One of my favorite parts of the movie would be when this behemoth takes off from the water, utterly ignoring all physical restrictions that have air turbines trying to push seawater would have. Nathan Schroeder has an impressive gallery of not only Marvel movies (yes, plural) but also pretty much everything. Ever. There’s a crazy amount of work there, which is really, really cool.
If you imagine that this is just an updated version of the Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow helicarrier it actually makes for a pretty cool universe crossover. It’d be sort of the original Captain America era, perhaps worked on by Stark’s older generations.
Reference – though I sort of roughed it in and promptly ignored it. I don’t often use references, so it’s a different workflow and old habits die hard. Yes, that’s the Starcraft 2 medic.
It does represent one of my first human paints. I’ve always been terrible at organic things, so it’s quite a step for me to be trying. I’m not entirely happy, but that’s the idea of practice, right?
And these are speedy paints. As in, under half an hour. That sounds like a lot of time, but it flies by.
Hand carved linotype stamps on Etsy. I love the geometric shapes. via
In related news, I ordered an Acrylogo stamp last week, so it’s in transit as we speak. Then: stamp ALL the things!
So that’s exciting. I’m not sure when I’ll ever use it in the day-to-day but sometime it’ll be needed and I’ll pull it out in triumphant victory to the dozen trumpets of preparedness.
Cutting down speed paints to being properly speedy seems to be the way to go – used as they should be, not finished works but concept generation and quick ideation.
The 3D model version took about as long as it would have to flesh out the paintings to a respectable level (with my current skills).
Every villain’s lair needs to have an unassuming topside front to conceal the sprawling underground complexes. Mine, of course, happens to be the innocent Snapstag Cider Flyers Brewery, complete with plywood cows that would pop up and play a pre-recorded “Mooo!” any time an investigator ventured too close.
I do think it’d almost be better without the bird chirp soundtrack though, because the visual metaphor is so strong by itself. The absence of sound would allow you to add your own but also contemplate that what you’re seeing isn’t a mere illusion trying to fool you; it’s that your brain is so easily manipulated.
What would be awesome is this sort of thing in like, 2cm square glass pieces that drizzle down like rain falling against the glass. I would totally use that for all the exterior windows in my house. Perpetual sunny rain, with perpetual shadows falling across the walls opposite.
I remember when they announced these and I watched the first few (because that’s all there were at the time) and was really inspired and excited.
Jump forward a few years and I’d all but completely forgotten about them, stumbling back on the path just recently.
With my recent forays into speed painting and concept art this seems like the perfect refresher course. Feng Zhu is, and I say this without hesitation, the master at so many different aspects of this medium. Characters and landscapes and robots and the subtleties of emotion and scene drama. It’s more than just drawing something, he knows and has a mind for creating an impacting image, which is that bridge between marks on a page and art.
Definitely inspiring and definitely a lot to learn. Exciting!
It should be noted that I don’t condone violence or weapons, but I do really appreciate the design of them.
I watch the two videos and love both of them in their own right. Projectile weapons, as terrible as they are to the health of living things, tend to have a really cool design outcome. It’s raw functionality. I can’t really say they’re precision things, because there are many examples like the AK-47 whose famous reliability is based entirely on working with sloppy tolerances, but there is something inherently precise about the design of weaponry. It’s rarely arbitrary; the outcome design is based on examples and data. The aesthetic is the realm of the neo-classical mind and is appreciated for it’s reasons and purpose, not it’s overlaying being. It’s gorgeous. Like the tiny gears and ticks inside a watch.
Part two is the difference between them: one is made in a factory or machine shop and each will come out 99.999% identical to the others. The other is made from a plant that is found and chosen by a man and then crafted into something by him, by hand (or foot, as it may be) and will be very different from the one beside it in form, but ideally identical in function. This, I feel, is an important distinction.
You can tell, for those who have already read the book, that I’ve been looking at the world though these lenses (or divisions of Phaedrus’ knife, as his metaphor would suggest) lately. It’s not a new concept to me, certainly, but it’s nice to look through someone else’s eyes for a while; see the world anew.
I’ve learned something about myself recently: I’m much more artisan than I thought. Originally – and realize this is untrue – I equated artisans solely with hand spun clay pots and woven wicker baskets. The people who sell laptop bags on Etsy made of sewn together scraps of old mens’ tweed jackets. The essays with reference to Yanagi Soetsu in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams (towards the back half, pages ~716 if I remember correctly – forgive me as I don’t want to look it up) feature his philosophy as a counter-point to Rams’ (representative here as all of industrial design) way of design for not only specific objects, but how those objects relate in context to the mass production and usage in culture. His point, from the perspective of craftsmanship, looks at objects in an uncannily similar way to the mass produced method: a means to achieving a goal. If the industrialist and the artisan both make a thing it should look to first achieve it’s intended task. Makes sense. This is where my misguided preconceptions come in again; I thought they inherently had to differ after they agreed on that. The industrialists to the neo-classical function and the artisans to the romanticist to the aesthetic. But! As I’ve recently discovered, not true. Not quite.
Aesthetics, of course, are a tricky thing to nail down. They’re different for everyone. I equated function with minimalism and practicality and ruggedness and the things that I personally appreciate and like. I was an industrialist, then. That’s what they do. The things that are frilly and useless and mass produced are just misguided. The artisans who made minimal things were rare and the minimalism was probably a result of skill lacking rather than intentional functionalism. They’re supposed to make what I deem gaudy. The ornamented and decorated. The bright and flashy and visually loud. They’re artisans, which I say (and, I apologize, still do) with a certain pretentious derision.
So aesthetics aren’t a function of romanticism but rather outside of those classifications, like a heading under the two forming a four box chart.
You’ll laugh, but these past few months have led to a lot of personal discoveries that are so obvious. I’ve shared a few others previously. How did I miss them? I’m not sure. But I guess that’s the point of being young and curious. I’ve come out of it with an even more apathetic spirit, though. Before there was a conviction for “right” and “wrong” where my personal standings were concerned, and while I still vehemently defend things, they are broader ideas instead of specific (and often meaningless) examples. Namely the ‘problem’ or ornamentation. I hate it and that’s okay, but I might design something that’s ornamental because I know you like it. I wonder though where the line is drawn between selfless and spineless, but that’s a question for another article.
If aesthetics are independent that implies I can be a minimalist artisan. I still dislike that word. Sorry. But I like the design philosophy of wabi-sabi so much. I’m not saying it can’t be incorporated into mass manufactured things because the design definitely can use elements of it, but there’s something inherently at odds when having objects being made identically imperfect. The idea of the imperfection is the beauty of it’s uniqueness.
Uniqueness. Each of those Yumi bows is unique, but they all provide the same function – accelerate an arrow using a string and the materials’ natural properties. Each of those crossbows has the exact same function and as a result of mass manufacture has the exact same form. There’s something beautiful in both, though, don’t you think? Something romantic in buying a hand-made bow (or a hand machined gun) but also that there’s a machine somewhere in the world that makes the same piece over and over again at a speed that would stagger the mind and that piece gets assembled perfectly into that spot on every single product. It’s just, beautiful to think about for me. That’s my fear though; I think hand made things resonate with people better in general. It takes a very functional mind like mine to appreciate a factory.
Now, am I giving up my industrialist tendencies for a life behind a potter’s wheel? Certainly not. But I do wonder where that broad, overarching line is. I have such a passion for the method and craft itself that the outcome seems almost secondary – whereas a true blood would set up a factory without a second thought and have the focus be entirely on the output product.
I’ll be coming back to this topic; I have other examples and explorations.
TL;DR Aesthetics are independent of design philosophy divisions and form and function are independent yet again of both each other and the previous classifications, creating unique possibilities I hadn’t considered before.
An anecdote: I took art all throughout school and it was always cool to walk around and see how a class of thirty people could come up with thirty different drawings of the same thing. You could call it individual style – and it was – but it always boils down into individual methodology. There were the people who were really good at drawing things, into which I fall, which we could call, I guess, technical illustration. Things had outlines and features were obviously drawn in a very binary system; line or no line. Shading was usually done with cross hatching, not by smudging smooth gradients. Medium choice was often pens and sharpies or hard, thin pencils. The shapes might be just as complicated, but defined by contour lines which are drawn but don’t actually exist. We draw what we rationalize the shape to be, not what we actually see. Like this:
Which is fine and good, especially for industrial designers who need to make quick jots of ideas – it’s faster, usually.
Then there were the kids in the class who I admired because they were “better” than me (although they admired my style, or so they insisted. I still don’t believe them) because they could draw what they saw, or what the object should look like instead of what they thought it was. These were softer mediums like charcoal and fat, soft pencils. Painters in either canvas or digital. These were people who could draw noses. I could never draw noses because I always wanted to draw a shape for it which unless you do it anime style rarely looked good. Certainly never realistic. These people didn’t draw a nose, they drew a gradient where the balled tip sits out in front of curved soft nostrils, where the bridge comes up and into the brow. They drew as if a photograph were taken with their minds. They drew things that looked real.
It was years ago, and the thought hasn’t really left me. Just now, I’ve figured it out. You’ll laugh at my revelation because it’s so obvious.
The latter group isn’t actually drawing anything. They’re making marks that make a picture.
Depending on how soft the image is, they might not actually draw any lines like I would. They add and subtract value, creating and destroying gradients of light and shadow until a recognizable image emerges.
That’s why I’m terrible at speed painting. That’s what I need to learn. It’s not about drawing lines and filling them in better than I usually do, it’s about drawing blobs upon blobs that mix together and create a picture. The video at the very top is exactly that. My approach is entirely wrong.
I tried years ago and they were all rubbish, which is probably the reason I never really got into this as an art form: I was dejected. It’s taken until much later to realize that it isn’t that I was a bad artist but it was that my methodology didn’t lend itself well to the kinds of outcomes I saw in other speed painters.
