Two Sides Imaging

It looks like Chomper and Fido took a wrong turn somewhere.

I'm just having some fun with a bunch of robots I've collected over time but rarely used.

TEH CUTE, IT BURNZZZZZ!!

One of my content vendors (DAZ 3D) has been having a sale the last few days, so I grabbed several new items, including this baby and the cat for a mere $2 each. I suspect it's because they're getting ready to roll out new versions of them, but these are good enough for me.

There's an ongoing controversy in the world of digital art over whether or not we sometimes create child pornography. That is, I could create an image of a pre-teen girl engaged in an explicit sexual act, and most people would look at it and declare it to be child pornography. But is it really?

The deepest root to the societal ban on child pornography is that it is evidence of a crime being committed, i.e. that of sexual assault on a child. Certainly that would be a proper justification for punishing someone who kept photographic trophies of their crimes. But what about those unconnected to the original crime? We tend to punish them because they derive value from the crime having occurred, and in that sense, they encouraged that crime to occur and encourage other crimes to be committed in the future.

But what about the cases where there was no original crime? Consider the photographic works of David Hamilton or Jock Sturges who often photograph nude adolescents at nude beaches, most often in Europe where the nudity taboo is much less than here in the U.S. The subjects were aware the photos were being taken, and the parents had consented. They are hardly sexually suggestive. Are they child pornography?

Getting back to the world of digital art, we are generally saddled with a restriction from most of the public galleries to not post any child nudity whatsoever. Their real justification is that they don’t want the hassle of some backwater judge declaring that they’re hosting child porn on their servers. They don’t pretend to answer the underlying question of whether or not a digital image such as this could truly be child pornography. It’s their site, and I’m not going to tell what they must host.

However, to enforce their prohibition on child nudity, they have taken the stance that a “child” is any figure that they feel looks like they are under 18 years of age. This has led to a number of images being removed for the “crime” of the woman not having large enough breasts or having the wrong proportion of head to body or for being too short.

Notably, the figure pictured here has been removed many times. Her name is Aiko. She was designed specifically to achieve the anime/manga look, and I think she does a good job at it. Now, just as nudity is not uncommon in anime/manga, it shows up in the Aiko-based digital art. Is all such manga really child porn?

I posted this image to one of the larger public gallery sites. Here Aiko is unmodified. I have done nothing to make her appear younger or older. I’m waiting to see if it gets removed. If it does, then I think it would be safe to say that any Aiko-based nude image is going to be classified as child porn by them.

I'll admit the title is a little weak, but it's all I could come up with. Anyway, I've been shopping. DAZ was running an incredible sale over the weekend, and I picked up the dragon for $2. I already owned the castle pieces, but I could have picked that up for $2 as well.

Yet another boring pin-up...

One of the nice things about building up a large library of props/figures is that it becomes easier to add the little touches to an image. This one looked a little bare (so to speak), so I added the playful little kitten.

Some friends of mine have been feeling blue lately, so it put me in the mood for a sad portrait.

However, I am also fairly happy in that I now have a version of face_off's old Real Skin Shader script that has been modified for V4. I'm sure it's not as good as the one he'll eventually release for V4, but it's finally removing some of the plastic look to some of my V4 renders so far.

This is my first image with The Freak from DAZ. I picked him up in their big Member's Choice sale. The cat is DAZ's Millenium Cat (also bought in that sale), and the leaves are from Palace of Leaves.

Probably the most unique thing about this image is not the image itself but how I made it. While I frequently save multiple test renders along the way, I usually don't start those until the image is close to finished, i.e. all the posing, materials, and lighting are more or less in place. This time I made test renders all along the way, from the first figure import to the last Final quality render, about 25 images in all. My goal is to turn that into a little flash animation to show to my non-Poser artist friends, to give them some idea of what my work-flow is like. We'll see.

In two weeks, I'll be showing some pieces at AggieCon. I'll definitely be taking these pieces:

Two Sides
Father, Forgive Me
Look What I Found
Invoking Power
Intercession
Shattered -- first showing for this piece
Be Not Lost To Me -- first showing for this piece

And I'm considering doing up small prints of these as well:

Not a Chick
She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not
True Love

Any feedback on piece selection would be appreciated.

It's been a good week, so I thought I'd do a happier portrait this time.

Here I was trying a new technique for painting feathers on Julia. I was hoping to get a nice gradation of colored feathers by doing some paint mixing along the way. What I ended up with was not really the look I had in mind, but it I am quite pleased with the way it came out.

Yet another boring pin-up...

This is the back view that I promised back in YABP 28. I had been talking to a dancer about using the natural curves of the body with the right poses and lights to exaggerate some of those curves, i.e. to make the hip-waist-chest curves look as extreme as with a corset, but without wearing any clothes. YABP 28 was the front view, so here's the back view.

For anyone who has had to say "no" twice.

This one's been rattling around in my brain for a while, but I didn't have the outfit or the right kind of gun until quite recently.

Little, yellow, different... really different.

Just having a little fun.

Just doing another portrait again. I'm really starting to like doing these portraits, but I find that I'm having a hard time coming up with titles, just like I did with the pin-ups. Could something like "yet another boring portrait #15" be in my future?

Just a quick little portrait. This is Sydney being a little camera shy.

I'm coming out from a long, rough night, and today was one more sign of the coming dawn.

So, anyway, just doing another portrait, but fear not, boring pin-ups will soon return along with some fresh fantasy babes.

Yet another boring pin-up...

I was playing around here with doing a pair of strategic nudes who conveniently show none of their Pythonesque "naughty bits". That came out fairly well due to V4's flexibility, but I wasn't quite satisfied with their expressions.