Molrak.com
Daily Digital Wanderlust

I was going to include this in a reply to someone’s entry (all filtered to fit in with the original photo), but then I couldn’t decide whether it was too weird to comment or not. Then I figured what the heck, I’ll just post it on the journal proper. It’s not too terrible for a photochop, but I probably should have tried to do a bit better. I think I know what really bothers me about it, but at this point, it don’t matter.

It’s often fun to play the what if game, so perhaps it’s just a photograph from some alternate reality, where Illinois wasn’t bought in ‘60, and maybe someone less likable bit the dust in Texas. Or maybe they staged it while in hiding. Who knows?

So with The Simpsons movie out in theaters, there are lots of neat promos for the film. To me the most interesting are the ‘make your Simpson self’ ones. Here are two versions that I made, the one on the left using a paper doll approach, the one on the right, using a computer-matching process.

What an age we live in, where computing power can be wasted on stuff like this.

Here is the list of sites (social and otherwise) which I use somewhat regularly. It’s more a guide to what else I do on the net, just thought you might be interested.
www.molrak.com - you are here. this once served as my horribly out of date blog for my student animation (which ended up sucking but I’m trying to salvage), and is currently in flux as I write this
molrak.livejournal.com - I’ve had this since 2001, and as such, it has evolved quite a bit over the years. Actually, it has more or less returned to that whence it originally sprang, a boring log of the crap that goes on in my life.
www.nikehm.com - my portfolio web site (a refresh should hit by Monday the 16th)
facebook - my primary social networking site, picked it up because my college mates were pimping it
myspace - my legacy social networking site, the horrendous design makes me a sad panda, but it seems a lot of my hs classmates use this for some reason, so I am hesitant to ax it.
flickr - has a mixture of lame photos of my life, coupled with some design work. whenever I get my next phone, I’m sure it will have a camera on it, and then it’ll be updated a lot more. For now, just check the paintings and art/design work.
deviantart - some of my art work, I can never decide if I want to keep this or not, but I probably will since I’m working on a Troy McClure poster project right now
last.fm - See what crappy music and podcasts I’ve been listening to
del.icio.us - I need to use this more often, social bookmarking site
digg - I’m an on- and off-again user of digg
wikipedia (user page) - My user page on wikipedia (English)

I don’t have have a twitt(e)r, jaiku, pownze, or any of those post-facebook social things, at least not yet, as none of my friends are on them that I know of. If any of you have a suggestions for ‘the next big thing’ in social sites, let me know.

Dropped by the old uni library today–they had issues with a few things I knew how to do, so I gave them a quick rundown of what to do. It was nice to catch up with them–candidate Edwards was actually on the campaign tour in the library this Saturday, so things were still really clean and tidy, plus they had been moving a lot of stuff around too. The 3 or so years I was there they never really changed a whole lot in the office, but now they have. Woo.

This is my final painting for Painting I class at Ashford (my last studio class at AU). We had critiques earlier today, and the prof was gushing about it! She was generally complimentary before the weekend, when it was still monochromatic, but she said when she came in Sunday to have a look around at the studio, the color “took her breath away”. She said that while the proportions aren’t perfect and the expressions are changed (among other things to simplify it), she really felt that I captured the essence of the painting. The graduating visual arts senior was grilling me on color. I couldn’t really explain a lot of it, I just paint and try not to think about it too much or else it’ll end up sucking. I basically only had the dark brown, a lightish brown, an orange, and the lightish skin tone on my palette (plus the grey-white later on).

After everyone had their say on the piece, the art prof asked what I was going to do with it. I had no freaking clue and said as much, to which she suggested “are you going to frame it or maybe give it to your art teacher…” I lamely responded that we could talk–I ended up giving it to her.

Something rolling around in my head for a while:
High art must be ambiguous so as to defy a single definitive interpretation, yet there clearly must be something beneath the surface.

Well my abstract paintings seemed to go over well today in our critique in class. We had a mini assignment in class before the critique where we had to try to analyze one of the pieces in a group. My analyticamorphasis abstraction was selected by one of the groups to analyze. The group of females thought that said painting was about the creation of the earth from the sun, or the dawn of the universe, creating order out of chaos. There was also stuff about it being female “fluids” interacting with the male fluids.

I was a bit surprised, as of the two abstracts, that was the least sexual in my mind. (My original concept for the piece, as I transmogrified my guitar hero controller into abstraction, was to represent the struggle in art that I have when I create–specifically, the left side of my brain versus the right side. The left was represented by black ink strokes of various sizes against the plain gessoed canvas, while the right was a yellow “blob” with blue and orange dissolving into the yellow body. (Thereby also representing the orange, yellow, blue, green, and red buttons on the controller.) I like their description–it wasn’t my vision for the piece, but certainly ideas along those lines passed through my head at various times as I created it, as it does have an aura of “order out of chaos” to it.

My process painting (an abstract painting using non-conventional paint delivery method) consisted of me filling condoms up with latex house paint, then pricking holes in the reservoir to create drip paintings. I got really lucky with my random selection of paints–the 4 colors I ended up using each had widely varying viscosity, and one of them even drained away, creating some really interesting depth to the piece. Pollock may have denied the accident, but I cherish chance. Unfortunately it’s probably going to look like crap when photographed–the depth will probably be gone. I wish I had come up with a good reason for the color scheme on it, but I just randomly selected paints.

As for the official logic for this creation? I had the idea of using paint in balloons, but not having any lying around, I went for the closest thing I had in my room–condoms. I then remembered a line Pollock retorted (from a clip of Pollock the movie we saw in Art Appreciation II). When he was asked how he knew he was done with a painting, Pollock responded, “How do you know when you’re finished making love?” I had my justification, aside from the whole drip painting being a metaphor for male ejaculation. (My joking justification in my own mind was that it was a metaphor to the first time I copulated–I was nervous, didn’t really know what I was doing, lasted about an hour, I gained a little confidence as I went on but realistically anything good I did was by accident, and it finished off with a bang.)

Prior to taking Painting I this semester, I had made a total of 3 paintings since k-12. One was a watercolor reproduction for the art for architects class; the others were crappy acrylic paintings I made in 2D design. I took zero art classes in high school (the closest I came to art classes were my drafting classes), and even in middle school I don’t remember painting that often.

I entered Painting I with a fair bit of nerves. My limited experience in painting gave me no reason to think that I would be any good at it. My initial forays into the medium tended to confirm my initial beliefs. On the first day of class, we had to paint from still life sculptures in the middle of the room. Mine… well mine sucked. After that, our first few paintings were from still life, fruit in this case. One was a 2-hour alle prima, the other a grey scale->colored glaze.

Then, something happened–I started to “get it”. Our next assignment was an emotive self-portrait. I opted to channel the low point in my life that ultimately led to me coming to school here six months later. I have issues looking at myself, and the human face is a bear to deal with. I still had no clue what I was doing as far as color went. However, by the time I had finished the portrait, things were starting to come together. I had saved what was, at first, a very mediocre drawing and painting. (Right now, that portrait is hanging in the temporary art displays in the main building. I cringe every time I walk by it.)

After that was the skeleton. I’m relatively certain that the prof is just trying to kill us–I mean, skeletons are hard, what with all the bones and weird angles. However, my initial painting in the burnt sienna was pretty decent, and layers upon layers of paint finally brought round a decent product.

Now we’re working on an abstract painting in class and a historical reproduction out of class. This is my historical reproduction after 6 hours. It’s not done–it will eventually look close to the image pasted on my board to the left (as you look at the photo). This is the underpainting, what I’m using in lieu of actually drawing with pencil upon the canvas. The toga is too high about the waist, and it needs folds in the fabric. David needs a face, and I need to work the dark tones into his flesh better.

Looking at what I did in six hours and looking back at how bad I was before, I think I’m relatively pleased with my progress in the class. During our evaluation for the skeleton paintings, my prof said that while my portrait was good, I had made the leap from a Painting I student to a Painting II student with the skeleton. I doubted that I would make the jump from II to III with this one, but who knows? So far it’s looking pretty decent.

So I made a little creepy image for a poster on campus today. Dunno if it will be used or not, but I sure enjoyed making it! (It scales poorly because it’s a 16-color gif, the full-size looks much better.)

I was actually kind of happy with how the guys turned out–I may see if I can figure out how to make this my Matt Groening Simpsons-esque style. Granted, it needs refinement, but I think I have a usable base, something I haven’t really found in all my many doodlings.

Tomorrow I’m doing lots of drawing–pencil tests for my surrealist painting. I also have some minor projects to clean up too before break is over.

I’ve been struggling with a name for this project. The codename for the project, “Godflower”, was fully unsatisfactory–something a 3rd grader might name a short story, but it’s not really a good name for a story. After realizing that this was starting to piss me off, I decided to go with…
Dämmerschlaf

What the heck is that? It’s a real German word, meaning literally “twilight sleep”. I created a brainstorm list, and my favorites on the list were Götterdämmerung and Ragnarok, but I didn’t want to go with either of them. After some google-fu and some German-English-German action, I stumbled across this twilight sleep, which nicely fits in with my concept for this short.

Now all I have to do is somehow magically complete this project without losing motivation.