Just a little shout out to this super cool little program called PureRef. It’s just a simple image viewer that lets you get all your reference images in one clean window. You can scale move and shuffle them around however you like. Just a great little thing to have open when working. Here is one that I used for Fall Colors and Simple Sets.
Photo Bashing Ideas
Found a pretty awesome breakdown on doing some photobashing that is really well thought out. Not just the technique, but the ideas behind why to use the technique. Interesting little vid that has me thinking about the full class to be honest.
Houdini hair / fur with Redshift Render Engine
So I spent an insane amount of time last week trying to get hair / fur in Houdini to show up when using Redshift render engine. I was looking at all sorts of tutorials and not one of them mentioned this freaking setting to make it work. You have to toggle the Hair Generation from “Generate Geo in Mantra” to “Use SOP Geo”. BAM, everything works. Took me forever to find it. Hopefully, this saves you the same headache.
A Love Letter to Reel M Inn, Portland’s Most Iconic Dive Bar
We used to live down the street from this place and spent a few nights there. Good times.
“I moved to Portland with a girlfriend of mine, and we got a place on Division. We woke up that first morning and started walking down the street, looking for jobs. We stumbled across the Reel — it was the very last stop, at 10:30 in the morning — ordered a bloody mary, and asked, ‘Do you know anyone hiring?’ The bartender said, ‘We are, I’m leaving, can you start tomorrow? It was insanity, I was just given a key and an alarm code with no instructions — don’t screw up, don’t burn the chicken. To no fault of anyone — that’s just how it works at the Reel. If you can hack it, you can hack it. If you can’t, you leave crying. It’s baptism by fire.” — Carey Bolton”
Sometimes, ya just gotta post that cat pic
Just chilling out here.
The Notwist, in the studio Aug 2020
I gotta admit, they kinda fell off my radar but this is a pretty awesome live performance.
Houdini Doodles
Just playing around with simple clean sets here a bit. Want to work on bashing out a few sets a day to see what I can come up with.
2020 Fall Portland Color Palette
Just walking around with the phone collecting some images that I will use for some Fall color palettes this season. Some interesting tones to pick from.
Well, hello there...
Been a hot minute with no updates here, sorry about that, but between all the election crap and a boat load of work landing I have not had much brain power at the end of the day. Anyhoo, here is a bulk dump of some more mirror balls and other studies I was working on. Just tinkering with some ideas here.
Jar Studies
Here are the three jar images all finished up and in one post to check out.
Tjalf Sparnaay Delicious Paintings
Some pretty cool paintings here by Tjalf Sparnaay.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
-cough.
I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.
Woo boy, pretty heavy read here.
“Today I assume you went to work. Bad news was everywhere, clogging up your social media, your conversations. Maybe it struck close to you. I’m sorry. Somewhere in your country, a thousand people died. I’m sorry for each of them. A thousand families are grieving tonight. A thousand more join them every day. The pain doesn’t go away, it just becomes a furniture of bones, in a thousand homes.
But that’s exactly how collapse feels. This is how I felt. This is how millions of people have felt, including many immigrants in your midst. We’re trying to tell you as loud as we can. You can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around. This, I fear, is one of many things Americans do not understand. You tell yourself American collapse is impossible. Meanwhile, look around.”
via- Kottke.org
This Machine Kills Fascists
Inspired by the Great Woody Guthrie, I made a new piece of artwork this weekend in response to the Alt-Riot / Proudboys coming into our town from out of state to cause havoc. Get out and Vote people. It’s pretty bleak out there, so do what you can.
FlowerPower Blue- Robert Peek
Amazingly cool technique on this series by Robert Peek. I was pretty sure they were paintings when I first saw them. Check out the full series on Behance, FlowerPower Blue.
Working on a little something something.....
Just mashing some stuff together for a new piece I am working on and this little graphic I wanted to drop as a preview. These two were kinda fun. The “eyes image” were scrapped form the internet but the game graphics style of “VOTE” was done in C4d.
As Their Numbers Grow, COVID-19 “Long Haulers” Stump Experts
More info is coming out about the long term effects of COVID and it’s not looking good.
“Anecdotally, there’s no question that there are a considerable number of individuals who have a postviral syndrome that really, in many respects, can incapacitate them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery and clearing of the virus,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in July during a COVID-19 webinar organized by the International AIDS Society.
…
In the study of Italian patients, the most common symptoms reported at follow-up were fatigue, shortness of breath, joint pain, and chest pain, in that order. None of the patients had a fever or other sign or symptom of acute illness, but about 44% of them had a worsened quality of life.
Tape Op!
Just got my new issue of Tape Op magazine and if you are into any kind of recording this is a must have. So many great interviews and stuff to check out all about studio recording, home recording and more. Plus, the magazine has a FREE subscription. If you play any music, it’s a no brainer to subscribe. Tape Op!
The Social Dilemma
Watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” the other night and while I think all the criticisms in this essay are spot on, I still think it is very much worth watching. It will really give you a clear picture on how much your devices are actually manipulating you. My news blackout now is expanding to keeping devices at bay. Blogging is a bit different as this is a sit down workstation for “doing shit”. Not just that addictive mindless scrolling, searching or playing mobile games like what happened when one uses any portable device.
Engineers produce a fisheye lens that’s completely flat
K, this is nutso, future stuff here. Think of the possibilities.
“Now engineers at MIT and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell have designed a wide-angle lens that is completely flat. It is the first flat fisheye lens to produce crisp, 180-degree panoramic images. The design is a type of “metalens,” a wafer-thin material patterned with microscopic features that work together to manipulate light in a specific way.
In this case, the new fisheye lens consists of a single flat, millimeter-thin piece of glass covered on one side with tiny structures that precisely scatter incoming light to produce panoramic images, just as a conventional curved, multielement fisheye lens assembly would. The lens works in the infrared part of the spectrum, but the researchers say it could be modified to capture images using visible light as well.”
“In one demonstration, the new lens is tuned to operate in the mid-infrared region of the spectrum. The team used the imaging setup equipped with the metalens to snap pictures of a striped target. They then compared the quality of pictures taken at various angles across the scene, and found the new lens produced images of the stripes that were crisp and clear, even at the edges of the camera’s view, spanning nearly 180 degrees.