darren
Emma Smith
frenchypink
kaleidoscopeflux
Jesse Black
Rob Nagy
Mathew Reynolds
garbage juice
Cosmetic Plague
seangadoury
senecaantony
shitisbadnews
norm
thylacinereports
Tom Nagy
Travis C
Oh hello, this is my first official art-time submission! My name is Travis, and I like to ruin other people’s art or photos. In other words, I play with photoshop to transmute a thing or combination of things into something else, sometimes something completely different. You may already be familiar with my ruined version of Tom Nagy’s “No Go Solo” painting, but now I’m here officially, muahaha.
Guess what, it’s Rob’s birthday… so for my first submission I’ve decided to ruin his art! (Alright, so it was a week ago but I was ready on time. I just didn’t have the user rank to upload and post images until today.) I enjoy Rob’s infamous Awkbird™ painting, which to me is a perfect example of classic Rob Nagy artistic styling that I remember from many years ago.
So here’s what I did with Awkbird, it’s called “Mother Awkbird“:
(please clicky for high resolution)
Mother Awkbird found hungry baby birds and she’s feeding them with a regurgitated rainbow, the spew of choice for awkward animals. Clearly not the same species, but Mother Awkbird doesn’t mind because her maternal instincts have kicked in. She has also provided honorary baby party hats for the baby birds so that she doesn’t feel weird being the only one wearing a party hat.
why Travis, why?!
Awkbird reminded me of how awkward baby birds look in their nest when they’re eating regurgitated food from their mother. They’ve got long necks with chicken skin-like textures that they stretch as high as they can, with beaks open wide like a snake, with their lack of significant feathers, squawking away in unison.
I’ve seen a drawing or three of animals puking out rainbows, notably a unicorn, and I’ve found that it makes them look awkward and awesome at the same time. So the idea came to me that it would be fun to draw baby birds in their nest being fed by a bird spewing out a rainbow, and no better bird than Awkbird is up to this task. (despite being wingless)
Original images used without permission, because that’s how I roll:
Rob Nagy’s “Awkbird” painting, the nest, the baby birds
boring technical details
- Awkbird was extracted, tilted, feet were redrawn and tilted, lower beak was extracted and tilted to open the mouth, party hat was distorted because I didn’t have enough vertical space at the top and also to look like it’s going backwards to add depth. Some lighting/shadowing and colour retouching was added to Awkbird for depth.
- Baby birds were extracted, edges were hand-modified, and a few layers were involved to get the overlapping that I wanted.
- Background nest image was enhanced and the front part of the nest was extracted to a new layer so that the babies could be placed inside. Many parts of the front nest were hand-made transparent to be more real. (Babies visible through gaps in the nest material.
- Baby party hats were created from the top portion of the original hat, color modified, base formed by hand, shape heavily distorted to fit their heads. Baby hat tassels added.
- The rainbow is from a fill gradient using a modified version of the default rainbow gradient, circle gradient was used, cropped to an arc, stretched and distorted to follow a suitable path and then fan out as it leaves the insides of Awkbird.
- There were I think 13 separate layers used to accomplish this image.
optional options that were optional
Even larger resolution than the linked high res image is available on request. Modifications are also possible without much difficulty.
My alternative idea for the nest was to go even weirder and use the Bird’s Nest Stadium from the Summer Olympics in Beijing, which would then make the birds giants. I was also considering using a heavily modified Awkbird to create the babies, or twiggy looking stick figure baby birds, but I decided to go with real baby birds. Another crazy option was to give the babies velociraptor heads, but that might have been enough awesomeness to cause injury to viewers so I didn’t want any potential lawsuits.
Filed under: digital manipulation, not quite sure, unicorns Tagged: | awkbird, awkward, baby birds, mother awkbird, nest, party hat, photoshop, rainbow, ruined, tribute
Haha! This rAWKs!!! :D
And ta for the deets info…
yaz:)
Brilliant. Welcome to the ‘popular’ art time community.
That is completely awesome. Welcome to the collective. I can’t wait for more “ruined” arts.
However… where’s the Cosbucks??
In addition, if I ever make an album, this is the cover art.
Thanks for the comments, and more fun will be on the way in the near future.
Nice ninja-use of “awk”, Yaz! I see what you did there.
While this item was brand new, I have a collection of past stuff I’ve done that I will gradually publish here, just not all at once. Most of what I do that might somehow loosely qualify as art tends to involve digital image manipulation, but I do have some interesting photographs, a few quirky images from science experiments (like strange electron microscope images), and there’s even one hand-drawn original “artwork” that comes to mind as something I’m willing to post.
I’ll post the Cosbucks here soon, I just wanted my first post to be something a bit more polished, surprising, and also there was the timing of it.
Maybe I’ll clarify my use of the word “ruined” too. Sometimes it’s kind of like this: Once you see it, you can’t un-see it. That’s especially true with abstract art. Once you get this idea that there’s something physical that it could be representing, it’s hard to stop that picture from emerging every time you look at the artwork, maybe even for the original artist.
So when I did it with Tom’s interesting art piece it was done as a joke because one of his friends mentioned a funny physical interpretation on facebook and then wrote “Ruined.” after it. So I thought I’d have a fun crack at ruining it too, but instead of describing it, actually producing it instead. Turning the abstract into something physical, something that might be hard to un-see, and thus ruining the abstractness. All in good fun and I wouldn’t do that to someone I don’t know.
With Rob’s Awkbird it was more of a tribute, and a little birthday surprise, but it still qualifies as “ruined” even though it’s not really abstract art. That’s because maybe now when you look at the original Awkbird, it seems possible that parties not only make Awkbird nervous, but they also make his stomach upset and he might puke out a rainbow at any minute. You can just see it churning in the fat awkward belly.
LOVE the party hats. awesome. just… awesome.
[...] this might also qualify as preliminary evidence for the Mother Awkbird phenomenon since there are three young birds following around the Awkbird and regularly begging for food with [...]