Evolution Of A Painting: Woman In Water

The idea for this painting came to me pretty much fully formed: an image of a woman emerging from a pool of water, hair slicked back, bathed in splashes of vibrant, exaggerated and highly unrealistic lighting. I started with a quick sketch and divided it up into a grid.

I then divided up the canvas into an equivalent grid and used the sketch as a rough guideline. I was working fast here and not very much concerned with accurately capturing the sketch so this was more to keep it from falling horribly off the rails rather than a measured approach to accuracy of any kind.

In Search Of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The abundance of worlds is perhaps only rivalled by their variety. Habitable world configurations exist around single-, binary-, and triple-star systems, around red and yellow dwarf stars, as planets and as moons, in mass ranges from 0.8 to 5.5 Earth masses, with very long and very short orbital periods, and with days lasting from a few hours to several months.

The science of planet formation is not sufficiently well developed to exclude solar systems that do not resemble our own. Indeed it seems the laws of physics as we understand them allow for as much variety of star systems as there are initial conditions. It makes sense then, to not presume what kinds of worlds we can expect to find based on our sample size of one.

Alienssssss

Since its release in 1986 there have been no shortage of video games based on the film Aliens, although one could certainly make the case that there have been a shortage of good video games. Most of those games were released closer to the franchise's heyday, so that in recent years the selection has been a little barren. Still, the idea of another video game based on the Aliens property with Aliens: Colonial Marines finally nearing release isn't entirely welcome. Even if games based on Aliens haven't been the most successful, the film has managed to permeate video games nonetheless, to the point that making an Aliens game seems like a retread, as if someone set out to make Videogame: The Video Game. Right off the bat we are assured of a quasi-realistic military shooter draped in a sci-fi aesthetic so often recycled it's become part of the tapestry of generic. Zealous over-use of caution strips? Check. Obligatory turret sequences? Check. Vaguely insectoid enemies that die easy and rush in waves? Triple Check. Climactic showdown in mech suit? Par for the course. At this point it's hard to think of an element, be it weapons, vehicles, even one-liners, that was featured in Aliens that hasn't since been wholesale lifted and re-used in a video game, Aliens related or not.

References:

Aliens. (1986) Directed by James Cameron [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif.: 20th Century Fox.

Gearbox Software (2013). Aliens: Colonial Marines [Video game]. Sega. 

Thoughts On: The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises is a piss-poor movie. It wasn't unexpected. Few franchises have been able to shoulder the weight of a hugely successful predecessor and deliver a film that serves as both satisfying in its own right and as a worthwhile conclusion to a series of films. But it wasn't inevitable either. There exists a wealth of stories in both comic and animated form to draw upon when it comes to Batman and that the final chapter of Christopher Nolan's trilogy should end up so muddled in spite of this is a pity.

Humanity Doesn't Deserve The Cosmos

On November 18, 2011, The Huffington Post reported that renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking expressed his views that for the human race to survive, we must reach out to the stars and colonize other worlds, as the spectre of man-made disaster looms ever greater here on earth.

This is not an especially new view, nor is it unique to Professor Hawking or even a select few individuals. Many people support the idea of colonization of other planets as a means of avoiding natural and man-made ecological disasters and effectively not putting all our “eggs in one basket.” It is a survivalist mentality that supports the continued existence of the human race above all other concerns. We must be mindful of our impact on the world, but our own survival comes first. It is perhaps a natural line of thinking, as individual survival is coded into our genes, but simply being natural does not mean it should be taken as the correct line of thinking.

In this essay I will attempt to present the case that colonization of other worlds should not be entertained as an idea to solve the problems of this world, and that if we are to be moral beings we must consider our place within the universe before pushing forever forwards towards a ceaseless and thoughtless expansion.

Evolution Of A Painting: Self Portrait

I thought it would be interesting to try doing a self portrait, since I hadn't done any painting of human faces and my last self-portrait sketch was much further in the past than I would care to admit. I decided to try a couple of things differently with this painting, and figured I would document the process.

I started with an older photo that I had taken of myself, probably to document the growth of my facial hair or depression.

I used PAINT.NET to process the image, using posterization and some filters to simplify the colours into basic regions.

I printed this off and then divided the page up into a grid with light blue pencil. I prepared my canvas by covering it in a few layers of white gesso. I then divided my canvas up into an equivalent grid and copied the lines on the printed page over to the canvas by eye.

Thoughts On: Borderlands Singleplayer

Borderlands does not strike me as a particularly well-conceived or well-crafted game. It is set on a mysterious planet, a planet so mysterious in fact that its only distinguishing features from earth are strange species of cacti and some alien (but not genuinely alien) fauna. A world with a day-night cycle lasting all of ten minutes seemingly designed to ensure that every player, no matter how short his attention span, will notice that there is a day-night cycle and yet serving no plot or game-play purposes (every night and every day is exactly the same). A planet called Pandora, although a more accurate moniker would perhaps be Planet Mad Max.