Just as citizen journalism and citizen politics crashes the gate of convention, citizen video and citizen art breaks through the established order with the inspired work produced by hungry, new artists and producers.
Karen Wehrstein, author and graphic artist, is just such a talent on Daily Kos. You may have noticed her in comments from time to time, or credited under numerous, gorgeous illustrations provided for the benefit of our readers. Her skill with computer and brush brings life to otherwise complex concepts in science and nature in a vivid and memorable way. So I thought it would be interesting to learn a little bit more about the emerging field of computer art and science illustrations. And just for Halloween fun, I asked her to produce some examples of what future humans, or 'post-humans' might look like.
Hypatia II, 2150 AD. She lives in a virtual and a real world integrated as one, with all the information of every library on earth in her head. The body is remade and maintained by nanobots, unless seriously injured beyond repair, she will live a thousand years. The large artificial eyes and the sensors on her occipital region detect all types of radiation and sound as well as a future version of the Internet, all processed by an enhanced visual cortex. IOW, when she looks at the forest behind her, information about the species and ecology is overlaid on to her vision along with acoustical ultrasound imagery.
DarkSyde (DS): How did you become interested in art and science illustration?
Karen Wehrstein (KW): I started drawing the moment I could hold a pencil, and cranked out so many pictures everyone took it as a given that I was going to be an artist when I grew up. When I was in my early teens, however, I switched over to writing. A lot of my drawings were really illustrations of stories, and writing felt like a better medium for that. As well, I grew increasingly frustrated with the insufficiency of my art skills in doing justice to the images in my mind. Writing was a way to create them in a reader's mind with words, instead.
It's too bad I wasn't born 20 years later, or computer development wasn't 20 years ahead of where it was. Now literally any image is possible, so that ideas that were simply too big visually for any medium available back then are now being executed -- Lord of the Rings springs to mind. My eight-year-old son Raphi, by the way, is just like I was -- except he's in the right era. Sometimes you'll see the two of us, side by side in front of our respective computers, both doing computer art.
Professionally, I've done graphic design work, layout for my own and others' publications, logo design, etc., but the illos I would do mostly for my own pleasure or for friends -- until Daily Kos came into my life.
I am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, though I've always found science fascinating. I've always had an interest in digging out truth, of whatever sort, and realism/reality in my creative work. My definition of reality is probably broader than most people's, and many might disagree with it, but the reality-based community is still where I like to be.
Robo-sapien1 3000 AD is an AI/Human hybrid built for deep space. His/Her 'skin' is an advanced living carbon composite which can feed directly off of everything from starlight to radiation. The immense processing 'brain pac' features a stand alone IQ of over 800 and is linked to a larger collective stretching across the solar system. Robo is shown here working on a superconducting mesh encircling the planet Jupiter which produces antimatter This image was done in a few minutes using computer graphic techniques.
DS: When and how did you start employing electronic media into your artistic work?
KW: I went from word processing to desktop publishing to graphic design and from there to computer art. There's only so much illo work you can do in, say, PageMaker, so when a friend who needed a fancy four-colour ad done offered to teach me Adobe Photoshop, a few years ago, I took him up on it. I was ecstatic when I realized the things you could do, and I began working them more and more into the graphic design work.
DS: What led you to Daily Kos?
KW: I almost can't remember... was there life before Daily Kos? Seriously, when I took the journalism degree I was a news junkie, but left it behind for quite a few years. It was 9/11 that drew me back into it, really. I jumped from site to site, looking for investigative work, good analyses, etc., so naturally I found Left Blogistan. And soon I was hooked.
DS: The illustration for Kosmos was exquisite! How does the budding graphic artist go about creating something like that?
KW: The first thing is, of course -- learn your software. Beyond that, it's a matter of having at least a rough vision. You'd asked for a primeval earth scene... I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I could make it look like a photograph? Trying for photo-realism was the premise of the whole piece. I had never done anything like that before, and I wanted to see if I could.
It was actually relatively simple. With computers, it's easy to do images that are essentially chaotic and random, like landscapes, or that are extremely straight-line and orderly, like schematics or buildings. It's the stuff in between that's hard, that forced you to get out the paint tool and really paint. This one was the former. I started with terrain and water-generating software, then imported the image into Corel PhotoPaint where I could adjust the colours. I used photos gleaned from the Internet -- that rock in the foreground, for instance, is generated terrain and a pic of an actual piece of granite, superimposed. The volcano was imported, too. The real trick was colour-adjusting -- that's probably what I spent most time on. When you add together parts like that, the trick to making them into a whole is making the colours harmonize.
That might be a born talent... in the Ontario Science Centre, which I visited fairly frequently as a kid, there's a console where you can try to match a colour TV-style by adding the right amounts of red, green and blue. I was surprised to see that out of all my friends, I was the only one who could get it close enough to make the line separating the two colours disappear. What makes me think it's genetic is that my sister has it too. I had another friend tell me that this skill is in huge demand in the film world. If that's actually true, and someone out there has such a job... my contact info is avilable.
But you have to use your visual imagination. You ask yourself, over and over, what would this really look like? The more you come up with answers to that question, the better it will look.
Five million years in the future. After the hypothetical fall of humanity, post-humans have radiated into many open econiches left by an extinction event of their own making. These post-humans are brutes, expensive brains have been downsized. They're also being herded by another recently evolved critter: That thing about to pounce is the hypthetical future descendant of the common rat. This piece was done using odds and bits inspired from other illos around the Internet.
Karen Wehrstein first did artwork professionally at age 13, drawing pencil portraits for friends and neighbours. She also began writing novels at the same time, and realizing she was spending more time writing than doing art, she took a degree in journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, where she also contributed editorial cartoons for the university paper. She has published three novels: Lion's Heart and Lion's Soul, solos, with Baen Books in 1991, plus Shadow's Son with S.M. Stirling and Shirley Meier in 1992, also with Baen. She has also published numerous articles and short stories... but obviously never entirely quit doing art. Lots more science-y & Dkos-y graphic art on Karen's blog.