The Cookie Minister

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Travis C

Since I haven’t posted anything for a while, I figured I’ll dig up something. This isn’t current news or brand new “art” but it’s probably better than nothing.

So there was a news story a bit over one year ago where the president and CEO of Alberta Health Services, Stephen Duckett, was pressured by some reporters to answer questions after he had left a meeting and was on the way to another one. Duckett’s reaction to them was entertaining; He was eating a cooking, and basically refused to speak to the press because he was too busy eating this cookie. The persistent reporters followed him out of the building, down the street, and all the way to another building and the whole time he milked his cookie excuse for as long as possible. While surely an immature and inappropriate way to deal with the reporters who had valid questions about a recent heath system problem that deserved to be answered, it was certainly really funny to watch.

You can see the whole event on this 2 minute video here, and if you don’t watch it you probably won’t understand why my graphic is funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DxeCK5Ne_Q
[Stephen Duckett's "Cookie Exchange" with Edmonton media]

His repeated cookie eating responses inspired me to create this:

The original image was simply a screenshot from that YouTube video, plus some random cookie monster graphic from a google image search.

P.S. He was fired a few days after this cookie controversy… and he also received a golden parachutte severance of one year’s salary.

Filed under: digital manipulation | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Snowman Samuel

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Tom Nagy

That’s right, today is a double post! Unlike the main contributors of Art-Time-Collective, I live far enough north where the effects of global warming have not yet completely eliminated snow from the winter landscape. Hense, the opportunity to make snowmen in the temperate world may soon be coming to an end. In foresight of this urgency, snowmen like Samuel here might soon become an endangered species. Some may say that they already have…

Ingredients: -11 degree weather + water + various bottle caps + one burned out lightbulb + 2 unidentified sticks = Samuel.

Filed under: real live art, Tangible art | 2 Comments »

Persea americana

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Tom Nagy

This tasty art was produced during the first Art Jam of the 2012 semester at Fleming College. I really like how the skin and the seed in the center turned out. The flesh is a little too vibrant, but I used what I had to work with. Click for hi-res!

Filed under: botanical, Chalk / Oil Pastel | 5 Comments »

St. Anthony’s Fire

Posted on December 25, 2011 by kaleidoscopeflux

Watercolour, pencil crayon and marker.

Alternative names for this piece include Ergotoxicosis, and Ignis sacer.

Filed under: paintings, watercolor | 4 Comments »

A Christmas Post: Skittles // Con Sequins // YoYoYo

Posted on December 24, 2011 by kaleidoscopeflux

Dear members of ArtTimeCollective,

As many of you know, Christmas has never been a part of my family tradition. While I remain open to the concept and welcome holiday festivities, I don’t go out of my way to do anything Christmasy or festive around this time. This year, I find myself spending the evening of the 24th with my art supplies. In the true spirit of the season, I would like to share with you the result of such an evening.

Firstly, we have Skittles the Christmas Skunk. I acknowledge that he is extremely deformed, but implore you to refrain from commenting on his unsightliness. After all, Christmas is about forgiving. It is proof that I am loved, given that my partner went as far as to put it on her Christmas tree. Like all my other needle-felt creations, this distant cousin of Pepé le Pew is fashioned out of Peace Fleece roving wool.

Next, we have the collage-type art, a medium to which I should clearly stick. This particular piece is called Con Sequins, and deals with the repercussions of an advertisement-driven childhood.

Lastly, we have some hand-drawn documentation of the Anti-Santa. When interviewed, all he had to say was YoYoYo.

I wish you all the merriest of Christmases, and a wonderful start to the new year <3

Filed under: cut-out, manipulated, Needle felting, sketches, Wool crafts | 2 Comments »

Three new arts: Geocache // For Sale // Vanity flair

Posted on December 9, 2011 by kaleidoscopeflux

Greetings, gentlefolk.

As you all know, it is important to adapt to the circumstances. In this case, the circumstances entail my home scanner no longer working as well as it once did.

What this means in the context of Art Time Collective, is that many of my uploads will be coming from the University of Toronto Scotiabank Information Commons. Indeed, my art will now be indirectly sponsored by a colossal research institution posing as a university, coupled with one of the companies responsible for the 2001 financial crisis in Argentina.

But my, what crisp images.

——————————————————-

Geocache:

Markers and pencil crayons, combined with a background from a Jacques Cousteau book, as well as a puffer fish from a book of questions and answers. The eyebeams were cut out from a duotang-type folder.

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For Sale

Images from a handyman’s encyclopoedia, as well as from National Geographic. The thought bubbles are outlines in black Sharpie.

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Vanity flair

Background from a handyman’s encyclopoedia, statue from a book about Greek mythology. I  drew the screwdriver using permanent marker.

Filed under: cut-out, manipulated | 2 Comments »

Tending the Tree of Life

Posted on December 4, 2011 by kaleidoscopeflux

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” –Charles Darwin


Darwin sees evolution as a non-hierarchical explosion of multi-directional changes and adaptations. I tried to capture the essence of the great man, tending to his idea over the multiple decades he spent developing his theory. The artwork is based on (and incorporates) Darwin’s sketch of his proposed Tree of Life, which in a lot of ways continues to be much more accurate than the forward-facing, teleological depictions of evolution we see today. Darwin’s figure was developed by manipulating various images (a bust of Darwin, a suit, a pair of shoes and a watering can), and the tree (along with its foliage) was drawn on the computer. The top of the tree, wherein speciation is shown, is Darwin’s original image, as are the words “I think,” which I believe, in their scribbled-down context, to be the two most modest words ever written.

Accompanying this image is an essay I recently wrote for my History of Evolution course, which provided inspiration for the direction in which I decided to take this artwork.

Hope to hear your thoughts,

–Ionatan Waisgluss

Filed under: botanical, digital manipulation, sketches | 6 Comments »

Christmas Ladder

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Rob Nagy

This was a collaborative effort with “Frenchy Pink.” We decided to go eco-friendly this year and decorate something we had around the apartment rather than wasting a perfectly good tree. That or we’re just too lazy to go out a buy a tree… a fake tree, of course. BTW, this is a 10 foot aluminum ladder. Makes for a great Christmas centre piece.

Filed under: not quite sure, photographs, real live art, Tangible art, upcycling | 3 Comments »

Money

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Tom Nagy

This is actually an older piece of mine that I neglected to post for a reason that currently escapes me. Fellow fart-timer Kaleidoscopeflux brought this to my attention and I have since taken appropriate measures (as seen below) to make this piece available to the internet. I like this one too, Ionatan. Click for hi-res!

*** Make sure to tell your friends. ***

Filed under: cut-out, manipulated, photographs, sean gadoury-esque | 4 Comments »

The Birds

Posted on November 26, 2011 by norm

Taking the light rail in, standing to avoid company. I think, maybe this suits me. Meeting the world with a glum frown that comes off as practised, professional. Frown that tells you not to worry, I’ve done this before. It might just be the way that everything is swaying slightly that makes me feel so sleepily morose and lazily beautiful. I wonder at a distorted reflection if this is a good length of stubble for me or if that’s an accurate representation of my jawline. I think, this is the kind of vanity that makes or breaks you. The kind of steely resolve in your own self-interest, or self-interestedness, that is one-hundred per-cent guaranteed to make everybody your friend, Or: They’re Just Pretending. Glancing around to see if anyone notices my breath becoming ragged. Pod People, and me too. Blank expressions, betraying not a single shred of our lone shared intention. We are going to get up every day, and we are going to go to work. We will never tell you why.

Filed under: unicorns | 2 Comments »

Burning Desire

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Tom Nagy

I haven’t done any magazine cut-outs fo a while, but this one turned out really nice I think. I seem to be in the mood for this sort of stuff when I am in school. I wonder why. Click for hi-res!

Filed under: cut-out, manipulated, photographs, sean gadoury-esque | 1 Comment »

Surprise Chipmunk! Om Nom Nom Nom

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Travis C

As promised, I give you some more cinemagraphs.

Surprise chipmunk!

This animation is quite different from what happened in the actual video footage since I had to make it loop and force the hand to remain frozen. Apologies to the chipmunk for falsely representing its actual behavior. I assure you it was compensated with a large sum of peanuts.

Om nom nom nom

Internet memes at art-time are the best kind.
So how long did you watch the chipmunk chew? Maybe if you keep watching for a bit longer it will eventually do something else. You wouldn’t want to miss that would you? No. Maybe that’s why you are still watching. Sometimes we like to construct an alternate ending of reality and then wait in anticipation for it to materialize. I do anyway… even though it usually doesn’t happen.
Or perhaps you are simply taking advantage of being able to get a nice long look at something that doesn’t normally stick around for more than a few seconds. You can watch the chipmunk as much as you want, but the chipmunk can’t watch you… Exploitation?

Filed under: cinemagraph, digital manipulation, video | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Vapours

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Rob Nagy

I’ve got another one to post… I just need to get a glue stick first.

Filed under: sketches | 4 Comments »

Welcome to Dissapointment

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Tom Nagy



Filed under: Negative, noise, sketches | 5 Comments »

The Haunted Drumset

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Travis C

A crash heard in the night
a camera placed for sight
the crash again
heard from the den
a ghost; the cause of fright!

The haunted drumset

It turns out that my drum practice room is haunted and I have captured the phantom drummer in the act!

Or… perhaps all this indicates is how easy it is to produce authentic looking fake ghost footage and that you should not believe everything you see, hear, or read… especially on the internet.

P.S. This type of artwork is a fairly new (began in 2011) construct called a cinemagraph. It involves taking a video clip and isolating a small part while the majority of the frame is a frozen image, and this is usually packaged in the form of an animated gif. This particular example is simple looking (although not easy to create) and maybe even natural looking because it’s not difficult to imagine that the rest of the image would be perfectly stationary, as depicted. (Aside for the absence of the drum stick and my body/arm that I sneakily removed) However, the cinemagraph becomes much more intriguing when there are other aspects of the image that you expect to move along with the moving part. For example a person could be walking  through a scene where everything and everyone else is frozen.
One limitation in the technique is that it is an infinite loop, so the transition from beginning to end has to appear smooth and often has to be completely fabricated by duplicating and manipulating many extra frames.

Now that I have discovered this new art form you can expect much more of it to appear from me here on art-time-collective in the near future. I’ll make a few based on the very limited videos that I already have, and eventually I might film stuff specifically for this purpose.

Filed under: cinemagraph, digital manipulation, video | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Ball-point paths

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Travis C

Pardon me sir, but do you have the time? Yes I do, it is art time.

I don’t do real hand drawn art very often, so I thought I’d post these two items. They aren’t at all recent, but hey they’re new to you so who cares. These pieces were drawn with regular ball-point pens on letter size paper. It’s a lot of ink and takes a damn long time.

The idea for this originated from random doodling with black pen during a class many years ago, and I decided to keep it going and eventually filled the whole page. A few months later I started a new one with blue ink and eventually finished that one too. Feel free to psychologically interpret my sanity based on these drawings:

Black


Blue

*********************************
Updates:

“A psychedelic, multi-coloured version of one of these would look amazing.” – Rob Nagy
“…I agree with Mr. Nagy on the rainbow action.” – Matthew Reynolds

Challenge accepted… Twice!

After some digital modifications I came up with these two images:

Rainbow mod 1:

Rainbow mod 2:

P.S. With these two additions, this post now officially qualifies for the “unicorns” category.

Filed under: digital manipulation, not quite sure, sketches, unicorns | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

Rob’s Cool New Drum Set

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Jesse Black

Nice drum set Rob Nagy, we’ll have to get you a t-shirt with a picture of them on it!

Filed under: unicorns | 4 Comments »

Shrink your dinks

Posted on August 31, 2011 by kaleidoscopeflux

Greetings once more, fellow ArtTimers.

Today’s exhibit consists of a rectangular sheet made of polystyrene (type 6 plastic, just like chinese food containers), which undergoes a fantastic transformation when exposed to heat. Shrinky Dinks reduce uniformly to approximately 5/8ths their starting size, retaining the colour of felt-tipped markers and various other colouring supplies. What does this mean for the intrepid artist? It means that he or she can make an elaborately-detailed art work and then shrink it, with all of the designs staying true to scale!

Take, for example, the Amanita muscaria mushroom, which was also featured in my previous post. If one were to draw such a thing with marker and punch a hole at the top of it, it might look something like this:

If one then proceeded to place these babies on an oven tray lined with paper, stick them in the oven for approximately 3 minutes at 325 F, pull them out and flatten them against the tray using another sheet of paper and an evenly-distributed weight (e.g. a book), then they would be ready within a minute. And if one were bold enough to add some earring hooks… SHAZAM:

Amanita muscaria earrings for your sweetheart. Hypothetically speaking, of course. One would have to be unfathomably awesome to do such a thing.

In other Shrinky Dink news:

“Professor Michelle Khine (University of California) has applied Shrinky Dinks to create tiny structures for the application of microfluidics to topics such as stem cell research.”

Shrinky Dinks may one day save your life.

Filed under: Shrinky Dinks, wearable | 2 Comments »

Because I felt like it.

Posted on August 25, 2011 by kaleidoscopeflux

Hello, fellow ArtTimers.

Over the last month I spent in British Columbia, I was introduced to the art of needle-felting (thank you Seneca :D). Since I had a lot of spare time, I tried my hand at a couple of different projects.

Needle-felting is incredibly easy. You start with a ball of roving wool (a special type of wool that works well for needle-felting) and you stab it into shape with special needles whose barbs only go one way.

The first thing I ever made by needle-felting was a tiny little woolen head, which is not pictured here.

The second thing I made was a turtle :)

Then I made my nephew a chick inside of an egg. Chicken not included.

I also made a Red Eft (Notophthalmus viridescens) for my good friend Jonathan :D

My very favourite needle-felt creation, however, has to be my felted Amanita muscaria ^_^

That is all for now…

However, right before posting this, I ordered $35 worth of roving wool; it should be here within a week. :D

Filed under: Needle felting, Wool crafts | 4 Comments »

Yo dawg, I heard you like pixels…

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Travis C

Pst…. hey you, come closer.

No, not like that! Zoom with your eyes, not your mouse.

Yes, Now you’ve got it!

OK, now do what you just did a second time.

Congratulations, you are looking at pixels of pixels of pixels. Mind blown yet?

Well, technically you’re looking at sub-pixels. Each pixel of your monitor uses a red, green, and blue sub-pixel and applies various light intensities to make the “whole” pixel appear as one a solid color. If you stick your face right in front of your screen you can probably see whole pixels because there is a black mesh that separates them. But good luck trying to see a sub-pixel. So how did I do it? Digital cameras have better resolution than the human eye, that’s how. You probably knew that intuitively when you see a sharp picture of yourself and think, “Oh… more defects than I thought I had”, or when you watch hockey in HD and you wonder why it looks “better than real life”.

This is a photo of “white” on the screen, but close enough to clearly see the sub-pixels.

But what happens if I repeat the process? I took a close picture of that picture and now you get to see your monitor’s pixels showing you sub-pixels of my monitor’s sub-pixels. Yay! Our monitors are now friends.

Zooming in within your computer only gets you so far. The software doesn’t store information in sub-pixels, and it doesn’t know about the gaps between your monitor’s pixels. Once you’ve hit pixels, you can’t gain higher resolution, only higher magnification.


Oh right… you guys like art. Umm… this… I guess?

Filed under: photographs, unicorns | Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

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