Arts and Crafts

[AddyBaha]

Hi! I dont know how well this wil work out, but it seems there are some creative people on the forum.
That's why I would like to ask you to post some of your handmade art (wether it be paintings, sculptures, songs, origami or what ever you can think of).

I'll start by posting a link to an Imgur-album of an origami session some friends of mine and I had last night.

http://imgur.com/a/P9Jjn

We folded some jumping frogs (wich are a really entertaining toy btw.),
a firework (the pink one was done at the meetup the other one I've done earlier and used it as a reverence)
and tried to make an modular icosader wich we'll continue next time.

These meetups are roughly once a month and I plan to update this thread after each one.

[magikeh]

:D Yes, this sounds like a fantastic idea!

Waaay back when I was still in high school and had access to colour printers. I found a site which allowed you to print and fold up minecraft characters. I went out and got some nice 10lb paper (the good thick stuff) and printed out the fold-able creeper onto it. I had great success with it, that was until my sister's little dog got ahold of it and tore the crap out of it's head. So now all I have left is this sitting on my shelf:

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After a quick google search it would appear that this is the design template that I used. This was super fun to do, and maybe I'll get some more heavy paper and print out a couple more characters :D

Seems like there are a lot of paper craft models on http://www.pixelpapercraft.com

[Gilberreke]

I've got some cool drunk sketches somewhere, I'll find em. Until then, have some pixel art:





Bonus points if you are familiar with these gentlemen

[MAZD1X1E]

Bonus points if you are familiar with these gentlemen

That's clearly the before and after shots of me getting a haircut.

As for arts and crafts, I once redecorated my bedroom in a lovely shade of beige. With paint and brushes and everything. That does count as art, right? Right?

[chaoticneutral]

I've got some cool drunk sketches somewhere, I'll find em. Until then, have some pixel art:
[pictures]
Bonus points if you are familiar with these gentlemen

Can't tell about the first, but the second is... perfect. You somehow captured that "mix" of amazement and fear and "I'm lost inside my own mind!" Barrett had in his eyes...

[Gilberreke]

Can't tell about the first, but the second is... perfect. You somehow captured that "mix" of amazement and fear and "I'm lost inside my own mind!" Barrett had in his eyes...

I swear I spent most of the time making that tweaking the eyes over and over again. There's not a lot of pixels to work with there.

[Larmantine]

wow that is awesome, Gil. With what software did you do it? Can you do that with any picture?

[Gilberreke]

wow that is awesome, Gil. With what software did you do it? Can you do that with any picture?

I did that in an MS Paint clone, it's not a photo edit (well, small part of it is, it's tough to explain). What you really need is about two decades of art education :p

Enough of me, more arts and crafts please :p

[BinoAl]

Well, I've been making shirts with pretty much just bleach and stencils. I don't have pictures of the majority of them, but I did post one pair to Reddit a while back.

I was going to just embed this, but it's a bit large so I'll just link to imgur

[Miss_Kat]

Only arts and crafts I've been involved in lately have been making my wedding invitations... currently at my planners house, but when I get home I should take a picture of our finished prototype.

[AddyBaha]

Well, I've been making shirts with pretty much just bleach and stencils. I don't have pictures of the majority of them, but I did post one pair to Reddit a while back.

I was going to just embed this, but it's a bit large so I'll just link to imgur

These look awesome - could you link a tutorial or do a tutorial yourself? I'd really like to try this.

[Gilberreke]

You're the man Bino, that's effing awesome

[Caboose]

I mostly draw and build custom LEGO models, I dunno if that matches up to the spirit of the thread?

There's some real cool stuff here though, Gil's Pixel Art is gorgeous and I love what Bino's doing with T-Shirts, stencils, and bleach. And the Origami is pretty cool, Addybaha.

[BinoAl]

These look awesome - could you link a tutorial or do a tutorial yourself? I'd really like to try this.

There's a few tutorials in the sidebar of the subreddit I posted them to, actually: https://www.reddit.com/r/bleachshirts/
It's almost disgustingly easy to make a good looking shirt this way

You're the man Bino, that's effing awesome

Heh, thanks, but mine can't even compare to some of the ones people posted on that subreddit I just linked. The level of detail some people manage to get onto a shirt is incredible

[Gilberreke]

I mostly draw and build custom LEGO models, I dunno if that matches up to the spirit of the thread?

Oh hell yes it does

[Gilberreke]

Someone asked me in PM how I did those portraits, I wrote a small little thing about it:

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So uh, first thing I did was study caricature art for several years, trying to focus on getting the likeness of a person in as few lines as possible.
Then I studied facial anatomy and musculature for several years, very in depth. Most of what those images represent is application of intimate knowledge, I don't have to think about most of the stuff I'm doing in getting the likeness correct, getting the anatomy correct, etc.

I started with a picture:


I made a painting, exploring some sides of that picture, trying to play around with stuff.

Then I took what i learned into a simple silhouette:


I defined major facial planes:


And minor (notice the overlap):


Tried to get some simple highlights in:


Finished off the picture with basic pixel art technique (anti-aliasing, indexed color theory, banding avoidance, etc):


For the hair, I started with a color reduction of the hair from the photo:


This produces a lot of artifacts, so it takes a few hours to clean this up with a combination of demo-scene-style index paint techniques and pixel art techniques:


I didn't like how likeness came out, as that reference picture isn't really how I remember Marc Bolan, so I caricatured it just a bit:


For Syd Barrett, I took pretty much the same route, but the hair is not a color reduction, but more like a collage:

I can't stress the intimate knowledge part enough, it takes a good bit of training for your eyes to be able to detect how facial volumes work together. I'm not an expert at it yet, but eh.

[Rawny]

Nice. The Ts are awesome, bookmarked for family fun.

Did this a few years ago and when the figures cam out I put a couple up on it. Thumb-tacked and taped.
Time and gravity haven't been all that nice to it and I never finished the stone background in the cave section.
All the patterns were found online.

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[abculatter_2]

Someone asked me in PM how I did those portraits, I wrote a small little thing about it:
*Spoiler snip*
I can't stress the intimate knowledge part enough, it takes a good bit of training for your eyes to be able to detect how facial volumes work together. I'm not an expert at it yet, but eh.

That process reminds me of what I love most about art, you can get so incredibly detailed and, if you really get into it, learn so much about the world, how it looks, and why it looks that way, as well as a lot of other bits along the way. It's unfortunate many people never experience art in this way, and tend to think it just poofs out of the nowhere we call 'talent'...

[Gilberreke]

That process reminds me of what I love most about art, you can get so incredibly detailed and, if you really get into it, learn so much about the world, how it looks, and why it looks that way, as well as a lot of other bits along the way. It's unfortunate many people never experience art in this way, and tend to think it just poofs out of the nowhere we call 'talent'...

Oh yes, that's such an important thing. People see my art and call me talented or even worse gifted or blessed (now it's not even in my nature but someone gave it to me?). I'm not talented, I never was (okay, I was always above average at artistic endeavors). I worked hard for most of my life to learn how to make pretty pictures, from art academy when I was a small kid, through drawing something every day in high school, going to art college and then starting my journey to understanding the human face in a more intricate way.

For example, here's two images, one is from 2012 and the other from 2015, you can clearly see the progress, I wasn't born with the ability to draw something like that:

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I have books full of facial studies in between, here's a small sample:

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Talent is just where you start out, hard work is where you end up. Also important: "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect" (I think that's a Vince Lombardi quote). You can try to learn how to draw for years by copying your favorite manga artists on Deviantart and you will slowly get nowhere. The quality of your practice dictates your progress. Find books by people like Glenn Vilppu, Andrew Loomis, Burne Hogarth, learn anatomy, proportions, gesture. Do what I did and try to identify points on the face that seem to appear again and again and try to understand which combination of fat, bone and muscle creates that point of interest. Now go back to your manga drawings, they will be amazing.

I hear from people that say "I just don't have any talent, I can't draw no matter how much I try". What you lack is the ability to learn how to learn how to draw. Drawing, like many things people ascribe to talents, is a skill. Sure, what you can do with that skill is indicated by creativity. I'll never be Picasso. But I can sure learn how to properly create a representation of a face. I still suck right now (I'm very inconsistent still), but just give me another decade or so :)

[Caboose]

Well, to start off with, here's an obscure Bionicle character. Most of my building is focused on the Character and Creature Building System, my System builds are pretty small scale in comparison. I'll take pictures of a few other builds tomorrow if I can find my camera.

And here's a link to the art tag on my tamblr, it is mostly pencilish linework, and a lot of it is fandom stuff, but I like a lot of it still. Anything tagged "Spectrum" is all original, though, and Iris is a character I made who is near and dear to my heart.

On another note, I love the papercraft blocks, Rawny, and I like the sense of dimension putting them in a corner lends them.

[Gilberreke]

That's pretty cool stuff Caboose, nice!

[FaceFoiled]

Not sure if it counts, but I like making videos of the games I play. I started a website/blog kinda thing, but fail to maintain it. I just never find the time to sit down and write, and lately lack even more time to make videos. Was fun while it lasted though, and I'll pick it up again at some point. If interested, http://www.FaceFoiled.com

[AddyBaha]

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Darth Vader (kinda ugly I know ^^) and Yoda - some stuff I did because some of the people of the origami club asked for it...

[Gilberreke]

Darth Vader (kinda ugly I know ^^) and Yoda - some stuff I did because some of the people of the origami club asked for it...

I love that origami stuff. I'm so jealous, because all I know is how to do some simple birds (not even sure which ones, they're all variations of the one from Prison Break).

[AddyBaha]

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Pegasus - I shouldn't have started doing request...