This is not my personal art blog, not my personal art blog, not my personal art blog. There. Apologies to readers awaiting IT info. This is not my personal art blog. I think I mentioned that.
All this recent artwork posting is due to several of my units finishing simultaneously and me making the conscious decision to try and do more art. Next year I’ll start that personal art blog.
In the meantime, allow me to indulge in sharing this quick painting/ink sketch of my dad and I in a photo booth when I was approximately 5 or 6 years old. He regrettably passed away this year.
I love autumn in Japan. Yesterday we decided to take a day trip and venture 4-5 hours north of Yokohama to Tonohetsuri & Ouchijuku in Fukushima-ken (prefecture) to catch the fall colours before they’re gone. It was a beautiful day as the day temperature is still hovering around 18-19 degrees celsius (that’s about 65F to my American neighbours neighbors). Have a look at the Animoto slideshow below if interested.
(The photo with the bees in the jar is shochu, which is a type of alcohol…yumm…bees in alcohol. I know, it sounds as tasty as pork ice-cream.)
I was inspired by this video to try something new with my artwork (thanks Craig R for sharing it). Though it is good to develop personal style, I find myself doing the same thing over and over. With time on my hands I gave the technique a go a few days ago.
The premise is to be influenced through music to explore creativity. I chose “In Sickness and in Health” by The Legendary Pink Dots from their The Whispering Wall album. I had no plan in mind and simply went with it, playing the song over and over for about an hour until the work was complete. It’s harder than it sounds and I doubted myself throughout the whole experience.
My goal was to simply break out of my comfort zone and explore new possibilities and various techniques that I usually don’t use. I used graphite, pastel, ink, coffee, charcoal, gouache, watercolour and collage.
The final piece itself is not a work of art, but a document of an exploration process, something newer art students may struggle with. I recorded the process in the video below and sped it up reducing it from fifty minutes to approximately three (you may also click the photo to take you to the Flickr page).
Wow, two Star Wars related posts in a week. My friends and I are seriously considering doing this. This is real, fun collaboration. Why didn’t I think of it? But hurry, clips are going fast.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
These Star Wars light saber chopsticks will be on sale in Japan from November for approximately 10 USD from Kotobukiya. You may also visit here (Japanese only) for more info. C’mon, you know you want them.
I got this idea over at the Drawn blog and thought I’d give it a go. It’s a series of stills set to music of all the culture that has influenced me and my work. Of course, as soon as I was finished, I remembered a few more.
Sorry, this post is not related to teaching or IT, but I couldn’t let go of John Hughes whose movies influenced my generation. As reported by Variety, John Hughes passed away yesterday at the age of 59. Hughes directed The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Weird Science. He also wrote and produced Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, as well as many, many others.
This is not my personal art blog, not my personal art blog, not my personal art blog. There. Apologies to readers awaiting IT info. This is not my personal art blog. I think I mentioned that.
