No Burn Day
Posted by: tedmartens on: January 18, 2012
The Fireplace site is blacked out until January 19th to join the protest against Senate Bill 968: the Protect IP Act. Contact your Representatives and tell them to stop SOPA, PIPA, and all future bills that would rob the internet from staying independent, free and open.
Artwork for Bit Pilot
Posted by: tedmartens on: January 6, 2012
- In: Art | Games
- 2 Comments
This is a piece I made for Bit Pilot (iPhone/iPad) by Zach Gage that I forgot to post when the game came out! You can unlock a larger wallpaper version by getting a high cumulative score in the game. Go to the Bit Pilot webpage linked above to see video and download the game.
This piece is also the album cover for Sabrepulse’s incredible Bit Pilot OST. Go listen to it, seriously, it’s amazing.
New Challenger & Cowboy Santa
Posted by: tedmartens on: December 30, 2011
- In: Art | Games
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Here’s an animated scene I made for yesterday’s episode of New Challenger hosted by Anthony Carboni. You can grab the wallpaper version here. Thanks for the Fireplace shoutout, Anthony!
If you haven’t seen New Challenger yet, it’s a game review show where a game reviewer reviews Anthony’s review of a game. It’s pretty meta, but I think you can handle it. Check it out.
Fireplace OS X
Posted by: tedmartens on: December 22, 2011
- In: Announcements | Games
- 1 Comment
Fireplace is now out for OS X! Download it here.
I can finally run it on my own computer without having to boot into Windows – YAY!! I’ve had a lot of requests for a Mac version of Fireplace, and I’m really happy to release it today. I’m a Mac user, too. This version is the same as the latest PC version (no new commands, sorry) with a small new feature that shows text as you type. Now it’s easier to type long words like ‘marshmallow’. The letters on the title screen also light up as you type them. Thanks, Evan Balster, for helping me program that.
Oh by the way, I’ve received some great photos of people using Fireplace, so I made an album. If you take some photos, send them to me!
Happy Holidays!
My Zelda Zine Submission
Posted by: tedmartens on: November 15, 2011
- In: Art | Hexels
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This is my submission for Zelda Zine which will be printed in Zelda Zine 2: Courage! It’s made entirely out of little triangles and triforces. Zelda Zine is organized by Game City and edited by Cory Schmitz.
Hexels: isometric cube mode
Posted by: tedmartens on: November 15, 2011
- In: Art | Hexels | Uncategorized
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Ken (the other designer of Hexels doing all of the code) added a feature to Hexels that I’ve begged for for weeks! In isometric cube mode, the hexels become cubes and you can use 3 colored light sources to tint the cube’s sides. You can either make the light sources occupy a point in space (local) or they can be directional lights (global). The pink/lavender/light-blue boxes in the above drawing are actually white boxes with directional lights of those colors.
It is done in a Q*bert fashion because the boxes still occupy the original positions of the hexels. This will be an on-going theme for the other features in Hexels that I’ll talk more about later.
George & Jonathan – Beautiful Lifestyle
Posted by: tedmartens on: November 1, 2011
- In: Art | Hexels
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We’ll miss you, Steve.
Posted by: tedmartens on: October 6, 2011
- In: Art | Hexels
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Yesterday we lost one of the greatest creative minds of our time. We’ll miss you, Steve. Thank you for everything.
- Ted Martens and Ken Kopecky
1440 x 900 – made in Hexels
Hexels – a new art tool in the works
Posted by: tedmartens on: September 16, 2011
- In: Announcements | Art
- 5 Comments
My friend Ken Kopecky surprised me with a new art tool on Wednesday. It’s a tool made for drawing within a hexagon based grid, and we’ve been calling it Hexels (derived from hexagons + pixels). It’s super fun to draw with and we’re adding new features all the time. Yesterday I asked Ken if there was any way he could add pen pressure sensitivity and 10 minutes later BAM! he did it (Ken is incredibly skilled at programming). I’ve made a few things trying to figure out what can be done with the limitation of hexagons. Below are a few pieces based on basic shapes (mostly), and I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Ken recently added an isometric mode (last image). I added glow or soft shading to some of them with Photoshop. I’ll be posting more pieces on Flickr and updating our progress through my intergalactic communicator.
Drawing Activity – What do you see?
Posted by: tedmartens on: September 6, 2011
- In: Art
- 3 Comments
In college I took a class about creativity, and one of the topics we talked about was how our brains have a tendency to fill in missing parts of abstract things that we see. Seeing pictures in clouds is one example. You can take advantage of this by looking at photographs traced by someone else. Abstract or nature photos usually work the best.
I’ve traced one (above). You might not see anything in the picture, but if you do draw over top of it.
Continue reading to see some doodles or sketches by other people as well as the original photograph at the bottom (spoiler alert):
