Archive for the ‘art’ Category

Sophia Medallion (artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on January 17th, 2006

Current mood: Wise



Re: So what are you up to these days, Gilgamesh?

Oh, you know. The usual. Mostly just working on rebuilding Ninlil’s sanctuary in Nippur (you know, the one in Tummal that the mesopotamians razed?)I haven’t seen much of Enkidu lately, he’s always been too busy ever since he hooked up with that harlot Shamhat, but this weekend she is out of town, so he and I were gonna get together and I was thinking we would go to the Great Cedar Forest and try to kill the demon Humbaba.And Ishtar keeps calling me, so I have stopped answering my phone. Sorry if I missed any of your calls because of that. Last time I checked my voice-mail there were like 50 messages, and the first three were nothing but her going “Oh, Gilgamesh, I love you, I need you! Call me back or I will call upon the divine wrath of my father Anu!” I just deleted the rest. I don’t know what I’m going to do about that girl. So needy.

Banshee Jeans (artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on January 10th, 2006

Current mood: upside-down


You may have heard the urban legend that you can trade a good pair of American Blue Jeans for a small car in Amsterdam. While that story is an exaggeration, it is true that blue denim trousers are often highly overvalued in certain economic contexts. If you haven’t done so recently, walk into any trendy clothing store targeting fashionable youth, and start looking at price tags.

Interestingly enough, blue jeans are especially prized in the supernatural realm, where the clothing industry still lags back at medieval levels.

Terra Branford – Level 99 (artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on November 25th, 2005

Current mood: ATMA


Terra Branford, the main character from Final Fantasy VI (Final Fantasy III US). This was the last Final Fantasy game to use 2D pixel art instead of 3D. I think it was one of the best games ever made for the Super Nintendo. It was re-released as part of Final Fantasy Anthology in case you want to play it on your PS1 or PS2.Terra is usually drawn to look more like she did in Amano’s original concept art. I wanted something that was a little closer to the in-game sprites, but also inspired by Terra’s appearance in the Final Fantasy SGI demo

I’m Afraid of Fluffy Sheep

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on November 23rd, 2005

Current mood: terrified

Yeah, you know you want one. This is taken from this episode of my rarely-updated Bob the Hamster comic.

Viola Concierto (artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on November 14th, 2005

Current mood: Green but also slightly blue



Viola Concierto – 11 Nov 2005 – Megaron, Athens, GreeceDevoted classical music fans this weekend were treated to a spectacular concert, including a 24 minute Bass Violin solo, after which Viola smashed her instrument over an amp and stage-dived into the crowd.

Eight renown patrons of the fine arts were hospitalized from “mosh pit violence”, and dozens more were injured.

Despite controversy, both fans and critics can’t get enough of the new star who has revitalized Popular Classical music.

    Upcoming shows

  • 19 Nov 2005 – Prague Opera House – Prague, Czech Republic
  • 27 Nov 2005 – Konserthuset – Stolkholm, Sweden
  • 04 Dec 2005 – National Concert Hall – Dublin, Ireland
  • 10 Dec 2005 – St John’s Smith Square – London, UK

2006 U.S. concert dates available soon

Major Motoko Kusanagi (artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on October 27th, 2005

Current mood: Integrated


I love Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and not just because of Motoko.The show’s storyline centers around social, political, behavioral, and psychological ramifications of technology– especially the integration of human and machine, which is IMHO, one of the most important and interesting aspects of technology.

Superficially you may see a cartoon about a Sexy Cyborg Crime-fighter battling insane robots and evil hackers, but what I see is a futurist story about real issues that our children and grandchildren may face. I also, of course, see the Sexy Cyborg, (she is hard to miss) … actually, come to think of it, I suspect that Sexy Cyborgs is one of the issues our children and grandchildren may have to face :)

She is an interesting character. She’s human, but enough of her has been machine for so long that she can’t interact normally with other people anymore. In some episodes, her empathy for robots and artificial intelligences seems to be much stronger than her connection to other humans.

Something to think about… Imagine if you could just go out and buy a new body, let’s say for sake of example, costing about the same as a car costs today. You would just pick one out, customize it, and have your mind installed. How would that affect you? Our mind is the seat of our souls, but our experiences shape our minds, and our bodies can profoundly influence our experiences. Imagine if you were stronger, faster, more resilient, and more beautiful than you are now. Would your life be the same? Where would you be? Would you be doing the same things you do now? Would you be thinking the same things you think now?

And a final thought; Batou’s glasses are cool. They are basically part of his eyes. How long until I can order eyes like that on E-bay?

Bronze Belle (artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on September 11th, 2005

Current mood: more cowbell!


I used again the same raster-to-vector-to-raster method that I was experimenting on with the Sexy Pirate. Again I am amazed at how much detail is lost in the process, but the finished result looks better than what I would have ended up with if I had tried to leave in all the detail– most of the detail that was lost was scratches, smudges, and paper texture.

What I did differently this time was to add back a bit of that texture afterwards. Using The Gimp‘s image transfer brush, I copied over the texture on the bell. The light sketches on the bell were obliterated by the 1-bit pixelation step, but I liked them too much to lose them.

Now you want to know something interesting? I didn’t realize I was doing it, but just now as I was posting these pictures, I noticed that Belle’s pose here is highly similar to the pose of the Sexy Pirate.Here they are side-by-side with lines drawn over the major axises of aestetic balance. The shapes are very similar. I wonder why I did that? At the time when I drew the pencil-art for this, I had no awareness at all of the similarity.

A Sexy Pirate, Vectors, and Entropy (artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on August 11th, 2005

Current mood: My Pirate Name is Long-Jimmy Short-Beard



Aye, I fine firey lass was she! Hair as red as the devil’s coals, a face that broke a thousand hearts, and a waggle in her hips that sank a thousand ships!

At the behest of my cousin Brian, who loves scalable vector art for games, I have been making an effort to practice vector artwork lately, so rather than coloring her in The Gimp as is my usual practice, I traced and colored her in Inkscape. I am pleased with the results. Creating vectors vertex-by-vertex is painful for me, but traced from a hand-drawn source, I am happy with it.

My vector-art-idol, whom I seek to emulate is the talented John Allison of Scarygoround. His work is well worth checking out, not just for the artwork, but also for the humor.

Look! There in the sky! It’s Abrupt Change of Subject Man!

The entropy of the Sexy Pirate picture is really high. (Some people sometimes yell at me for using the word “entropy” in a non-thermodynamic sense, so I will clarify that I am talking about Infotropy) I began with a really large amount of information in the form of a scan, dividing 2D space into a grid and recording a color value for each pixel. When I reduced that to 1-bit and reduced the resolution, a huge amount of information was lost in the pixelation process. The original scan contained almost ten thousand times as much information… at least measured in bytes. In terms of visual recognition, it only lost a little. You can still tell it is supposed to be a Sexy Pirate. All the information on what make something “Sexy” and what make something a “Pirate” are already present in the mind of the observer. Most of the 99.99 percent of the information that was lost wasn’t important information. In the tracing process, even more information is lost, but now since we are working with curves in vector space rather than describing black and white boxes in a grid, the remaining information is oddly enough even more meaningful than it was before. That is what makes information interesting to me. That is what makes it so difficult to think of in simple terms like you can with math or logic. Some information is more important than other information…. and the only way to tell the difference between meaningful information and meaningless information is– More information!

And in conclusion… *wolf whistle* … um… yeah… ;)

EDIT: added shaded version in place of flat-colored version (less entropic I suppose, but oh-well)

Blinky the Three-Eyed-Whale

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on August 4th, 2005

Current mood: Happy

If you drive all the way down Gaffey street in San Pedro, all the way to the Korean Friendship Bell, and you look on the west side of the road, you will see two famous pieces of street-art, which I have always called Blinky and Inky. Blinky is a three-eyed fish, and Inky is a one-eyed octopus. I named Blinky after a three-eyed fish in a episode of the Simpsons

I have always wondered what Blinkey’s real name is, and who originally painted him, and why. I found my answer this week on the front page of a copy of Random Lengths which I found on the floor of the Lobbey of Vagabond Inn on Gaffey near 2nd street. I found an online copy of the same article.


Blinkey is also known as The Three Eyed Whale, The Mutant Fish, and Charlie the Tuna. He was first painted in 1991 by Cartoonist Dave Butkus. Dave’s original art has long since been painted over, but other local artists keep Blinkey alive by re-painting him whenever he is erased or defaced.

If you happen to be in San Pedro, be sure to say “hello” to Blinkey.

Still no word on who originally painted Inkey. According to the article, Dave himself doesn’t know that.

Midnight Complexion (Artwork)

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on July 26th, 2005

Current mood: Aware
Paint brushes frighten me. I am used to pencils and pens. Those are solid; they don’t squish and deform when you press them against a surface.

But in spite of my brushphobia, I am fascinated by painting, so when I had a free afternoon last week, I went to the Apple Barrel and purchased the biggest canvas they had and a couple cheap brushes. Then I went to Rural King a bought three cans of latex house paint and a drop-cloth.

I spread out my art supplies on the porch and opened a bag of ice (it was hot out there), and painted for about two-and-a-half-hours.

She isn’t anyone in particular, althought I will admit that her right eye is Ryda’s (and Ryda will kill me for saying that)

As a final note; while I was working on this painting, I came up with a Theory of Art

Creating art is the inverse complement of learning. When you learn, you take a part of reality, and you create a working representation of it in your mind. When you create art, you take something that exists in your mind, and you build a physical representation of it in the real world.

Take that with a grain of salt ;