One of the craziest things I've ever seen

Olga's post of that incredible music video made me think of the most visually maddening video I've ever seen. It became sort of popular a while back so you may have already watched it. It's much, much different. Although it seems so ridiculous it might as well be waved off, it gave me the most profound sense of confusion I've had in a long, long time, which I think warrants some kind of inspection.

Yoshitaka Amano

Looking at all the works of art in the textbook made me think about my own favorite artists, and I figured I might as well post about at least one of them here. I'm much better at being wow'ed by art than I am at actually producing it; anything that's outside of any of my skill sets is immediately fascinating to me.

As I've mentioned, I love Klimt, so I would say my own taste in art tends towards the fanciful and exaggerated. This is made even more obvious by the work of my absolute favorite artist, Yoshitaka Amano. His style draws heavily from old Japanese "ukiyo-e" art, like the iconic "Great Wave at Kanegawa":

by Edo period artist Hokusai

Ukiyo-e is translated as "pictures of the floating world" and there's no better phrase to describe Amano's work. He got his start in animation (series like the original Speed Racer), however, so his style is noticeably influenced by such work. The Final Fantasy games probably gained him the most fame--his concept art and character designs form an enormous part of the franchise's style and content.

Here's a video of him doing a drawing live. Amazing to watch.

The reason I got into his art at all, though, is because of his partnership with novelist Hideyuki Kikuchi on the Vampire Hunter D series. The 20 or so volumes of horror/fantasy stories are by no means serious literature (they're "light" novels in every sense) but I really do enjoy them and am absolutely astonished by the artwork. I'll end this post with some of my favorites.

"Gloom"

"Serenade"

"D - Armageddon I"

"Seated Swordsman"

A fairly appropriate self-portrait

Gotta be honest, my self-portrait involved a lot of hey-let's-push-this-button-and-see-what-happens. Being new to both Macs and Photoshop, this was actually a much harder challenge than I'd anticipated. After looking at all the artwork in the textbook, I felt especially daunted. (I was especially happy to find a Klimt work used as an example; I really, really love his work.)

I had plenty of ideas on what I wanted to do, but as many things in my life, I couldn't properly execute what I saw in my mind. Thus I left it largely up to chance. But that's how I end up with a lot of things in my life, so it seems appropriate for a self-portrait. And I got to play with Photoshop, so it's a win-win, really.

Nerds and Videos

Just got back from a Star Trek convention in Seattle. (I know, I know.) It was pretty fantastic. I mean, I met LeVar Burton, who had the entire audience sing the Reading Rainbow theme song along with him. How cool is that?!

Apparently there was also a fan-made music video contest before the con, so we got to see some of the "best" ones throughout the weekend. These made me think about our future venture into video editing in this class. If I learned anything, it's that video editing is a lot like playing the violin, in that when it's done skillfully, it's amazing, but when it's done badly, it's really not pleasant to watch or listen to. I'm not gonna lie, that made me even more nervous about any videos I might produce, but hey, you've got to churn out a few clunkers at first, right?

We'll see

Looking forward to finding out cool stuff computers can do that I didn't know about before; however, I used to get really upset in elementary school when it came time to color/draw.We'll see how the whole "being an artist" thing works out.