From a comment on my previous post about Fractal Images (thanks, Cedra), I learned of Carter Hodgkin, an artist working on one of those wonderfully fuzzy borders between art and science.

Hodgkin’s paintings, drawings and prints are inspired by the tracings of “exotic” particles, strange bits of matter born in the miniature cataclysms created in the bubble chambers (or “cloud chambers”, I love that phrase) in the heart of the great atom smashers like the Tevatron at Fermilab or the Large Hadron Collider.

These particles, the examination of which is one of the gateways to our understanding of the fundamental nature of space/time, exist for only the briefest blips of time, increments so small they defy understanding.

The tracks that trace their fleeting expression in this world are the paths they take out of the collision, usually in graceful spirals and curves with their own strange beauty (you can see a couple of actual images here and here).

Taking these spirals, curves and lines as a starting point, Hodgkin creates images that are partly digital, then inkjet printed at a fairly large scale and painted into with oil enamel or watercolor.

The resultant images carry some of the mathematical geometry of the original cloud chamber inspiration, imbued with the artist’s range of color and value choices, and are somewhere in between representational and non-representational, as well as in between art an science, and in between nature and imagination.

I just love fractal generated images. These computer based images, crafted out of mathematical formulae, carry with them some of the visual characteristics of both natural forms and of abstract mathematical beauty. At their best, they resonate with a brain-tingling hint of infinity.

Dainis Graveris has collected 60 prime examples, in this case all generated using a freeeware flame fractal program called Apophysis (Windows only, unfortunately), and posted them on the 1stWebdesigner blog. The article is listed as “Part 1″, with the rest presumably to follow soon.

Many of the images are linked to larger versions, frequently on deviantART, that show some of their intricately recursive worlds-within-worlds details (see the detail of the last image, above).

Credits, in this case, are often just screen names. (Images above, Gibson125, babymilk and parablev.)

For more on fractal images, see my previous posts listed below, particularly my article on Benoit Mandelbrot.

Update Part 2 has been posted and is a list of links to 33 Apophysis tutorials.

Trial and error.

What artist has not at some point resorted to “I’ll just try this and see if it looks better.“?

You might say that, in light of Darwin’s model of natural selection, nature itself does the same: make a genetic mutation or two, or a billion, and see what works.

Swedish programmer Roger Alsing has created a playful experiment in “genetic programming” applied to image making, in which he wrote a small program for rendering 50 translucent polygons into an image area.

He set it to mutate slightly with each iteration, so that each pass of the program produces a different distribution of the polygons (the “genetic mutation”).

The fact that the polygons are translucent allows for many smaller subtle shapes within the composition, produced by overlapping areas of color, like laying an area of yellow glaze over both blue and green shapes in an oil painting.

At the end of each rendering sequence, the program uses a “fitness function”, basically a small routine to compare the resultant image pixel by pixel with a target image, in this case an image of the Mona Lisa.

Based on the “fitness” of the image, the program keeps either the new “dna” or the existing “dna”, whichever is more like the target, as the basis of the next mutation and iteration.

Trial and error. Survival of the fittest.

There is a selection of images on Alsing’s blog showing various renders, from which I’ve pulled a few representative samples, above. (For those who are programmatically inclined, there is also a faq with some of the basics.)

Under each of the sample images is a filename that shows the number of times the program had to run to reach that particular image.

The one at bottom-right shows 904,314 incidences of “I’ll just try this and see if it looks better“.

[Via Kottke]

As a long time Photoshop user, I just love this version of the Photoshop interface as represented by real-world objects.

It’s a poster for software-asli.com, the creative credits are: creative director : Hendra Lesmono, art director : Andreas Junus & Irawandhani Kamarga, copywriter : Darrick Subrata and photgrapher : Anton Ismael.

The mock up is actually quite large, as you can see in the accompanying Flickr set that shows how they assembled it. Be sure to view the full size image to get the real effect.

I love the little details like the fact that the grabber hand glove is smudged.

[Via BoingBoing]

The COLORlovers blog, which I mentioned in this post and in my post on the History of the Color Wheel, has posted an article with a nice collection of Fractal Art.

I find these kinds of images, created by manipulating the paramaters by which certain mathematical functions are interpreted, to be endlessly fascinating; both for their intricate beauty, and for the intriguing relationship they have to natural forms, organic and inorganic.

Most of the images in the article are linked to originals on Flickr, where you can view large, high-resolution versions; and get an appreciation for the delicate latticeworks of color and form, and the descend-into-infinity nature of their recursive relationships .

Many of the Flickr sets are part of photo streams that are associated with the Club Apophysis group pool, named for the open source fractal flame Windows software, Apophysis.

The COLOURlovers article also includes some nice examples of fractal patterns found in nature, with images of plant forms, seashells, river basins and coastlines, and goes on to mention and show some of the winners from the Benoit Mandlebrot Fractal Art Contest 2007, named for the mathematician who coined term and created the original mathematical expressions on which images like these are based.

See my previous articles on Benoit Mandlebrot, the Benoit Mandlebrot Fractal Art Contest 2007 and Flame Fractals.

(Above: fractal images by longan drink, exper and Lynn)

In the course of writing about science fiction, fantasy and horror illustration and concept and production art for movies and games, I’ve come across lots of wonderfully scary Monsters and icky creatures, but rarely do I encounter images that are truly scary.

I find Chris Jordan’s images genuinely frightening.

The image above, an interpretation of Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece, A sunday Afternoon at the Island of Le Grande Jatte, was created by Jordan using digital compositing, and depicts the image as composed of 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the U.S. every thirty seconds.

In his series Running the Numbers: An American Self-portrait, Jordan has set out to convey with photographic manipulations and a few succinct statistics the magnitude of our consumerist society, an out-of-control rampaging monster that would send Godzilla, King Kong and the Cloverfield monster whimpering for cover.

As Jordan points out in interviews, the human mind isn’t wired to grasp numbers beyond a certain scale, so he has constructed images using the cast-offs from our consumer madness to create beautifully scary images that, once you understand the reference point of their scale, are shockingly visceral.

His images themselves have some scale when viewed in a gallery setting, displayed as large photographic prints about 5 ft (1.5m) high, large enough to see the whole from a few steps away and the individual elements close up.

Jordan started out as a straightforward photographer, searching for “accidental color” in places like container import shipyards and garbage heaps, but his images of colors found in large scale trash heaps started to elicit responses from people that made him realize the power they had to convey a bit of the enormous scale of what we discard. He eventually began searching for a way to communicate that more effectively and turned to digital compositing in Photoshop.

Jordan explains this more eloquently in this video from the Greener Gadgets Conference and a more extensive one from Bill Moyers Journal.

In the videos you can see some of his photographic prints on display in galleries and get a feeling for their size. He also places silhouettes against some of the images on his site for the same purpose.

Most of Jordan’s images are not versions of famous artworks like the one above, I just naturally gravitated to that one, but many form a recognizable image; like a forest of tree trunks composed of 1.14 million shopping bags, the number used in the U.S. every hour, a skull formed from 200,000 cigarette packs, and a series of tubes made of one million plastic cups.

He has broadened his scope to encompass other social issues, like a wall of large childrens’ alphabet building blocks, composed of nine million smaller photographs of childrens’ building blocks to represent the number of children in the U.S. without health insurance in 2007, and, in a recent addition, the top of the first page of the U.S. Constitution, composited from 83,000 photographs of the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Some of the earlier works in the series are more direct, like a field of 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the U.S. every five seconds and a wall of 3.6 million tire valve caps, one for each new SUV sold in the U.S. in 2004, and many others in the Intolerable Beauty series. (His site is unfortunately in frames, so I have to pop you out of the site context to link to the individual series.)

The numbers are vaguely scary, but seeing the numbers in a way you can immediately grasp is much much scarier, and displays some of the power inherent in the skillful use of images to communicate ideas.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Eric Smith]

Note: Some of the images linked to here, though they should be seen by every American adult, should be considered Not Safe For Work; particularly those from Abu Ghraib, which are unacceptable in the truest sense of the word.

I wrote back in February about a listing of 100 Photoshop Tutorials, many of which applied to digital painting.

Here are some more Photoshop tutorial resources I’ve come across. Though fewer of them are directly related to digital painting, they may be of interest to digital artists as well as those involved in design and photo manipulation.

The first is a listing of 50 Lighting Effects Photoshop Tutorials on The Photoshop Roadmap, in which various techniques and effects using blending modes, masking, compositing and filters are are outlined for lighting enhancement and special effects (first two images at left).

The next is Top 10 Photoshop Tutorial Websites, on Outlaw Design Blog, which is a list of lists; or more accurately a list of sites on which you will find extensive resources for Photoshop tutorials in many aspects of digital image creation and modification.

Another individual link is specific to digital painting. Though it is titled Learn How to Paint Digitally Albert Einstein, it isn’t actually a tutorial (it goes by too fast for that), but a potentially instructive time-lapse video of the progress of a digital painting of the famous theoretical physicist (left, bottom two images). Starting cleverly with cartoon-like sketch based on his famous formula for the relation of mass to energy, it progresses through various stages to a finished likeness. The little flashes are control panels being brought up and used, most likely to change blending modes on a layer. Unfortunately, they go by too quickly to be instructive, so you may have to fill in the blanks yourself (or see if you can stop the video on those frames). The video is posted on the 5min Life Videopedia.

Just for fun, throw in Worth 1000, which I wrote about in 2006, in which the venerable image editor is put to good use in the service of abject silliness. Though not tutorials, the image manipulation “Challenges” are a humorous tour through some of the compositing and touch up techniques possible in Photoshop. In my post at the time I complained about their terrible interface. They have since cleaned up their act with a new, much clearer and easy to navigate site design. Go to “Ended Advanced Photoshop Contests”.

Even the propaganda department of the only remaining member of the “Axis of Evil” (who thinks up these things?) is trying to close the “Photoshop Gap” these days. Iran is apparently in possession of Photoshop (a weapon of mass distortion?) and not afraid to use it; as evidenced by their enhancement of a photo they released, proclaiming the apparent success of a chest-thumping missile launch, with a cloned-in extra missile.

I just love this stuff!

[Some links via Digg]

I was hoping to have a thoughtful and well-informed analysis of this situation for this post, but my personal schedule has made that difficult.

I can only say that this is about two pieces of legislation coming up before the House and Senate here in the U.S. that may adversely affect visual artists here (and those abroad who show or sell there work here), in terms of making it much more difficult to protect your work with copyright.

I will point you to more detailed information elsewhere and urge you to at least get an understanding of the issues.

Here is a description from the Illustrators Partnership of how the bills will affect visual artists:

H.R. 5889, The Orphan Works Act of 2008

S. 2913, The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008

Here are the actual bills if you want to wade through them, H.R.5889 and S.2913, on THOMAS from the Library of Congress.

The Illustrators Partnership has a series of form letters that you can send to your Representative or Senators by simply filling out a form and sending it. The system will even find your legislators by your zip code or address.

The letters themselves can give you some idea of the impact the bills will have on various aspects of the visual arts, as they are presented from the various points of view (illustrators, cartoonists, biomedical and scientific illustrators, photographers, etc.).

I’m not opposed to the original stated intention of the bills, to provide for the use by museums, libraries and other cultural institutions of works for which the copyright is no longer being actively defended; but the bills as they are worded don’t put the necessary definitions in place to restrict the provision to those kind of institutions and non-profit use, and go way beyond that into the creation of a bureaucratic nightmare for visual artists, who will now have to devote unreasonable time and resources to defending their art against opportunists, image thieves and copyright sharks.

The bills as they stand basically undermine many of the copyright protections we now enjoy and blithely take for granted. They need to be changed to protect those of us who don’t have the resources of Warner Brothers or Disney to constantly monitor use of our work with armies of lawyers.

Take a look. Be informed. Take a simple action.

I will only take a few minutes and it could save you hours of grief and countless dollars in the future.

The winners of the 2007 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest have been posted. This is the second international contest and the entries are stunning examples of the visual beauty and intellectual fascination to be found in fractal based art.

Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician responsible for coining the term “fractal” and creating the deceptively simple expressions that artists (and mathematicians) use to make the startling images commonly called “fractals”, is the Honorary Chairman of this contest that bears his name.

The contest’s web site has an archive of the 49 winners, like “Crowded Street” by Yvonne Mous (above), and a more extensive page for the entries.

Fifteen of the winners have been selected to be in a physical exhibition, although the site isn’t very informative about that exhibition.

It’s also not very precise about the defined limits of how much of a given piece should be fractal-based in order to be eligible, apparently leaving that up to the discretion of the judges.

It seems as though the major portion of the work bust be fractal based, however, and the images on the site can give you a nice introduction to some of the potential in the dazzling beauty of mathematical infinity.

For more on fractal art and the science behind it, see my 2006 post about Benoit Mandelbrot.

[Link via Boing Boing]

Kevin Mack’s digital compositions are like a roller coaster for your eyes.

You glide into them on big swooping forms that recede into the depths, looping and swirling among themselves like the veinous system of an android, or vibrating into a crenulated landscape of primary colors. As you go further into the images (and “into” is the operative word), traceries of liquid strands twist around floating islands of Henry Moore forms, and sinuous wires multi-colored quicksilver explode into blossoms of robotic flowers.

If I seem to be waxing poetic, it’s because Mack’s images are conducive to the kind of dreamlike interpretation and “animals in the clouds” visions that are characteristic of the fantastical landscapes of Max Ernst or Robert Venosa; sort of a hyperdimensional Jackson Pollock on digital steroids, or Yves Tanguy in a blender.

It’s hard for me to look at these and not think of them as digital sculptures, and marvel at how fantastic they would be if they could be made into actual physical objects that you could walk around (or through).

Mack creates his images digitally using mathematical models that are the outgrowth of his work as a film industry concept and matte artist, which led to work in “artifiical life” and rule based systems that can be used to “grow” 3-D CGI forms based on sets of programming criteria.

His work in that area was utilized in films like What Dreams May Come and Fight Club and inspired the development of software that is being used to simulate the growth of biological tissues for virtual stem cell research.

Mack is the child of two Disney artists and studied Fine Art, Illustration and Film at the Art Center College of Design. He is now an Academy Award wining Visual Effects Supervisor and received the Oscar for his work on What Dreams May Come.

His other film credits include Vanilla Sky, Apollo 13, The Fifth Element, Big Fish and A Beautiful Mind.

Mack’s digital pieces are produced as limited edition giclee prints (image above: Neurosymphonic Self Reflection, 36 x 48″ giclee print on canvas). His digital art has been exhibited at The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Siggraph, and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

[Link via BoingBoing]