speedpaint and alchemy…

A real quick post today showing another desert speed painting trying to get the feel of the landscape for the short I’m working on.  Also, I’ve been playing around with Alchemy recently thanks to the Chaos and Evolutions DVD by David Revoy.  Alchemy is an open source drawing application geared towards stimulating the imagination and creative process.  It’s great for throwing a bunch of random things on the computer screen and trying to see what you can make out of them.  It’s also pretty handy for model sheets as it has a nice mirror feature.  The sketches above came out of some of the randomness created.  I also quickly painted over the kneeling tribal man in Gimp to give it a little color.

If you couldn’t tell from my flurry of blog activity in the last few days I’m trying to get into the habit of sketching or painting for at least a few minutes every day.  I’ve been bringing my sketchbook around with me every where for the past week or so, so look for a few sketches to be posted eventually.  I’m certainly not the best pencil and paper artist in the world, but hopefully that will improve in the future.

I started the next rolling ball sculpture this week and am aiming for a smaller desktop model.  Learning from my experiences with the first one I decided to start by building up the frame before adding any of the track.  The base of this one will be 1/2″ copper pipe, with the rest of the frame consisting of 2 pieces of 14 gauge copper wire twisted tightly together to add some strength.  It should be plenty of strength and weight to support the 1/2″  marbles that I’m planning on using.  Look for some pictures next week!