Recent Art & Portfolio

Once again I have become neglectful of updating this blog with my artwork, so let’s do a roundup of the last uh… 7 months?!?! and maybe I’ll try to get it back on track from here on. Though I do have a nice portfolio site now that I have been keeping up to date, so if you really like my art you could be following that as well. More on that below.

Socialist Revolutionaries Past & Future

Last October I was trying to get back into the development of my game Just a Robot, and started as I always do by completely re-imagining its entire look. In this case I was inspired by the look of Soviet propaganda and Anarchist woodcuts.

I followed that up in December with this tribute to the luxurious moustache of Irish revolutionary socialist James Connolly.

Spaaaace

For the New Year I committed myself to working on more space and sci-fi themed stuff. I started with this depiction of a space station roughly based on the ISS.

Also in January, a spaceship approaching Mercury, with some tricky perspective.

In February I did another piece loosely inspired by Soviet propaganda, and a theme that seemed to be somewhat controversial - the idea of billionaires fleeing into space and leaving the rest of us to our fates. Some people took that as a literal prediction of future events, but I think of it in more allegorical terms - capital is ruining the natural and social environment without any sense of responsibility to the rest of us, while its masters can escape the consequences of their actions without literally leaving the planet - depicting them doing so is just a good way of describing the situation, in my opinion.

In March I brought it back to Earth and explored the same theme from another perspective, more or less.

I started a piece in April for Cosmonautics day, but I didn’t get it finished until June - the capsule and final stage of Vostok 1 in orbit. I did a game jam and an oil painting in the meantime though!

And that pretty much brings us up to date!

Portfolio

My portfolio site, which went live in July 2020, is another statically-generated site based on Pelican, but focused on image galleries instead of blog entries (using the standard gallery plugin). I wanted a central place to put my art that wasn’t a social media platform, and that would display it optimally. I’ve linked to it a few times from here despite never actually mentioning it.

It is inspired by the ideas of Matej Jan on displaying art on the internet, and attempts to display my pieces at the best integer scaling to fit in the browser window, on a background with appropriate contrast, and with no distractions.

Of course, I also wanted to keep it as small and responsive as possible, so it does this with about 3kB of javascript, 11kB of CSS, and a selection of minimal SVG backgrounds. Because all the art is pixel art, transferring it at 1x resolution and resizing it in the browser (as discussed in recent posts) keeps things extremely compact, with the entire portfolio currently only amounting to 390kB. The portfolio does a lot better job of displaying the art than this blog does though, here the images are just resized to max width without attempting an integer scaling.

I think it looks real nice and that my art looks real nice on it, so go check it out!