Pen Tablet Repair Kit

My pen tablet broke last weekend. Not a good thing. Having used it 3 or 4 times a week for the past three years, I couldn’t part with it. I couldn’t part with the $300 for a new one either, especially since the only thing wrong with it was a bad USB cable.

I jiggled it for a while, and the blue LED would flicker on and off. No good.

So, I found myself fixing it the hard way. Does anyone but a do-it-yourself gadget freak enjoy this? I think not.

Is this what you do when you’re digital artist? No. This is what you do when you’re an Electric Warrior. And, this is The Artist at Work.

Steel and fiberglass model of Leonardo da Vinci statue. September 2008.

A cell phone photo of da Vinci horse, in front of San Jose’s High Tech Museum. The artist never saw this full-scale design realized in his own day. Protracted design time, and later, a lack of war time bronze resources, scuttled the project.

A “mythical” Apple I computer

Before the iPhone and the iPod, Apple made this computer. Like a lesser known painting by a famous artist, this Apple I is tucked away in a Silicon Valley wine cellar, one of perhaps 50 still known to exist.

“Sexy” close-up

The motherboard originally sold without a keyboard, monitor or power supply. That big white microprocessor chip on the bottom row wasn’t made by either Motorola or Intel, it’s a MOS 6502.

Blogs ~ Microsoft’s Real Problem: The Second Coming of Apple
Blogs ~ Why iPhone Games Will Rule
Blogs ~ Why you should never say never

Chaotic Animation

Here’s an example of what I call "non-linear" or Chaotic Animation. What I mean by that is most cartoons run in a straight line, from beginning to end. In this case, the animation is "bounded" or limited by the number of things it can do, and it will do them continuously in random order. So even as the creator, I don’t know exactly what it will do next: Lunge, Intimidate, Twitch, or Blink.

Digital+Painting

The backdrop is a digital painting, maybe not as "chaotic" as Jackson Pollock, but the best approximation I can achieve, spattering color with a computer. Although it appears to have a gamut of colors, it really has a limited palette.

If you are working digitally, I recommend that you isolate the colors you want to work with, from the 2 million or so shades that your computer can render. In other words, your software offers lots of colors, "straight from the tube", and you should mix and blend them to make your own palette, just like artists using traditional media. It sounds less spontaneous that way, but it’s worth the extra effort.

Hacks

To do something similar using Flash motion graphics, you’ll have to use Action Script. Assuming you already know a bit about Flash, I’ll make a few intermediate level pointers. Feel free to log-in and comment if you need more.

The transformations this character goes through are ordinary "tweens" and single frame animations. The trick to making your animation non-linear is to create frame labels, and then goto and play those labels, in random order.

Now that you have a mental image of the play head jumping back and forth on the timeline, you may be wondering why the backdrop doesn’t jump back and forth as well. That’s because the backdrop is another movie clip, with its own timeline, on another layer.

Pretty impressive technology, don’t you think? And a good reason to creatively delve into Flash Action Script.

To Do ~ Learn to create your own characters with Photoshop shape layers

Blogs ~ Brilliant ‘UFO’ Controlled Remotely by SMS
Blogs ~ Flying Saucer Power Source Discovered: Ionized Air
Blogs ~ Culture of Contact – Mythology is Reality?

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»Zoom this

In this video Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek combine to create a new person. Start with two familiar faces and create someone vaguely familiar, who exists only in imagination.

»Now Playing on YouTube Cruz, Hayek : A Photo Never Taken

The La Gata video exposes the software foundation behind a digital media portrait that seems like someone you know.

The term “la Gata” is a tribute to these two Latina superstars. It’s a slang term that, loosely, means “female cat.” The proper Spanish word for cat is the masculine, “el Gato.”

The Making of La Gata

The La Gata painting and video were digitally produced using a variety popular software applicaitions running on ordinary computers.

Gwen Stefani – Sexy

Gwen Stefani goes from sad to happy in this morphed sequence. You can also see it on YouTube.

Gwen Stefani – A Range of Emotions

Peter Gabriel Wisdom portrait Now Playing on iPod

My ghost likes to travel so deep into your space.

Simply drag from The Artist at Work to the Now Playing window, bottom left, in iTunes.

Cydonut Matrix Animation

I created the Cydonut Matrix in the Spring of 2000. It was my first all-digital painting. I ended up making 100 different versions of the picture in this animation, to populate a photomosaic of about 1600 elements.

What I liked about the painting was that it drew upon the scientific notion of self-similarity on various scales of magnitude. Both the image and the individual picture elements were the same thing. So, it was scalable. That is probably why I made two prints, one Zoomed In and one Zoomed Out.

Living Space

I think artwork should be lived and worked with, as opposed to something seen in a museum or lobby some place. Here’s the Zoomed Out painting wedged into a recreation space.

Work Space

Over here the Zoomed In painting resides with some office and networking stuff. People ask, "Are your walls really yellow?" Yeah. Just those two.

Peter Gabriel – Digital watercolor and stylus

For 2008 I’m adding video clips. Peter Garbriel ages 20 years in this morphed sequence. You can also see it on YouTube. (The one below is higher quality.)

Peter Gabriel – Yesterday and Today