Fossil Gears

One of the highlights during our road trip from Toronto to Halifax was spending a night at atheist-political-sciencey blogger Lousy Canuck's place. Jason and Jodi were kind enough to put our travelling caravan up for the night and introduce us to the wonder of Portal 2. 

To thank @lousycanuck and @pixelsnake for their hospitality, I repainted one of the paintings on slate from my (now-dismantled) final school project into this new work, Fossil Gears. 

The visit was far too short. We need to meet up again some time! 

Flying Trilobite, left, Lousy Canuck, right.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
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Recent sketch in my Moleskine.

Forgotten art for a late night.

Taking apart a room due to some slight water damage. Listening to Stromkern (thanks Stephanie!) and Wolfsheim. Here's some of my slate pieces from my final school project scanned and converted to black and white. I almost put this image in my latest print collection, and then skipped it and forgot about it.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.

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Art Monday: slate fragments

Some of the dismantled pieces from my final undergrad project.

It's funny, after the discussion it provoked I have ended up dismantling it anyway.  I kind of like the pieces, and I'm going to experiment with ways of hanging them on the wall.  This is the type of slate pieces I've been thinking I may put into my eventual Etsy shop.

I kind of like how the slight difference in thickness of the bottom piece of slate ("gears") causes all buy the center to become blurry.  Depth of field is funny with scanners.

Here's an up close picture of my brushstrokes on that creepy eye. You can see I didn't use white, I instead used naples yellow and naples yellow red, which I think give it a tired feel.

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Medium overriding the message?

When presenting the final project of my undergrad here on The Flying Trilobite, (see the process here: one, two, three, four and five) some excellent points have been raised in the comments of the last post.

My Art Evolved peeps Craig and Peter have been discussing whether or not unconventional mediums (like a wooden cube with busted slate tiles painted and hanging from wire) end up muddying the message more than conventional, easier to read forms.

Here are a couple of more photos, different from the the last post in that they show off the individual paintings more:

Click to enlarge.

This picture was taken on a weird angle. Sorry.

It was an interesting experience for me to have some of my artwork turn off someone for being post-modern and medium-focused. Typically, I am a painter in love with creating representational, realistic paintings.

As Craig pointed out, the medium is the message. We see here not only a 3D series of paintings hanging in a cube, we see them through the lens of a camera and displayed on a computer screen. It's very removed from say, Darwin Took Steps, a much more 2D picture which translates better through scanning and being online.

How much can the presentation enhance or interfere? Would video of a 3D object present better online, panning, zooming and with soft techno music in the background? Would it be clearer to scan individual pieces and present them as head-on photos?

Is this presentation in the immortal words of Mo the bartender, "po-mo; postmodern; weird for the sake of weird" or is something more getting across?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

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Next time on The Flying Trilobite: my interpretive dance fossil project!

Final. Art. Project. *gasp*

Top view.

Front view.

More after the jump...
More art after the jump!

Art Monday: Hyperferrule

Hyperferrule
Pencil in my Moleskine, 2007.
A steampunk-inspired painting device; obviously it needs the latest in Linux hand-eye shareware.
Originally appeared on this post.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Last project underway

My last project for my undergraduate degree is underway.  Here's a snapshot to give you a glimpse at what I'm doing with all these slate pieces.

Danger! Wet oily trilobite!

Carrying wet oil paintings home on public transit (bus-->subway-->streetcar) from York U is always delightful, *cough* but someone stopped me to ask why I was carrying a trilobite fossil around.  That brightened my day.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Some sketchy sketches

Here's a few things I've been working on.

Sketches for my class. The topic is body image. Pop culture and sexuality is popular as a topic, but I thought I'd tackle anthropometry and perfect proportions for the artist. Lots of nodding at Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man here.

With how my lungs have been feeling lately, I thought I'd revisit my Asthma Incubus drawing from a few years back, and dive into ArtRage a bit more. This is not even close to done: the figure is on a separate layer so I can delete it after I paint them in properly.

There's also a new Steampunk Trilocopter on the way, with larger, Opipeuterella-ian eyes for the cockpit.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: steampunk trilocopter sketch

My last day before returning to school tomorrow. Had a bit of time to monkey around some more with ArtRage and I loooooovvvve it. For the first time in my life I have a new computer; triple-core, 4MB ram, 750MB hard drive and magic elves. I know this may sound ridiculously provincial, but the screen is awesome. And it takes my digital tablet strokes beautifully.

I used my Intuos 3 tablet to sketch out this rough idea in the amazing ArtRage. I cannot recommend this digital painting program enough. The interface is so close to using real paint & pencil (but with an undo key!) it's stunningly elegant for a greasy oil painter like myself to use.

Steampunk flying trilobites: I've had this idea kicking around since my first year online, and I figure with the technology upgrade in my art I might as well give the little critters an upgraded mode of flying. The big one in the middle is a dirigible (I love that word.)

Here's the first one, sketched to simulate pencil. This is a digital sketch, not something I scanned. Obviously I'm happy with the software simulation of graphite.Here's a duplicate, transformed and re-worked, this time adding some digital paint to it. Again, this is just me goofing around.Tomorrow I'm back at York U, and this term I'm taking Drawing & Narrative. Seemed like a wise thing to take in this portion of my semi-illustrator career.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***