THE SOJOURNER FALSE

I am checking this damn blog almost as much as my Facebook now.  See also: Thrice the checking time of email, news, and other randomness combined.  Also taking out of my study time.  See also: Right now.  Currently playing: Money Folder by Madvillain.  Currently playing: ALL CAPS (Video) by Madvillain.  This is the second greatest music video of all time.  The first greatest is Nothing Like This by J Dilla.  ALSO, IMPORTANT: CHECK OUT THE HALO 3: ODST TRAILER! THIS THING IS HOLY SHIT STATUS! NO JOKE!  POSSIBLY THE GREATEST COMMERCIAL OF ALL TIME!  IF YOU ARE INTO 3D ART WHATSOEVER, IT DOESN'T MATTER IF IT IS A VIDEO GAME, THIS IS THE SINGLE GREATEST MARKETING EVER USED TO DATE!

Please check out my news bar and feeds.  This stuff is unbiased and radical.  Also, anyone know how I can constrain font within a column?  Al Jazeera News is really pokin' it's way into the columns...it's 9/11 x A THOUSAND!

I can't exactly figure out why I couldn't upload more than one picture per post, so my apologies.  Please comment here.  I will keep adding as I work along.

I didn't title any of these anything specific, it's not that I didn't want to, just didn't really think about it.  The first picture, let's call it Close Minded, has a quote by Bob Marley.  I was going to make all of the bars the quote, but I couldn't make it look right.  If I do go back to fix it, it won't be for a while.  I enjoy making new things and if necessary will go back later to finish.  But the first thing that popped in my mind was a dreaming brain in a cage that had a keyhole on the front, and there was a man (because I am, no sexism or anything.  Calm down, ladies,) holding a very large key, as if he was going to press it through the cage and into the keyhole in the mind.  I've always loved Bob Marley, he was and is a very influential person, it is just too bad that not everyone listens to certain influences.  Another favorite quote of his that I like is "Man is a universe within himself."  This is basically my "religious" belief, more of a personal one, a play on the words of the latin saying, "Deus ex vir", meaning "The God out of The Man".  So...there's my contextualization of piece one.

Piece two, let's call it...Scarred, has a quote by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of classics such as: Fight Club, Choke, and Stranger than Fiction (not the Will Ferrell nonsense).  He is one of my favorite authors of all time...I tried looking up Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend - aka the Greatest Novel Ever) but I found nothing.  So, with his blatant sarcasm and ability to bring out the worst in the best, I chose the quote "I just don't want to die without a few scars."  I'm PRETTY sure it's from one of his books...maybe not.  He is a badass either way.  But essentially I tried doing this at the library...while watching video tutorials...tried a number of different techniques.  I tried texture, I tried 3d illusion, I tried warping the text to make the face look scarred...NONE of it seemed to work.  So I just ended up going with simplicity.  I just kept trying to freehand draw the face...it's so funky looking haha.  But it does represent at the least the vein and style that I draw, if not the best representation.  I've always thought the scar running down the eye is the baddest thing anyone could have, and I just watched 300, so I figure that's what I would do with it, plus I've made a painting doing that before...thought I might as well go for it.

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."  Isn't it?  Entitled...Withinstability.  Interpret that how you want to.  Philip K. Dick is one awesome dude, and his mind is full of some of the coolest stuff.  Or was.  I don't know if he's dead.  A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite movies of all time (haven't read the story!), and I tried to do something that looked like rotoscope at first...but you can guess how that turned out.  So INSANE popped straight into my mind, and I thought of the Spongebob episode where Mrs. Puff get's trapped in Iso and Spongebob is all of the walls...yeah.  Hence, walls yellow, was going to make the quote cover the walls and make it looked like it was scratched in, but I do not have the Illustrator know-how to do so.  I made a dreamish thought bubble above the head of the "insane dreamer", with the quote being the perimeter of said bubble.  I attempted to make the rest of the environment more dreamscape, but again, technical limitations ensued, ergo the final result is once again simplified.  This is one that I would love to go back to, as I am fascinated with the concept of the unconcious mind.

Number 4...my favorite one because I was able to get some basic things working...like Blob Brush.  And...that's it.  And I only kinda did some of the things I wanted to with Blob Brush (No custom brushes? Really?).  Maybe we could call it...Grace, Beauty, and the Horrific Cost of Both.  The quote itself, "War is a perversion of sex," is by the acclaimed storyteller Alan Moore.  If you have not heard of Alan Moore, you have heard of Watchmen and V for Vendetta...guess what?  He wrote both.  Basically everything he touches with a pen turns into gold, so check out his graphic novels - sheer ascendence.  He was also extremely intelligent, politically outspoken through his writing and transitioning, and one hell of a beard-grower.  Seriously.  Anyways, because he is another one of my favorite authors, I must support his greatness, which I hoped to envelope with this picture.  My original concept was much different, but again, Illustrator limitations.  So this is what I ended up with...LOTS OF PATHS were used to make this, blob brush, and I love the way I use the normal brush strokes to evoke emotion and imagery.  The tank is extremely vivid and proportioned in a way that you will notice it, along with the "battle" going on below, and hopefully you would think of war - this is also why I chose the font that was used.  Amongst the chaos though, the "sex" is going on between two lovers on the right side of the picture.  Sex is not always what people portray it as - violent acts of reproductive abuse that are extremely vigorous.  A lot of sex is about love, and I believe that is what Moore is trying to get at, is that war is a complete opposite of all that humans can care for in one another.  That, and I didn't want to have two people going doggystyle somewhere randomly on my image.  But really, Moore has a powerful message, and I hoped that the contrast I created between war and sex would play off of that.

Apparently you can not move images around, so my last one is at the top of the page.  I got sick of looking up quotes by authors and philosophers...stuff like that.  So I went to a couple real thinkers - hip-hop artists.  I worship some of these guys.  For that, I will call this last piece Flow.  This quote is by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien (he was in the Gorillaz song Clint Eastwood), aka Deltron 3030.  He is Ice Cube's cousin, fun fact.  Anyway, I looked up and listened to some of his songs, along with Lupe Fiasco, J Dilla, MF Doom, and Fabolous.  This quote was short, sweet, and vivid, so I'd figure I'd try to capture it within my ability.  There is A TON of paths in this picture.  That is not an understatement.  If you weighed them all, it would be a ton.  But I tried to do what I could to make the blob brush looked like you could do lighting effects with it (you can't), I didn't use any filters because most of the time they don't work too well with blob brush (they won't).  What I did like was being able to copy a set of paths, paste it, than change the opacity.  That's what I did with the guy.  I did it the hard way by coloring each one individually, instead of coloring one than pasting him at a lower opacity, but it gives it a slightly different look.  It is very sloppy, this is not intentional, you cannot constrain a brush within a path (to the best of my knowledge).  The dog...screw the pooch.  Seriously.  I won't even write about what a pain in the ass that thing was.  The paths from the doghouse were weird too.  The fence...haha well yeah...I tried doing something with moonrays and lighting and opacity...and that's how it came out.  Green = grass.  Darker color on same object = shadow.  You get the gist.


So please comment and thank you for checking out all my work!


- The Almighty Ruler of Peoples: Past, Present, and Future.

Here's what I've got so far.  My concepts are so much greater than the way I can represent them with this program though...somewhat upsetting.  The artist's interior, in my case, is usually much more representative than what the exterior can perform.  Shame, but that's how it works.

By the way - Do not eat seven week old Wal-Mart brand Pop Tarts (or as I have dubbed them, Mart Tarts). My stomach is feeling the pain.

Here goes:

I have been working on Illustrator for three hours now.  My first project, as weak as it was, took me two and a half hours and the computer crashed as I was saving it, therefore the file corrupted.  Awesome.  Backup, you say?  Yeah that was next in line.  So here I am re-doing some work so I can get ahead.  I am hungry.  I am tired.  I am full of angst.  I am done writing nonsense that no one besides me will read.

Dear Diary.

Zakk

I give up.  I do not understand why when I go use a tool, it completely changes it's settings upon direct use.  I go back and fix it.  This does not work.  I go and watch tutorials.  They do not answer my questions.  I promise myself, before absolutely destorying this library computer, that I will never use this program again.  For my children, and their children, I will pass on the legacy of how impossible this program is for my kin, how they will always use the glorious crafting tools of their hands and of Photoshop.  Never will the defocation and filth of so-called "Vector programs" hurt their terrific minds by presenting themselves to mine own.  It has taken me over an hour for the first quote and I've been stuck at the same step.  If I don't try to kill myself with a keyboard or mouse, may I be praised for years to come for the restraint I am currently expressing towards my body.

May we be saved.

Pardon my language, but vector can (insert vulgar insult towards Illustrator).  My hatred to this program is undying.  The only thing I have personally had success with in this god-forsaken program is transferring a 2D Logo and making it 3D...and that took 3 hours to figure out.  I will try tutorials, but may the mighty digital gods smote wrath upon the heathens who developed this Adobe product.

Photoshop is nice.

Here is my attempt at Illustrator and Vector Graphics.

Dear christ.  The uploading even looks odd.  Alright...so this is my attempt at realizing the concept I had in Illustrator.  I only hate it because I have only used it for two days, but the learning curve is much higher than Photoshop, even for avid users.  So I messed around with a couple things, couldn't realize my concept for either due to limitations, so I went with a "Simple, but Elegant" approach.  I was going to have words that I wrote completely covering the screen, but at a low opacity so that you couldn't see the word I was trying to display (Camouflage).  It's easy to see because I was not able to get that effect, so I put red under the lines of text to divert attention, all the while putting a back layer underneath the text that has a texturized rectangle layer.  So...yeah.  I hope to get my concepts working, but it'll be a lot of tutorial reading.  Onward, ho.

Alright...over the past week I've been reading a lot of people's blogs, namely essential stuff like project submissions, conceptual ideas, problems, and the like.  Maybe a tidbit about NFC West Divisional games...but that part can be ommitted.  I've gathered up a couple of undeniable facts: 1. We are extremely diverse in our work, as many artists are.  Some more than others, and, as is Scion's remarkable perspective, we are united by our differences.  I personally believe that the more different an artistic viewpoint is from another, the more unified we are as artists on a common level.  No one should worry about "bad art", (I HATE saying that, because it is such a stupid combination of words.  Don't make me use expletives, because I will) because there is no such thing.  So I believe everyone's identity is there's, and you should not be afraid to take off with that, not conform to someone else's style because you liked what they did and feel a need to mimic it.  Sure, take a technique or two, but apply it to your own creative perspective.

Bottom line, I don't want to be the "failed artist" who sits at home making their artwork ALL the time, trying to use it as a career and selling it at a park without a license to do so, and never being able to earn anything because they have no passion to sell themselves or there work with more confidence or networked assistance.  WE NEED TO GET OUR NAMES OUT THERE.  I understand there is a curriculum we need to follow, but if we can get a dedicated side-project going, i.e. something we can start at a basic level like First Friday's or the ASU Galleries, than I believe it can give us all a step in the right direction.  Meet some people, whore yourself out (in a positive way of course), because if you don't initiate the selling of your own being, than who will?

I know Gavin and Elisabeth have wanted to get something going, and Peter has commented to Gavin's so far, but we can do something, even as novice designers.  And yes, we are novice.  That does not mean you can't make something everyone will enjoy/appreciate.  I've been reading graphic novels, comics, books, and interacted with other sorts of media throughout my entire life, and I believe we can do some digital work in many mediums, including those aforementioned.  So it's up to all of you, and I know I want to find ways to get myself known.  We shall discuss it Wednesday.  Rage on!

Zakk Adam
480.516.3317

This photo is my interpretation of a dynamic still life that resolves around the social functions of the university.  Day and night, each pillar is different, updated on a day to day basis.  It may be in the same place each time, but it is still in constant motion, acting as a catalyst for social interaction.  The picture shows that communication can last a lot longer than a mere set of words.

I used 5 different pictures in the compilation, taken at various times throughout the course of three days.  I put the accents on night and early morning, as they create the starkest contrasts.  Most of the lighting is natural besides the leveling, contrasting, and slight coloration.  Many of the posters and signs are in their original state, minus a little bit of alteration and some filtering on a few.  Other than that, I manually touched up some of the darker tones with a brush, and let the rest of the imagery speak for itself.

Hope you enjoy.

Thanks,

Zakk