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I've said this before.
I hate the MSPaint spraycan tool.
Even though I learned some new tricks from Travis such as how to make the spray a wider range of sizes, it doesn't change the fundamentally unaesthetic look of that dot dispersion pattern.
After the subtleties of MSPaintbrush (Paint's superior predecessor that Microsoft ruined), it's like painting with acrylics after learning oils.
With the previous drawing I did everything I could think of either to use the spray proactively or to divert attention from it.
1. Made the surface illusion very flat since you can't depth-model convincingly with that uniform fake pointillist pattern.
2. Tried to think of a surface that's naturally granular, such as "lunar dust."
3. Varied the width of the spray and used some big, fanning sweeps as kind of a wash or glaze--fuggedaboutit.
4. Saved it as a .GIF from the native .BMP to add more of a "grid feel" via the dithering of those grays.
5. Used a blue "intrusion" pattern (an homage to Houston painter Perry House) to confuse the read of the image.
I'm still stuck with that dead-ass, rectangular dot grain. Yeuuchh. (I like the drawing, though.)
Internet Acronyms
AFK - A Fine Kettle
TTYL - To Toss Your Lunch
FTW - Fuck The Wankers
FTSS - Fans Trail Sharon Stone
ASL - Ankylosauruses Should Leave
OTM - Off Track Meddling
YSI? - You Sure Is?
FFS - Free For Seniors
RTFM - Rock the Fother Mucker
originally posted in the Nasty Nets comments but no one said LOL (Let Osama Linger) so I'm putting them here.
ArtKrush has published a second installment of its "art online" series. (The first was here.) This blog is on the link list as a "new media blog." I'm down with that as long as new media means "the ism that follows and subsumes conceptualism in the history of art" but I do consider this an art blog. Art made with a PC, blog-in-a-gallery, and computercentric reviews notwithstanding, during the last six months the following have been discussed, depicted, or parodied on this page: Charles Ray, Judy Pfaff, Cindy Sherman, Ludwig Schwarz, Roxy Paine, Ryan McGinness, Sol LeWitt, Richard Woods, Kelley Walker, Klaus Mossetig, Allison Smith, David Moreno, Vincent Van Gogh, Triple Candie's "Limelight" exhibit, Miklos Suba, Chris Burden, Fiona Banner, Mark Dagley, Don Voisine, Marc Handelman, The Art Guys, Gary Hill, Doug Aitken, Elaine Sturtevant, Salvador Dali, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje Van Bruggen, Tony Conrad, Ralston Crawford, Ken Lum, Ivan Albright, John Pomara, Jackson Pollock, Matthew Geller.
Comic book movies suck because the writers "humanize" the stories. That's screenwriter code for "take properties originally written for alienated adolescent males and turn them into chick flicks." Marvel in the '60s had heroes with "hang ups" but rarely villains. We never got any back story on what a nice guy Dr. Octopus was before he acquired extra arms. And every Spider-Man fan from the comix days knows the Sandman was a pure crook, a hard case, bad to the bone (or the grain) but listen to what they've done to him. Stephanie Zacharek, in Salon:
And there's a new villain in town, a grown-up Dead End Kid in a stripey jersey named Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church, in a soulful, solid performance), who has just escaped from prison, motivated solely by his wish to see, and help, his young daughter, who's suffering from a serious illness. While on the run from the police, he stumbles into the center of a particle-physics experiment, which gives him the power to transform himself into a colossus of sand: Sandman.In the comic book a mishap on a beach near a nuke test site turned prison escapee Flint Marko from an asshole into an asshole who could smother you in the quicksand of his own body. Scary! Not anymore:
[Director Sam] Raimi at least manages to make [Spider-Man 3] both huge and human. He also pulls off one of the most beautiful special effects I've ever seen, in any movie, a testament to the ways in which CGI, used right, can actually humanize a film. After Flint Marko -- a criminal who's done all the wrong things for the right reasons -- steps into that whirling particle-physics blender, he's no longer himself: He's a mound of sand, a one-man desert, and before our eyes he tries to re-form himself into some semblance of the man he used to be. As he tries to stand, rivers of sand run from his muscles. His contours take shape, fall away, and then stubbornly rebuild themselves: He's a piece of sculptural poetry, a song of being and becoming, a living, moving Henry Moore statue.That's nicely written (except for the cliches), but it's not the Sandman she's describing. He didn't clutch lockets, he killed your ass.
Eventually, a bigger-than-life creature, an anguished giant, emerges from this hill of sand. He's clutching a locket containing a photo of his little girl, and as he surveys this tiny picture, we know that he's remembering not just the man he used to be, but the man he failed to be. In this one astonishing scene, Raimi and his special-effects artists give us an image redolent of the great beauty, and the gravity, of silent film. Without a word, they sing the ballad of the disappearing man.