pamulas leaf

Final artist post

It was very hard to find an artist that did exactly what I did for this project, so I decided to further research the artist I came across that helped me develop the idea of printing on leaves and them returning them to nature. Her name is Pamula Petro, she is an artist and a writer from Massachusetts. Although she is no where near famous her work is quite interesting. The style of art of hers that I came across is a method used to create petrographs.

Petrographs are created by using liquid light and them exposing the medium. The great thing about liquid light is that you can put it on almost anything you want to. In her 2009 installation called Faces in Nature she used many different items from nature. She used feathers, leaves, oyster shells, wood and even pine cones. In her blog she said that in the spring of 2008 she "received a grant from the Northampton Arts Council to create an installation that united urban downtown with the green periphery around the city".

She began creating this link by taking photos of pedestrians on main street. This took the city side of her art work element. Then she printed these what she calls "naturegraphs" onto pine cones, fungus and more. she then placed these items back where she found them and "let them settle into nature". Then as the settles she photographed them and let them lay where they were.

This is where i got my idea of printing on leaves and then placing them back into the environment in which I found them. Although I used a different method then she did I still followed the same concept.

more eyes

video game presentation

I attended the second half of the video game presentation. I got to see the presentation of Chrono Shift Blast Wars and Paint it. I will analyze the game itself along with the art work in it and just hoe the game design team implemented the art work into both games.

Chrono Shift Blast Wars is a game that is set in the past, present and future, all simultaneously. It is a ware like game that is played by multiple people with multiple different roles in the game. There are police, military and scientist style players. The goal is to make all three realms of time work together to win the war. The landscapes were created by compiling small pixelated tiles of simple images to create a flat landscape. For example, mountains were represented by multiple single tiles of a mountain on them, the same for water, sand and so on. Items such as players, buildings and dinosaurs were each on a single tile which could move through out the game board with each turn. It was interesting how well the three reals of time correlated with one another. If the player made a move, then sometimes the consequence of that move would change the future.

The creators during their presentation played the game in a well educational manner, they touched on the main idea and concept of the game. The part that struck me as the most interesting was how you had to use all three times realms to complete the game. On some of the game boards in the past almost everything was flooded and in order to reach your destination you had to go into the present or future to where there was now land in order to move to your destination. Also, if say in the present one of your buildings was blown up, then once your click on the future, it would no longer be there.

Artistically I feel that they implemented the art work well. I think that proportionately to the screen the board should have taken up more room and made the tool box and text smaller, but that's just my opinion. Also, in the beginning of the game on the menu screen the flashing vivid colors was very distracting and too excessive and fast. I would change that if I had input. They used the more complex images of the characters very well. They were pngs and were cut out looking put on solid bright backgrounds which helped them to standout even more.

Overall it was a well designed game and the artwork was placed into the game well.

Paint It! was the game I worked on and was very happy with my end art works. The game design team consisted of John Stewart, Rowan Copley, and Alex Stek. I worked with Nemasis to create the art work for this game. Te original idea of this game was based off of logic gates and hoe coding actually works. Convert that into art ideas and they came up with the idea of using three primary colors that would then flow into tubes and then be painted on to the walls of a castle ruled by a colorful king. The King was to come out and ask for the player to paint a certain room a specific color. They the player has to link tubes from the primary color tubes and lead these tubes to a gate at the end, mixing the colors just right to create the desired color.

I created all the backgrounds for the game. This included twelve different colored rooms along with a castle and the king. I was pleased at how the king was used as well as the back grounds. What surprised me the most was that I created all the room to be a solid color but then for some of the levels they waned two colors to be created so with my little mistakes such as an orange floor and purple walls translated into a new room to them that was useful.. they also alteres my court yard image to make it have a lot more colors in it for a herder level. I am glad that the art work fit into their game well and I am interested to see if they do achieve their goal of making this game commercial.

eyes

I originally had the idea of transferring images of eyes onto bricks around campus so that you would see them randomly as you walked by. It was my safe way of graffiti on campus. Well that idea failed because bricks just didnt suit as a medium, so i places them on white foam board and them placed them around campus generally on also white surfaces.

leaves

I gathered leaves from outside around Montey that I thought were porous and flat enough to create a very natural canvas to print images on. Then i used super sauce to transfer images onto the leaves. I then placed the leaves back into nature and photographed them.