still drawing monsters (a career-killer for any serious artist but you can't make me stop). I think the OptiDisc gif was rooted in these little circles that litter every piece of paper I come in contact with.
Update: A color version:
art - tm
stormlogo
carjackcker posted a GIF of Storm, from the X-Men, looking strangely bulbous and flying around in a circle in the sky. The frame below grabbed my eye, for the way its extreme foreshortening turned the character into an almost-abstract blob. Originally I had her centered against a blank sky background but then decided to overlay her over something. Fishing around my hard drive I found a frame from a topologically distorted version of my blog logo (blogo?) that someone (apologies for the dropped attribution) made a while back. Many of the colors were the same, and the distortions of the figure and background seemed to resonate. The jagged pixel edges, a byproduct of transparentizing the original background, "expose the seams" for an added touch of self-referential authenticity. [/gratuitous exegesis]
demonflower
My contribution to the wendypaint.com genre (or as dumper "peggy" calls it, wendyvanitypaint).
On the plus side I like the combination of paint strokes with photocollage, or videocollage. (The gradients from all the dragging create a 3D effect that looks like cut up photos to me.)
On the minus side, these rubber-stamp or photoshop-brush style brushes are awfully clumsy. I searched for a way to shrink them to pencil width for some finer lines but couldn't figure out how to do it.
Also, couldn't figure out how to add my image to the "stream" so better hedge a prior statement about this site partaking of the "social" scene. It's possible that Kim Asendorf is "curating" the stream -- drop me an email if that's not so. [Update: Users publish to the "stream" by checking a small unidentified box with no "submit" button, leaving the drawing page, and praying to whatever deity or deities they worship -- should have known that, whoops]
canvas_painter_25b
Various dumpers were playing around with Kim Asendorf's wendypaint.com website, created for The Wrong digital biennale. It's a pixel-y art platform where you can "make brushes" out of images or icons and drag them around to leave MSPaint-like trails. It reminded me about canvas painter, which I hadn't used in a while.
A dumper called canvas painter "excessively free software" in that you can download the javascript and make art in your browser from your home device, without any need to register and give your email and (uggh) real name, as Asendorf is requiring you to do. Also, you have to make your own screenshots (as in my painting above).
With wendypaint, Asendorf adds the all-important social dimension in that a community develops of wendypainters all sharing and archiving their drawings. This increases the likelihood of coverage on the "art and technology" websites, and of Asendorf being praised for circulationism, dispersion, and all the rest of that social utilitarian rhetoric.
The modest little canvas painter, while more "open source" than Asendorf's project, nevertheless lacks "social," bringing it closer to the dreaded hermeticism, that bugbear of new media prognosticators. Years ago I said Nasty Nets wasn't really social, because people just posted stuff and didn't talk about it all that much, which drew the ire of Marisa Olson, who informed me that all manner of back channel discussion was happening about Nasty Nets posts via chat and email (that implicitly, I had been excluded from -- nice).
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