peeba.gfxile.net

This here is a chimpanzee who has been cybernetically enhanced. 1.5h fast gfx scribble in Photoshop.

So, it came to be that Conan crowned himself as the King of eastern lands.
And having no further concern, he sought adventure in the barren north.

This is a sketch of a poster of a movie me and a couple friends of mine have been dreaming about. The perfect amalgamation of finnish craplore and a few awesome movies. There’s of course Uuno and his pals, Härski Hartikainen and Sörsselssön, and his mighty challengers, Conan the Barbarian and T1000. Naturally, T1000 assumes the form of Uuno’s plough. Beheadings will occur. Maybe someday I’ll paint this picture further but we’ll see…

I was browsing through my archives of old projects and saw that there’s quite a bit of stuff that hasn’t seen the light of the day and I thought that it might be nice to air them out a little bit. These are all old and most of them have been left rotting on my HD for a good reason. Often because I thought that they didn’t turn out that well or I never actually finished them but also because I simply haven’t bothered displaying some of these in the internet “publicly” before. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to show some old and stupid stuff for a change.

I finally got a few rolls of Holga photos from the last few months developed and scanned. There were a few surprises along the way of course. In addition to the basic newbie double exposure mistakes, of which one shot turned out to be rather cool, one of the batteries for the flash (I’ve got the “fancy” Holga 120CFN with the multi-color flash) managed to escape the grips of the black electrical tape with which they were secured on. And since they reside in the same space as the film does, I got a few shots with large black cylindrical objects in the middle of them. It’s just too bad that the battery-enhanced shots weren’t that interesting because with Holga, in every mistake resides a great opportunity! Anyways, here’s a few picks from the batch:

Just got back from Assembly 2008. I made some stuff for the graphics and fast graphics -compos and the results speak for themselves: I placed 11th in the fast gfx and 18th in graphics competitions :D

Ok, first the fast gfx entry. The theme of the compo this year was “size matters not” and there was 1,5h of time to complete the pic. And, surprisingly, there were only a few boobs and penises featured despite the theme.

I had a bit of a technical difficulty when I started making this piece. When I had managed to draw about two lines on the canvas in Photoshop, I managed to break my drinking glass. So the result was that I flooded my keyboard with coke and rum and shards of glass and spilled quite a bit of it on my display, Wacom, speakers, table and of course the rug on the floor too. After one roll of tissues for cleaning the mess up I had to install the cordless keyboard from my living room PC to this one because the cuba libre soaked keyboard refused to produce any letters and symbols. It settled for primitive “beeps” from the PC beeper and needed a bit of time to dry up. After two days, it is working again, however the keys on the lower left hand side of the keyboard are not springy anymore. The just sorta “gloop” their way up. But despite the wasted fifteen minutes, I’m quite happy with the picture myself.

Okay, onto the “regular” graphics entry. I started doing the picture the night before Assembly so I finished the painting process in five hours and five beers. So because I knew right from the beginning that I won’t have time to do anything awesome I decided to go way overboard with it and just have some fun. And fun I had. In fact, this was the most fun piece of graphics I’ve done in a long time, and even though most of the people won’t agree with me, I really liked the outcome. It certainly could’ve used a few more hours for more careful rendering of the lines and fixing the really messed up foreshortening on the arm holding the mace. And of course some more love for the shading. But anyways, somehow now I really feel inspired to do more surrealist and dadaist paintings. Hopefully the feeling lasts since at the moment I’m just too tired. So even though the picture might not be that awesome, the experience of drawing it certainly was.

On my vacation I developed an addiction. For Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures, a collectible fantasy tabletop tactical miniature skirmish game. Anyways, the game is played on large (usually around A1 size) printed maps and I decided to try out making one and here’s the result.

Gameplaywise, this map is fairly simple. Three victory areas and no fancy terrain features besides difficult terrain (the squares marked with the little triangles). Although the map isn’t really entirely finished, I’m inclined to say it’s close enough. First of all, it completely lacks playtesting but since I have no easy (or more specifically, cheap) way to print this out, I think it’ll have to wait. And the second thing is that I still should check out that everything looks a-ok on 100% zoom and add some fancy detailing on the victory areas to make them stand out visually. But overall, I’m quite happy with this experiment.

Here’s a close-up shot that shows some of the detailing a bit closer:

If someone happens to own an A1 size color laserjet or printing press and is willing to make a print for cheap, drop me a line ;)

There was a challenge at the gfx-foorumi.org to create a manly barbarian in the spirit of Frazetta et al. A perfect opportunity to push phallic symbolism to the limits. I don’t consider this one even nearly finished but I think it’s time to do something else for a change. My year 2008 penis-quota is full now.

Last night I tried an alpha version of a delightfully demented sketching software called Alchemy. Instead of striving to give more control to the artist, like the traditional graphics software does, it intends to take it away to make room for creative chaos. Here’s some of the less abstract stuff I came up with it.

I had a fast graphics challenge with a friend of mine last weekend with the theme “carnivorous plant”. This is what I came up after about one hour of modeling and rendering in 3ds max and one hour of compositing and touching up in Photoshop.

Okay, maybe it’s time for some photos then. These three pics are from my first rolls of film I’ve shot with the lovely Holga. I have a few rolls more ready for development already and I’ll pop by a lab when my vacation starts next week to get them done. So there’ll definitely be more of these posted here in the near future.

These are from last fall and they are shot with my Canon EOS 5D, using mainly the 24-105mm f/4 IS L IIRC but then again: who gives a damn anymore when you own a Holga?