Gare's non-Xara Art

[gray]

All stunning work, my friend.

[Gare]

Thanks, Graham.

But what does it say of this corpus of work, that is better received than my Xara work?

And is non-Xara art that same as Non-Art? Or (most likely) non-Sense?

And do I ask too many questions?

:)

-g



By the way, this is what Pixar RenderMan can do in the hands of mere mortals.

[gray]

Heavenly looking fruit Gary, or is that non-fruit.

[Gare]

Heavenly looking fruit Gary, or is that non-fruit. :)

It might just be non-vegetables, Graham. :)

The fruit composition is not a new piece; it dates back to the early 1990s when I made friends with someone at Pixar. She mailed me some Pixar software disks for review. I was the editor of a user group magazine on temporary leave.

At the time, I was stuck in our apartment recovering from a hip replacement, so not only did I have a lot of time to experiment, but the pain killers usually inspired me, as evidenced by this work.

-g



The inspiration for the image above was a time when I was considering giving up coffee...

[gray]

Wow, stunning looking image Gary. What technique did you use to get that wispy looking steam?

[Gare]

Wow, stunning looking image Gary. What technique did you use to get that wispy looking steam?

I created the wispy steam using Photoshop, but began with a render of some chaotic math, a product of Chaoscope. From the render, I created an alpha channel, loaded it on an empty layer in P'shop, and then filled it with white. Then I used the Twirl distortion filter in specific places, and then used the Liquify filter to hand-distort a few other areas. you'd be surprised at how phony fractured math looks as a graphic unless you are really critical of the results, and willing and able to do something about it.

Chaoscope is free. If you want to try this jazz in Xara, I suggest you render your chaotic graphic against a black background, and then use the Contone feature in Xara to make the foreground steam white, twist it around using some of the distortion features in Live Effects, and use Screen blending mode (formerly Bleach) to composite your steam against a coffee (or tea, or hot soup, or steaming pile of...) container.



Permutations from this starting point can include selectively reducing the opacity within the bitmap, and/or combining two different messed-up chaos images at less than 100% opacity.

There's also Flame Painter, which makes the whole smoke/steam process a no-brainer, if you're willing to pay $30 for an applet that doesn't really do anything else!

My Best,

Gary

[gray]

Thanks for the info and link, Gary. Downloaded Chaoscope, what an interesting piece of software.

[Gare]

It is indeed interesting to see what math does and how it maps to recognizable stuff, isn't it?

For fun (masochist that I am) I doodle around with fractals expressed in 3 dimensions. I started out with XenoDream and then branched out...pun intended.



Without really understanding the underlying math, I fly blind most of the time with fractal stuff. sometimes I luck out and by accident create something interesting. Other times, I create things that look like the floor of a New York City taxi cab.

-g

[gray]

I'd say you have an instrument rating, Gary. That produced a striking winter looking image.

[Gare]

Thank you, Graham.

There's only you and me in here, isn't there? :)

Echo, echo?

This is from one of the first Photoshop books I wrote along with Barbara. You can see a Windows 3.1 window in the picture. No special effects or retouching. I just bought a bunch of balloons, a laundry marker, and drew the faces on the balloons.



My Best,

Gary