Project #2: The Clique Bears

This is my twisted parody of the Care Bears.  The idea behind it is that we all have to watch shows when we're little kids that try to teach us values that society deems necessary for us to believe in, and what happens when we get older?  We turn into people like this.  There are five highschool clique stereotypes here, from left to right: emo bear, nerd bear, jock bear, cheer bear, and my personal favorite, the punk bear.  But I find that the stereotypes are just as shallow as the childhood values that society tries to program into us.  So it may be a good thing that we left behind those childhood lessons because the world is too complex to live by such simple ideals.

Project #2 The final pieces

The following are pictures that I used to finish off the project.

Next, we have the three bears that I created and the background I selected, which is my favorite spot at my previous college.  The bears are supposed to be in highschool, but I don't think it makes a difference.

Project #2 still going...

It's been hard to work with the picture that I already found online to use.

Disgustingly cheerful, I know.  I was able to make a couple of pieces using this one...

...but now I'm afraid the original picture has outlived its usefulness.  I would rather find these bears in more useful poses if I can help it.  I still have several more pieces that I need to make, somewhere in between 3 and 5.

Chapter 1 Response

I thought that reading chapter 1 of the text book would be such a pain, what with all those pages to read.  But it wasn't so bad, a lot of pages were just pictures.  I find it rather amazing how much stuff can be done with digital tools, if I wasn't dead set on becoming a video game developer then digital art would definitely be an option.  There is a trend that I've noticed with digital and analogue photography, and that's how the photographer seems to go to a lot of trouble to set up just one or two pictures.  Like that one picture that was just the paths of lights made by people doing sign-language, there's no way anyone could figure that out just by looking at it.  I've had experience with photography before, in a class for black-and-white film photos, so I know about how dicey it can be to set something up.  Some photographer purists think that digital photography is the wrong way to go, that it's for people that want to take pictures without being professional or some such things but that's not what it's about.  Think about it, with digital cameras we can cut a lot of work from photography out of the equation, making production cleaner and more efficient and also allowing room for new things to be developed.  Another thing that got my attention were those 3D skewed skulls that were done.  It's such a cool and futuristic thing to be able to print things in 3D and could be really useful to me personally, if only I had access to the on campus 3D printer.  I like going to anime conventions, and I often need props to go with my costumes but I'm not much of a crafter.  So if I could just design 3D props on a computer and print them out, imagine the possibilities.  One last thing I'd like to know is if this text book will actually explain how to do any of these things ourselves, but other than that I've got nothing more to say.

Project #2 progress

Okay, so my original idea consisted of taking pictures of Dick Cheney and merging them with images of the Terminator and Darth Vader and whatever else that would show him to be as evil as he actually is.  A couple of problems occured.  First thing, such pictures are actually somewhat common.  Secondly, the images I found just weren't working out.  So that idea has been tossed in favor of another one.  The new idea is a parody of high school stereotypes starring the Care Bears.  I hope it works out, I'm too tired to think of anything else right now.  I'm not even going to bother hunting down a picture of a highschool on Google, seeing as how I live across the street from one or I could go visit my old one.  Maybe I can even talk to students there to get their ideas about clique stereotypes that I could use.  I've already decided on using the jock, cheerleader, nerd, slut, and emo types, but there must be others I haven't thought of.

Parody video (I think...)

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I hope this works, I've never tried to post a video to a blog before.  Not sure it's a parody either, it does poke fun at rock bands and Woodstock and it sort of resembles an Abbot and Costello routine, and while it doesn't have any profound meaning it sure is funny.

Text and brush assignment

After finding a set of lightning brushes, I decided to throw in some lightning-related puns for good measure.