painting thumbnails 3-4

mypaintexperiments3-4_thumbs

Above: more thumbnails of paintings I've been doing using Linux MyPaint.

Was looking at Peter Halley's portfolio pages -- you click through dozens of his cell-and-conduit paintings, all roughly the same size thumbnails. It's an intriguing design exercise -- after so many years of production, there are hundreds of variations on the colors and basic shapes he employs. Halley wrote an essay in the '80s about Frank Stella and the simulacrum, arguing that Stella was neither the last formalist nor a "bureaucrat" but a post-modernist emerging early, in the 1960s. Halley's own career continued the logic of ironic serial production. He could even be said himself to have anticipated 3D printed canvases, since the actual objects he makes have a kind of chalky, plastic perfection. All those coats of acrylic could be passes of the print head, over and over until the surface is built up.
The ultimate logic of postmodern simulation would be to bypass the objects altogether and just have the digital archive of patterns. The art becomes more easily transmissible, gets out to more people, and doesn't add bulk matter to the universe.

sketch_k3

sketch_k3

Drawn with Linux MyPaint and GIMP.
So far these tools are looking and handling similarly to the Chibi Paint plugin used by Computers Club Drawing Society (among other plugins).
Haven't figured out how to use the hard-edged black and white fill patterns as a brush, yet. I had to make an underlayer in GIMP with that stripe pattern and use the eraser in the top layer to pull it up.
MyPaint has more brushes and effects, a few of which aren't horrible.

Addendum: Am thinking I would like to see this Epson-printed at 17 x 22 inches on some kind of hand-crafted paper resembling a rumpled, brown grocery store bag.
Addendum 2: Added an off-white background.

painting thumbnails

mypaintexperiment_thumbs

Linux application MyPaint has some possibilities: it's just a matter of clicking through the brushes and separating the tacky from the less-tacky. It's fairly intuitive: you choose a background and start noodling. The main brush I'm interested is "blend," which allows modeling from dark to light. Chibi Paint has an excellent "watercolor" brush that can be used for blending. MyPaint's is adequate -- it may be a matter of messing with the speed and opacity settings.

sketch_k2

gratuitousobject

AKA "assembling gratuitous object for 3D printing (with pipe)"

Drawn and modified in a handful of paint programs: Chibi Paint, Microsoft Paint, Linux MyPaint, and GIMP.
Am attempting to wean myself off of Windows, after the last round of outrages from the criminal class in Redmond. Linux Mint is a much better operating system in many respects than Windows 7 through 10 but the creative software is going to take some getting used to. This is not to apologize for the above drawing, it's supposed to be this way.

3d-printed Tardigrade

EricHo_tardigrade

Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler famously declared: "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." This dictum never got around to Shapeways, a startup dedicated to filling the world with copious amounts of additional objects... via 3D printing. At Shapeways, kids using phones (or adults using laptops) create cartoony objects, a designer can be hired to help implement the project (some kind of Uber sharing/exploitation situation), and then Shapeways 3D-prints the objects to be sold in its online store.
The above sculpture, which actually looks pretty appealing, at least as a jpeg, is the brainchild of EricHo, working with designer Kostika Spaho. The tardigrade is an internet-fan-adored micro-animal that lives in ponds, eating moss. It looks like a space creature (and is in fact so tough it can live for brief periods in space), a comparison emphasized by the artist's placement of it on a futuristic grey pedestal. The "sandstone" textures of the creature and base, as well as the color choices, have a sensual allure. A viewer from the time before 3D printing would greatly like to see this carved by hand, looking much like this, but several times larger than its actual size (5 x 4 x 3 centimeters). It's an outmoded prejudice of wanting to think of a hand, with tools, patiently cutting and smoothing these particular bizarre shapes.