S K Y L A R K I N G: March 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

SUMMER FAERY

I wanted to do a sunny, happy, pretty picture -- particularly one that captured that exuberant feeling that one gets from a summer day.

I'm impatient for summer to start where I live. It's still really chilly in the mornings and wet and rainy. There's still little bits of winter hanging around in fields and some lawns.

Bring on the sunshine!

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

AFTERMATH

This is a picture I first did years ago. I recently tried to re-vamp it but never quite finished it to my satisfaction. Just this morning I pulled it up and added a background and some colour.

Fuck it. It's finished.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

A RUMINATION ON TV's NEW WONDER WOMAN

The New:

Where they got the idea(?):

The Old:

The way it should be:

The really old:

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

WIP WEDNESDAY - Betty Page

I meant to post this last week shortly after I'd posted the final artwork. Better late then never.

Here's the initial sketch, done in Painter 11 in a sepia tone.

Here I've set the sketch to multiply mode and put in a neutral background

Working the background

Here I've added a neutral flesh tone between the background and the sketch

Added a blue tone to the background

And I begin shading with a darker value of the flesh colour.

More shading

And here is the finished product again. pushed the shadows darker and added softer highlights, did a lot of blending and added a yellow highlight to the right edge of the figure. Viola! Betty!

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S TRUE

Monday, March 28, 2011

MONDAY MISCELLANEA: MARCH 28

Another random set of pictures from my image morgue.

Earl Moran - 1960

Barbier

Donato Giancola

Gil Cohen

Mort Kunstler

Tim Hildebrandt

Mark Schultz

James Bama

Chester Ocampo

William Stout

William Adolphe Bouguereau

Saturday, March 26, 2011

RUBBER BY BORIS & JULIE

Fantasy artist gods Boris Vallejo and his wife artist Julie Bell have done artwork for the movie poster for the crazy independent feature RUBBER. That's quite a coup for a low-budget, quirky, independent French film.

Check out Julie and Boris's blog here.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

EARTH HOUR - A DISSENT

Earth Hour is the one time a year when we're all supposed to turn off all the electricity in order to take a stand against climate change

Aside from the fact that it is an empty gesture, one solely designed to make people feel good, to expiate their environmental guilt, and does nothing to mitigate any of the so-called "greenhouse gasses" that are erroneously believed to be causing the Earth's slight warming in the late twentieth century, the whole philosophy behind this stunt is anti-human.

Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics from the University of Guelph, says it best in his article which I reproduce here in its entirety:

Earth Hour: A Dissent

by Ross McKitrick

In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.

Here is my response.

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.

Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.

Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.

Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity.

Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.

Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply.

If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations.

No thanks.

I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Ross McKitrick

Professor of Economics

University of Guelph

So when Earth Hour comes, celebrate our achievement of cheap and plentiful electricity and turn on your lights and blare your music. Listen to your ipod, play a game on your ipad. Get on the internet. Watch TV. Celebrate the greatness of humanity. Don't sit in the dark like a caveman!

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

Friday, March 25, 2011

STEAMPUNK WONDER WOMAN by Papa Ninja

I got nothing this morning. I slept wrong and my back is killing me. I've decided to abandon my latest painting and start again fresh on Monday. So here I've swiped a picture from digital artist Serge Birault.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

Thursday, March 24, 2011

GOOD OLD AMERICAN KNOW-HOW...

...and sophisticated Japanese technology.

The US Airforce has built a supercomputer out of commercially available Playstation 3's.

The Air Force’s Research Lab in Rome, NY. has one of the cheapest supercomputers ever made, and best of all over 3,000 of your friends can play Tekken on it. The computer is made from 1,716 PlayStation 3s linked together, and is used to process images from spy planes. From the article: “The Air Force calls the souped-up PlayStations the Condor Supercomputer and says it is among the 40 fastest computers in the world. The Condor went online late last year, and it will likely change the way the Air Force and the Air National Guard watch things on the ground.

Read the whole story here.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

FRAZETTA'S CONAN

This is interesting.

It actually is a photograph. It's been through Photoshop, obviously, but the guy and the girl are real people. The make-up concept and design was by make-up artist Mike Marino (Black Swan, The Wrestler, I am Legend). The graphic was put together by designer Anil Gupta.

Before the current Conan production, the one starring Jason Momoa from Lionsgate, Warner Brothers had the property. According to chud.com:

At a couple of points it got close to happening at Warner Bros; close enough that make-up tests were commissioned. The image you see above is one of those.

The make up was from Prosthetic Renaissance, and it was a pretty big set of appliances – forehead, nostrils, chin, bridge of the nose, wig, even cheeks. The design was, obviously, based on the late Frank Frazetta’s vision for the character, and it’s looks like a painting from the Frazetta archive come alive.

Here's the base sculpture of the make-up:

And, of course, the iconic Frazetta Conan:

I don't know if it would have actually happened this way at Warner Brothers. I doubt it very much, hollywood being what it is, but it would have been amazing to have a whole Conan movie that looked like a Frazetta painting. Imagine someone like Zach Snyder just going apeshit with those paintings. It probably wouldn't satisfy Howard purists (or Frazetta purists) and it probably wouldn't appeal to a very large audience but it could have been a kick-ass experience for millions of fanboys out there.

If you're one of us, you know what I mean.

You can read the whole story here.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

Monday, March 21, 2011

THE MAGNIFICENT BETTY PAGE

Well, Betty was magnificent -- I just hope this rendering does her some justice. Nevertheless, now that I have done a painting of Betty I can now call myself a real and true pin-up artist.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

MONDAY MISCELLANEA

A collection of completely random pictures from my image morgue.

Bernie Wrightson

Alphonse Maria Mucha

Frank Kelly Freas

Simon Bisley

Frank Frazetta