Physical skateboard - finished product

Zoo animal lineart

LIne art of the following animals scanned and online
Penguins / Bush baby / Lion / Squid / Rattle snake/ Buffalo
6 more animals ( students choice ) for each of the environments

Alien Artifact project - Concept Sketches

For the final project in DMA179 Sketching for Communication, we were asked to create a story, a skateboard deck design and a physical prop that involves alien artifacts (browse my blog entries by clicking the DMA179 tag on the sidebar - it starts with a voicemail message). 

Though initially I was not very enthusiastic to start working on this project, mainly because of time issues in order to do something proper, I did create everything myself, aiming for originality, rather than get inspired and stick with the old fashioned idea we all have of aliens. 

The above sketches are concepts I drew on and off in class and home, whenever I could find the time. My aliens, as you’ll notice, are part human (this has to do with the blog entries of the story I came up with).  They are highly creative and deformed, and they even play musical instruments, as you’ll see on the sketches. In fact, you may even see them off sketches, if you look close enough, wherever you are, in any part of the world. Luckily, our Earth has been, and continues to be full of them. 

They will all get the “sticker treatment” when I’m done putting them together into a digital skateboard deck (as required - and they are protesting!) so mr. Tedford can print them. 

Since this is, afterall, an artifact project, I have the freedom to sculpt something, or part of the complicated sketches. If the physical prop were to be a full figure alien, I’d probably have done something that would resemble the aliens from Toy Story - my sculpting skills are inexistant. 

I will be posting the digital image of the skateboard, a photo of the actual skateboard with the artwork printed, and lastly the physical prop of the alien artifact in the following two weeks. So, tuned you should stay. 

March 12, 9:51 PM

I may have found something else. If I haven’t gone completely insane, this is starting to make some sense after all. I mean, it cannot be all creepy coincidences, can it?

After finding the map out of the two images with the same signature size, I was staring at the small one. It’s rather ambiguous. It depicts some kind of mutated human face, facing something that looks like a cross between the dinosaurs I’ve seen at Andrew’s blog and aliens. I don’t know what to make of it. On the top left corner, there is a woman that appears to be sleeping.

I noticed the map’s edges and positioned the image on top of it so it would fit, as you’ll see in the picture above. And as i was staring at it like that, it hit me! What if… the subjects on the photograph are actually regions in the map?! I removed the picture and I marked the regions on the map with ellipses. See above.

Am I going insane, or can any of this be questionable? Why did the person in the voicemail have my voice? Who is he? Where is he coming from? What are those noises?!

March 12, 8:22 PM

I may have found a map!
Maybe.
I noticed that my signature (0607) had (almost?) the same size in 2 images. In the third image, which appears to be a photograph, it is considerably smaller. So I aligned them both on top of each other, carefully positioning both signatures so they would fit (almost) perfectly. I was left with a vertical image, which I sketched quickly, to find out the lines and dark values, without detailed distraction from the photos themselves. I painted over the dark values then, and I noticed that if cut, the left side would fit together. I tried doing that and this is what I got. It does look like a map. Could it be the map that the voice in the message is talking about? 

Phone’s not working at all. It just… died. Will have to get a new one in the morning. 

3:48 AM - March 11, 2012

I am staring at the screen in shock. The audio had images embedded in it. I have posted them above. They all bear my signature… why?! Who the fuck is playing this sick joke?! 

It is 1:53 AM, March 11, 2012. 

I have spent the day analyzing the audio file from the message and looking at the spectrogram. The file from the phone itself was quite large. At first look everything seemed normal, except for a couple of frequencies that were rather odd. They appear as data at first sight; pixellated in an unusual way. They differ immediately and can be easily spotted, as you’ll se in the screenshot above. The peak frequencies are odd too. 

What’s even more intriguing about it, these frequencies are the operator’s voice and modem tone. After some research, I still cannot figure it out how can one leave a voicemail and throughout it the phone’s company broadcasts an automatic and unrelated notice that is usually sent to a caller when the user has changed phone numbers. I didn’t even know phone companies disclosed that data to begin with. What’s even more unnerving, the operator says “The number you have called, has been changed (the operator’s voice has a curious tone when she mentions the change). She then proceeds to say “the new number is… please help! the new number…”. I do not know what to make of it.