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"process"
The CVA in Greensboro had a show earlier this year for art on skateboard decks. It sounded like fun so I entered a couple of decks.
I bought of a couple of blanks from Eastbilt.
I had several ideas, and worked out my two favorites on the computer.
Here you can see the beginnings of The Reptilian Agenda.
The other design was more typographical, and inspired by Masonic Tracing Boards. Rather than illustrate and symbolize order and balance, my design invokes chaos and entropy.
The gallery had some cool festivities for the big opening, including a small half pipe inside.
Here’s my piece for the Super iam8bit show in Los Angeles.
Rise From Your Grave - Andy Foltz 2011 - Acrylic on Canvas
I really had a lot of fun with the theme and was grateful to Jon Gibson and the iam8bit folks for putting everything together for the show.
Ghouls and Pac-Man Ghosts
I was pretty excited, and I wanted to pull together as many references to games I loved as possible.
Trans Am wings signify Resurrection
At the same time, I was playing with ideas of the cycle of putting a quarter in the machine, getting a new life, dying, and returning again after another quarter is spent.
Zombie Mario, aka Dig Dug
Also, I decided that Dig Dug was actually Zombie Mario.
Zeus, from Altered Beast
Is that a Berzerk robot, or a Cylon? Yes.
Rise From Your Grave!
Kong loves the ladies.
Poor Fygar
Opening Night!
The opening for the show was AWESOME! Enduring long lines over 1000 people came through to see the art, meet the artists, hear Leeni and DJ R Rated perform, and play Galaga on a giant screen. Here’s some coverage and footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_RbsbZZPkQ
Process
I started by throwing together elements in Photoshop, working on a structure to anchor all the different elements I wanted to pay tribute to.
I thought a vertical format might be more like a stand up arcade cabinet, so I tried a few tall layouts and liked it.
This was the final rough I used to lay out the painting.
After getting the layout to a point where I was reasonably satisfied, I began roughing out the painting.
That was the last process photo I took before the all nighter it took to finish it!
I found Mike Laughead’s site the other day, and loved the work. I also appreciated the description of his process.
For a good while I’ve been torn between styles that feature line work, and styles that are more shape and color based. Mike’s process bridges those competing aims well.
So I played around with his process in ArtRage the other night. In ArtRage, you have to make a stencil of a layer to ‘lock transparent pixels’ the way Photoshop does. Unfortunately, this means you’re looking through a transparent red field the whole time you’re painting in the lines.
Occasionally during the course of the many iterations we go through for our interface designs, someone will wander up and wonder, in passing, how well it will work for color blind people?
Because of this, we try to have at least two differentiators (e.g. color and shape) for most of our little icons.
But sometimes you need a way to proof and check your image. Vischeck has a very handy Photoshop plugin just for that purpose. And it’s free!
Notice the cyan-green range dropping out.
At work I have a Wacom Intuos 2 pen and tablet. For the longest time I’ve felt that it was on the portly side for a drawing instrument. The other day Dave was trying to figure out how to replace the nib on his pen, I made a discovery. You can just unscrew the tip, and pull off the sleeve! You can even pull out the button if it gets in your way.
HAY GUSY!
I was so inspired by Alamo’s guide to playing the druid class in World of Warcraft, that I decided to make a painting to memorialize his hysterical post, especially after he returned to teach us all about Burnin Croosaid.
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Here’s a color study I made after a few initial sketches. |
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Here’s a more detailed drawing that I transfered to the canvas with a projector. |
While at the beach last summer I saw a man on TV with an unforgettable face. I paused the show for a few moments to sketch him. I tried to paint him at the beach, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t until I revisited the sketch on a 16×20 canvas that he started to come back. Here’s an early look at the painting.
And here’s a little more progress. The face is coming along, but I’m not sure what I’m doing with the shirt.
And here’s the final version. For the text, I used Clarendon as a reference, because it matched the TV show. There’s some glare on the canvas though from the lights. I need to fix that. The small version kind of clips out the darks.
