welcome to camp telophase

Right. So as one of my ideas for generating art for the SF con next month (aaaaugh!), and as stretching my wings a bit, I thought I'd try to paint some space scenes, with spaceships and stuff like that. Of course, I am utter crap at designing mechanical stuff. But then I was reading through one of my how-to-art books, James Gurney's Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist, and he suggested kitbashing--getting cheap model kits and basically, randomly gluing bits together until they look like a spaceship.

That I thought I could do. So I hied myself off to a couple of arts and crafts stores and bought models they had on sale, and have spent the past week or so wandering by the living room coffee table, where all of this is spread out, and randomly (well, maybe not quite so randomly), gluing bits together until they looked like spaceships.

I've just taken photos of them.

( cut for pics )
Thoughts? (Does anything stick out and go HEY THIS IS A CAR PART or something?) I probably ought to get some grey flat spray paint and paint them all one color, but that would be work.

Right! So you've heard of Google's Deep Dream, which uses a neural network to find and enhance images in photos, and which ends up in some trippy-ass shit, often with eyeballs everywhere. There's an online service now that will run your photo through the Deep Dreaming code, but it does take about two days at the moment, because there are thousands of pictures in the line. They give you a URL that you can check every so often to see if your pic has been processed yet.

So of course I put a couple of pics through it. I did this one, of the fox shrine in Arashiyama that rachelmanija and I happened upon back in 2007. (Pic from 2015, on my visit with Toby.)



( What hath Google wrought? )

I also did this one, a candid shot I grabbed on an observation deck overlooking Tokyo Station:



( The world of a child's imagination... )