Sunday, 22 February 2009
Long time, no see
Haven't posted anything arty for a while, so just been practicing, trying to get a bit more realism into the way I draw people. I'm a bit sick of looking at him so I thought I would just throw him onto blogger for now.
Friday, 6 February 2009
Thursday, 15 January 2009
Holidays
Anyway I hope everyone had a great Christmas and fab New Year. This Christmas break had me traveling quite a bit so I didn't get as much done as I had planned, however it was a nice break anyway from Uni and I got to go see my cousin's christening on the 28th which was really sweet.
The run up to Christmas was really strange as after Christmas Day-day (Christmas at Uni) it felt as though Christmas had come and gone, but in the end I had like 3 Christmas's spread over 2 weeks, which was awesome.
Santa also brought me a new shiny wacom tablet, so now I have no excuse for not doing any speedpaints.
Anyway hope everyone is all refreshed and looking forward to presentations.
Monday, 21 April 2008
The Xbox Generation
Once again the Media points its shady finger at gaming for once again doing something awful to children. The gaming world is now finding more problems at the worrying change in statistics that a child is more likely to get repetitive strain injury playing games then breaking a wrist due to falling out a of a tree.
The increase in cars on the road have increased in the thousands over the past few years, I can’t help but think that some of these people that point the blame to games are thinking in the past. Let’s face it life isn’t as safe as it used to be 10 to 20 years ago. There are more cars, housing estate are built next to heavy roads, kids are becoming prime targets for mugging since technology is trendy to have, nearly every child will have a mobile phone on them or an iPod or a DS. Some kids get bullied, mugged or happy slapped so home becomes safe, games become comfort. Both parents and children are constantly bombarded with the media displaying terror stories of child abductions and children bringing knifes to school. This world is a terrifying place to live. I grew up in a fairly small town in which life was pretty normal and nothing out of the ordinary happened till a girl about my own age at the time was raped and killed. You just can’t trust anything anymore.
I think the main difference between now and 20 years ago was that places were a lot smaller and more people had access to a supportive community, which is dying out as more and more people shut themselves off from everyone else. Sad to say is that people don’t really need each other anymore, real life communities have been dropped in favor of online communities so people are still connecting with each other but doing it in different ways then before.
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Good and bad Art
Time to have another stab at the subject of Good or Bad art, which is a real tricky subject since there isn’t really a proper answer to this as not everyone is going to have the same opinion on the same piece of material.
However I do think that people who have been trained up in any visually creative field would have a different approach to looking at a piece of art as they would have more of an idea about the creative process in general. I would say that I do judge art very quickly because I know about the gruelling hours that you put into a piece of work and all the hard work like perspective, colour theory, composition etc etc. However that only applies to certain types of art.
“ I really like this! You drew and colored the Pikachu so well”
“Wow. Very awesome. Fav.”
A fat pikachu is not good art, but there are tons of badly drawn pieces of “art” strewn about on this site with people commenting about how great it all is. Ask them who Kandinsky is and they probably wouldn’t have clue. I believe the problem is that people get too wrapped up in the subject matter and the style (American Manga for example) to even care about if it was drawn well or not.
I do think site likes this are great for the artistic community since everyone has a fighting chance of being seen and noticed, but the point that I am trying to make is that I don’t like that piece of art, as I do not see that as art, however many other people do. Seeing a piece like that evoked a negative reaction from me and a positive reaction from others and that is what art is about, your reaction to it?
I don’t like art that looks like it was done in an hour or artwork that doesn’t have much depth, I can’t really see the artistic depth to a matchbox stuck on the wall and someone says that art. To me it’s a matchbox stuck on the wall. I don’t like squiggles that look like they were painted by a two-year old, I personally don’t see this “art”, it’s a type of art to someone but not to me. This brings me to my next point.
And just to see how much you know about art.
Well I believe I'll stop babbling on now.
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
A SpeedPaint
Saturday, 5 April 2008
A Moral look
I’m going to look at good and bad but more at a moral level.
It seems that the playing video games have been blamed for causing a lot of problems in modern society like increases in violence and crime and now with many addictive games available to everyone such as mmo’s that games are also being connected with symptoms of Autism and Asperger’s syndrome. Click Here
Gamers have there own secret society which is theirs and people that don’t play games can’t relate to what they’re talking about or what they mean. Me and my brother can just talk about a certain game and it something that only we know about, it like talking in Morse code to some people. Some people strive to fit in and have some sort of community, which they can relate to people, some people can’t do that in “Real Life” and resort to games and Internet for social acceptance.
Games offer people more chances to be themselves as you are more known for your personality instead of your looks, race or class. It makes being social more easier and less daunting. People have made friends, formed relationships and even have had marriages because of the social networking due to online gaming.
However games still get bad publicity, it causes deaths – allegedly. I’m sure everyone knows about the manhunt incident, the World of Warcraft death and the Legend of Mir 3 murder. Click Here.
The media blames a lot of things and contradicts itself on many occasions. For example, health specialists say that drinking bottled water has no benefits over regular tap water, yet health specialists also say that drinking tap water contains estrogen (due to women taking the pill) which is lowering men’s sperm count. So each view just contradicts itself over and over again.
The media is very willing to point blame wherever it feels like, so games get a heavy share of bad publicity. However when games help a disabled kid feel like they’re playing sports once again it doesn’t go as noticed. Click Here.
When I read these negative articles it makes me challenge my moral standpoint on games, but I’ll always go with my gut and remember just how much fun I had growing up because of games.