Batman Vs. Joker

Nathan Olsen — Sat, 11 May 2013 08:00:44 +0000

Bang! Pow! Last fall I made a little sketch of Batman fighting the Joker for a Photoshop demo at LCAD. The demo went great, the sketch went into a notebook and I forgot about it.

Until a month ago. I pulled the sketch out and decided it deserved to be finished. I posted the results on Tumblr but forgot to add it here. Pretty fun, right?

Here’s a photo of the sketch, from my Instagram account:

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The Incredible Hulk

Nathan Olsen — Sat, 04 May 2013 01:09:10 +0000

Here’s a little something I made recently. As has already been established, I’m a lifelong fan of comic books. I don’t follow superhero books so much anymore as an adult (with a few exceptions — Hawkeye has been a lot of fun lately), but superheroes sure are fun to draw.

I was able to find surprisingly few drawings out there of Bruce Banner’s actual transformation into the Hulk, so I thought that might be fun to tackle. Here’s the sketch I started with:

That’s actually about as finished as I got with that. Sketches are just that… sketches. Maps. A place to figure things out. I felt pretty good about what I had so I just moved on to the painting.

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CSS Zen Garden (HTML5 Markup Update)

Nathan Olsen — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 06:04:48 +0000

Update: In honor of the 10th anniversary of the CSS Zen Garden, David Shea has updated the site’s code to HTML5 and reopened the design contest. The new code can be found here.

I teach Internet Design in the Visual Communications department at LCAD and one of the core objectives of the class is to ensure that each student is fluent in HTML and CSS by the semester’s end. For students that have no background (or particular interest) in programming, it’s very challenging to bring them up to speed in such a short period of time.

After a few weeks of exercises and demos, I introduce the class to David Shea’s CSS Zen Garden. The CSS Zen Garden is a highly effective way to introduce a group of design students to the power and purpose of external stylesheets and it also makes an excellent first project.

When they first start working with HTML and CSS, students often give into the temptation to rearrange the content of an HTML page (and ignore semantics) when they can’t figure out how to achieve their design goals through CSS alone. By making students work with the CSS Zen Garden HTML code (and by not allowing them to alter it), students are forced to seek out solutions to their design problems using only CSS. It’s great way to teach the proper implementation of web standards.

Unfortunately, as it is now coded, the CSS Zen Garden is rapidly reaching the end of its usefulness. Many of my current students will graduate from college in 2015. If I am to properly prepare them for the job market, they will need to understand HTML5. While it made sense last year to teach to XHTML while HTML5 matured and browser support increased, I no longer see either as a roadblock. HTML5 offers a lot of advantages over XHTML and I’m very happy to transition the course curriculum to the new standard.

While the markup may be different, I still believe that the CSS Zen Garden can be an excellent teaching tool. However, having already introduced my students to the semantically rich new markup options now available in HTML5, I can’t see using the CSS Zen Garden as it is now written as a class project. Certainly, I could always make a new page for them to work from but, I don’t know, I kind of like the idea that the CSS Zen Garden might live on.

So I sat down and took a stab at it myself. My version strips out a few of those extra tags that David Shea included: the extra span tags that were once necessary to perform an image replacement, the unordered lists for navigation, and the empty divs that had no semantic purpose whatsoever. The acronym tag is now the abbr tag. Access keys that did not fit the UK government recommendation were jettisoned. The navigation has been moved to the top of the file, now directly below the header. And the is greatly simplified.

and

have replaced the

tags that once served a similar purpose.

All of the original links and text have been unchanged — even the more dubious meta tags — it is my intent to leave David Shea’s work in as close to its original state as possible. I still remember how excited I was the first time I stumbled onto the CSS Zen Garden and I’m just hoping that, for at least a few more years, young designers might continue to take up the challenge of redesigning the CSS Zen Garden using nothing more than a stylesheet.

Download CSS Zen Garden HTML5 >




	
	
	
	
	
	css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design
	






	
		
			css Zen Garden
			The Beauty of CSS Design
		
			
	
		
			Select a Design:
			Under the Sea! by Eric Stoltz
			Make ’em Proud by Michael McAghon and Scotty Reifsnyder
			Orchid Beauty by Kevin Addison
			Oceanscape by Justin Gray
			CSS Co., Ltd. by Benjamin Klemm
			Sakura by Tatsuya Uchida
			Kyoto Forest by John Politowski
			A Walk in the Garden by Simon Van Hauwermeiren
		
			
		
			Archives:
			next designs »
			View All Designs
		
			
		
			Resources:
			View This Design’s CSS
			CSS Resources
			FAQ
			Submit a Design
			Translations
		
	
		


A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design. Select any style sheet from the list to load it into this page.
Download the sample html file and css file



The Road to Enlightenment
Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of browser-specific tags, incompatible DOMs, and broken CSS support.
Today, we must clear the mind of past practices. Web enlightenment has been achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of folk like the W3C, WaSP and the major browser creators.
The css Zen Garden invites you to relax and meditate on the important lessons of the masters. Begin to see with clarity. Learn to use the (yet to be) time-honored techniques in new and invigorating fashion. Become one with the web.



So What is This About?
There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really.
CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure. To date, most examples of neat tricks and hacks have been demonstrated by structurists and coders. Designers have yet to make their mark. This needs to change.



Participation
Graphic artists only please. You are modifying this page, so strong CSS skills are necessary, but the example files are commented well enough that even CSS novices can use them as starting points. Please see the CSS Resource Guide for advanced tutorials and tips on working with CSS.
You may modify the style sheet in any way you wish, but not the HTML. This may seem daunting at first if you’ve never worked this way before, but follow the listed links to learn more, and use the sample files as a guide.
Download the sample html file and css file to work on a copy locally. Once you have completed your masterpiece (and please, don’t submit half-finished work) upload your .css file to a web server under your control. Send us a link to the file and if we choose to use it, we will spider the associated images. Final submissions will be placed on our server.



Benefits
Why participate? For recognition, inspiration, and a resource we can all refer to when making the case for CSS-based design. This is sorely needed, even today. More and more major sites are taking the leap, but not enough have. One day this gallery will be a historical curiosity; that day is not today.



Requirements
We would like to see as much CSS1 as possible. CSS2 should be limited to widely-supported elements only. The css Zen Garden is about functional, practical CSS and not the latest bleeding-edge tricks viewable by 2% of the browsing public. The only real requirement we have is that your CSS validates.
Unfortunately, designing this way highlights the flaws in the various implementations of CSS. Different browsers display differently, even completely valid CSS at times, and this becomes maddening when a fix for one leads to breakage in another. View the Resources page for information on some of the fixes available. Full browser compliance is still sometimes a pipe dream, and we do not expect you to come up with pixel-perfect code across every platform. But do test in as many as you can. If your design doesn’t work in at least IE5+/Win and Mozilla (run by over 90% of the population), chances are we won’t accept it.
We ask that you submit original artwork. Please respect copyright laws. Please keep objectionable material to a minimum; tasteful nudity is acceptable, outright pornography will be rejected.
This is a learning exercise as well as a demonstration. You retain full copyright on your graphics (with limited exceptions, see submission guidelines), but we ask you release your CSS under a Creative Commons license identical to the one on this site so that others may learn from your work.
Bandwidth graciously donated by mediatemple. Now available: Zen Garden, the book. 





html5   
css   
cc  
accessibility

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The Exhibition

Nathan Olsen — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:05:16 +0000

For those of you who have been kind enough to follow my work but were unable to attend my MFA exhibition, I thought I might post some photographs from the show. Unfortunately, I don’t have any shots of the opening reception — after all the hard work that went into getting the show up, I was just happy to be conscious and in attendance that night. The reception was great though — there was a huge turn-out and I had a lot of fun talking to folks about my work.

There was a brief write-up of the show in the campus newspaper.

The work in the show is all from large scale digital files — many of which are over 3GB in size. The largest prints, the Candy Wrapper Series, are printed at 3′x3′ from files that each contain 234,090,00 pixels (15,300px by 15,300px). I’ve never worked this large before and seeing these pieces at this scale was really gratifying. Months of drawing, painting, layering, masking, and color correction went into each piece but I never really got a good sense about how it was all working until I finally saw the prints on the gallery walls.

Now that the show is over, I’m looking forward to figuring out what to do next. I’d love to continue working on some of the ideas that developed out of this body of work, but I’m not quite sure how to proceed. Working at such a large scale is very demanding and outputting high quality, archival prints at these sizes is not easy on the pocket book. I would love to do a short run of limited edition prints of some of these pieces.

By the way, this entire album of photos can also be found on my Facebook page. Liking my Facebook page is a great way to keep up-to-date with what I’m doing and to help me spread the word about my work.

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Emergency!

Nathan Olsen — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:48:00 +0000

The vendor I used to print some of the work for my gallery show screwed up one of my prints. With just days to go until my show opens (and far too much work left to do), I managed to track down a printer on campus that could handle this 15,300px by 15,300px monster file. The catch? The printer is powered by a 2001 PowerMac. I wasn’t allowed to leave the printer unattended, so I spent three agonizing hours sitting on the floor of a small workroom staring at this thing.

As last minute emergencies go, I can hardly complain — the print is gorgeous!

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MFA Thesis Exhibition

Nathan Olsen — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 22:41:42 +0000

On Sunday, November 14, 2010, my MFA thesis exhibition, Make Believe, will be opening in the Dutzi art gallery on the campus of California State University, Long Beach.

A map and directions can be found on the university art department website. Park in lot 7 if you plan to attend the reception.

The reception will be from 5:00pm-7:00pm and coincides with the opening receptions for the MFA exhibitions of three very talented friends of mine, Nancy Chiu, Jennie Cotterill and Harry Diaz.

The exhibit will be on display the week of November 15th-18th. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 12:00pm-5:00pm, and Wednesday from 12:00pm-7:00pm.

I’ll personally be on hand at the gallery to answer questions and talk art both at the reception on Sunday as well as during gallery hours on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, so stop by if you can!

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Brushes

Nathan Olsen — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 03:05:44 +0000

Today was a work session for my Tuesday Photoshop class at LCAD, which left me with some downtime. I like to draw while I await requests for help from my students so, in that spirit, I decided today to check-out the Brushes app for the iPad. It’s a neat program. The interface is really simple to use, but I still found it a little awkward at first. As I got the hang of it? I really started to enjoy myself. It’s no replacement for actual paint, but it’s definitely a much more practical option for sketching on the go.

I know that there is at least one or two competitors out there to Brushes and discussions often revolve around which of them has the most/best features. Honestly? I love the simplicity of Brushes. I don’t think I need anything more than this. I just learned that there are shortcuts for changing the brush size and picking colors, which is great. If there was a shortcut for changing opacity? The program would be perfect.

Update: You can watch a time lapse video of the painting process at YouTube.

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Batgirl

Nathan Olsen — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:10:01 +0000

Other superheroes in the notebook:

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The White Queen

Nathan Olsen — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:22:29 +0000

My favorite comic book series as a kid was The Uncanny X-Men. I was too young for the Byrne era, but I was there for Rick Leonardi, Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee. Chris Claremont’s writing was so convoluted that half the fun was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on from issue to issue. The first time The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants showed up? I had no idea who they were, but Claremont wrote the story as if everyone knew who they were — I think that was kind of what made the book so interesting. Reading it was like joining a club and the longer you stuck with it, the higher you rose in the ranks. Long time readers knew the Brotherhood, and that’s all that mattered. Me? I just had to catch up.

Other superheroes in the notebook

And it wasn’t too difficult to find the motivation — the Brotherhood’s leader was a character called The White Queen. A cold, evil woman named Emma Frost who had the body of a supermodel and a costume that looked like it had been picked off the rack at Fredericks of Hollywood. To a pre-teen boy? The most terrifying supervillain imaginable — either she’d kill you or kiss you and at that age both prospects seemed pretty frightening.

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“Meanwhile, Below” Print For Sale

Nathan Olsen — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:55:47 +0000

Hey folks! It’s been a long time coming, but I finally have a new print for sale. For those of you who have been following my work, you probably recognize the Lollypop Squid from a previous print of mine.

This new print, Meanwhile, Below, is offered in my store as a 12″x12.5″ giclée on 13″x15″ acid-free fine art paper and ships signed by me, the artist.

While I’m really happy with how this piece came out, it’s been a long journey to get it to this point. I actually started the piece last winter, initially rendering it as a pencil drawing.

At the time, I was mimicking the workflow of many digital illustrators by starting with a pencil drawing and then moving to digital coloring. However, my method of digital coloring was a bit… complicated. Slow, tedious — those would also be apt descriptions. I mean, the results were always great, but I really didn’t enjoy the process and I was really getting bogged down while working on this one.

After a good month (yes, month — perhaps longer, but that’s too embarrassing to admit to) or so of working on this print, I gave up. I needed to find a new way of working. So, I set this print aside and started experimenting, looking for better, faster, more enjoyable ways to make pictures.

Comparing the final image to what I made a year ago, I think it’s clear that all that work hasn’t gone to waste. There were certainly some nice elements to the early piece, but I’m much happier with the results I’m getting now. More importantly, I’m much happier while I’m working, which is also really important.

Once again, if you’d like to have a copy of this print for yourself, you can find them in my online store.

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