We animated the fm guy to yawn and look bored. Cute? Boring?

This 3D map animation starts with a view of the greater Bay Area, and progressively homes in on the San Jose Museum of Art. The map technology is powered by Google. The widget and animation sequence powered by Forthmedia.

To see an even bigger map with satellite imagery click here. (Hint: Set your browser to full screen mode.)

Yes, but is it art?

From a design standpoint, the Google Maps API uses 3D technology introduced by Adobe into Flash and Photoshop CS4. Also the same Google Maps Navigation in Droid smart-phones. It’s pretty nice.

Now that you have an idea of the range, you can play around with the controls on you own. Try Satellite view. If you get lost, switch to Hybrid to see street names. Is it art? You tell me.

Silicon Valley

Evolution

Once again, I saved intermediate steps and made a Flash to show how this piece evolved. From start to finish in six phases. Near the end, I added a few drops of black India ink.

On White 1

Many of these images created over the last few years, such as the backgrounds for Twitter, or this site, were on black. These are On White. The Flash gives you an idea how the artwork evolves.

On White 2

On White 3

»Zoom this

This is a Flash drawing, over an energetic, splattered paint background. I put a detail of the background texture on Facebook.

Archive ~ Energetics: Sampling Space

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?

Zazzy

I called this one jazzy because it reminded me of Matisse. It started out as a live sketch, that really celebrated the female figure, without being too overtly sexual.

Sketch – Los Gatos, 11-Feb-08

»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.

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.

Neo Violet

Flash as a drawing tool.

Northern California Violet