??????????

I have absolutely no idea what this thing is. But it moves. Or at least it does for me.

I wanted to make a new image tonight but the ol' brain box is pretty dry. Let this be a lesson "make something everyday". For a while I was keeping up with a sketch book. I would add something new every day. It worked great! I had all kinds of ideas and things were growing and moving all the time. But I haven't been keeping up. There's only a few doodles for this month. And I haven't done much in Colors! either.

So this is the type of image I get when my brain wants to punish me for being so lazy. "Look at this!" It says (loudly), "Is this the best you can do? Do you really want to look at that thing? I know I sure don't!" But we'll see tomorrow if I listened to me when I told me to get back to drawing every day. If not, I'll call this piece "This is your brain on not drawing. Any questions?" If I do start drawing again tomorrow, I'll call it "Inspiration".

[Note to self: Fear and inspiration are the same thing maybe? Dammit.]

Back in Balance?

It's been a little while, hasn't it. Well that's how it goes, I suppose. I would apologize but no one is reading this.

This image is not strictly a study of contrast. I have always like the yin yang. It's a symbol that looks like what it represents: balance of white and black. It's not a fight or a conflict, it's a balance. There is need of both black and white. And within the black is a little white, and within the white there is a little black. So there is both good and evil in all things. The idea, to me, represents both hope and fear. Hope because there is good in everything. Fear because there is bad in everything. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" sayeth the Bible. Amen. See? Even God can't get around that one! So check it out.



I like Opart, too. I like the moire effect a lot and it's super easy to get that when you jam a lot of high contrast lines real close together. There is something about this image that really appeals to me on that balance level. I guess because it's easy to get lost in the lines and not notice you're looking a fairly popular and well known symbol. If Everything in The Universe was (were?) perfectly balanced, you would not notice the difference between Good and Evil because they would each contain as much of the other as of itself. So this image takes on that form. If you notice the last complete circle around both "centers" is the same color as its center. So to me the one with the white dot is actually white with black stripes, whereas the one with the black dot is black with white stripes. But a regular yin yang couldn't have the same color dot and blob, or you lose the point of there being black in white and white in black.

I made this image into my desktop.

Contrast Study #3: OpArt

I like playing with "stroking" an image in Photoshop. (For those that don't know, that's when you make a selection and then create a solid border to that selection, either inside, outside, or centered, at the width in pixels that you decide.) I recently made an action that would select a layer, stroke it at 2 pixels in black, then select the layer with that stroke and re-stroke in white. Then you repeat and you get this:

I think this is real neat. I wish it was real obvious that this was one of my bots to the untrained eye, but I doubt that people who recognize my bots would even see it. Except for the "Robots Are Friendly" around it. I added the text to help point out the robot-ness of the image and to give it a bit of grounding. It was real hard to focus on without that. I might turn this into a sticker one day, but who knows. . . I am lazy after all. I think that if it does become a sticker it would be successful even though it's not obvious what it is simply because it would give people a bit of an optic shock. And with the text there I think some people would think that maybe it means something. It doesn't, but if someone sees it and thinks "This must mean something!" then I'd be extremely pleased.