Team Progress Report - 2.25.2010

One of the primary reasons this group has come together has been to track the progress of our projects over time and with that, get extra motivation to be more active and gain a valuable opportunity to assist each other's work. We have decided to do weekly progress reports to showcase our efforts to create and to show you all what we have been accomplishing. Considering this is our first such post, there probably will not be as much to share but you can expect these progress reports to become a major cornerstone of our group.

Justin - I'm working on creating some final textures for my iPhone game fishMoto. I found some nice surface textures on bittbox that I'll be using to enhance my game textures. I'm also in the middle of redesigning the main character and I think it's looking good -- I hope to share the results sometime next week!

Mike - Been busy with school the past week and probably will continue to be busy this upcoming one, so I intend to take advantage of this weekend to get a project or two rolling. First will be the storyboard for a script I have been working on. I plan on playing with different time frames and cutting those together in interesting ways so it will make a lot more sense if I have major scnes on something like notecards that I can move around. Should I finish this, I want to get the darkroom and makeshift studio set up in my garden shed.

Taylor - Recently I have just been working on a portrait of a friend, I'll post some progress pics soon! At the same time though I'll be looking for more subjects to paint!

Christina - This week I have been going back and forth between an under-painting for a commissioned piece, and designing a new tshirt made of salvaged thrift-store tshirts. Here are some snapshots:

Some designs for future ideas and the shirt Im currently sewing.

Set in the NY Stock Exchange. Architecture is a new thing for me to paint so its a pretty good exercise.

fishMoto: Art Direction

FishMoto is an iPhone game I'm developing using the Unity engine -- you play as an electric catfish hooked up to a motorbike with ridiculously stretchy shocks that allow for some crazy gameplay. While I have a good idea about how I want the game to play, I'm less sure about how I want the game to look. Below are some things I tried out over the last couple days -- these were all thrown together pretty quickly and served more to prototype different ideas.

Introduction: Taylor

My name is Taylor Blocker and I am currently a student at the University of North Texas double-majoring in Art History and Painting and Drawing, and pursuing minors in French and Chemistry. In my studio practice I like to focus on portraiture, though I plan on exploring a great deal more, especially while in my undergrad. Studying Art History has had a great deal of influence on paintings. I feel that along with a knowledge of terminology and methodologies, simply the vast quantities of different work you ingest and study as an Art History student has given me a wide breadth of knowledge to draw inspiration from.

I feel that I have gravitated towards portraiture basically because I find people interesting. I feel that people can be overlooked or judged very quickly without anyone bothering to look back and really consider someone's humanity, and I hope to bring their humanity into light with my work. I find Iconography and Semiotics particularly interesting, and try to include poses and symbols from classical and ancient work into my paintings, as well as creating some of my own to suit the modern modes of thinking.



I love the idea of bringing different subjects into traditional art, but also having a sense of humor about it. Not simply recreating what was done in the past but finding new ways of using their methods to portray different subjects, or commenting on how we live today.

An Introduction: Christina!

Hi guys, my name is Christina Day and I am a 24 year old visual artist. I recently graduated from the University of North Texas with a double-BFA in New Media (Electronic) Art and Drawing/Painting. As an artist my work is informed by both the deep historic tradition of channeling our creative energy onto a surface via pen, pencil, paintbrush etc, as well as the more recent phenomenon of computer generated artwork, and all of the philosophy that entails.

My subject matter evolves pretty quickly, but on average I am interested in portraying human figures and portraits in surreal or minimal environments and situations that allow the figure to become a surrogate for myself and my viewers.

In this way I can explore aesthetic representations of psychological states of liminality: how we craft our sense of identity around our current occupations, locations and social surroundings, and how we struggle to define ourselves when we are caught in-between these defined states of existence.
Here are some notable pieces:

The River Styx (2010)  24x36 Graphite on Stonehenge paper

Intro: Justin

I'm Justin, 24 years old -- graduated from UNT in 2010 with a BFA in New Media Art and a minor in Japanese. I consider myself an artist but definitely think against the grain -- I believe the art world has a tendency to over-think the simplest ideas. I think creating successful art boils down to creating things other people can be entertained by, so that's my goal with any art I create. I'm now following my dream trying to start up a small independent video game studio (Overpowered Games).

You can play a game I made called SpaceJunk on Kongregate.com (click image above) -- it's an online first person shooter that takes place in zero gravity. Although I don't consider SpaceJunk finished (mainly because ugly placeholder assets make up all of the art for the game), I've turned my focus to work on smaller, more profitable projects. I'm now working on an iPhone game called fishMoto that I'll be writing about often on this blog in the short term.

Apart from video games, I dabble in a few more conventional art forms and, when I have the time, I'd like to continue creating interactive installations. Bellow are some links to some of my previous work:

an introduction: Mike

I am a 23-year old resident of Austin, TX and currently an undergrad at the University of Texas studying the Japanese language. I grew up in Southern California, moved to the suburbs of Houston when I was 15 and finally settled down in Austin to go to university four years ago. While Japan and its culture are probably my greatest passions, I consider my interests varied and have found myself working more and more on my writing and my photography in particular.

I have been very interested in photography, particularly film photography, since getting my first camera (my dad's old olympus) when I graduated. Here's a picture I took a couple of years ago while studying in Tokyo. I hope to get some newer photos on here as soon as possible (now that I have access to film scanners, I have absolutely no excuses). I've also recently acquired a digital camera after mentally torturing myself for years over the idea and plan on using that extensively around town.  With the SXSW music festival coming up in three weeks or so, you can expect a slew of pictures from my end.