More Mushrooms

Revisiting one of the mushroom from last post, and adding a new one. 

Mushroom Drawings

Just a few recent drawings.

Low-res Landscapes

Here are a couple of low-res landscape pictures that I drew for practice.  The idea is to make drawings that might one day be used as backgrounds for a video game. 

Digital Art

For anyone who stumbles across my blog, or uses it as a hub to get to the blogs in the box labeled "Awesome Site List,"  I have the first update in five months!  I've switched my focus to digital art, and learned a lot about Unity and Blender.  I just finished the image above, and I think that it is miles beyond my previous work in Blender.  Its worth looking at at full resolution.  If you want to see more, check out my portfolio at:

http://joelmryan.carbonmade.com/

Most of the work in this portfolio has been on this blog at some point, but some of it is new.  I will continue to update the portfolio as I make new stuff.

VCU Application

As many of you know, I tried to apply to VCU's Sculpture and Extended Media program this year. It was a lot of work and took several months to get together.  Unfortunately, in the end, my final reference did not feel that my portfolio was ready to be submitted.  We did not have nearly enough time to make enough changes, and, without his reference, I wasn't able to submit.

I'm pretty disappointed at this, but I trust his judgement.  On the bright side, he would like to work with me for the next year, and I'm sure we can put together a portfolio that will be accepted.

For now, I need to do some thinking and re-evaluating.  The blog will be on hiatus for a while. 

New Resin Project

When I was little, I used to play with food coloring, watching it drop into water.  The way it disperses is so interesting and beautiful.  A few weeks ago, I came up with the idea of dropping resin into thickened water, and capturing the dispersion.  As it turns out, although the resin does make cool patterns, it turns into small spherical droplets very quickly. Its impossible to capture the inky patterns, at least using my current methods.

 However, I found that in water with a significant amount of gelatin in it, the resin will sit on the bottom for a few seconds, and then begin to rise.  As far as I can tell, this is because the resin heats up as it cures, making it less dense.   When its density becomes less than the density of the thickened water, it will come up in tendrils.  The little guys in this picture are all different methods of making these tendrils.

I have a lot of ideas to try out now.  Even though they are not at all what I was going for at first, I'm hoping that something cool will come of this concept.