Digital Life, aka Goodbye Cruel World

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a traditional media person. The transition to digital has been, and continues to be, a bit of a challenge for me. One class from last term in particular really tested my limits. Digital Life, with instructor Cliff Nielsen, involved painting still lifes and nude models using a tablet and PhotoShop or Corel Painter. I believe in humility, but I'm still not posting any of those in-class paintings. We also had three long assignments for homework.

The first assignment was to do a digital master copy. It had to be a stroke for stroke copy, all on the computer, and all in one layer. I had no idea what I was doing, and consequently there were many, many CTL + Zs. I copied a Jenny Saville painting. I spent two days and 30 hours on this.

The second assignment was buffet-style, from several options. I chose to do a promo piece for Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter: Warlord of Mars. In doing the research, I was struck by the outlandishness of the story, and also by the, um, sexism, of much of the art. I opted for a tongue-in-cheek take on the franchise, and called it John Carter: Boarlord of Mars. The line art is traditional brush and ink, with digital color.

The final assignment was fairly open, so I chose to apply digital color to a vis dev drawing I did for a previous class. The prompt for that drawing was to create a submarine that an extremely intelligent six-year-old built in her dad's ship-building workshop.