Ungood Art Day seems like it was just exactly one month ago today, which makes this yet another Ungood Art Day.
Here, I've enlarged a bit of art from a previous post. This is the detail of my rendering of the Canadian two-dollar coin, affectionately nicknamed the "toonie". The animal is supposed to be a polar bear. My wife thought it was a capybara (the world's largest rodent). Either way, it's stinkeroo enough to earn a spot in my monthly Ungood Art presentation.
I was attempting to use a technique called "digital impasto". It's a form of dynamic bump-mapping, likely as not using a Blinn-Phong interpolation. Duh, duh? The idea of digital impasto is to simulate real impasto, which is a thick-paint art technique. The paint is applied so thickly that light reflects off of the bumpy parts of the paint. A computer can simulate the effect by creating a height map for individual pixels. The higher off of the surface the pixel is apparently to be, the more of the virtual incidental light source it will reflect. The effect looks kind of like embossing. When done properly, digital impasto looks like it is three-dimensionally coming off of the page. When done like I did for the toonie bear, it looks like amateur hour at the improv.
I did look at pictures of polar bears and even had a toonie as a visual reference, and the animal still came out looking like a capybara. This wasn't even my first try, although I did not keep any earlier versions. I guess I need more practise with the digital impasto, but as you might guess, I just don't use that art tool very much.
See the capy-bear-a in his original habitat by clicking here.
EDIT: The remote Blogger software has suffered a major problem over the past 24 hours. This has affected JSVB. You may notice things like improper post ordering or editorial gaffes. Hopefully, the Blogger people will work these issues out soon.
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