Pete's art dump page 5

Well, apparently the author of Imagine, Jonah Lehrer, fabricated some quotes in the book. He’d also been called out for recycling his own earlier work for WIRED, Wall Street Journal, and other dignified publications during his tenure at the NY Post. I guess he resigned from the Post late last month. Now you can’t buy the book; it’s been recalled.

So much for that. You’ll have to trust me. It was an excellent book.

I don’t really agree with Cleese’s premise, e.g., that creativity cannot be fully understood. On the contrary, I believe that it can. But he goes on to explain that creativity is not a talent, and that I fully agree with. Creativity is a skill… it is learnable and can (and should) be practiced and exercised.

Creativity is, in its simplest form, the combination of two or more things whose new relationship is not familiar to most people.

Let’s design the theme of a game currently under development. We can start with this easy and fun “creative” MadLibs exercise.

The game is about _____A_____ in/on ______B_______.

A. Choose or roll a die:
1. Cowboys
2. Ninjas
3. Pirates
4. Bounty Hunters
5. Anthropomorphic Animals
6. Athletes

B. Choose or roll a die:
1. Post-apocalyptic America
2. Zombie Epidemic
3. Space Station
4. Wild West
5. Roman Gladiator Arena
6. World War 2

Those are all very common game motifs, but you can replace them with very specific and abstract things.

The point is, this is creativity. It’s the mind’s ability to combine ideas, objects, things, thoughts, people, places, that don’t immediately lend themselves to each other.

LOVE <> OIL DERRICK
WALL STREET <> TEXT MESSAGING
RED <> HAIR GROWTH

And so on…

Here’s a portrait of Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road and voice of the beat generation.

As usual some very insightful thoughts. Ever think about teaching? haha

I’ve done lectures. It’s kind of fun to do them but ultimately the experience isn’t usually worth the effort. Mostly I do presentations about skateparks… that’s my full-time gig; promoting proper skatepark development for a nonprofit organization. Drawing and design, at least these days, is more for fun than money. During lectures, mostly I just stand up there, show a few slides, then talk about art and design for an hour with the audience. (I prefer conversations over monologues.)

Adam Yauch portrait. Sharpie, about 3-feet tall.

Allen Ginsberg

Carved skully footrest…

Chainsaw?

Wee circular saw.

Hand-drawn shirt design for a skatepark advocacy organization I used to work with.

Another shirt design for SPS based on the Godfather logo. The organization has a reputation within the skatepark industry for being unwavering concrete advocates. One steel-ramp company once referred to SPS as “the concrete militia,” hence the shirt.

Yet another design I did for SPS. A majority of the organization’s activities is working with communities directly, guiding them through the skatepark development process. As such, they are an educational nonprofit. Hence this riff on the PBS logo. It was a VERY polarizing shirt design. Some contributors loved it, and others hated it.

Occasionally I would introduce a new organizational logo, just to keep things fresh. (The org didn’t really maintain a brand identity, so we could be flexible with marks.)

Here’s one that I liked in its full form.

And its abbreviated form for smaller situations:

Sorry, the design is way more interesting when it’s on my friend.

Illustration depicting the proper amount of head on a pint of beer.

Thought one or two of you might find this interesting. This is a rough sketch of an “air tower” I did for fun to play with my tablet and experiment with coloring. I never got around to coloring it. (This is just the raw scan from a sketchpad.) This is basically where an idea starts. This particular version might be the third or fourth traced iteration until I felt like it was good enough to begin refining digitally. Maybe someday I’ll get back to this one.

Goofy logo for a softball team I used to “manage,” as it were. Truthfully, we were just a bunch of drunks trying to hit a big baseball around.

An exploded diagram of a skateboard wheel bearing. I did this for fun, but ended up using it in a book.

On my first day at a sign shop I basically got fired. I was in high school and didn’t know anything from anything. I was taping off a panel truck to prepare it for painting and I got to the antenna. I coiled the tape up the antenna, (left). The boss strolled by, saw what I was doing, and ripped all the tape off. Then he taped it properly, (right). I wasn’t invited to come back the next day.

Wow big dump today…>.> …hmm poor choice of words. Nice T-shirt illustration. I liked seeing the raw sketch. Good stuff.

I was backing up my hard drive… cleaning house, a bit. Found some stuff laying around. Lots more, if you’re interested. I’ll see what I have for hand-drawn and sketchy-type stuff.

Ahhhh I see. Well I find it a pleasure to see your work, but it is up to you what you want to share.

I’d like to see more of your collaborations for games, I really liked that TD game art you posted a while back. As always, great work, and just letting you know even if I’m not posting, I am watching this topic :)

pete your inspirational never stop.

:D

Thanks, Lime!

Uzzbuzz, most of my game graphics are for paper-based productions. I’ll see what I can come up with. The most interesting thing about them is revealing some of the challenges and reasons behind why it looks the way it does.