#also just had a lot of fun doing some experimental painting here haha hope you like!

[destinysquared]

Did a pic of a new fanfic I'm reading called The Road Less Travelled by @discoeffect ! I’m really enjoying it and had to draw the characters (again). Also I’m a bit of a sucker for batarian/human stories haha.

Let me know if I got their designs right! (the colors of course are just fun/experimental stuff). Enjoyyyyy

[cbedfordart]

Hey! I’ve been following you for a while and I really love your art, it’s absolutely stunning and I love the way you paint and capture anatomy. I know this is a bit of a broad question but I was wondering if you had any tips on getting better at painting digitally and studying anatomy, maybe more specifically blending, colour picking, and structuring anatomy in a way that looks somewhat realistic?

Thanks and I'm glad you enjoy my work long enough to be following me for this long! I definitely love drawing a naked body that's for sure haha. In terms of tips for getting better there's a few things I can mention but it's going to fall broadly in the general answer of "study", because this is the most sure fire way to be able to understand what it is you're trying to emulate in your art. There are different ways to study, and they teach something slightly different. For example, doing studies from life (live drawing classes) help me understand movement in a way studying from a photograph cant, simply because you're seeing the same model in different poses in real time, you can see how the fat and muscle moves around as they shift to different positions. So they're not technically moving the whole time, but you're still seeing some movement there, and understanding what sticks to what while it rotates and bends. Studying from photographs can help give you time to do some real deep dives and investigate where different bones/muscles sit while someone is in a particular position. There's also the opportunity for understanding how shadows may be formed by the body as typically photographers are more conscious of how the subject may be lit than what may be available in a live drawing class. Beware though, as more things are photoshopped than you realise, not all photos represent reality. Especially glam and fashion photos. It doesn't mean its bad to want to have these effects on your work but just be conscious they might not always be anatomy accurate if that's what you're striving for. I sometimes make a conscious decision to go against what is anatomically correct for a certain effect myself. A book I have been recommending for years for anatomy is Dr. Paul RIcher's "Artistic Anatomy". It's great for understanding muscle structure intimately - it's designed specifically for artists, but with the idea of trying to stylise the diagrams as little as possible for the sake of understanding the human form. There's a lot of great info and detail in here, but beware, there is not a lot of variety in body structure (at least not in the edition I have which is missing female anatomy I think already so I'm not sure what else I don't have in here). So you'll be able to understand function a lot from here but you wont be able to learn a lot about fatter body types sadly.

Colour picking is probably the most difficult for me to explain easily, as I have spent a long time winging it, then studying it, then being really experimental with it. I could write a lot a lot about this but to spare making this post any longer I'll refer to another fun book just for getting started on some frequent and common terms called "Color and Light" by James Gurney.

I also love that he uses like, dinosaurs for everything in here lol. It's a great starting point that can give you some go to ideas that you can then experiment from there. It's not very authoritarian (or at least that's what I feel), and doesn't push anything forward as a hard and fast rule, just showing what affects some colour combinations might instil in someone.

As a whole, I've gotten better at painting digitally by studying traditional painting techniques. They theories are basically transferrable one to one with some few exceptions. I tend to blend my colours by simply using a soft round brush in Photoshop with a low opacity. Much the same way I would with a real canvas, with a large round brush and diluted colour. I hope this answers your questions in some way. I tried to be not too specific only because this answer would be at least another 30k words lol because this is something i think a lot about! I love technique! If I ever stream again, feel free to pop in and ask more questions where I might be able to show some stuff in real time! Not sure when that will happen though!

Also the way i do stuff isn't a "correct" way either. I like painting from imagination so this is how I make that work. Some people like to only work with references for every piece, and that is a completely legit way to create stunning art as well. Good luck!

[thebandcampdiaries]

Pablo Iranzo is out on the scene with a brand new release: Overdose

May 2020 - Artist and songwriter Pablo Iranzo is back on the scene with a brand new single release. The new song is titled Overdose, and it defines the artist’s style and background in a unique way. The track, indeed, features influences as diverse as indie, electronic music and experimental pop.

If you are a fan of fellow artists like Son Lux, Active Child, and SHON, you are definitely going to enjoy what you hear on this release. The song has a lot of energy to it, yet the production still maintains a nice, texture-rich tone, which enhances the value of this production, giving the song so much more vibe and attitude to begin with. This is a perfect example of how Pablo Iranzo can bring some serious artistry to the music’s creative formula, going for a more insightful, personal, and diverse sound when compared to other artists in this particular music genre. Innovation is key here, and Pablo Iranzo maintains a distinctive sound that’s still fresh and appealing.

Learn more about Pablo Iranzo and check out the artist’s music, including Overdose, which is currently available on the web’s best music streaming platforms.

We had the opportunity to ask the artist a few questions: keep reading to learn more!

I love how you manage to render your tracks so personal and organic. Does the melody come first, or do you focus on the beat the most?

Answer: Thank you. I do think some of the stories in the songs are personal material mixed with fictional elements. I usually focus on the melody first and I try to flesh out the rhythm as parts of the song come together with guitar and vocals first.

Do you perform live? If so, do you feel more comfortable on a stage or within the walls of the recording studio?

Answer: I have not played my live solo stuff just yet.

Supporting my solo albums live would be something

I am interested doing in the future though.

I sing in a local band called Superpulse. We describe it as “Dirty Audio” and it has Stoner Rock elements. There’s definitely a rush that I feel onstage compared to just sitting comfortably in the studio or in band practice but I enjoy most aspects of these things because the group is formed of people who are quite different from another but we get along like a small family and we laugh all the time as we play old and new things. It’s “can’t catch your breath from laughing out loud” fun and funny.

I would have to say though, that I am drawn to the creative process more, because onstage you usually have rehearsed and are prepared but if you’re experimenting and trying new things as you write something new you can improve on what you’re doing and hopefully write better songs that reach my own unrealistic standards. haha.

If you could only pick one song to make a “first impression” on a new listener, which song would you pick and why?

Answer: Tell me your mood and I’ll name a few things. If you’re sick of 2020 as much as I am, I’d say definitely go for Overdose when it comes out in a week. In the meantime, I would encourage anybody who wants to be taken on a journey to check out “Lost & Found” from my debut album. It’s slow but has a cinematic character to it. If you’re looking for something more pop I can recommend “Oblivion Walk”.

What does it take to be “innovative” in music?

Answer: I am more on the lookout for a certain emotion, feeling or sound in my music. I get an idea in my head and I work on it until it reaches the point where I think that I reached the goal set in my mind.

Innovating for me personally would be growing as an artist which is part of my goal.

I believe in doing good things with music. Reaching people, talking to people, listening to people, even help people if it makes them feel good, for example. That’s already more innovative than blowing up my own importance with my ego (not pointing fingers at anyone). Which doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy rocking out onstage and enjoying the party after it.

The lock-down situation and the state of things in the world today was a driving force behind this release. Can you tell us a bit more about its themes?

Answer: I wrote this song some time ago and I wanted to finish it this year. When I was going through the lyrics again during lockdown, I felt like this needed to release this year since it seemed to me like it was speaking more to me than ever before. It’s not even about a pandemic or racial

discrimination in itself, it’s about how society is falling apart before our eyes because we choose to be ignorant, greedy, selfish hypocrites, accept injustices that happen before our eyes and in many cases are even evil and this affects our relationships which is touched upon in the second half of the song. It’s frustrating to watch. I don’t want everything to be pointless and hopeless because we can’t collectively be good to each other and to our environment which is our only home? I am pro BLM hoping for good changes to come for the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and all the other places in the world who need to remind themselves that racial discrimination is wrong in any shape or form and needs to be stopped - like in Germany where I live or in Spain where I am originally from. All power to them! I’ve seen my share of horrifying and heart breaking videos of black people being publicly executed and it’s infuriating because how inconceivable it is. I’m using my voice in Overdose to point out that we’re doing so many things wrong, hoping that we can all start reflecting more on how we treat others. It’s fine to make mistakes, but let’s

all try to learn from them and be better to each other and to ourselves. That shouldn’t be a question of race or political affiliation but a question of common decency. Overdose to me paints a very dark picture almost post apocalyptic but I hope it won’t come to that because I have to believe that most people are good.

I had a similar feeling to pushing a release with the title track of my debut album “Blind Faith”. That track was about a dictator under a truth serum. I also felt like I was warning people of electing a certain president.

The recent pandemic situation is making it difficult for artists to tour and promote their releases: how are you planning on approaching music promotion?

Answer: I am actually learning how to use Instagram more. That’s all I can do right now but I am also writing new things.

Anywhere online where curious fans can listen to your music and find out more about you?

Answer: Sure. You can find me on Facebook: https://

www.facebook.com/iranzomusic/

Instagram: @iranzo_music You can find links to all the music on the link in the bio of my instagram.

[allandanny]

What even happened during Spring Semester?

This semester was honestly the most intense educational experience we have ever had. We dedicated so much time and mental energy to all of our technical classes, project-based classes, and our outside commitments that towards the end, it felt like we didn’t have any time to even breathe (or sleep very much tbh). There was a pretty clear split though from pre-spring break to post-spring break in terms of work load/things happening in general. If we compare our semester to the timeline of a hurricane, Pre-Spring Break was when the sky began turning gray and clouds began forming. Post-Spring break was when high-speed winds of deadlines and pouring projects began.

Classes Overview (the rest of this post will reference the class numbers):

1) 8.02 – Physics II. This was a very not fun class for us, since we really don’t like physics. It involved weekly psets, and being tied to Sunday office hours. In the end we both passed and are super happy it’s over!

2) ES.7013 – Biology (taken through ESG). This class was better than 8.02 since we took it through ESG, so we got more one-on-one attention from the teacher. That was really nice.

3) ES.333  - Production of Educational Video – The goal of this class was to make, as the name of the class implies, an education video. It was extremely time intensive, but very rewarding. Here are our videos (Allan) (Danny)

4) 2.00b – Toy Design – In teams of 5 (we were on different teams), we had to make a toy! Again, very rewarding and very time intensive, especially towards the end.

Allan’s 5) 21M.601 – Drawing for Designers – This class was a very relaxing and nice life drawing class!

Danny’s 5) 4.520 – Visual Computing – This was a pretty cool and somewhat hard to describe class about rule-based design.

 Events of Pre-Spring Break:

This was us. The first half of a semester usually has a slow start, but the weather made this spring semester’s particularly slow. We had 3 snow days! In terms of work, we had 2 8.02 exams, 2 ES.7013 exams, and our project classes weren’t that intensive, mostly involving lots of planning.  Edit: after reading this, we remembered that we actually did do blog worthy things during this time of the semester! We hosted a knitting workshop in Next House, our dorm, and taught a knitting class through SPARK! (for both, we wore these babies during the whole thing) We also participated in the calling campaign to congratulate pre-frosh, and got some interesting pub .(haha) Also, since one of the snow days was on Pi-Day, we were able to bake all the pies with our friends!

Events of Spring Break 

IT WAS WONDERFUL. We went back to the warmth of Florida, and just soaked in beach water for hours each day. We also met up with high school friends, which was really nice! And we met new high school friends (who will now be college friends!) at a local admitted students gathering! That’s about it :) 

Events of Post-Spring Break

Campus Preview Weekend (CPW)!

This was so incredibly fun! We hosted so many events from art club to rainbow lounge events, went to so many parts of campus, and talked to so many pre-frosh! One of the days, we had events (some hosting, some attending) back to back from 11am-4am.

Some highlights of CPW:

-When we were walking back to next house at 4 am, we saw a friend (who happened to be a senior) walking out of his dorm, and just casually said “hey guys! Good Morning!” We hope we do not turn into that type of senior.

-During the activities fair, which is the time when pre-frosh get a preview of what activities exist on campus, we met one person that one of us (allan) spoke to on the phone in the calling campaign! It was a really fun coincidence!

-Throughout the weekend, we got the comment “Are you guys THE twins?” multiple times. Apparently the pub we mentioned above was posted to the 2021 facebook page. Every time we got this comment we awkwardly laughed, but it was a pretty good conversation starter.

Ring Committee

This is the committee that designs the iconic brass rat for each class. We both applied to be on this committee, and one of us got it (Allan)! This worked out actually because Danny’s fifth class was more time intensive than Allan’s, so this balanced things out. Ring Comm has involved having a couple meetings so far where we discuss and plan many many more things than excepted, including making a logo, website, getting venues, planning events, getting food for those events, planning study breaks, deciding our public image as a committee, and much much more!

The Borderline Project

This was incredibly mega super duper cool and we are super unbelievably happy that this happened and that we were a part of it! Basically this was a project that let essentially anyone who submitted a sketch to paint a 5x8 foot mural in one long expanse of one MIT tunnel. On top of that, 6 of the ~34 murals ended up having augmented reality animations (ours were 2 of the 6!). Something that was also super duper cool was that we basically witnessed the birth of this incredible project and idea! One of the five project leads did the OpenMind::OpenArt project with us, and she was discussing this idea during our weekly meetings in January. So when we got an email from her a couple weeks into the spring semester about this actually starting, we were super stocked! We ended up painting our murals the weekend after CPW in the span of about 12 hours. It was so cool because at that point, very few murals were painted, and since we’d periodically walk through the tunnels, we’d see people painting and making progress and just filling up the wall! We ended up doing the animations for our augmented reality component weeks later with a friend who is more tech savy than us. We did all the frames for the animation, and then we had a 5 hour meeting with our friend where we meticulously timed and complied our animation in Unity! It was time intensive, but so worth it and fun! We’re really happy we had that experience, and are honestly interested in continuing exploring augmented reality/virtual reality now! The opening night of the tunnels was also soooooo great! It happened really close to finals week, so it was a great distraction! It was also really nice because we hadn’t seen many of the artists, since we were all assigned different weeks to paint, so this was a cool chance to meet the people behind the amazing art! The amount of exclamation marks in this paragraph is a pretty clear indication of our level of excitement for this thing that happened! here’s a (partial) group photo! 

Art Club (and specifically fixing its debt)

We started being part of Art Club Exec in the beginning of Spring Semester, but it was pretty chill before spring break. After spring break though, we found out that Art Club was actually put in debt accidentally by the old exec team (basically they took money out of the wrong account), and now it was up to the new exec team to fix it! The process of fixing it involved rasing a third of the money we were in debt by through a bake sale, and then sending some emails back and forth culminating with a very apologetic one that sealed the deal to get Art Club back to a balance of 0. This took the span of many weeks to organize and figure out. Also, the Sunday night that we were baking was an utter mess for many reasons, and we will list them out because we think its pretty funny just how many things went wrong. definitely not our finest baking moment:

1.The drainage in the sinks in the next house kitchen were broken so the water filled up in the sinks.

2.Right before we started baking, a pretty large “Next Iron Chef” contest started, which involved many people running around and using supplies we needed. They also made the sink much grosser than they had to be. So, we’d have to leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom to clean everything, and we are lowkey clean freaks so we made many trips.

3.The hand mixer we were using didn’t mix the flour well enough into the batter, so for about 40 minutes, we had our four hands (they were mega clean, don’t worry!) in the batter bowl taking the flour clumps out.

4.After the first batch of mini muffins came out of the oven, the ones in the metal tray were stuck so we had to cut them out with a knife. After that we decided not to use that tray anymore, so it took about 5 or 6 more batches to finish baking everything. We were in that kitchen until 2 freaking am.

ESG Yearbook

ESG, or experimental study group, is a fancy name for a community of 50 freshman who spend there time eating, bonding, talking, pseting, taking GIRs in smaller class sizes (of 4-12 students),  and being awesome on the 6th floor of the very hard to find (due to construction of the new nano building) building 24.  We innocently volunteered during fall semester to be in charge of making this year’s yearbook, not realizing that the majority of the work would get done 3 weeks before the deadline and during the super duper busy time of post-spring break. Nevertheless, it was mostly fun to make it! We used shutterfly though, which at times could be frustrating. And when we say “at times,” we mean specifically that shutterfly doesn’t allow you to change a style without ruining all the layout you already completed. So, basically after finishing the entire yearbook unknowingly with a style that would cost people an extra $6 (our fault for not checking this), we had to change the style, and thereby have to start from scratch. So essentially we made 2 yearbooks. In the end, we actually liked how the cheaper one looked more...go figure! This is one of our favorite pages:

Art Scholars

This is a program that brings together graduate and undergraduate students who have a passion for the arts! We get to go on outings throughout the year and get to know awesome people! We applied this semester and we got it! During the interview, the person who runs the program said “this year there were 16 applicants and 16 openings.” It was very cool haha.

FAP Counselors

We applied to be Freshman Art Program Counselors! And we got it! This is especially exciting because due to scheduling issues, we were unable to actually participate in this program as frosh, but now we get to experience it by being counselors! We are super stocked to pass on our knowledge of MIT art opportunities to the frosh and generally be mega artsy for a week in august before school starts!

Declaring our Major

This was a very confusing for us. The majors we were considering were 2 (MechE), 4(Architecture), 6-3(Computer Science) and CMS(Comparative Media Studies). The way we were making sense of these majors was that if we choose that we want to make physical things that look good (as in products mostly and abstract sculpture/conceptual design), then we would choose to combine 2 and 4 in some way or another. And if we choose that we want to critically study and make digital media (including exploring VR/AR more and just generally understanding computers better) then we would combine CMS and 6-3 somehow. Through many discussions, we discovered a major that would allow us to combine 2 majors, which is super convineint because both options involved us doing that! So, this major is called 21E (humanities and engineering). It allows students to choose a humanities field and an engineering field and then mesh them together. After much consideration of what we found fun this semester (which was really difficult, because we found many things fun), we both decided that we each wanted to go with 21E, doing CMS for our humanities and 6-3 for our engineering. This is honestly still subject to change, but this is the decision that feels most right right now.

Finishing our Videos for ES.333

Video editing is so incredibly time consuming. Finishing this video involved spending multiple nights in the computer room in ESG (since we don’t have FinalCut Pro on our laptops) until 1-2 am. This was a very sad existence when we were still in that room when all we wanted to do was sleep, but in the end it was worth it!

 Finishing our 2.00b projects

If we thought finishing our video project was hard, this was harder by 10 fold. It is incredibly good that ES.333 finished before the final crunch for 2.00b started because we wouldn’t have been able to do both at the same time. For 2.00b, each of the last four days before playsentations involved literally staying in the lab from 11am-5pm and then spending extra hours in our dorm (until 11pm-1am) just working to get our toys finished. Then the day of playsentations (Allan’s starts 1:21:00, Danny’s starts 2:03:00), we had to rehearse all day for our skit. Somehow, both of our awkward totally non-actor selves ended up in the skits for our teams. But in the end, many people said we were pretty good! Yay! Despite this, many things actually went wrong right before/during the presentations. For Allan, water guns started leaking 30 seconds before going on stage so extremely fast duck taping was implemented, and for Danny, water was sprayed when it wasn’t supposed to be sprayed so improvising was implemented. (somehow both our teams made water-related toys…the twin is strong within us) 

Buying tickets to Natasha, Piere, and The Great Comet of 1812!

We bought tickets to see our current favorite musical on broadway. We are going to see it with a friend at the end of August right before going back to campus and we are sooooo incredibly excited!

Sense 8

After our last final, we went back to our room and spent 10 hours watching 10 episodes of this freaking masterpiece of a show. If you have free time this summer, and you want to be blown away by mesmerizing visuals, an incredibly cool concept that also translates to a beautiful metaphor, awesome action pact scenes, badassary redefined, ships you cant help but ship, amazing representation, and absolute authenticity, please watch this show!

ending thoughts

Now we are in Florida, mostly recovering from a super hectic and busy semester. We are really happy with what we accomplished during our freshman year, and are looking towards next year, but right now its great to just float in hot sea water and do absolutely nothing else.