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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Real Life Awkbird

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Travis C

Confirmed: Awkbird actually exists!

Real Life Awkbird

Awkbird species confirmed. (Awkwardus Grackleus)

Perhaps a direct comparison of real Awkbird to Rob Nagy’s theoretical Awkbird is necessary to understand the species confirmation process:

Twins

Party makes Awkbirds nervous.

The Awkbird species matches the conceptual body color, frowning beak, circular dot eye with distinctive nervous stare, wings hidden or potentially non-existent, awkward demeanor, oh and spiffy party hat with tassels.

Interestingly, 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 open beak. Unfortunately no rainbow spew was sighted. Perhaps the rainbow spew is only fed to baby Awkbirds and not the juvenile stage Awkbirds depicted here. It is suspected that they are too cool for rainbows and they appear to be embracing a Gothic attire at this stage in life. They have also opted out of wearing the blue iridescent head coloring of their parents; clearly an attempt to avoid being conformists.

 

What?
 Well I wasn’t planning on repeating this topic but it was just too perfect! I looked out the window one day in June and saw an adult grackle with a few juvenile grackles. They certainly weren’t babies and were only a little bit smaller than an adult grackel, but they haven’t yet developed the iridescent blue head coloring. They also haven’t given up the practice of begging for food because anytime a parent was around they would stretch their necks and point their open beaks in the air at the parent hoping for a hand-out… or… a beak-out, I guess. Often the parent would grant the request and drop a seed in the juvenile’s mouth, even though it was perfectly capable of feeding itself. I thought it was a funny to see nearly full sized birds still acting like mooching baby birds, so I grabbed my camera, took a picture, and then laughed when I saw Awkbird appear on my screen.

Also, please excuse the mediocre photo quality. The picture was taken with a somewhat old digital camera from about 7 meters away, fully zoomed in, and through two layers of dirty window glass.

Filed under: digital manipulation, manipulated, unicorns | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Cosbucks

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Travis C

Imaging a world where Bill Cosby is the powerful leader of a large country.

What would the currency look like? Probably something like this:

Cosbucks

Historically equal in value to one hundred pudding pops.

When Cosbucks were established as the currency for his country, Bill Cosby historically declared that one Cosbuck shall be equal in value to one Pudding Pop.

 

So what would it look like to have a lot of money? This, I assume:

Popsicles for every girl and boy!

That’s a lot of Pudding Pops.

————————–
Origins
Cosbucks were originally created as cash for my character who was scripted to carry around a case full of “acquired” money in an 80′s themed murder-mystery party, hosted by Rob Nagy and “frenchypink”, of art-time fame.  The intention was for a splash of mildly clever comedy at a party rather than the creation of a quality art piece… but some of you might enjoy it anyway.

Construction Details
The Bill Cosby image was extracted out of it’s original and a second layer was added for the hands to extend over top of  the oval, which I think I drew in powerpoint. Multiple copies of the One Hundred Cosbuck bill surface were printed as well as a few pages full of horizontal lines which were created with powerpoint… (because that’s the best I have for vector type art at the moment). The stacks were built from large cardboard blocks that were originally received as packaging protection for a recent online purchase and had to be crudely cut down to size with a rusty, dull, hand saw. Cosbuck surfaces were taped on the carboard blocks and the printed line paper was taped to the sides to cheaply simulate the appearance of stacks of paper. Blue paper was cut, wrapped, and taped around the blocks to look like those bands that hold stacks of real money together.
The resulting stacks were very rough and imperfect, but considering the one-time minor use of the Cosbucks, that was plenty enough time investment for it’s purpose.

Filed under: digital manipulation, not quite sure | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Mother Awkbird

Posted on June 6, 2011 by 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“:

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: , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

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