Light from the Firmament

I have had a revelation...

...Concerning these robots. I did not know their names, but now I know that the one on the top is from the Tetragrammatron Series. Model number currently unknown. He is made of silver and gold. The fembot's name is still hidden to me, but I have discovered that she is made of lead.

CONFIRMED.

Furthermore, 01000001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110100 01110101 01110010 01101001 01110100 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01110011 01101001 01110011 01110100 01110011 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100001 01100111 01100001 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01100101 01110010 01101001 01101111 01110101 01110011 01101110 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01100100 00100000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101100 01100100 00101100 00100000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100001 01111001 00101110.

Still not sure how that whale got out there.

Dr. Laser's Revenge, The Final Chapter

Past Blasters: Volume One, Issue Three

This is the final installment of volume one of pastblasters, wherein I entertain myself by recounting to myself all of the awesome things I have done. Currently I have been discussing the creation of a wall mural entitled

Dr. Laser's Revenge

!!!!

Catch up with issues one and two. 

Now, I'll admit it. In this series so far, I've been a real pic-tease. So this post is going to be heavy on pictures of the completed work.

That sexy dude on the right is the Artist, preening before his work.

A couple of technical notes:

• The 'space' color is Disney brand Galaxy Black, and it is the richest color black I've ever experienced. Gotta love those animator colors.
• Every star/galaxy/globular cluster is either red- or blue-shifted. Just like it would be if you looked out your spaceship and saw this in real life.
• Acrylic paint is very cheap at Wal-Mart. That said, I doubt the ability of this mural to age evenly. Or to age well at all, considering it's in a frathouse, and a good chunk of the wall has no insulation behind it.
• The coral reefs were my favorite part to paint. The ecosystem of the planoctopod is best viewed from ~2 feet away.
• During the day, sunlight will shine through the holes mentioned in the previous post, forming the brightest constellation in the sky. Sometimes art happens by accident.

Within These Walls.

Uh way to focus Joe.

A couple of thematic details. The characters in this painting have a story, or mythology. I've been thinking about it for over a year now, but I'm not ready to tell it because I'm not done gestating. Here is what I can say at this point:

• When I painted this I assumed the robots and planoctopod were in conflict. I later realized they were dancing. If you had 8 arms, you would want to dance with more than one partner at once too.
• The gold 'occult' robot is male. The silver robot is a female. CONFIRMED.
• The viral looking ship in the middle of the painting is a T4-stellarophage. It infects stars and uses their energy to create replicas of itself which explode out of the chromosphere, leaving a lifeless brown dwarf in their wake.
• The planocotopod has a gold sucker filling. It's ballin'.
• How did that whale get there?! What a crazy place for a whale! He sure looks surprised! CONFIRMED.
• These robots were build by other robots. However, they do not have smaller robots inside them, like many other robot-built robots. They are just automatons, not autoautomatons.

Beverly!

Dr. Lasers Revenge. Acrylic on plaster. Appx. 11 x 8 ft. 2009.

Questions still unanswered (Please discuss in groups of three to five, and be prepared to present your answers to the class):

• Where did the robot constructors come from? Are they planet (planoctopod) bound?
• How do planoctopods reproduce? Can gaseous members reproduce with terrestrial breeds, or have they speciated?
• Do interstellar octopi have any natural predators? Do they do they have an energy source other than stars? Perhaps they are cannabalistic, like some aqueous squid. 
• Is the sun also a octopodian creature? What about the ringed moon? If the sun is octopodian, how does it sustain itself?
• What's all that binary say?
• What does the occultbot do, besides having some outlets, a soundboard, usb plugs and a dot matrix printer?
• Seriously, what is that whale doing there?! What a crazy guy!
• Where is Dr. Laser and how does this constitute his revenge?

Next time on Past Blasters, a heartbreaking tale of hope, loss, domestic terrorists and the fire department.

Dr. Laser's Revenge (2)

Past Blasters: Volume One, Issue Two.

Previously on Past Blasters I covered the sketches I made in anticipation of painting a mural in the summer of 2009. A mural that would come to be known as...

Dr. Laser's Revenge

!!!!

In the second week of August I took a trip to my frathouse, kicked out the guy living in my dorm, (he had an apartment), and dragged everything out of the room. It looked like this:

An empty room.

A messy hallway.

The room without anything in it was a narsty place. One of the walls was covered in accumulated drunk scribblings spilling off the door and mostly in smeared crayon. The previous year I had experimented in gluing CDs to the ceilings, but the ceilings in the house had a popcorn treatment, which made gluing tedious and tenuous. Since I had more CDs and further ideas, the popcorn posed a problem. The crayons, the ceiling and the total lack of color all had to go.

"Miniona <3" I wish I had kept.

I Eat Asbestos.

I made decent progress the first few days. I scraped the popcorn ceiling, which is pretty easy with a spray bottle and a paint scraper. I painted the ceiling, primed and painting the walls, and glued up the CDs. I also attempted to "prep" my canvas. The wall I was working with had an orange peel finish, which, given the detail of my drawings, was not ideal. I had anticipated this, but did not have a clear idea of how to surmount the problem. I could have re-plastered the wall but c'mon- I not some sort of professional craftsman, nor am I made of money. So I took my family's rotary sander with me, and applied it to the wall.

The wall, it turned out, was already bowing in and cracked. This is due to a fact I discovered when I took down a dartboard that had been nailed to the wall. The wall, my canvas, was put up over a window. The window is visible from outside of the house. The gap has not been insulated in any way; light comes in through the nail holes. You can peep through them.

Sanding was not effective. I wore down all of the grit wheels at my disposal and did not make any part of the wall appreciably smoother. I did kick up a lot of dust, however. After sanding set off the smoke alarm in my room, I put a shower-cap over the detector. Further sanding set off the smoke alarm in another room.

that's not me

that's a rat on the loose

I then turned my attention to the door. The door to the room had two pre-existing elements I wanted to keep. It named the room, "Dr. Laser's Office" (Dr. Laser is a a demo bar). The bottom half of the door said "HELP" in flames. Otherwise the door was covered in forgettable things. In order to keep the elements I wanted, I repainted them in black. Then I painted the whole door in red.  The sections in black showed through. After a second coat of red, I repainted the black outlines, thus preserving the elements I wanted and covering extraneous details.

that's not me

that's not hell, it's help.

During this whole time I was also working on an even more elaborate project, renovating a room in the basement. My attentions were thus divided, and I began to slow down. The story of that renovation has been recounted elsewhere, but I think I can sum it up with two pictures:

this actually is hell.

this is a purington paver

Regardless, after a significant fit of labor, I was good to resume full time work on the mural.

Last time, I mentioned that my approach suffered from not being well thought out. In the first place, I distrusted my measurements. They were made, alone, while the room was still full of somebody else and their stuff. I wasn't sure exactly the size of the wall I was working with, and wanted to be able to adapt to that.

Moreover, I overlooked practical measures that would have saved me time in favor of technological gizmos promised to make work easier. An overhead projector, I am still convinced, would have worked (better). I would have had to print out everything on transparencies, and possibly print the sketches on several sheets, but it was something I was prepared for. An overhead projector was not forthcoming, I could not find one to borrow and they are actually very expensive.

At this point, I should have realized the easy way to do this required photoshop (which I had been working with), no projector, and a smidge more confidence behind a brush than I had at that point.

Instead I started looking at the commercial grade projectors in the art store, and because I was on a budget, bought the cheapest one. The Tracer Jr. The Tracer Jr. is something best used to entertain a child wanting to draw a large version of a sticker. It should never be used for a mural. The projection window is 3 square inches. There is no way to raise or lower the projection except for the elevation of what it's sitting on. The Tracer Jr. is very wobbly. Perhaps  the Tracer Sr. has sturdier legs.

After a few days of stacking up boxes and arranging lofted beds and trying to block all the light out of the room and sweating I managed to draw a rough outline of my pictures, projected on the wall.

It looks easy enough.

But using it feels like this.

So how could this agony have been avoided? Simple, draw a 1 foot grid on the wall, create a gird over the mural picture in photoshop and re-draw (or paint directly) on to the wall. At the time, I did not consider this option. I probably would have been suspect of it in any case. Until the point when I was standing at the wall with the Tracer Jr. in use, I thought I would be reproduce all the details in the paper copy directly on the wall. I thought painting would be akin to coloring-in what was already there. I really imagined it would be like a coloring book writ large. In fact, until rather late in the game I planned to outline everything with cartoony black lines at the end. Most of these preconceptions were shattered.

At the end of my visit, I was far from done. I had a some of the characters in the mural painted, but no background and no details. I had to leave with much of it undone, and I had to come back to school early and work like a marathon runner to finish it.

This is how things looked at the end of my mid-summer trip:

I also built this couch

And sawed the top off that bunk bed

The Beksinski is by my roommate.

It's a lonely planet with no arms.

Next time I'll cover how I worked myself to the bone to finish this thing before I crash landed into my senior year. I'll talk about how I discovered how to paint, and what techniques I stumbled across. I might even discuss what I think the work could mean. Or not. Mostly I'm going to talk about Galaxy Black.

Also there will be pictures, lot of pictures. /wg/ quality pictures.

Past Blasters: Dr. Lasers Revenge (1)

Past Blasters: Volume One, Issue One

This is the first in a series of fourish installments on some of my more notable creative accomplishments over the last year and a half. Today in Past Blasters, we'll look at a full-wall mural I painted in the summer of 2009 titled...

Dr. Lasers Revenge.

!!!!

In the June of '09, I had just finished up my junior year at college, and was slated to move into the largest room in my fraternity house that coming fall. I was also getting over a breakup. For a while I had aspired to at some point paint a mural somewhere. A number of factors had combined to make the summer the opportune time to undertake this project.

• I did not want to spend more than, oh say, 1/3 of my summer wallowing in self-pity.
• I had a lot of free time, see above.
• Fraternity room budgets had recently been increased.
• The room, like much of the house at the time, was unpainted. It also had a large blank wall.
• My roommate also agreed to cover a wall in the room with a mural.

Obviously, the timing was fortuitous. At the time I committed to the project, I had no idea what I was going to paint. Actually, I had no idea how to paint because I had not held a brush, artistically, since I was in grade school. At the time I considered myself a pen and paper artist; my conception of the project was transpose a drawing to a wall, and add color.

Things were going to get, well, educational.

The summer started with a lot of doodling. I had a few threads of ideas, but no overall concept. I knew I wanted animals, lots of animals. Probably an octopus, likely an elephant; and dinosaurs (incl. birds). I was also fairly committed to the concept of robots from the outset. As for setting, I was bandying between a prehistoric jungle setting with volcanoes and the like, or outer-space.

I jumped in headfirst and started drawing all of these concepts in turn. As for animals, I quickly gravitated toward octopi, but continued to work on birds and soon found interest in microscopic life. The question of locale was settled on outer-space when I hit upon the idea of a satellite constructed as a bacteriophage. From there, the terraforming of the octopus' head was a natural next step.

Having sufficiently technologized viruses, I turned to robots. Robots proved significantly more difficult to draw. Your common robot is an intricate balance of straight lines and regular geometries; something my more fluid drawing style struggled to conquer. I think, in the end, I managed. All of these sketches were beginning to congeal into something concrete.

(I still have all these sketches and may publish them someday, if I see significant interest.)

I had planned a week long trip to school in early August to put the mural up and tackle other projects. As the first fortnight of July fell away, these congealing ideas were still splattered in a number of different sketchbooks and had yet to be brought together. So I took my largest sketchbook one night, sat down, and came up with this:

My methodology at the time was to progressively enlarge sections of the drawing and draw more detail onto them; draw interorbital objects separately; and somehow project the whole thing up on the wall. Hindsight is what it is, and I realize now the ways this methodology could have been more exact, not to mention much, much simpler. In any case, I proceeded single-mindedly. With a little photoshoppery, I produced a sheaf of grayed-out guidelines onto which I made this set of sketches:

This continent is presented the way I drew it, not the way it was later painted.

 

These drawings formed the basic corpus on which I would build the coming mural. Although some of the more intricate details were eventually jettisoned (in the sun and gaseous planoctopod, particularly), the core ideas in these sketches made it to the final painting. Albeit clumsily.

As I am growing tired of writing right now, and because I want to have a topic readily available next time I feel like blogging, I am going to leave off here. In the next issue, I will discuss the difficulties encountered in time, texture and light projection.