Merry Xmas Eve, ya’ll; hope you and yours are together and enjoying the holidays this year. For the final image of this set I am using the Impressionist tool, which gives you a very Vincent Van Gogh kind of virtual painting. I will no doubt be posting more about this type of software soon, or at least the variations of it I have been playing with, once I figure out a bit more about how it all works together.
As I said, when we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and this time the same two pictures are being modified using two different tools from Painter Essentials. While the results of these two processes look similar when you look at the images they created, the parts of the original pictures which were enhanced were quite different. I suspect it is going to take me a while to learn what kind of image requires which tool to bring it to its best advantage, especially considering what its best advantage is will change depending on what I want to use it for. Computer wallpaper, animation background, and 3D model textures each have different ways of presenting the results, for example, with the first a static screen image, the second being shadowed and moved by the characters in the foreground, and the third changing continuously with both the camera viewpoint and the orientation of the scene lighting.
When we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and I am sure everyone will be shocked and surprised to learn many of them were taken on, in, or around steam powered locomotives. I took a few of those images and processed them through an art program, Corel Painter Essentials 5, which is the stripped down successor of their earlier package Paint It!. I wanted to share a few of those results, this time using the Colored Pencil Tool.
SIGGRAPH is going on right now, from August 9th to the 13th, and many of us are missing it. Here are a few videos explaining a couple of the tracks. While it isn’t as good as being there, a number of these individual programs will hopefully be captured and uploaded to their official SIGGRAPH You Tube Channel soon. While we wait for that, enjoy these teasers.
Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.
They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.
This short animation, Le Gouffre, was created by just 3 animators who took two years bringing it to life. It has won a number of awards including Best Animated Short at three film festivals and Official Selection at about 35 more. The quality of the finished work is amazing, from the oil painting textures to the story itself, all told without words.
Le Gouffre from Lightning Boy Studio on Vimeo.