Tag: illustration

a sheep taking pictures as a line drawing

Loving Adobe Fresco – New Drawings

Loving Adobe Fresco – New Drawings in 2023

I have been getting busy with Adobe Fresco. (Fresco is FREE by the way!) I admit it, I love digital drawing! If you are an artist that is making a transition from analog materials into the digital world, then look no further than Adobe Fresco. I know, Im excited, and no, they are not paying me to say this. This is a great product and piece of software, but mainly, a powerful tool! Did I already say that it was free?

What exactly is “digital drawing”? Let’s try to break it down, or at least interpret it, digital drawing is the process of creating artwork using digital tools. Examples? Well, digital tools can be a graphics tablet (iPad or iPhone) and stylus (apple pencil), or a touchscreen device.. These kinds of tools are important because they allow us to create, edit, and share the work more easily and efficiently than traditional methods. Digital art can be easily stored, shared, and edited, whereas traditional art, such as physical drawings or paintings, can be difficult to preserve and share. I know this because I have a seemingly endless “space and storage” issue with those things.. Additionally, digital drawing allows for greater precision and control, as well as the ability to undo mistakes and experiment with different techniques and effects. Im not saying that Im going to give up paint, paper, pencils, markers and charcoal, but, wow, drawing with a tool like Fresco is addicting!

Let’s check out some new work below!

 

Look at those clean, smooth stylized vector lines! If you would to color this drawing in, e-mail me and I’ll send you a pdf version to work from. I had a blast drawing this, and also colorizing it, digitally..

With so many new and accelerating technologies and tools popping up everywhere, what will art look like in 10 years? I find it difficult to predict exactly what the future of art will look like in 10 years, as it is constantly evolving (in general) and being influenced by various factors such as technology, society, culture, the media, politics, social issues, education, individual artists and etcetera… However, it is likely that technology will continue to play a significant role in the creation and consumption of visual art. For example, virtual and augmented reality will become more integrated into the art-viewing experience, allowing viewers to interact with and experience art in new ways. Additionally, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the creation of art will become more prevalent. It’s also possible that more creators will start to use digital platforms to distribute their work and make art more accessible to a global audience. However, traditional mediums like painting, sculpture, and printmaking will always have a place in the art world, and in my process and heart for sure!

For now, scroll down and enjoy some new digital drawings! Let me know what you think, do you have a favorite? Like the textures, colors?

Want to see more?

a group of b-boys and b-girls chillin' together as a single line drawing

 

A Sketchbook Tour

A New Sketchbook Has Been Completed, Let’s Tour It!

Well, here we are in the summer of 2022!

Classes are now over, and its time to catch up on some “other-ness.” The category of “other-ness” can mean a lot of things for sure.. like redesigning this website and updating my brand and visual identity! But wait, there will be A LOT of procrastination in between that so I can DRAW, and PAINT, and DRAW some More! This new sketchbook was completed in the month of May 2022, its pretty much a “one drawing or collage per day” kind of gig. Yes, this all happened in between final exams, grading, my client work and life! 

Keeping a sketchbook is so helpful, let’s see why below..

Check out the video tour!

Feel free to pause the video and or revisit that images that you like the most.

I have been filling up sketchbooks since I am a little kid. I have well over 300 of them in my collection.. (OMG!) I use sketchbook’s as a vehicle of immediate expression, intuition and the of recording ideas! There is nothing more liberating than simply allowing myself to make an image! There is no judgement, it is not good or bad, I don’t seek to like it or dislike it, I just allow myself to spill out onto the paper and fill up the pages until they run out. I then repeat the process! 

Share your comments below!

Im going to incorporate this into a class collaboration assignment this coming fall semester!

Cut-N-Paste-Analog-N-Electronic-Ness

A new post on process reflection through blogging.

The best teacher I have ever known is the “inner-one” that allows a time for reflection as it wiggles through its narrative from the inside outward.

Here is my take and example.

 

December, late 2021

Back at it. The saga continues. I want to make images, always.. Which is really saying I want to communicate better, or just more, or in new ways. Sometimes the communication is purely fictional. Sometimes the communication is out of frustration because I cant find the words at the moment. Or, sometimes it’s an other worldliness that is using me as a “tool” to make itself known. Either way, it’s a practice and methodology of my expression of “the-self”. My feeling towards art making has always been: “make something and then further extend what has been generated”. I always want to see how that “something” can be taken further. If I make a drawing, I will eventually want to make a painting based on the drawing (sometimes it’s with paint and sometimes the paint is with pixels). After I make the painting it may become the background for the original drawing I made, but the drawing has now been scanned and digitally manipulated. That digital image will get tweaked and revised and also expand. I will then print it, I love old school ink-jet printers and the aesthetic they can produce. Im a “cut-N-paste” lover too, so making collage based works is a must. 

Above, this is a pretty regular perspective I find myself gazing at. Many pieces, parts, fragments and clips awaiting their deployment. I like to see things both on screen and off screen. Printed matter still holds my attention. Its a form of nostalgia and a time-machine into my childhood where art making was always a part of my world. It never stopped and Im sure it wont as long as Im on the planet. Im sure it will continue even when Im off of the planet too, haha.

I suppose, Im always seeking to communicate some form of a “situation or circumstance” in my work. As if “something” was occurring at the moment and the viewer was able to peek in and hit the pause button to freeze the frame of that “something”. I do make quite a bit of animation work too, but that was the natural progression over time as a medium. Plus the tools are so much more accessible today. I never forgot the basics of what I have learned from two-dimensional design in high school. Figure / ground. Foreground, middle-ground and background.. I placed a border around this piece above, perhaps that clean boarder makes the image as a whole seem a bit more important.. or it just emphasizes the moment. The fragments above were not yet glued down, I lay them out and look at them for a while before I make them seemingly permanent. I always take a digital image.. always!

Im really happy with this piece above. The perfect tension between the subjective and the representational. A moment of passing memories, elusive and most likely not even accurate. A portal out of reality and into the imagination. I like to linger there. The image is made from a series of digital photographs and hand drawn illustrations that were manipulated digitally and the full cut-n-paste treatment at its best.. This piece is currently still untitled, for now.. I will surely scan it and bring it back into the digital arena again.

(this piece above is available as a 3/3 edition here – https://hicetnunc.art/objkt/375773 (or click the image)

Ah ha, well, the image above this one was derived from this one! A combination of a manipulated data bent images layered with several glitch renderings. Cut, layered, pasted and cut and pasted again. What works for me the most is the hand cut lines that are visible by their contours. You can see that this was printed and then cut out with a pair of scissors. The lines are not straight, we can only get that perfect line from a ruler and an x-acto knife.. I have no need for making anything “perfect” in such an imperfect world. 

Format change. A horizontal layout variation to switch it up a bit. This piece uses the same process as stated above. It has not yet been glued down and made permanent.. but is that even necessary with digital tools like photoshop? A good question to ponder and what does that mean in the future?

And then, oh yes, the ink-jet bleeding experiments! Did you know about it? Well well well, look at who’s attention just focused in! If you print on matte paper with an ink-jet printer you can use a soft brush and water and create some very cool looking bleeding aesthetics! Im a big fan of this piece! This is surely a subjective and abstract art work, but it still followed the same steps and process as I shared from the beginning. Im going to print some larger scale variations of this, and perhaps have one framed.

I decided to get a bit more formal here in my presentation and laid down a few of these pieces. Sometimes it helps to get the gallery perspective and see one’s work “up on the wall”. The vertical perspective is helpful. Of course these pieces would look better in a more traditional frame, and its this exact exercise that helps me make those decisions. Below, are a few close up versions of each piece. Obviously there is more to come. Thanks for reading!

A Metaphor, A Reminder, An Assignment..

"A Metaphor, A Reminder", 2021, a Digital Illustration by ryan Seslow - A Metaphor, A Reminder is a new digital illustration that brings together an array of peculiar imagery. Most of which is very subjective - shapes, colors and forms layer over each other to display creative suchness.

“A Metaphor, A Reminder”, 2021, Digital Illustration

A Metaphor, A Reminder is a new digital illustration that brings together an array of peculiar imagery. Does it not?

What do you experience?

Are they logos? Icons? Glyphs? Pictograms? Symbols? A sheep in wolf’s clothing? 

Everyday is an opportunity to bring new shapes, forms and color combinations together. For what purpose, you may ask?Well, this might be an exercise, about the expressive power to evolve and transcend a something.. a metamorphoses..

Even if, some, or all of the new forms may be 100% subjective at first, they come from a “somewhere” and can be applied to a “here” and also to a “now”. We can fuse the whole process with emotion, creative energy, memories and positive vibrations. If we look and don’t create what will happen?

If we make and design and practice that everyday what will or may happen?

What can, only if, and or may, happen?

This world has made us all creators by default but we do know it?

What will you do next?

Metaphoric Narratives with the Nature of Nature

Metaphoric Narratives with the Nature of Nature

2020/2021 Digital Illustration

Aaaaand we are back with another series of digital art works and a bit of a “how to” process post. Forgive me for the title of this blog post.. At first, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be an assignment tutorial of some kind, or just an over-sharing process and rambling session. It will serve as all of the above. Ok, so, lets face it, we all love photoshop. We all love the pen-tool and the ability to cut, create, apply and remix images with our graphic assets. Yes? Of course! OK OK, Ill get down to brass tacks already.. In this series I wanted to create and play with some fictional characters and also displace them into my everyday surroundings. It is in this process of being experimental that new narratives seem to poke at and guide us. Lets jump in. Of course I am sharing this process from the perspective of my own art making but also will use the steps to illustrate a class assignment for my foundation design and digital storytelling students. The ability to create well balanced and compelling compositions is skill set that is fun to cultivate and it never gets old. “Let’s always be practicing”, practicing  the ability to compose and create while mastering the dimensions of our picture plane. (that academic jargon…)

 

The gang is all here.. This example shares an integration of characters and the ability to use repetition, duplicates and scale (plus those shadows…). I love walking past the Brooklyn Museum in my neighborhood. I love the building itself and wanted to use it as one of the locations for this new “situation” to occur..

 

This image was taken outside of the Brooklyn Public Library, it shares a series of imagery and the application of a character. Our hero has found itself as a part of public advertisement. Perhaps this is fictional? OK, it is, but think about how your everyday surroundings may offer an opportunity for you to intervene, hack, displace and re-contextualize things. There is beauty in the seemingly banal or redundant, and what I mean by this is our everyday surroundings. We have the power to transform and transcend them. Visual imagery and image-making is a fun way to participate and also see the world in a new way.

 

By default, your friends are going to show up! Another example of repetition, composition and scale variation. Does this illustration tell a more compelling story than the image above it? Are the additional plants needed? What do they add to the composition and story? What is their intention here? Will they expand and take over? Well…

 

Above, is the original image that I took at Prospect Park that inspired the entirety of this series. (Im back tracking the narrative of this post a bit… just like in the Film “Pulp Fiction”… haha, not exactly but Im thinking about that..) The algae was really think and particularly a warmer value of saturated green than I recalled from most visits to this spot. It was also late July and pretty warm outside. Sometimes all it takes is one experience, story or image that causes the creativity trigger. After I took the picture I immediately reflected upon a memory of the 1980s film “Swamp Thing”.. are you old enough to remember that movie? Lol, I was just a kid when it came out but I loved it! So, I got inspired, fast! The image below was the first iteration beyond the “normal” picture that I took. But there is more to this puzzle below..

 

Sooo, you recognize the image below.. that is where the plant came from. Its one of the 5 plants (and growing) that I take care of..(its much bigger now as I write this a few months later too). Im illustrating all of this to help give you a bit of insight into the immediate and very intuitive thinking and creation process that I go through. I like the immediacy of using my own surrounds and digital image captures. This can all be so easily synced with other forms of media found in the public domain or via other creative commons resources. Plus, I experience the process as a muscle, it wants to be exercised, nurtured and practiced. It wants to grow!

 

I brought the image into photoshop and used the pen tool to cut it out. Once I had it free as an asset I started constructing my character. The figure was extracted from a painting found in the MET Museums Digital Open Access Image Archive of public domain works. There is a lot of good stuff there!

 

OK, so this fellow is NOT exactly “Swamp Thing” but it certainly expressed that energy and inspired the flow of the illustrations. I animated this guy below and also added it as a sticker on Instagram. If you use Instagram Stories, under the GIF search option you can put in my name (ryan seslow) and find this guy below… use it at will! There are some some others there too 🙂

Well, one idea leads to another and I kept going.. this is another character and asset above. The static image wanted to be added to a narrative and that narrative became a looping animated GIF. Its a short surreal story, and it was fun to make…

 

The Assignment Details:

Simply: Using this post as your inspiration, dig into your intuition and creative impulses and create a fun hybrid character that you can interject or displace into a narrative using your familiar surrounds.

Have fun and be sure to share your work here!

HNY! The First Post of 2021!

The First Post of 2021

Welcome to the first post of 2021, as well as the first body of new art works for the year. It all begins with a series of digital illustrations made from my own photography and Adobe Dimension. I have been meaning to dig into this application for about a year now so Im happy to start off 2021 with these new illustrations. They are surely surreal and “otherworldly” but the last 9 months is a reflection of just that, certainly surreal, isolating and otherworldly…and then-some. 2021 will be a year of deep investigation and experimenting with digital 3D design, 3D software and a jump further with 3D animation and motion graphics.

Im beyond excited! Hope you enjoy these first iterations, much more to come! Happy 2021!

 

“The Egg-Shaped Visitation”, 2021, Digital Illustration

 

“The Visitations”, 2021, Digital Illustration

 

“The Pill-Shaped Visitation”, 2021, Digital Illustration

 

“The Return of the Monolith Visitations”, 2021, Digital Illustration

The Contemplation of Metaphoric Flight, A Creative Teaching Template

“We need a caption, Phil, I don’t want to disappoint Roz again, help me out here”
Countless memories, the sea air and the seemingly creative blunders of reflective such-ness..what will you contribute to the process?
This is a manipulated image, its a silly one, or perhaps you resonate with it seriously? Either way, we need to adjust the contrast of the art work, please help by listing some of the options we can apply.
This is great fodder for creative inducement, consider the potential of how images speak to us, especially finding value in the subjective. What will you “allow” yourself to share?
Contrasts can be oh so subtle, they can disrupt the default patterns, this is a metaphor! How will you disrupt the pattern to bypass the part of you that clings to the familiar?
OK, patterns can also be very COOL! Patterns are about order, but order is in need of an integration of variety every so often, OK, this is another metaphor, see the pattern? 🙂
A little bit of movement goes a long long way! A little bit of texture goes a long way as well. Seems to me that creative variety is more accessible than we may think..
Ahem, you get the message, right?

“The Contemplation of Metaphoric Flight”, 2019, is a series of digital art illustrations & GIF animations generated from public domain source images via the NYPL digital archives. The illustrations were created by your old friend, Ryan Seslow. The new series of works above were specifically created to be displayed here on the C.A.C as a part of the Net Art website’s ongoing exhibition series. It is intended to serve as a visual example, an accessible template, and the creative potential for displaying, publishing, presenting and archiving such a project. (The whole thing is a metaphor)

Wait! Am I suggesting that an online exhibition, published as a blog post on a unique cross-campus social media network can also be used as a teaching tool? A transparent pedagogical tactic?! Well, yes, yes, I am! Lets dig in.

The original public domain images were cut-out with the pen-tool, composed and applied using adobe photoshop (photoshop is your friend and loves you). Do you need a photoshop pen-tool / cut-out video tutorial? Go Here – The cut-outs were necessary for the first iteration of the static pictures above. (Im referring to the bird portraits and the human clothes used to place their heads onto and into) The cut-outs are handy as they can be saved as both .psd files (the original photoshop documents) and as a transparent .PNG file. The .PNG files have a transparent background, this makes it easy to layer them over and into existing images. Plus they are forever re-usable (variation, variation, variation). But, Ryan, I don’t have access to Photoshop… OK, well, there is a trail versions! Sign up and try it! But after that trail ends, so that you know, photoshop is not required to do any of this. Web applications like Pixlr are free and accessible for all to use in the browser window itself, er, with access to the Internet of course.. OK, you can just download the .PNG files here in ready to use mode (your welcome). 

Click here to access my database, this includes all spiritual GIF making insights and alchemy tactics to engage students!

OK, so, there are a few animations above as well. The first animations above were created in adobe after effects. The renders were pushed to my iPhone and into mobile applications like Glitche (yikes, its only for iOS) and iPhone’s “Clips” video sequence maker (there are alternatives for android) The files can be saved as mp4 or .mov files making it easy to apply the videos into other mobile video editing apps. Filters are fun to play with for more customizing and visual effects. The videos can be looped into GIF animations using great apps like ImgPlay (this app is awesome, it re-sizes, edits, and has multiple out-put sources.) Animated GIFs are great extenders of so many forms of communication! Im hooked on making GIFS! I make them all public domain by adding them to Giphy.com so by all means use them at will! Here is my feed.

Of course, the digital art, illustration, collage, GIF animation aspect can be a great creative course project in and of itself! Indeed, both on an individual level but perhaps collaborating is where the extended creativity and learning takes place. This can be achieved through digital storytelling using a blogging platform just like this one. See that, you find yourself “inside the actual example”! The illustrations above clearly required a caption, captions and or a narrative. Is the narrative fictional? Will you write a short story to support the images or maybe a reflection induced by the sequences of images? What references come to mind or coincide? How can you make the description compelling? Will you share hyperlinks to your references and resources? Will you embed animated GIFs or other snippets of relevant content? Can you recompose this blog post and use it as a metaphoric template for your own class project, assignment, syllabus or exhibition? (Hint, you can easily break free of the digital art example, but it might be fun to play with this as an idea.)

I believe that this example / template series will expand, who wants to collaborate on a creative cross campus project?

And seriously, have FUN with this!