Experiment Lab: Results

On and off for a week or so, I had a webcam running while working. Years ago I did the webcam thing. The webcam was different but also not very great quality, and I had it on a tripod over my left shoulder in my older and larger studio. This was probably about 2000 or so. Rather than a live feed, it was an auto-refreshing page that would display a new frame every 15 seconds or so. Oh, how the internet has advanced.

I used Ustream.tv this time, a great free service that live broadcasts your webcam feed. You can also record your broadcasts straight to their server, which is nice. Back in the day, I made a few time-elapsed videos of some paintings, with even a little narration on top. When I took a job for a year at Nexon, Inc. that all stopped.

Basically, the live camera feed I'd call a failed experiment. For it to be worthwhile (for both of us!) to try again would require: A webcam with 640x480 resolution or greater--the cam I used was 320x240. At that larger size, a faster internet connection would probably be necessary. Such a cam would probably have a better picture overall, and with 4 times the pixels, you could actually see some detail. Secondly, a different studio setup besides the guerilla art studio I've used since '05 now, something where I could have the camera on my left side again, so my arm wouldn't block the view.

However, I also did a few experiments before the painting, doing greyscale studies live using Webcammax, a free program (which puts a banner on top until you buy it) that worked really well, capturing a configurable portion of your screen, live. The quality is nice and it doesn't slow down my system very much. That experiment was a success.

However, if I wanted to use the second option to show some of my digital preliminary work and such, there's still the issue of where to post the feed in a way that you'd know about it, since I spend more time doing traditional over digital work. All things to keep thinking about. In the meantime, I did record two greyscale studies, and so I'll post them here. I used the value study shown in the second.

The first one I did playing around with a free online flash-based paint program called Sumo Paint, which is pretty cool on a basic level. The second was done in Painter IX and Photoshop.