RAG - Random Art Generator

Hey everyone who follows my blog (all five of you!) If any of you are artists, I've got something you might find interesting/exciting. I'm working with a game dev friend of mine and he's helping me create this Random Art Generator. It will be available in both. swf and .exe formats for anyone who's interested.

The purpose of these creations is largely personal. I find the first step in designing to be one of the most difficult. In the early stages of design I think it's crucial to have some sort of inspiration behind what you're designing, whether it be a human character, a monster, or whatever. I sometimes wake up in the night and have the most awesome designs in my head, but I find that that rarely happens in the day, when I can actually use it. While photographs, art books, and artist blogs are good for referencing when designing, I've always found the initial shape designing to be the most difficult step for me. My hope is that these engines will provide the inspiration there that I need and will hopefully be useful to other artists as well.

We've only been working on it for 2 days so far and we're coming up with some pretty incredible results. I plan to create alternate versions of the application for a variety of purposes. This one we've been working on will be for vehicle design. There will also be versions for:

Humanoid Design
Alien Design
Monster Design
Prop Design
Background Design
...and probably some more as I think of them

For those wishing to create designs based on their own custom art, that may be an option, though I doubt the source code will be made available.

Here are a few samples, enjoy! (If any of you artists use any of these to create some cool designs, I would love for you to send me what you come up with so I can show some examples. Thanks.)

You can e-mail me flashpotatoes@gmail.com

Woogi World Review Designs

Some Desktop Designs I recently did for WoogiWorldReview.com

Washington/Oregon Vacation

Manzanita beach, Oregon

Lyss's way of saying "Don't try sticking me back in that car seat!"

Quinault Lake, Washington

I had to take four photos to fit the whole tree in and merged them in Photoshop. Then I had to use another picture to put me and my daughter in the shot so you can get a better idea of just how huge this tree is.

Beautiful view of Packwood near Mt. Rainier in Washington.

Sketchbook Stuff

working on it some more.
I got the trial version of AutoDesk SketchbookExpress when I recently bought my new Intous 4, yay! A new tablet finally. My Intous 2 had a long and happy life of about 5 years. It still works, but has kind of been on the fritz. I bought an Intous 3 a while back and had issues with it when drawing in Flash, so I returned it and decided to put up with my old tablet. I'm happy to say, the Intous 4 is totally awesome; at least so far. It came with this trial software; pretty much a bunch of junk except for Sketchbook. I think it's a better application for sketching than Photoshop. I can't really put my finger on why, but it just seems to be more suited for sketch work.
I pretty much suck at painting right now, I know. This is little more than a color slapping right now. I think the design has got some potential though.

Some rough and finished designs

I typically work extremely loose like this in the beginning. I've had a lot of teachers, friends and acquaintances discount my abilities as an artist because of it. I say phooey though; I've found that drawing the way I draw and not subscribing to "the right way" frees my mind and my hands to be more creative and I end up with illustrations and animations that are "me" and they're the ones people tend to like the best. Granted, I have a long road ahead of me still, I plan to continue teaching myself through books and practice until I die (which is hopefully a ways off still).

Cluck Cluck

A fun little desktop for anyone who likes psycho little VooDoo chickens and green that will burn your eyes out of your eyeholes.