Wolfenstein Papercraft: Tesla Gun

The first 3D first person shooter computer game I can remember playing was Wolfenstein 3D. This papercraft Tesla gun comes from the 2001 remake of the game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. In both games the storyline involves an American soldier who attempts to escape from an underground Nazi research facility during World War 2. The Tesla gun comes in handy in the escape attempt as it fires bolts of electricity that fry enemies. This scaled down papercraft model of the gun was created by German industrial design student, Jan Kapischke. A template may be downloaded here.

Concept ships by Nick Constantine

Check Nick's port for higher res images... Amazing. Now over at ILM it looks like. Nick's back in the day header.












Keywords: painterly concept ships concept spaceship art by nick constantine concept artist at ilm industrial light and magic san francisco california

New Kitty Art

So is it just me or are Persian kitties the Bulldogs of the cat world?  They seem to have so much attitude ... even more than the average kitty. I really enjoyed working on Gizmo. He had a great original photograph. He looks soft and sweet and also rather sassy.

"Gizmo" ( see all proofs)

© rebecca collins /artpaw.com

Nintendo Papercraft: Toad Paper Toy

Toad is a character who has appeared in numerous Nintendo video games. He lives in the Mushroom Kingdom and is one of Princess Peach's most loyal servants. This paper toy Toad was originally posted on a Japanese website as late as 2006, but sadly the web page is no longer up. Fortunately, Denise at the "Oh! Crafty Me" blog has a copy available for download. Go to her page here and look for the link near the bottom of the page to get the template.

New Doxie Art

"Archie & Eddie" ( see all proofs)

© rebecca collins /artpaw.com

This is Archie & Eddie ... I just adore these two cute Doxies and their mod couch. The original photograph was great so this project went well.  I need to work on their kitty friend soon.

"3D speech bubbles"

Very nice vector 3d speech bubble frames. Enjoy.
Authors unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 700 KB

Download

"FIFA logos"

The logos of the football federation and world cup logo in south africa.
1 AI : 1,3 MB

Download

"Brick wall"

A vector brick wall...whatever....
Author unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 9 MB

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"Acupoints on human body"

A nice vector map of acupoint on human body.
Author unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 1,7 MB

Download

Taking off the Mask: Essays Volume I

The Blog of Innocence was started in 2008 with the motivating desire to write essays and meditations on a broad spectrum of topics that intimately concerned me. The title of “Innocence” is a partial response to Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Whereas Pessoa’s writings center on an imaginative cynicism, I sought to create essays that would appeal to just the opposite.

The sense I wanted to convey about myself and the world was a simple questioning and naivety toward material reality and experience. I don’t go in for any postmodern tricks here, but rather I seek to return to a state where cleverness and sophistication are alien and not very useful to understanding ourselves. I want to experience not knowing, so I can further discover something.

You will see many references to The Blog of Innocence in these essays; this is because the essays were originally posted on my blog. There will be four volumes of essays available as eBooks, each covering a different subject area. This first volume, entitled Taking off the Mask, concerns life and culture. The next volume will be concerned with art. The volume after that will be concerned with technology and the web. And the last volume will be concerned with literature and writing.

My sincerest wish is that you take something from these words of mine. Writing is the closest thing to my heart. It is the way I commune with others, and myself.

Taking Off the Mask: Essays Volume I

Vinicius Menezes' concept ships

bloodtaster on deviantart.







Keywords: concept spaceship art illustrations by vinicius menezes bloodtaster on deviantart south american concept artist brazil concept art

Hershey & Snoop /Sneak Preview

"Hershey & Snoop"  (work in progress)

34 x 54

© rebecca collins / artpaw.com

Original photo above

Today I am working on several projects including the two sleep labs above. It is going to be a busy week, I will be posting more projects soon.

Concept spaceship art by Mariusz Szulc

masz-rum on deviantart.











Keywords: concept spaceship art from by mariusz szulc masz-rum airbrushing traditional illustration digital art from poland

Mosaic Monday/ Godzilla

Godzilla
Originally uploaded by Velvet Glass

Found this rather wild mosaic over at flickr. Artists Mark Bloom and Maggie Rickard take "camp" to a whole new level with their off-beat subjects. Click on the image to visit them over at Flickr or check out their main domain velvetglass.com . I love that studio name ... with "velvet glass" , not only do you get the campy image of black velvet paintings in your mind but there is the playful contrast of soft and hard.... this is one very clever and talented duo.



You really need to click on the image to go see this one larger ... it is something else.

Concept ships gets dirty

How are some of these sites getting so much traffic? Thanks dirty! Twenty thousand page views in two days. Dang.




Keywords: mad visitor internet traffic from dirty.ru website to conceptships.blogspot.com 20,000 pages in two days

From The Archives/ Mickey

Mickey
Originally uploaded by artpaw

This is a project I did way back in 07. You can click the image to find a larger version over on flickr. It is a sunny Sunday and this happy smiling dog sums up my enthusiasm for the day ahead. Hope you all have a good one.

With the Passage of Time

Julie Heffernan, Self-Portrait as Broken Home

Throughout the course of a day, many battles are fought. The mere fact of having a physical body creates stress--whether in the form of exhaustion, bouts of emotion, anxiety. But the alternative, floating around in some amoeba-like wavy film, doesn't sound any more appealing.

And so we have this body. I've been a bit unhappy with my body--now into my thirties, I lack the motivation to lose the weight I've gained in the last year. This requires discipline and for a long time, I've avoided the necessary restraint to curb my appetites.

I wonder if as we get older we lose certain motivations. I'm obsessive about writing, reading, and my work--those things seem to motivate me to a fault--but the care of the body, once a concern, no longer matters.

I'm sort of embarrassed to say that I don't care for my body as I once did. Because the real reason for this is I don't have anyone to impress. There are no women I'm trying to woo, or otherwise get their attention, have dinner with, etc.

Since my late twenties, I've socialized less and less, and my circle of intimates has narrowed.

By choosing to marry, you can prevent the circumstances I've just described. You may be lonely in another sense, but you'll never feel isolated. If anything (and I'm speculating here because I'm not married), you'll feel crowded or as my mother used to put it, "I feel like I'm drowning."

My mother was a fierce individualist, an artist, and not really suited to raising a family or having children. But she did and I acquired many of her traits for contemplation, creativity, solitude and private work.

She used to keep journals in her art studio, many of them handmade. She bound her own sketchbooks and journals. I remember seeing the half-cut fabrics in the laundry room beside reams of thread. But she stored her journals downstairs, in a chest of drawers. My mother's art studio had immaculate white walls and was filled with repurposed furniture and random objects cluttering the floor.

She created scenes with the furniture, rugs, or whatever she found around the house. Her models sat under giant flood lights, and for hours my mother would stand at a canvas and translate this imaginary situation into a painting. The window of her studio regularly appeared in her paintings, with a view of our suburban enclave, a privileged world protected by a gate.

It was a beautifully landscaped, dead conglomerate of houses. The houses were so big and set apart that it was an inconvenience to visit people. You would have to drive to their house just to say hello.

As a teenager, the vastness of the subdivision inspired many adventures on my bike. I charted the territory available to me. Originally a golf course, which had been transformed into a gated community, there were several large ponds, always with a great deal of Canadian geese squawking and shitting in the grass. I remember the exact color of the grass on most days. It was dark green. Around the ponds were massive weeping willow trees and I used to stand on the tops of the roots jutting out of the ground. Sometimes there were nooks in the bottom branches, where you could sit and watch the cars go by.

The grounds of the Midwest Club, where I lived, were expansive. Cul de sacs snaking up hills, and new houses always being built, large, preposterous modern ones. I used to to explore the construction sites with a friend, and we collected those bottle-cap things. The little metal caps were scattered in the sawdust, and we filled our pockets with them.

The basements, I recall. Most basements of the houses we couldn't go down into; there wasn't a staircase built yet. But we peered into the gaping hole that extended into shadows and frameworks for rooms. We marveled at this part of the house, I imagine, because it was so inaccessible.

In time, every basement we peered into would become a finished one, with lush carpets and modern cooling devices to keep the temperature just right. Some of the basements would be equipped with small movie theaters or bowling alleys. The general rule of the place where I lived was that every year a newer, more elaborate house would be built. The new house in the subdivision with a waterfall, indoor gardens, and running streams, would inevitably provoke gossip and cause the other residents to look with envy as they drove back to their humble, dated mansions.

This probably explains why I wanted to spend so much of my later adolescence outside of the house, and the neighborhood, for that matter. Our environments undoubtedly shape our personalities, and when I was younger, I remember being by myself a lot. Whether it was amid the vastness of the gated community or sequestered inside my own large house, it was a common experience that repeated itself.

It seems I had more friends when I was younger, but at every stage of my life I've felt a disconnect between myself and others. I felt this even when I had made friends in high school or college; my friendships were always private and never in large groups. They were also tenuous. When a friend was accepted into a larger group, I was usually left on my own. I'm not wallowing here--that's just how things turned out for me. And I kind of liked being by myself.

Of course, a part of us desires what we don't have, and so, I did long for acceptance and to be part of a larger group. But my personality never allowed for it. Another way to put this is I didn't fit in.

And now that I'm thirty years old, soon to be thirty-one, I'm slowly recognizing why things are the way they are for me.

We tend to forget the past, and how we developed into individuals. I feel stuck when I forget my past, like a coma has obscured some vital reference points. And these instances of my separation from others, where I lived, how I grew up, describe my tendency toward contemplation and creativity, as opposed to other forms of immersion, like social immersion, which has always made me slightly uncomfortable.

I understand why I'm on my own, and it doesn't bother me as much as it used to. I've always wanted this, even though I may have pretended otherwise.

Every choice in life implies the loss of another. Since I was very young, I chose to cultivate my interior world. And that's where my poems come from, and these essays.

Strangely enough, when I write these essays, I'm consciously reaching out to the world. The fact that my interiority changes to its opposite makes me think that while we're always "on our own," we also have this place to meet others, through language and art. It's a wonderful hidden doorway, and I'm passing through it a lot these days.

Half-Life 2 Papercraft: HEV Suit Shin Armor

For most of Half-Life 2, a Mark V HEV suit is worn by Dr. Gordon Freeman, the main character of the video game. HEV is an acronym for "Hazardous EnVironment", so in the game the suit was designed to be worn by scientists when handling hazardous materials in a laboratory environment. The suit consists of a body glove covered by various pieces of armor. I received a request a while back to do a full size papercraft HEV suit. My hectic work schedule of late prevented me from releasing any of it before now, but the first piece is finally complete! Over the coming months I will attempt to release the various pieces of armor that make up the HEV suit. First up is the "shin armor". The template info for it is as follows:

Scale 1:1
Finished size: 20.5" (52.2 cm) x 7.7" (19.5 cm) x 6.1" (15.5 cm)
Number of pages: 10
Number of parts: 30
Difficulty: 3/5
Download

The template for the shin armor is based on the right leg of a 3D model from the game. The paper model is symmetrical enough that it can be worn on either leg, but if anyone is a stickler for detail and would like a reversed template for the left leg, send me an e-mail request. I tried on the test build of the shin armor and it was almost an exact fit. However, I am 5'11" (180cm) tall, so someone of a different height may need to modify the template in order to get it to fit correctly.

Related Posts

Headcrab Zombie Mask

Glock 9mm Handgun

Mothra!

So what's in your backyard?  We have been invaded by super duper large moths around here.  This stunning chartreuse fellow is supposedly a nighttime moth named the "Luna Moth".  His colors could not be more exquisite. He is about as large as my fist.

Next week I will have lots of new projects to post so check back in on the blog.

Ears Matter ... in pet portraiture

"Mac" from Australia ( see all proofs)
© rebecca collins / artpaw.com

A lot of pet portrait artists will tell you that the eyes are all important because they contain the soul of an animal. This is very true and yet it is important to remember that while the eyes may hold the soul ... the ears often contain the joy. The only thing that expresses more about mood and attitude than a wagging tail is the way a pup's ears are showing. I love perky ears and when I do not have them in an original photograph I will try to create them. Scroll down and check out the original image below and you will see that Mac's ear to our right was a little flat. Many digital service providers that offer pet portrait services have a routine of erasing the background and then slamming on the filters, never pausing to really see the image in front of them. Even traditional painters can fall into a trap of interpreting the original photograph way too literally, not pausing to ask themselves what could be better here, what is distracting and what could be better? In Mac's case I found he had too much collar flap and not enough ear. I don't mean to pick on other artists, in fact sometimes I fail to catch these sort of things too, in a pet portrait project I did last week Lady's ear to our right was folded a little strange and I am going to go back in and fix that.  Anyway ... the point of today's post : "Ears Matter,"  and never allow yourself to be limited by the original photograph of your subject.  A landscape artist painting a lovely lake would not hesitate to throw in a sailboat even if he has to create it from scratch based on his own knowledge of what a boat looks like.

© rebecca collins/ artpaw.com

How Did I Make  A New Ear?

I borrowed our ear to the left by selecting it and making a duplicate layer with just the ear. I flipped it horizontally so it was facing the right way, cloned over a dark freckle and then used the warp tool to change the shape slightly. That last step of warping the new ear is very important, nobody is perfectly symmetrical and depending on angle and the tilt of the head the ears will be different sizes naturally. Just slapping on an identical ear would not have looked very natural, it had to be reshaped and fine tuned.

Twin turret tank

I took one of Ben Wootten's drawings and elaborated on it a little bit.
This is a TWIN TURRET TANK. It is remotely operated and has two independently moving turrets for twice the punch. There is more storage for ammo since the vehicle carries no people/soldiers:)



Keywords: collaboration elaboration on ben woottens tank twin turret remotely controlled armored tank vehicle animated flash loop concept ships

Chica, Bailey, Gracie

"Chica" ( see all proofs)

© rebecca collins

"Bailey" ( see all proofs)

© rebecca collins

 "Gracie" ( see all proofs)

© rebecca collins

These three adorable pups are shipping out today. Bailey & Chica both measure 24x24 and the images shown were the selected proofs.  Gracie is a little 11 x 14 and  her selected proof had the same red ground as Bailey. All were created in my painterly style.  Some days we do nothing but big dogs like labs and Weims and then some weeks it is all about the lap dogs.

We have several projects in-house and I am trying hard to keep up. Working on: Doxies, kitties, rooster, horse, Basenjis, Labs, a Schnauzer and an American Bulldog, and some adorable human kiddos.  Be patient guys and I'll get everyone proofed as quickly as possible.  I'll be away from my desk on Friday in order to prepare for a class I am teaching on Sat.

Ben Wootten on Concept ships

Ben Wootten's deviantart gallery.









Keywords: concept spaceship illustration scenes ships futuristic space port in hangars by ben wooten concept military land tank vehicles

Multiple Pet Project

Lady, Mitzi, Soldier, Lacie ( see all proofs)
© rebecca collins /artpaw.com

Multiple pet projects can be rather challenging when it comes to composition.  When you have a variety of different types of pups in totally different poses you have to get very creative when it comes time to place them on one canvas. You will notice in the original photos here that we have one pretty girl laying down with her nose cropped off, that is Lady. Mitzi is hiding behind the chair that had to be cloned out. Lacie the white pup had a great photo with no glow eye and yet she was shot from above so when we erased her background we had a pretty image and yet her back-side was growing out of the top of her head so that had to be erased. That little rascal Soldier the yorkie had a great straight on full body shot and he was really the easiest to work with.  You will notice I placed some pillows in the scene...that was a device to try to hide areas where bodies were not filling in the entire space and in the case of Lady, she really needed something to lay on. I was able to take Ladie's top paw and place it under her chin so she looked like she was resting better, that paw would have been a real problem left where it was.  I crab a lot about the how hard multiple pet projects can be but the reality is that I enjoy a challenge, and with pups as cute as these how could I miss?

"Scissors"

Yes! 1 always need this vector scissors for couponing graphics`n stuff.
1 AI : 200 KB

Download

"Mixed silhouettes"

And it won`t stop. Just another small set of some vectorized silhouettes.
Authors unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 200 KB

Download

Mosaic Monday: Swarm Robot

Swarm Robot
Originally uploaded by artpaw

Wow, Mosaic Monday so soon. We spent the weekend taking care of a 2 legged senior doggy. It was hard work and I am a bit exhausted, but I did get a good nights rest.

This will be a crazy busy week, and I am totally ready to conquer it. This robot image is one of my recent 6 x 6 little robots.  I am finishing up several mosaic projects this month and hope to post about a large 24 x 18 octopus soon.

I am teaching a workshop this weekend on using the computer as a design tool for mosaics. I have 2 openings left if anyone is in Dallas and wants to sign up. I will also be creating an on-line version of the class for those that can not travel and it will be posted a week or so after the real-world class. Learn more here: http://www.rebeccacollins.com/workshop2.html.  You do not have to be a digital junkie like myself to take advantage of tools like Photoshop or Photoshop elements when it comes to design work.  The goal is not to replace the old fashion pencil and sketch book, but to add to your creative arsenal with tools that can help you spin your creative ideas around quickly into new possibilities.

Concept ships by Gergely Buttinger

skylow on deviantart.









Keywords: concept spaceship art design illustration concepts by skylow deviant art gallery gergely buttinger from hungary