Since I got sidetracked by various things (college, etc.), I missed the last two weeks of Magical Monkey Adventure updates. By way of apology, here’s some art I’ve been making in my spare time.

These pieces are based on and quote songs from Lemon Demon’s incredible album Spirit Phone. I’ve been listening to it a lot lately; it’s one of the mythical perfect albums, where every song on it is worth listening to. (It might even come closer to that ideal than Lincoln.) They were all made with GIMP using only built-in filters and effects. (The fonts all came on my computer, I think, but I’m not sure.) I’m a firm believer that, with enough time and effort, anyone can make art. This is part of my ongoing effort to prove that. All of these were made with a free tool, and all it took was time and experimentation.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Touch Tone Telephone

Cabinet Man

Man-Made Object

How They’re Made

There were a couple filters I kept coming back to. All the edge detection filters were pretty useful, and the “Render” sub-menu was necessary. (Otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything on the canvas to filter to begin with.) I also made heavy use of the “Fractal Trace” filter, which is why my “Cabinet Man” and “Man-Made Object” both have the same sort of shape to their background, if you ignore the underlying pattern. These are mostly just products of me messing around, though- “Lifetime Achievement Award”’s background looking like a bunch of red blood cells was an incredibly happy accident.

So! There’s my art. I’m proud of how these pieces came out, and it was a fun way to learn how to use GIMP. Next time I’m working on a project that isn’t just ASCII art, I’m probably going to use some of these techniques for backgrounds and stuff.