As I mentioned in my critique, I'm going to be doing a timeline of events with my android series. The sketch I have drawn out will be for the first image in the set. It depicts a car crash from the robot's point of view. It will be saving the female victim, and then helping her to recover through its robot transformation that I worked on in my first sketch.

The artists that I've been looking into this semester have all have had a more new age focus in digital art with more of a technically focused genre. The one that still interests me the most is Matei Apostolescu, his style is so original and unique and covers such a nice field of subjects. They aren't necessarily very deep in the meaning, but his skill is what really catches my eye. I'll most likely want to change what I'm doing halfway through the semester, because even now I feel like I don't like where I'm headed. Once I find something that I really want to do, I'll be able to, I just haven't pinned it down yet. I think with this second piece I will radically change the artistic style of what I was doing previously. I want to present it in more of an stylistic fashion like Matei but still make it my own. 

I've started to tone out some of the features in my portrait of this android at this point, and will continue to do so over the next few days. I haven't added any really distinct features or played with the blending modes of each layer, but when I do, each portion should stick out a bit more distinctly. The edge between the grey plating of the body and the flesh will have layer of color emanating and glowing from it to signify some type of radiating energy presence, sort of like iron man, or any type of regulating engine that produces a heat emission. The main focus on this will be showing how the figure is a living thing, but not entirely different from a machine itself. In the near future, I'd like to correlate this relationship with how we are becoming increasingly dedicated to the presence of technology and machinery in our lives. The presence of these objects is not entirely necessary, but we choose to constantly implement them into our lifestyle. More and more we'll vie to depend on technology to keep us going throughout our life, whether it be setting an alarm to wake up by in the morning, or replacing a body part such as an arm or a heart with a prosthetic instrument.

Current event post

While it may not be the most interesting or stunning news in the world of art right now, I'm extremely satisfied with the release of Adobe's CS6 package. Over the past few months Adobe and popular art media outlets have been publishing all the great stuff that has been coming along with the debut of CS6 and its beta, namely the major changes to Photoshop, and users are in for a surprise with some of the great new things coming their way. Having already downloaded the standalone Photoshop version, I can say I'm quite happy with what new things I've encountered so far.

For one, almost everything runs much smoother than the previous version. Large format works process much more quickly with tools such as smudge, filters, content awareness, and blur effects as long as the hardware  you're using can keep up with Adobe. The CS5 version was severely bottle necking the user's CPU, especially on Windows machines, but the improved algorithms have been showing off quite nicely, even in 1920x1080 resolution and higher. I was curious on how much better these changes might be so I opened up the same file in the CS5 version as well as CS6 and applied a complicated pointilize filter over a 3x3 foot image. CS6 blew away CS5 by almost 5 seconds. I tried it again at 5x5 foot and it was almost 10 seconds faster during that application.

Something users will recognize right off the bat is that the interface for CS6 is slightly different. A couple of the tools on the left side of the UI have different looking icons, and the default windows and options on the right hand side from CS5 are nonexistent until you activate and customize them in CS6. However, the windows blend together very smoothly and get minimized nicely. Another noticeable tweak is that your background colors are now a muted gray color instead of the standard white of every other version. The feedback is much lighter on your eyes, and makes your own work pop out much more clearly. Personally, I think it gives the whole UI a nice, updated and refreshing look.

The last thing I'd like to mention about CS6 is the huge improvement to the content awareness tool. Taking unwanted portions out of pictures or elongating sections has never been easier. In July when I made my "8 Bit Blast" piece I literally recreated half of my right chest with the content awareness tool and it looked just fine after I smoothed and blurred everything out. Some of the demos I've watched in recent weeks have been absolutely stunning, even on complicated images like forests and seascapes. The tool is now basically foolproof and can be used for tasks of all ranges as long as you remember to try it out.

There's plenty of other fun and exciting new things for CS6 including lots of 3D imaging techniques and video editing applications, but the things that I mentioned previously are the ones that I've had the most fun with as of yet.

Asa 9/10

Framework for a female android I started today

9/7

I got some free time work done with the tablet after renting it out and using it at home for a bit. I learned a couple important techniques from following some tutorials that are making things easier and more realistic. Just trying to draw out real life objects around my room proved to be pretty fun, and I got better with each sketch I did.

I'm probably going to start this second attempt for a piece over with a picture of a real face to reference from, I really just used a skull and some mis match people parts when drawing this one out so its not as proportional as it should be. I'm sure my housemate John will be more than willing to pose. But I've got free time this weekend so I'll be working again soon