring. No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark, But the tree is lifted by this inward work And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours And strikes its roots deep in the house alone: The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors, White curtains softly and continually blown As the free air moves quietly about the room; A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall

—

These are the dear familiar gods of home, And here the work of faith can best be done, The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace, The timeless sense of time when furniture Has stood a life’s span in a single place, And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir The shining leaves of present happiness? No one has heard thought or listened to a mind, But where people have lived in inwardness The air is charged with blessing and does bless; Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind."

Article Link from Colossal