Blood Stain Child
Album: Mozaiq
Release Date: October 9, 2007
Label: Locomotive Records

Have you ever said to yourself “I bet it’d be cool to incorporate large amounts of electronic elements like dance, techno and trance sounds into a melodic death metal album?” My magic 8-ball says “highly unlikely” but for the members of this Japanese band, it must have read “Definitely.” Blood Stain Child take the melodic death metal genre to an odd and yet compelling new level with their latest album “Mozaiq.”

Not too long from the album’s opening the waves of techno synthesizers will wash over you like a typhoon. These are accompanied by speedy guitar licks and booming drums. As for the vocal styles, they are reminiscent of Anders Friden of In Flames, with both growled and clean vocal harmonies. However, if you can understand what they’re saying a... Read more »

The following is a Research Paper I wrote for an English class during Winter Quarter of this past School year. The pictures are unfortunatly not included but are not completely needed. You should be able to find most of the pictures by looking up both artists.

Two of the most prolific artists alive today are H.R. Giger and Alex Grey. Both artists excelled without formal training in art, creating works that arise from innate personal visions that revel foremost in the creative act itself. Giger and Grey share the main skill of a visionary artist: the ability to listen to the inner voices of the soul and to create expressive works from what they hear, though what they create may not even be thought of as 'art' by the creator (AVAM).

Gig... Read more »

Salvador Dali is considered as the greatest artist of the surrealist art movement and one of the greatest masters of art of the twentieth century. During his lifetime the public got a picture of an bizarre paranoid. His personality caused a lot of controversy. After his death in 1989 his name remained in the headlines. But this time it was not funny at all. The art market was shaken by reports of great numbers of fraudulent Dali prints. What's all behind it?

For copyright reasons we cannot show you artworks by Salvador Dali on this page. Instead we decorated the article with woodblock prints by contemporary artist Tadashi Osaka, born 1937. One image shows Cadaques in Spain, where Dali had bought a fisherman's house and lived and worked with his wife Gala for a long time. If you are interested in buying art prints by this exceptional Japanese artist, please con... Read more »

During his lifetime, Van Gogh's work was represented in two very small exhibitions and two larger ones. Only one of Van Gogh's paintings was sold while he lived. The great majority of the works by which he is remembered were produced in 29 months of frenzied activity and intermittent bouts with epileptoid seizures and profound despair that finally ended in suicide. In his grim struggle Vincent had one constant ally and support, his younge... Read more »

GAUGUIN, PAUL

pôl gōgăNˈ, 1848–1903, French painter and woodcut artist, b. Paris; son of a journalist and a French-Peruvian mother.

Early Life

Gauguin was first a sailor, then a successful stockbroker in Paris. In 1874 he began to paint on weekends. By the age of 35, with the encouragement of Camille Pissarro, he devoted himself completely to his art, having given up his position and separated (1885) from his wife and five children. Allying himself with the Impressionists, he exhibited with them from 1879 to 1886. The next year he sailed for Panama and Martinique. In protest against the "dise... Read more »

Adobe's new Photoshop CS4 packs a ton of fresh features and an updated interface, which alone make it a worthy upgrade for existing users.

But the big news is that Photoshop now comes in both 32- and 64-bit Windows Vista versions. The 64-bit edition will allow PCs with lots of RAM to work on very large images with less hard-disk swapping (ideally, no swapping at all), thus speeding up operations. With the shrinking amount of RAM available to modern PCs (due to a 4GB limit on 32-bit Windows versions and those operating systems' increasing hunger for RAM), that's a significant update.

I tested betas of both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Photoshop CS4 by installing them on a workstation with dual Intel Xeon CPUs, running Windows Vista 64-bit and 8GB of RAM. Photoshop requires that you manually allocate a specific amount of RAM to it, rather than its acquirin... Read more »

Imagine yourself making a Pixar movie and not paying a dime for the software needed to do it. That's the premise behind Blender 3D, a free fully featured 3D content creation suite. Open sourced under the GNU GPL since 2002, Blender has grown a lot since then. The current version, 2.36, is a real winner.
You can download Blender for all supported platforms (Microsoft Windows, Linux (i386), Mac OS X, FreeBSD 5.3 (i386), SGI Irix 6.5, and Sun Solaris 2.8 (SPARC), as well as the source code and several plug-ins. Bleeding edge users can download a Blender CVS compilation from the Blender Testing Builds forum. You can also grab the source from CVS and build it yourself.

For Windows users, Blender provides an installer program. If you have a *nix box you just have to unpack the contents of the install download to a folder of your choice.

Blender comprises ... Read more »

Introduction

For years now, ZBrush users have been begging and pleading for an upgrade, but kudos to the Pixologic team for holding their ground and not releasing a new version until the features were something to sing about. Well, it has finally arrived and it was worth the wait. ZBrush 3.1 is stronger and more innovative than ever.

From simple user requested improvements such as the ability to load custom brush presets to major new developments like MATCAP and the inclusion of ZMapper and the Displacement Exporter, the new version of ZBrush extends the revolutionary nature of the product even more.

ZBrush is a revolutionary software package that enables digital artists to enhance images and objects using a set of unique brushes and sculpting tools. ZBrush includes several brushes that actually let you paint in 3D space by pulling the brush strokes aw... Read more »

Introduction
NewTek's LightWave 3D isn't the most popular 3d package. It also isn't the most expensive or the cheapest 3d package available, but it does have an incredibly loyal group of users. This raises the question, what is it about this package that makes it stand out from other packages? The answer is surprisingly simple. First, LightWave has all the features and tools that you need and second, they are designed and implemented in a way that makes the software incredibly easy to use. The combination of powerful software that is simple to use makes it the 3d package of choice for many users.

The LightWave Interface
3d packages are complex and they are getting even more complex with each new release, which can make it particularly tough on a user interface designer to include controls for all the new features to an already busy interface. Lig... Read more »

Introduction
Softimage XSI has an amazing heritage. Softimage has been a staple in high-end computer graphics (CG) studios since the early '90s, giving the software a level of experience and breadth that few other 3d packages have. For many years, Softimage has been comfortable to lead the high-end animation market with few other competitors. Among all the 3d software offerings it was quite expensive, but yielded amazing results that were worth the high cost. Because of the high price tag, Softimage was mainly used for film work.

Softimage, the company, was bought and sold several times over the last 10 years, even being part of Microsoft for awhile. Today, it is owned by Avid, who produces broadcast quality video editing tools and solutions. Avid sees Softimage as a critical piece of the video editing pipeline that they support and has been putting a l... Read more »