Gizmodo inspired me to make this wallpaper yesterday. Then they were gracious enough to post it this morning. I’m such an attention whore. Click the image for the full size version. Go here to buy the shirt.
One More Space Girl
Just finished this up. All in the shop. She’ll be the last for a little while as I’m up to my knees in actual, paying contracted work at the moment.
Two New Shirt Designs – “Space Girl” and “Embrace Diversity”
I’ve got two new designs up in the shirt shop. One is from the successful “Klingon Propaganda” viral campaign I did in November and the other is the second in what will hopefully be a long line of astro pin ups.
New Shirt Shop Open. Art Prints Soon.
I’ve got a new t-shirt shop open at RedBubble.com. They are an excellent printing service. I’m actually wearing one of their shirts right now: an American Apparel T with a very vibrant print. At checkout they let you pick the color of your shirt as well as the style (Men’s, Baby Doll, Long Sleeve, V-Neck). If you’re also looking for a shirt printing service I would highly recommend them over services like Cafepress or Zazzle. They sent me the wrong color once and, after I complained, they not only sent me the correct version but let me keep the original. Pain free customer service. They also print anything from post cards to 36″ posters, so I’ll be getting some wall art up for sale soon too.
Bad Monkey Studios Shop @ RedBubble
More Flash Video Export Headaches
I wanted, nay, needed to export a movie I was working on in 720p resolution. I thought I had everything ready to go. My project’s stage was not 1280×720, but it was a 16:9 ratio (711×400). My logic was, keep the stage small to save on memory and processor power while working and export to the larger size. All my content is vectors, so it should have scaled up smoothly just fine. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. More »
Requiem for a Dexter
This is something I noticed a long time ago, but had a hard time getting the footage together to make my point. In comes Youtube and After Effects and any idiot with an inane pop-culture observation can post something hacked together in minutes. So here’s this idiot’s observation. Aparently Darren Aronofsky’s uber violent and relentlessly bleak Requiem for a Dream has a lot of imagery in common with, you’re going to love this, a Dexter’s Laboratory episode called “Topped Off”. I shit you not. Both are about drug abuse (sort of), use split screens, quick montages, and silly sound effects. And, get this, the Dexter episode was released two whole years earlier. More »
Illustrator’s Blob Brush Tool: WTF?
Adobe Illustrator CS4 got a new tool that was recently brought to my attention. It’s called the Blob Brush and it acts just like the regular paintbrush except that it creates fills instead of lines. You can adjust the brush to be pressure and tilt sensitive, change its shape, and tweak its smoothness and fidelity just like the regular paintbrush. The fills that you draw on the same layer all merge together into one über-shape that makes it easier than ever to click fill with the decade old and mostly useless – until now – Live Paint Tool. Basically it does exactly what Flash’s paintbrush has been doing all along but with beautiful line clarity of Illustrator’s original paintbrush tool. So the question is, if Adobe can create a sweet new brush that makes fill shapes and remains true to the user’s intent why can’t it add it to Flash as well? WTF Adobe?
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Alien Soldier Concept
Here’s a concept for an alien aggressor in the current series I’m working on for ISIS. We’re on episode 3 (Episode 2 is in post production and will be posted soon) and I needed a group of unique creatures to attack one of the main characters. He’s mostly an original concept (especially the breathing apparatus) with some body structure and outfit cues from Niven’s Kzinti.
Flash CS4 10.02 – Update Now!
Let’s face it, Flash CS4’s performance sucks whether you’re dealing with a misinterpreted CS3 file or you just have too much stuff on screen at once. I noted in my CS4 review that several seconds could be spent staring at a spinning beachball by just moving from one spot on the timeline to another. Scrubbing complex scenes could prove completely impossible even if it performed well in CS3. Well, how’d you like to know that most if not all of your CS4 performance issues completely disappear with Adobe’s 10.02 update – downloadable here. More details on this update and my impressions after the jump. More »
Are the Arts Failing?
There is a growing consensus that the “art world” – that bastion of so-called serious expression – is failing. According to a Time article I just skimmed while rolling my eyes and yawning, many traditional art institutions are losing money hand over fist. Government doesn’t want to fund them, people don’t want to attend, and private donations are not as tax friendly as they used to be. But is it really that the arts need saving or that the definition of art has changed from what we have been taught all our lives? More »
Fire Everything! A Star Trek (2009) Review
Of all the nerdtastic entertainment I devour on a regular basis, the original Star Trek is my favorite. I watched my first episode at the age of five – it was “Devil in the Dark” – and have been hooked ever since. If I was stranded on a desert island and could only bring one TV series to watch for all eternity it wouldn’t be Star Trek, because I’ve already got all seventy-nine episodes and five of the six films memorized. So for the past two years I’ve been following the production of J. J. Abrams’ new film with great trepidation and doubt. Could he make this hardcore TOS purist believe in his take on a show he’s admitted to not liking all that much? The answer is a restrained and grudging “yes”. More »
The Definitive Guide to Exporting Video From Flash
One of my biggest peeves about Flash is its various hit or miss methods for exporting video. In version 8 and earlier Flash would create a file made up of a series of frame by frame image captures with the soundtrack recorded separately and laid on top. This worked fine, except it didn’t record animations inside of MovieClips or created by ActionScript. It only recorded whatever could be rendered in real time in the authoring environment. In other words, just Graphic symbols. Adobe revamped video export in CS3 to allow both MCs and AS animation to be captured by recording the the SWF output in realtime. The problem with this method was that if your movie dropped frames in FlashPlayer it was going to hiccup in the video output as well. Here’s a way to finally have both performance and your full movie in video form. More »
The Inflexible Professional
Professional graphics people are a strange lot. On the one hand they embrace many technologies as they appear. Newer and better lenses and imagine sensors, higher DPI scanners and tablets, faster graphics cards, and rarely is a favorite app not upgraded as soon as the new version is released. But like audiophiles who cling to their vinyl, graphics folks can’t let go of their computer displays. Every time there is a major change in displays you will inevitably find a very angry and nearly fundamentalist vocal minority of graphic pros followed by hordes of mimicking amateurs complaining that the new tech is inferior. The difference between the graphic pro and the audiophile is that eventually the graphic pro caves to the new tech and then grows to have enough love for it to hate the very next thing as much as they hated what they are currently using at the time that it came out. What in the world is the cause of this bizarre behavior? More »
Why Watchmen’s Ending Matters
I just saw Watchmen last night on an Imax screen. Critics have been so hard on this movie I could only be impressed by how my low expectations were exceeded. I liked it a lot, in fact – at least most of it. It was a far better film than Dark Knight was by a very wide margin. I think director Zack Snyder really brought the characters to life pretty much the way they were in the comic. The one thing that I was sure would be a disappointment, and turned out to really be one, was the ending. Massive but necessary spoilers ahead. More »
Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future
I’ve had a pretty deep love for tropicalismo/pop duo The Bird and the Bee ever since I heard what I believe is the ultimate song about fucking, Again and Again, two years ago in a noisy cafe. The band became a mainstay in our household when our then one and half year old began referring to all music as “La La” – the name of another track from their debut album – and insisted we play The Bird and the Bee songs nearly constantly. Fortunately she moved on to Feist and then Hasidic Surf Rock before she was old enough to realize what “brain” is a euphemism for.
This month marked the release of “Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future”, which, with few exceptions, is pretty darn awesome. We were also able to attend Inara George and Greg Kurstin’s first live performance in San Francisco in nearly two years, which, with no exceptions, was pretty darn awesome. Would I please clap my hands? You bet.
So, I was easily inspired by the show and the new album’s title to make this image. I’d love to do a music video for the title track in this style…ahem…if anyone would just ask me… The pic is proportioned just right for use as an iPhone wallpaper, and would probably fit other mobile devices as well. Enjoy!
Sometimes I Impress Myself
| Here’s a little tid-bit I worked on this morning. It’s part of the Star Squadron series. I wanted to put it up as a stand alone movie because it goes by so fast I’m not sure it can be fully appreciated with all that’s going on in the scene (she’s walking across the screen toward someone. |
All Scuffed Up – An Intuos3 Retro Review
When you use a device day in and day out you get to know it better than the average reviewer who’s only dealt with it for a few hours. A digital art tablet like Wacom’s intuos3 is definitely one of those things. I bought mine the same month it was released in 2004, replacing my intuos2 tablet. It’s been four years since then and the rebates and Gun Metal Special Editions tell me the intuos3 is nearing end of life. So what better time to talk about its strengths and weaknesses than when awaiting the imminent release of the next gen? More »
The Better to Smell You, My Dear – The Female Nose
A year ago I did a pretty well received article on rendering the human female’s mammary glands, or “tatas calientes” in the vernacular. Today I want to talk about another part of the female body that is equally the subject of controversy both in the operating room and on the printed page: The Nose.
Yes folks, more than the breasts even, the Hollywood Starlet, the hip Brazilian dancer, and even the Jewish girl next door is getting her nose done. In my home town of Miami I’d say more than half of all Hispanic women overthe age of 16 have had the “bump” cut off the top of their noses. A lot of white girls have their’s done too, shaving their Bill Clinton-esque bulbs into deadly sharp tips, not unlike the Folsom Point. More »
Nearly There – A Flash CS4 Review
Only a year and a half ago I wrote a scathing and fiery review of Adobe’s first iteration of Flash: CS3. Now I’m back to write a mildly pissy review of Adobe’s second attempt: Flash CS4. Score one for Adobe for making me slightly less annoyed with my day to day job. Flash CS4 is a huge step in the right direction for Flash. It’s got a lot of flaws, but while they maybe be deep and filled with puss, they aren’t quite fatal. Let’s take a look, eh? More »
