I did this for my band page. All the images were taken from wikipedia articles. It’s a bunch of layering an shading work. I also use a bunch of different layer effects. I went in and shaded the worms to maker it look like they belong inside the apple. It’s all pretty gross, but I think I had a point to it when I went about it. It looks better than I thought it would, but still could look a bit better.

This is a character model redesign I did for a now defunct Half-Life mod. I remodeled the G Man character that had been imported from the ps2 into the pc. I cleaned up a few excess polys and made it more resemble the Half-Life 2 model. I credited the model to its source and such and I still have the file for it on my pc. It’s kind of cool to see sometihng you worked on moving around in a video game. I also added a few details, improved the textures, and gave the model more depth, but I take zero credit for it since it’s someone else’s work originally. The only thing I did from scratch was the suitcase texture. I was 19 and at Texas Tech when I worked on this. From premed to art student, I kind of saw that change of choice coming from a mile away.

These are various character designs I’ve made. Overall I’d say I have created probably about 200 different characters. These aren’t the best one, but they’re the ones I could find on my pc. I don’t really do much thinking when I come up with them, I just draw and they somehow magically appear out from my brain and onto paper. I guess that’s kind of difficult to explain, but that’s the best way I can go about it. This is also probably why I like art, it’s like an instinct and not much thought passes through my mind concerning how I should go about it or even what I’m going to end up with. It just happpens, and I kind of like the idea of that. It’s almost like something from nothing.

I made this when I was 18 and that was 4 years ago. Looking back on it, I didn’t really fully apprecaite the fact that I won a second place award for drawing it from the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Now I realize how many different people were going after the same thing and that second place wasn’t that bad. I took the picture it was drawn from. Everyone else in my class used flashes for a dimly lit setup while I just opened that aperture of my camera lens to let more light in. Using a flash seemed to defeat the purpose. Only one other person did a painting similar. So, all in all, looking back, I guess I did a pretty good job with a few pencils and a black piece of paper.

in the enless ways to die

hidden fear under a veil of agression

a blade deeper ‘n’ deeper inside

sleeping dreamers fake awake sometimes

sleeping dreamers dream awake sometimes

and there is no reason I can see, why this should be

walked this path once before

we’ll walk this path once more

waking up to rerun nightmares now child

set a knife on one another

give the earth and skys to the meek and mild

before the child kills the other

in the enless ways to die

hide our fear under a veil of agression

a blade deeper ‘n’ deeper inside

sleeping dreamers fake awake sometimes

sleeping dreamers dream awake sometimes

and there is no reason I can see, why this should be

all the pain and hatred beneath the sea

will drown the comfort from you and me

will we ever wake to see

http://www.myspace.com/assemblyofsquares

designing an organized webpage on myspace is pretty difficult unless you understand html; I’m lucky I understand some. There’s only one song up and it is an outro, but I’m working on another that includes bass guitar electric bass and syth drums. I made most of the art in the photo albums, unless it has someone else’s name on it, I probably made it. The band logo looks better than I expected and was pretty simples to make. Overlapping transparent squares and guassion blur? No problem. The text was more difficult and included a few different layers. Making black metallic text stand out above a black background isn’t as easy as it looks, and it probably doesn’t look easy. Made the background pattern too. So yeah, I like making art, including music. I’ll probably post the lyrics to a few songs up here. Only is older than the webpage, but I’ve changed it since I was 19. Waking Nightmare is the one I’m taling about.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/11/obama-and-the-existential-crisis-of-american-capitalism/
It looks like this article is full of be afraid of the boogeyman type rhetoric, and some of its facts are questionable. The policies proposed and passed in congress that burst the housing bubble were those of the Clinton administration and not the Bush administration. But they were left unmonitored by Bush. So either the problem is that government is too involved with matters concerning the economy by proposing such bills, are under involved by leaving the effects of bills like this unmonitored, or as is most likely – both at the same time. What is a paradox? I’m not really an economist or an expert on government policy; these are just vague and most likely misdirected perceptions I have on the whole situation. But I think we’ve got a government that has many limbs and too few eyes to see what any of them are doing.

I believe that our understanding of the material and the immaterial are two things that have somehow ended up far removed from each other when both belong to each other. To think that the material is so horrible that God does not dwell within it is not a good place to find oneself. I believe in the movement and grace that gave us this moment, whatever that may be. And science very often deals with the things we can not see. There’s no way we can fully understand or even visualize what goes on inside an atom, yet by the human imagination we’ve gained a loose understanding of what goes on inside an atom. That disconnect between being only able to see something in order to understand it and somehow being able to imagine things outside of sight to understand them is where the material and the immaterial meet. There’s something in that kind of happening that can only be described as a soul, but I don’t believe that is something that is exclusive to people or the living; it extends far out into this world and is in everything.

All things pass a way. maybe that’s an uncommon observation to make on a bright sunny day like this one; it’s one I couldn’t help but make as the the wreck in front of me warped and compressed into a tangle of metal that could no longer be made out for it’s individual parts. It was two hulking SUVs that had collided and collapsed into that inconceivable mess. I had just barely avoided becoming a part of that tragedy. I would later find out that each carried a passenger per vehicle and neither had survived. I’m cynical and I don’t know which was the bigger waste: the loss or life or the excess those lives were bathed in. Why do I think like that? The answer was obvious. It should always be obvious. Life is precious and they were strangers. They could have lived decent, good lives. I guess it is part of my nature to think like that. A product of the life I had lived. I baked and watched the aftermath as the heat bounced off the surrounding cars that had built up behind the wreck. An hour and no trace was left of what had been a mass of metal and death blocking both lanes of that narrow rode and in no time I was home, how strange.

I chose the Puerto rican flag because, I guess, that’s a part of my heritage, although I feel absolutely no special connection with the place. My mom often takes the express time to point out that since I was not born there that I am not Puerto rican, and she never even bothered teaching me Spanish growing up. – Anyway, I uploaded the pictures in the order of the steps it took to make the image. I actually made the flag image from scratch. That was easy, basic shapes. Then I found a cloth image and turned it into a grayscale displacement map, which included blurring it a bit. I applied it to the flag via the filters tool. After all that, I overlayed the cloth image using the multiply tool, and finally I adjusted the contrast to get the final image. Photoshop 101. I learn more from the internet than I do from college and I pay much less for the internet than my college tuition.