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Up for sale on Etsy as of today, a painting I did in college called "The Death of Peach".
Mario is grief-stricken in this nightmare scenario where Princess Peach is impaled callously by a giant pirahna plant. Toad watches in horror as Mario prepares to hurl a Bob-Omb and avenge his love. Oil on canvas 38"x36"
You can check out the listing here. Now's your chance to own a little bit of The Weekly Geek!
Thought you guys might enjoy watching a video of me hit by a sudden burst of inspiration today. I've been thinking of something to fill up this canvas I painted over a month ago. The subject? Only one of the creepiest villains in game history: a Combine Hunter from Half Life 2: Episode 2. I wanted to keep it simple and exercise my brushwork skills while capturing the strangely vicious kinetic energy of the things.
Non-moving photo after the jump.
I love Patapon. I love it so hard. I am entranced by the deep and unique gameplay and the gorgeous artwork. It's a complete package rarely seen in video games, and over at GameSetWatch there's an insightful interview with the French minimalist artist who worked on Patapon who goes by the name Rolito. Check out the article here, and if you haven't picked up the $20 PSP instant classic, I think less of you as a human being.
We asked you guys to come up with your best examples of crazy PopCap game cover art, and you definitely exceeded expectations. Our contest was a rousing success and we have some fantastic prizes to give away, so let's get to the losers! I mean... the people who were awesome but not as awesome as the... awesome people.
C yoolly certainly entered this contest! His grandma sounds like a cool lady.
Bfeld sure likes Homestar Runner.
Sam Spina has a dirty mind.
Nick spent his life savings on an MS Paint certification.
Tim found this game advertised in his Grandma's copy of Reader's Digest.
Winners after the jump!
I am in love with this guy's art. Cool illustrations of game characters on old book pages. Fort Awesome indeed!
Over at BoingBoing, Herr Doctorow links us to a nifty how-to about making pixel art cookies! Apparently you use a Play-Doh extractor (the one that makes square-shaped noodles) and stack the colors of cookie dough together. Clever! Does this mean we are going to see a flood of gaming cookies in 2008, replacing 2007's obsession with gaming cakes?
Alternate blog post ending: insert joke about the cookies making a Tetris in your stomach, disappearing in the process. New diet fad?
[link via BoingBoing]
Don't you wish you had a way to express your deep love of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption? Some sort of object you could hang on your wall to show all your friends that you live and breathe all things Samus? Well, worry no longer! We have a new print available at the Weekly Geek store - it's a new edition of our popular Metroid print. It's a linoleum cut hand printed (by yours truly) onto high-quality deckled paper and it's only available in a limited edition of 18. When they're gone, they're gone!
They are $15 with free shipping (that's $10 off the first edition price!) - buy one now before they all run out!
CTZ over at Destructoid interviewed me last week for his Art Attack Friday feature, and it has gone live today! He managed to boil down my life's work into one teensy html page on the internets. Sniffle. Check it out and see some art that I done did.
Geekateer Lordfate sends us in this awesome photo of a painting he recently had commissioned from an artist named Kelli Nelson depicting Link and Zelda in a very stylized stained-glass style. Apparently it only cost him $75 (pretty inexpensive for a commissioned piece of work, and VERY inexpensive for something of this quality) and she takes requests for other video game art. Click the thumbnail to view the awesomeness in its full glory.
Check out Kelli's work at Cheap Paper Art and spruce up that hovel you call a home. (Thanks, Lordfate!)
Today I have decided to part with one of my favorite paintings. This is a piece entitled "Obsessed" that I did as part of my degree back in 2005. It was a combination digital/analog piece, with two parts. The first part is the painting/collage, comprised of all my Game Boy Advance game boxes and manuals I had saved up over the years. I am a compulsive box-saver, and it was quite the sacrifice to cut them all up, I tell you what. The other part was an online component, where you could zoom in and mouse over the individual games and read a little history behind them. Not a history about the games, but of my experiences with the games. Naturally the only thing being auctioned is the huge 30" x 40" mixed media piece, seen here (click to zoom).
Much like the words "soda", "cap" and "sofa", the word "paddle" used in regards to a game controller has always grated on me. Never the less, We Make Money Not Art directs us today to an intriguing art project by Christoph Kroenke titled "Paddle Skin" where he uses a sort of liquid latex to make empty castings of game consoles and their respective controllers. The castings apparently feel like human skin. Delicious! More photos on We Make Money Not Art's blog. Click through and get really really creeped out.
Installation artist Aram Bartholl recently (well, in 2004) created a series of life-size crates from Counter-Strike and watched as people reacted to the pixel-perfect recreations. From the site:
The constantly recurrent textures are immaculate and constant, they never wear out. Blood and corpses dissolve by themselves into virtual thin air after few seconds. The crate, which is always the same, is an image map called “de_dust“, one of many changing game scenarios which appear frequently in varying sizes. The desert scenario imitates the appearance of certain countries or regions but remains locationless within its restricted spaces. The game design transforms the wooden crate into a generic, duplicatable and locationless object.
I don't know if I would think twice seeing something like this crate out in the real world. Would you?
Did you know that The Weekly Geek, both in blog and podcast form, is done on a completely ZERO budget, with no corporate sponsors? This is not a lie! Though we like to pretend we are living large, we certainly do not. We just have years of experience making the most out of what little pocket money we can scrounge up, and from the support of our listeners.
We just want to take this time to thank all of you who have supported the site in the past and want to encourage anyone who hasn't to drop a buck or two in the tip jar. This goes to web hosting and bandwidth fees and podcasting supplies like microphones and software.
If you want something tangible in return for your support, why not check out our high quality video game prints in the store? They are all hand made and limited edition.
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Heck, even if you just sent a link to one friend, we'd be more than grateful.
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If you happen to be in the LA area (West Hollywood specifically) check out the i am 8 bit art show opening April 17th. The opening is from 7-11PM and is usually a grand old time. Apparently there is going to be a GIANT ATARI JOYSTICK (that works!). From the release:
...over 100 artists will reinterpret images, characters and scenes from our favorite old school 1980's video games, including Travis Lampe's "Sad Joust" seen above. Look and purchase new and other original video game masterpieces from Joe Ledbetter, Amy Sol, Luke Chueh, Roland Tamayo, Erik Alos, Matt Dangler, Greg "Craola" Simkins, Bob Dob, Jose Emroca Flores and many, many more. This exhibit is packed with some of the best work this gallery have ever seen, as well as some new prints from favorites from prior years.
I checked out the first year of this event, and was impressed by a lot of the pieces. What I wasn't so impressed with was the fact that the show wasn't open to submissions. All the artists are local LA artists with ties to the gallery in some way, and many of them aren't even part of the actual video game art scene. Being part of that scene myself, I was slightly offended I didn't get a chance to get showcased in such a high profile show, but such is life.
Get cultured and go see some art. 8 Bit Weapon is playing too.
Thassright, the holidays are coming around again (seems like they do every year...) and it's time to think about what kind of crappy bag of socks Grandma is going to get you again (hint: the same crappy industrial-sized bag of socks she gave you last year). Give a good impression with your own gift giving by checking out what is offered in The Weekly Geek Store! No crappy Cafepress items here, it's all hand made art and some high quality shirts from Brunetto. To your left you can see an example, a high quality linoleum print depicting a Bob Omb pre-explosion. There is a limited quantity of items, and all are reasonably priced! We take paypal exclusively, and shipping is a breeze. I personally guarantee everything to be shipped properly, as I am the shipper. There is even a possibility you can get some of my pocket lint in your package. Excited yet?
Click here to shop!
Protip: buying things from The Weekly Geek Shop makes you a better person and may actually end world hunger.
This past weekend we did some pumpkin carving, and of course being a gigantic geek I had to do some game related pumpkins. So here we have my wife's generic pumpkin, my Katamari pumpkin and my ode to the Triforce. You can see my repositioning of the pumpkin's stem to the Prince's antenna. Also you can make out the Sharpie™ marks from where I cut the pieces out. I probably should have used non-permanent marker...
Have you carved your video game referencing pumpkin yet? I wanna see em!
This week, The Geek and Frodo discuss Wii preorders, Red Steel multiplayer, Clover Studios being shut down, G4 being absorbed by the gelatinous blob that is E!, Blizzard stealing money from people, video game halloween pumpkins, eventually seeing scrotum, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Mercury Meltdown for the PSP and more. Have some delicious show notes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
