Introduction To Who I Am As An Artist (Artist Spotlight Crom131)
PREFACE
I would first like to say my name as a digital artist and digital content creator is Crom131 , and that this blog and the other blogs too come that I will place here on this site are to showcase and display my own digital art and that of other digital artist and or digital sculptors that have contributed to the Art current genere known as Roticapunk .
in the next blog post I will go into a deeper understanding of the term Roticapunk and it's relationship to a growing art style and current that has been around for some time now.
Artist Spotlight: Crom131
9/8/2015 11:16:16 AM by Teronsuke
(Edited: 9/8/2015 11:24:16 AM)
Artist Name:
Crom131
Store Catalog: http://www.renderotica.com/content-artists/Crom131/95
Artist gallery: http://www.renderotica.com/artists/Crom131/Gallery.aspx
Q) what brought you into 3D?
First I would like to say thank you and it's an honor to be in this Artist Spotlight, now to answer your question, 3D CGI began for me in and around 1992 to 1995 with the arrival of Virtual reality,
in the one movie I loved so much that helped to start the mainstream concept of cyberspace and the virtual reality revolutionary phase of conscious thought, the movie was called The Lawnmower Man, starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan,
that movie was released in 1992 and had me run to the local Barnes and noble bookstore a brick and mortar store, understand at that time online and the internet was in its infancy of dial-up BBS sysop and Co-sysop bulletin board forum communications, so I found myself looking for any books on this new tech called virtual reality and I found one that had a floppy disk in the back and that is what brought me into 3D.
The book had a generic title so I don't remember the name of the book but only the name of the floppy disk in the back, from what I can remember
it was called how to make a virtual world, and that day I held the holy grail of 3D art making in my hand, now understand I am from the traditional Old school of pen and ink art so I took time to learn illustration
as best as I could growing up, my biggest influence to my art was my godfather and how he did not want me to be a thug youth that ran around in the streets and I did a lot of that back then, but one day he brought over to my house a stack of magazines they were all old warren publishing magazines,
1984 that was retitled 1994 in the 80's the magazines were, Creepy, Eerie , Vampirella , The Rook, etc. magazines stacked four feet high, From all those magazines artist like Frank Frazetta, Neal Adams, Richard Corben, Dan Adkins etc. became a new Art style current to me, and being brought up in the Bronx in the Hip Hop era and knowing and growing up with graffiti artist like Zane, Bio, Taz, that would all hang out in the Bronx River Projects local neighborhood library a few blocks away from Soulsonic Force afrika bambaataa's first chapter of Zulu nation in the soundview section of the Bronx
one of the true hip hop cultures birthplace and come up with the next hot B-boy avatars to graffiti on a train, later it would become Lee jackets as more street crews wanted to have the wild style and avatars that would outshine another.
each of them from the Old school graffiti crew went on to become Icons in the Hip hop graffiti culture, and I do this make content and never looked for the fame with what small family I have left I protect them from that and I don't think I could stand to see anymore of them fade away without me being there. In those magazines It was Richard Corben who was my favorite illustrator within these warren publishing magazines, I even had some old underground comix in the stack with his illustrated short stories in them, one of them was about from what I can remember a hippy that was frozen by accident and woke up in a post apocalyptic nuked world and saved a hot looking female from mutants that wanted to bang her, and then the hippy had to go up against mutant humanoid cockroaches, in the end of that first underground comic some graphic sex took place
this was my true introduction to the adult side of fantasy , all that I saw in those magazines opened my mind to a new world of SCI-fi, Horror and the possibilities of what an adult version of fantasy was that had no bounds and I had the floppy disk of Virtual reality in my hands, all I had to do was learn, so I did on a gateway 2000 PC and being the only guy on the block with a PC and where I am from in the Bronx a Pc was a luxury and money to buy one was hard to get at that time, my foster brother rob who passed away in 2000 loved my artwork and loved my SCI-fi illustrated short stories so much he made my gateway PC, he was a MIT grad and obtained reused parts from what he found in the back of hospital bins and court buildings, at that time he had security side jobs so he would run into thrown away ink-dot printers and hard drive PC towers he built my first PC in the name of art, so I could not let him or my godfather down and I learned all I could about 3D.
but 3D Now is the golden age and I am happy to still be living in it. When I left the Bronx years ago and moved to a nice town out in Florida I looked back into 3D art and found poser, Photoshop I had been using it for years now and poser seemed to help me combine my know how in 3D tools like auto desk 3DMax and Zbrush into a nice new workflow, then I found renderotica and started making content and that's all she wrote,
I still do freelance work and I like to keep my Client's confidentiality intact, that's why I still have work till this day.
Q) How did you choose your nickname?
My original artist a.k.a. is brujho, and I still have the art out there in the world with that name on it,it means a male Witch, but it's really sorcerer ? wise man in Spanish linguistics, it was a title I was given by friends and family from a young age due to the fact that in the Spanish island culture I helped so many persons and things came out good for them, and those that tired to slam my name "well" as the saying go's "karma is a bitch", and the environment were I came from you get the good with the bad so one develops an instinct to know the good from the bad, so Friends and family called me that as an endearment expression of affection, wise men in Spanish culture is known as "Brujho's Male witch's and females are "Brujas" the female witch equivalent of the male counterpart, but not in a bad way, you see a witch in the western world is just that a person how uses magick to bring about change with the aid of tools i.e., spells, potions, mantras, but in the Spanish world we place the type of witch after the root word so a bad witch would be "el brujo del Diablo" that would go to mean "the witch of the devil", but the word alone just means "Wise one" in Spanish, and in the new modern Wiccan religion this has been adopted from the same source but that I learned for a very well-known witch of our time and shes a doll "Lady R"and if you read this thanks for the time we spent.
CROM131 did not come about Because of Conan the barbarian magazines REH's crom the god that does not care unless you do for yourself is a fiction of Robert E. Howard's world and nice to know my name conjure's him up loved his mythos, but it is the Portuguese word for "chromophoric": any chemical group that produces color in a compound, as for the 131 I was always fascinated by numbers and their meaning and the number One represents a single entity,
Three is the first odd prime number or the first unique prime in the progression of numbers, so if I sum it all up CROM131 means One biological entity that will always try to be unique and true to oneself in as many ways possible.
Q) How long have you been creating your artwork?
From the time that i got my hands on my first TV guide a piece of paper a pen,in those days TV guide had an advert to draw a parrot or a pirate and then send it in with five dollars to see if you qualify to go to the academy of fine arts.
I qualified but was to young nine or ten so to answer your question a long Time.
Q) what are the specs of your render machine?
Iupgraded just for art and 3D around three months back , for fun and surf I use my old comps I have the four in the house two my Significant Other uses for her fun and streaming Boob tube watch, I use my old Compaq for Photoshop and a Dell for modeling
but i render on a Cyber power PC Gamer Ultra GUA380 Desktop AMD FX-Series Quad-Core FX-4300 Processor 3.8 GHz (4 MB cache) 8GB SDRAM DDR3 1024 GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 Graphics don't need much for rendering
but I got it to speed up my work flow when I use Vue to render an environment it is a beast on lag render hell , but as the old saying go's save before you render, it's a wise move to do so.
Q)Poser or Daz Studio and why?
"""Drummmmm rolll please"""Ta daa" "Poser",
I just love the work flow, and all the new stuff they added make it Ez, I worked with poser from the start, Daz is good and some of the mat's you can get out of Daz are I'll just say wow,
but With some time and some elbow grease you can get the same or even better out of poser, but post-work is the key in the end to make any image stand out just right, as well I have taken note that allot of poser art has its own
current style that brings out that originality to each and every different artist.
Q) What so far has been your favorite “creature” type product you’ve made?
That would be my Crom131's SOGS in the short discription I have in the Rotica Store catalog it sum's it up,Being a lover of strange and alien things and all things Extra-Dimensional, I wanted to make an alien race that would last and grow as a mythos.
Q) Where do you draw your inspirations from?
it's strange to say, I have old Blackbooks filled with ideas, and I make it a point to keep my tablet on me now, since I like to look at landscapes as I go places, and I ask myself what or how would this place look if an invasion would happen or an outbreak
but not in the cinema way but more of a chaotic baron munchausen dada surrealistic way, I think old films of sci-fi genre helped my conception of the strange, my grandfather hooked me on 50's and 60's Sci-fi, you know well we never see the monster or the impending doom till the
end, you hear a noise, or you get to see the silhouette of whats coming but in your mind eye you create somthing before the big reveal something from the deep unconscious, my inspirations just come easy nowadays, my brain is filled with an amalgam of
Strange concepts it's like the landscapes and objects become a scrying mirror and I take what looks good or needs to be changed and add it to my art or 3D content.
Q) which product gave you the most “pain”
I would say Crom131's A.H.Toon Deluxe Pro it's not just a product to turn your poser figures and props toon shaded but the PDF gives instruction on how to keep the underlay texture of the original mat texture in the figure or prop used,
not a EZ task without a python script. I obtained the colors from pixels in-between solid colors that came from old cinematic stills of animated old color cartoons then compiled and had to change the numbers in each 116 procedural toon shaders mat file to work just right, the PDF as well shows you were to dial in the shader tree of your toon creation to change the toon line thickness it's a very Flexible toon kit that lets you get the pro graphic novel look to full on Disney look and, six custom ethnicity body morphs and shaders all was a pain but a well worth the time in making a product made just for Rotica.
Q) any plans for more monsters or aliens in the future?
Yes, in fact after I finish this new project called Alien Objects kit a nice nasty kit of new stuff one can use to make your captive feel some extra fun, a new alien morph kit will be made to use, "ahem"... almost gave it away
but "yes" more to come, I will place in my Crom131 Product and info page announcements of new Products before October.
Q) Out of all the various art mediums why 3D?
It's simple to move with the times,Sculpting once was with clay now it's just a tablet pen push, but 3D printing is the future of bio synthetic carpentry, think of it one day nano 3D printing will make all we need, I am glad I know
how to make and morph 3D objects, by the time I am so old I cannot walk We might have whatever photo realistic 3D landscape environments to hop around in with the power of thought one hundred times better than any second Life, I hope I make it to the party to teach my grand kids Children.
Q) What are your plans for the future?
More to add to my rotica store catalog , and getting my tabletop game Apoctopia © ready for publishing, I am so almost done just testing and prototyping. I would like to open a 3D content production lab one day to have a large team making 3D content for Poser, Daz studio and the future tech render machines that will come to us, in the not to distant future with the way computer processors are advancing we will have the power of a render cloud in our PC's I hope in our lifetime, won't that be fun.
Q) who are your favorite artists other than yourself?
Ahhh yes the great old ones to name a few dali, Frank Frazetta, Neal Adams, Richard Corben, Dan Adkins, H.R. Giger and one who is not a pen ink artist but an artist in his own right Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (born 17 February 1929) a Chilean filmmaker, playwright, play director,
actor, author, poet, musician, comics writer and spiritual guru. Best known for his avant-garde films and a big influence on my mental preparation for my work.
Q) If someone reading this wants to start creating their own artwork what words of advice would you give them?
Don't Give Up, a lump of coal is pressed for years before it becomes a diamond and that light is within all of us, some more than others but none the less Light.
Q) Do you have a job outside of 3D or do you consider this your full time occupation?
This is my full time occupation, as well as freelance work I have done for several Select Clients and small indie film Companies.
Q) Speech time! any final words you have for your, fans and fellow 3D community?
I want to give my heart felt thank's to all those up and coming artist, and the still standing pro's that I have met in this community and that have given me support to continue all these years.
One day our work in 3D will be collectors items of the long forgotten digital age but it will be solidified and made real within the impending future to come, Thank you.
