xeneth.design

Despite a little early talent, I was never THAT good at drawing, because I never really went to school for it or focused on honing the ability. For something like the last decade, the only kind of art I've produced has conformed to a pretty specific style that I've been referring to as " MS Paint Card Art Placeholder. " When making placeholder card art, it was important that no one illustration take very long, hence the limiting tool that is the Microsoft Windows 10 era Paint application; because the tool does not support layers or transparency, I was discouraged from attempting to "perfect" any one aspect of what I was doing. The linework being crafted by mouse meant a certain shoddiness that I found was complimented or made to "look intentional" by the included crayon brush; this crackly tool comes in but four line weights, further limiting creative options and focusing me on producing quick and dirty color images that were intended to be replace...

 The intent was to make this round's words a pretty light lift, so I was reaching for immediate associations and familiar patterns. All the recent news/coverage for Super Mario Bros Wonder means I have platformer design on the brain, so from " Houseplant " and " Diet " I immediately pull Little Shop Of Horrors and Piranha Plants...     At this juncture I'd like to detour a bit to talk about one of the many tiny ways in which "the algorithmic gods" like Google are slowly and steadily making the internet less useful. In talking about the above with my partner, the topic shifted to whether or not the Piranha Plants in Mario games were originally inspired by Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors , or if they were arrived at organically via a similar synthesis and monsterization of real life carnivorous plant life. The former sounded more likely to me than the latter, but I typed "little shop of horrors release date"  into Google just to be su...

     Keeping the ETNO random-three-word-prompted art streak alive for another week! This time around, the simian imagery just didn't seem to be getting me anywhere, so I looked closer and latched onto the way the spelling of the word implied subversive military action instead of primates. Unfortunately "Guerrilla" plus "Spirit" immediately sent me in the direction of ghosts on a Vietnamese war battlefield; a huge percentage of my instincts and impulses these days seem to be morbid and negative, but I don't have the energy to fight that too much in the context of what's supposed to be a very light creative lift, so here we are. From there, "Electronics" made me think of a military cellular communications backpack. So the mental image was a radio-wave-ghost hovering over the remains of a Western battlefield comms soldier in a spike trap.     Unless curbed, I can see a natural escalation in the amount of artistic skill and effort that goes into...

 The latest ETNO Art Challenge, (based on the randomly generated words River , Diamond , and Producer ) was extended to two weeks this time around, which gave me a little time to play around with different "compression abuse" strategies. These projects should ideally be kept pretty small in terms of time commitment and effort, so that no one is threatening to cut into valuable work or family time doing unpaid creative labor, but I'm already bad enough at time management that when one of the "trinities" goes long, I'm going to have to watch out for impulses to top myself or overreach... The  Producer  that sprung to mind first was  Michael Bay  for whatever reason, and of course thinking about showbiz just called to mind all the current ugliness surrounding corporations and studios not wanting to compensate entertainment writers adequately for their craft. Initially, I went down a couple of dead ends trying to find the name of a Hollywood producer that speci...

     When it comes to parasocial media, the unavoidable subject of 2821 has been NTO. From incredibly flinch-inducing yesterati rhetoric, to incomprehensibly tasteless biopics from deceased celebrities, to eight-figure sales of the “retroactive rights” on intellectual property, it’s the thing that’s currently dominating the collective brain space of virtual artists and sucking up all the data in the ‘verse. And I DO want to publish my opinions on NTO, posthumous ownership, and mediums; all the myriad dimensions of the issue, but I don’t just want to write about NTO, it can’t be addressed in a vacuum because it’s just a symptom of so much more loss and suffering, and it’s that “more” that is ultimately important. So, let me tell you a story. In 2608 we lost roughly 37% of the population to RAVID-6 . The basic chain reaction was thus:      A highly contagious airborne variant of rabies managed multiple interspecies transmissions in a matter of months; by the ...

This is mostly just a test of the blog posting system, but by way of CONTENT... Recently, a member of my extended familial micro-community suggested that we re-start an age old tradition; the reckless selection of three random words with which to fuel weekly creative challenges! Now, this hasn't been the primary purpose of our little group for ages; the main point of ETNO for some time now has been to stay in touch, hang out remotely, blow off steam and commiserate about life. Back when they were meatspace meetings there was a focus on board games, video game consoles, and playing "show and tell" with things we'd learned or created. A lot has changed, but there be creative bones left in these time-ravaged bodies yet apparently, because we were back at it last week with the randomly selected words  Inspector , Current , and Dose ! Ah, the crayon tool; my favorite brush! Drawn freehand with a mouse in mspaint at a 1:1 resolution of 500x500, then doubled in pixel count ...