http://i.imgur.com/WSFUgVe.png

This is my favorite comic of all time.  It's called "We Go Forward" by a person named Shenanigansen.  It shows of a story of someone that can't go forward, so they go on with their lives and make a family, but in the next generation, he teaches his child to do what he couldn't do himself, only for the child to learn the same thing.  This resonates to me because it symbolizes the cycle of life.  There is a limit on what everyone can do, and if anything, you would want your children to go beyond what you could have imagined you could do.  It makes you think about your own life and mistakes, and what you've done to surpass your parents, and what you can do to have your children surpass you.  It's a very simple, but powerful comic and I read it everyday to put my mind in a calm state.  It's weird, but it works.

Art and Tech collide.

This picture I like because it shows the capabilities of art when it goes with technology.  This is digital art, which is drawn with a computer and various touch technology that is used as a canvas.  Since computers can let you have as big of a canvas as you want, the level of detail you can do it astounding, and you can do it with less effort.  As a computer science major, I would love to see more artists strive for stuff like this using our inevitable advancement of technology.

Splash Art

This is a pic that caught my eye while I was browsing the internet.  It's pretty much a hummingbird with splash effects near the wings.  This is a very beautiful picture and just a pleasure to look at.  There isn't much to say about this one as it's just more of an eye pleaser than anything deep, but I can't help that the lighting on this must've been more of a pain than anything to get right, as hummingbirds have a habit of flapping very fast.  This is one of the rare pieces of art that I don't really have words for.

3d Megaman boss statue in Minecraft.

Minecraft art has been a marvel to see.  Since it's a building game, people have been taking it to do their own bidding in terms of what to build.  Even though it was meant for houses and other slice of life luxuries, people will use them for statues, drawings, and the like.  There has been a couple of Youtubers that actually make an upwards of 50,000 a year just doing Minecraft art, that appeals to little kids and young teenagers.  My cousin watches them alot and enjoys it very much, so I don't really mind them babysitting him when I'm busy myself.  It's amazing for someone to take the time to build miles worth of blocks as the picture above shows to put together something massively beautiful.

Covers of music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAUNie6r354
cover of Tokyo Ghoul by pellek, a famous cover artist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aMOurgDB-o
The actual opening

Covers of songs have always been a controversial issue.  Covers are when someone takes another artist song and puts their own spin on it.  There is a big demand for it on Youtube and other media places, and even, but another side of the story accuses cover artists of blatantly stealing their content without permission, and sometimes even going as far as monetizing it.

In my opinion it takes a lot of effort to memorize and make a complete spin on music, and it's very creative for people to use it as such.  Music needs to be more flexible to survive, or else it will be snuffed out under it's own weight.

Creepypastas

http://creepypasta.com/sniff

This is a creepypasta.  Creepypastas are stories that are not too scary, but leave a feeling of dread, or teaches dark lessons.  They can range from folktales to fanfiction told by other fans.  The diversity of stories that people can use is mind boggling, having over 200,000 stories a year.

Creepypastas are a form of art in my opinion because it takes a creative side to come up with a story that only draws out creepiness and not fear.

Banksy

For the namesake of the class, i'm showing graffiti art by Banksy, an anonymous figure that goes  around and does political art on streets, walls and bridges around the world.  The art depends on the current events going on, and they are usually very creative and symbolic.  I really think it's more of a group than an individual since I see a lot of different styles and signatures on the work.  The legality of it is controversial in itself because some of the work could be called priceless, but they have to cover it up sometimes.  it's still up for discussion, but Banksy will still be an enigma regardless.

Rakugo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybUa1JoGTUQ

This is a performance art called Rakugo, a type of comedic storytelling from one person.  This is more of a one man show, with the narrator playing each of the characters in the story.  Most of the stories are already planned out and must be memorized beforehand, making the storytellers very talented with expressions and leading the tone.  This is a very ancient art that still strives in modern times, being very popular in Japan and now spreading to the west.  I like rakugo and listen to it on the background, but to get the full experience you need to actually watch it since they do a lot of expressions and hand movements simulating opening and closing doors, etc...

Mosaic of pictures

This is a photo mosaic, a picture that is made of pictures.  The entire thing is a single frame of the movie The Lion King, while inside there are frames from the movie itself.  A picture made of pictures to be more precise.  I like the creativity and how even though there isn't a perfect shading and lining, our heads compensate for that, making the picture more realistic.  I love the classic scene combined with the more classic scenes inside.

Sculptures in perspective

This is a wooden sculpture that resides in the Salar Jung Museum caught my interest when I first looked at it online.  Looking it up, it's actually two people:  Mephistopheles and Margaretta, two characters from the play Faust.  Faust was published in 1808 by Goethe that shows a story of a sould lured by an evil spirit, and shows the effects of being led astray.  I like this because this was made out of a single block of wood, and also the complexity needed to make two different poses of two different people with one perspective.

Street painting

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/absolutely-stunning-3d-street-art-paintings/

This is a website on street 3d painting.  This is amazing because it takes advantage of how you see things, (perception) and plays on it.  What happens is the painter uses a longer version (so vertically it's longer than it will actually look like) so when looked at from the bottom, your eyes will try to compensate by compressing the image, giving the illusion that it's in 3d.  I've seen one of these during the military and it was the most mind boggling and fun thing I've seen during my tours.  It's cool how science and art can intermingle sometimes.

Tatoos

These are Yakuza tattoos ( or Irezumis), full body tattoos showing their loyalty to their affiliation.  They are usually made by traditional tattoo artists, usually in secret, and this is hard because unlike the US, Japanese artists will take years going through training.  These pieces of art on average take 1-5 years  in weekly increments and would cost upwards of $30,000 USD.  They would cover everything but the hands, feet, and neck up.  These artists are usually highly sought after and praised for their good work.  I like these tattoos because it shows the creative side of people using an unusual canvas (the human body).  They are very appealing to see and also very colorful.

Chicago Madness

This is The Bean (or Cloud Gate), a sculpture made by Anish Kapoor.  After a competition, his sculpture was chosen, but there were questions about how it would be done.  So to do this, they had to recruit numerous experts and professional.  When it finally went into construction, it fell behind schedule and eventually had to be revealed incomplete, but then finally completed at a later time.  This is interesting to me because when I went to see it for myself earlier last month, being a very logical and engineer driven person, I could not fathom how they even finished this work.  It actually gave me a fear of going near it because it might fall over and crush me, but it never did that.  I will probably go over there again to try to figure it out.

Memorials

This Lincoln Memorial, made by Daniel Chester French, was placed in Washington DC in a Greek style building.  It was only supposed to be about 10 ft. tall, until they decide to almost double it to 19 ft. tall.  Two of his speeches, the second inauguration speech and his Gettysburg Address, was engraved in the outside, as well as MLK's I Have a Dream Speech.  I like this statue because it has a lot of history behind it, and it's one of America's longest standing memorials in history, and also well known.  It's a marvel how detailed it is from the tools of the past, from the coat being slightly messy to the hair and even eyes.  Everytime I see it it baffles me on how it was done.

Anime Endings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3SlUmr_T4g

This is an ending from Blood Blockade Battlefront.  The name is roughly called "Sugar Song and Bitter Step" by Unison Square Garden.  There's a lot of symbolism with the ending but I'll point out 2 big ones.  The first is that the song in general is very cheerful which is in contrast with the actual show, which has mainly dark themes.  It sings about how it's always a cycle of happiness and hardship, and they just have to get through the hardships to taste the "sweetness of life" again.  The second big thing is near the beginning and middle, where the main character kneels in front of a wheelchair.  This symbolizes his remembering his sister, which her fate is, as of now, not known, but the event near the middle is where the entire thing started, and how her sister sacrificed her sight to save his and give him the "God Eyes".  The amount of effort taken to make this ending is astounding and it's one of my favorites of all time.

Anime Symbolism

This piece is a picture from the anime Tokyo Ghoul, in which the story consists of two different species (Human and Ghoul) has been fighting over each other for a while, and the main character, originally a human, becomes half Ghoul through a accident.  This picture represents the two worlds in which it symbolizes the same but different backgrounds.  He is residing on the ghoul side(grey) but his reflection represents his human side still remaining.  The chair in itself is a big contributor to the story since it's the point where he accepts that he is both a human and accepts his ghoul side too (through extensive torture).  I like this picture because it's very simple but through context it tells so many things.

Favorite personal pictures and symbolism

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/27/48/4f/27484f3d006b8471a5a61ca6b4e4ec93.jpg

This is one of my favorite pictures from the anime Cowboy Bebop.  The quote "You're gonna carry that weight" is one of the most iconic sayings in the industry, even though it originated from The Beetles.  It means that people's choices have a weight to them, and they are going to have to carry the consequences to it, good and bad.  This quote was shown on the end of the last episode, where the culmination of the main cast's decisions end up with the main character dying.  This means a lot to me because it has shown me a lesson I probably wouldn't get anywhere else.

Still Shots Collide With Moving Art

https://49.media.tumblr.com/f3ed75dbaa538fa583ad99dde36b1408/tumblr_o0wyiburw01unbtf2o1_500.gif

This is a gif scene of a castle in a hill.  I like this pic mainly because of the moving water showing the reflection of the sky.  The lighting and point of view also shows a lot of thought in this work.  I tried putting it in my desktop but it didn't work, it took too much of my memory to keep it up.

Political Comics

This is another comic I seen when I was about 18, which had me remember how my school was.  Teachers always had to walk on eggshells and the student had all the power because of the shifting dynamic of school culture.  Back then my dad told me that the parents sided with the teachers and worked with them to see what's best for the child.  Now parents expect for their child to pass or else the teacher is doing something wrong, alleviating all of the blame from the student.  There are a lot of factors why, but they are too complicated to go into in this blog...

Military Cartoons

This image by Dana Summers really hit a spot for me, being a veteran.  This shows the entire issue of the Iraq war in the first place.  With their culture being very behind ours in terms of progressiveness, it would take a long time for them to catch up to us, and yet we let them go when they were just growing out of the ancient ways, which ended up with them being open to attack by neighboring countries (Iran, and more specifically, ISIS). This teaches the outcome of going into a situation without following through the entire thing

Cover Art

This is the coverwork of Fire Emblem Awakening, which is the game before fates, and also pertains to the events that lead up to said game.  It has more of a political plot than Fates, about a band of people lead by you and Prince Chrom to overthrow a ruler that usurped the throne from the prince.  My favorite part about this picture is the lady in front, Lucina.  She is the daughter of Chrom but was sent from the future to prevent the original timeline (everyone, including her father dies, which is why she has the same sword as Chrom, because it's his).  This symbolizes how everyone is facing the future, but Lucina has to face the past.


One other reason I like it is a sly joke:

The arrow is pointing at a character in the story called Kellum, who is a very large Knight, but has a very low presence and is not noticed often throughout.  

Even in the cover he gets shafted. :( 

Poster Art

This artwork is from the game Fire Emblem: Fates.  This is probably one of my favorite game franchises  in terms of symbolism and artwork, especially this particular piece.  In this game you are a main character that is raised by the Nohr family (on the left side) only to find out that the nation you're at war with (Hoshido, on the right) is your true family.  The first thing most people would see is the sky:  the left being dusk and the right being dawn.  This doesn't exactly represent good and evil, but the ambiguous nature of it.  Nohr is not entirely evil, and Hoshido is not as pure as people think it is in the beginning.  Another thing that people might not notice is the parallels with each side.  If you look from the ends and go inward you will notice that they are symbolizing that each side has the same composition of people in terms of personality:  from the loyal knight to the role model older brother.  Each circle in the background represents a "fate" to be decided on the player, and a third one that has not been revealed yet (until recently).  I will leave it at this but I can talk about this picture all day if I wanted to.