Ted Martens - Blog

No Burn Day

tedmartens — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:41:39 +0000

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

tedmartens — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:18:33 +0000

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

tedmartens — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:54:44 +0000

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

tedmartens — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:39:02 +0000

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

tedmartens — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:10:47 +0000

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.

Check out some of the other AMAZING Zelda fanart submissions here on Destructiod and Tiny Cartridge.

This piece was made in a new art tool I’m co-creating called Hexels.

Hexels: isometric cube mode

tedmartens — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:17:48 +0000

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

tedmartens — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:22:29 +0000

George & Jonathan just put out another fantastic album. If you like the Toe Jam & Earl games or funky electronic music in general, you’ll dig their tunes. Listen to them here.

I made the fan art in Hexels.

We’ll miss you, Steve.

tedmartens — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:55:57 +0000

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

tedmartens — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:13:32 +0000

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.

Hexaglow [Hexels + Photoshop for glow]

Galaxy [Hexels only. Used low alpha while drawing this one]

Tri Star [Hexels + Photoshop for glow]

Skull Flag [Hexels]

Hazy ISO Blocks [iso mode in Hexels + Photoshop for soft shading]

Oh yeah, and one of the best parts is that I have my own “.ted” file type now! I always wanted my own file type! My name is 3 letters after all.

Drawing Activity – What do you see?

tedmartens — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:02:25 +0000

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):

A dinosaur by Carl Douglas – @Cartoonosaurus

“I’m sure this is what most people saw. a giant fish eating a gianter mushroom.” Joseph Stevens – @splixel

“I saw a guy picking leaves out of his hair.” Ryan GTG ( @ganatronic )

“I see a rabbit-thing flying a plane” Tyler Glaiel – @tylerglaiel

I don’t usually see anything in photos I’ve traced myself, but this time I did.

Here’s the original photograph. The people in the picture would be easy to identify and might hinder imagination, so I cropped the photo to make it more abstract. Then I roughly traced the explosion.

original photograph by Jaipal Singh, EPA/Corbia

Try it out yourself. It works best with a group of people that trace a few photos each. National Geographic is a good place to look for photos. Good luck.