Friday, August 1, 2008

Tubular Expression

Three years ago, I took a Photoshop class. I liked the teacher so much that I signed up for her next class, which was Painter. I really wanted to take Illustrator from her but it wasn’t offered that last term when I had a hole in my schedule, so Painter it was. It was a fun class with a nice group. I would have gotten more out of it though, if I’d actually had some standard artistic training under my belt, because I didn’t really have a concept of the different types of media represented by the program. Regardless Painter was still a fun program to mess around with. One assignment was to create a series of three pictures based on the theme of a common everyday item. I decided on toothpaste.

This piece is titled The Holy Order of Aquafresh. I had this image of crusader knights as tubes of toothpaste and so I ran with it. Their defeated foes are the Cavity Creeps. If you look at the mouth of a tube of Aquafresh, the paste kinda looks like a cross made of red and greenish blue. It’s funny because no one in the class knew who the Cavity Creeps were. I guess they didn’t watch Cartoons in the 1980s.


This one is your standard take off on pop art painting. It’s simply called Tubes.


The title of this image is Sir Crestor. I was going for an 1980s sorta vibe with it.


-Swinebread

9 comments:

Don Snabulus said...

I wish I could use Ctrl+V to get my teeth clean.

Great pix!

Arkonbey said...

Nice! As soon as I saw the top one I thought of Cavity Creeps ("WE MAKE HOLES IN TEETH!"). The last one looks like a still from an avante garde video from 1983.

Don: it's actually ctrl+alt+shift+v+2+~

There is not floss command, though.

Life As I Know It Now said...

I have not heard of the cavity creeps either--but I'm all anti-television so that's probably why. Cool artwork dude.

Thomas Fummo said...

The first pic felt like a party in my mouth.

Randal Graves said...

I remember the cavity creeps. Glad to see you worked some crusader motifs in there, you patriotic American, you.

Swinebread said...

Snab – Thanks Snab and I always thought you were pretty good when it came to oral hygiene

Arkonbey – Thanks for not tearing them apart because I worked really hard on them ;D

Lib – Very nice of you to say. Being anti-tv probably saves a lot of brain cells I bet.

Doc smoke – lol, you do have a way of capturing the essence of something doc…

Randal – You got it! I was wondering if anybody was gonna pick on the uber patriotism, kudos randal!

Dean Wormer said...

I will never brush my teeth again. I'm afraid the toothpaste will attack me.

Dr. Zaius said...

Awesome! ...And minty fresh.

Freida Bee said...

I love the first one though I admit that while I know who the Cavity Creeps are ("We Make Holes in Teeth" is etched in my mind.), I though it was more of a statement of the toxicity of Aqua Fresh in large doses. I only recall the chant of the CC's, not what they look like.