Xaious, Master of Time Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 Alright, I want to know anything and everything you could possibly think to tell me on this. Be brutally honest on the critique, as you desire. Inspired by Acid Bath's song God Machine. (Song Lyrics)God Machine The God machine is hungry For individualism and ripe brains The skull farmers do their rain dance And pray the machine falls to sleep She holds me close And whispers wet "there are cannibals among us." Mad in love with dry dead boys In the backs of Abandoned cars Smoking the bones of children Plotting the murder of love Strapped into the chair The needle now descends As they lick their cracking lips Their twitching never ends Blood beneath their finger nails, Swallow all my pain Dirty needles break the skin Suck hard as I drain Drain me Drain me Sunken eyes, a twisted spine A whiter shade of pale Rockabilly man come to pound the coffin nails Inject my stomach full of Cockroach eggs Their machine is coming carried on a million legs Waking in the sleep of reason Winter is the forever season Lick thy mother's bleeding lips From this glass of hate we sip Fuck the glass we pump the keg Kill conception at the egg Her chin is wet with someone's hate Love, disfigure, amputate Amputate Amputate Can you remember how it felt to be alive? Your god machine is cold And dead your eyes they cannot cry Fuck your deities of dying love We have shot them down from the skies above Screaming convulsing My eyes are bleeding Be silent now and take your beating I wonder how long you would live With a bullet in your gut I wonder how much shit you'd talk If your throat was cut I wonder what you'd sound like begging me To let you breathe I wonder how much pain it would take To make you all believe Believe, believe, believe, believe In me I'm your god machine Fuck your god (Wow...honestly, that's the first time I look at the lyrics to this song....heh...yet still inspiring) Now, for the image this inspired: Commentato! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gryphon Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 The image is cool... the lyrics are disturbing, but not in a scary way - just lots of darkness in them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mynx Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 *giggles maniacally* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xaious, Master of Time Posted December 8, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 Yeah, Acid Bath had a lot of dark and evil soundingness to their music. It's the kidn of stuff that really gets my creative juices flowing. Which leads to things like this at times.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tyrion Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 Hmmm, that's the cathedral of Cologne, if I'm not mistaken. Certainly an odd image. Interesting to see how the brain makes connections between words and images, isn't it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kasmandre Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 Seriously creepy. It won't stop looking at me. Very nicely done. ...Now how am I supposed to get to sleep tonight? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cryptomancer Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 *shoots the theological side of the brain* It is a very interesting set of lyrics. The picture itself is a fantastic depiction of its theology. How much the age of technology controls the spirituality of our world. Amidst the brutal wires and alloy limbs Tangled in the empty core, Tied with cables to the source Of a chrome and neon power. Amidst the blades of weaponcraft, On the fields of terror, Your home is the battleground My land a scarred waste. Amidst the glint of all that shines, In the light of the neon sky, Bathed in the blood of the unborn, Evolution takes no sides. Amidst the din of infestation, The crippling of the soul, Bound to machine in spiritless life, Sold for the metallic sheen. Amidst the silence of decay, the metal rusted through, Amidst the bones of dead and loss, In His Spirit life abounds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Venefyxatu Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 That is one impressive image! I hardly dare think about the time spent making it... Had you given me only the image, I wouldn't have called it the God Machine. Had you given me only the title God Machine, I would've envisioned something else entirely. Now that you gave me the two, they are connected forever in my mind. Great work! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
epinephrine Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 Wierd Picture! It didn't inspire me, but I must admit the lyrics are passionate and I can appreciate passion in any work. It still felt a little "misunderstood teenager" for my liking, but maybe I'm just getting old... I appreciate you posting it though. It definately made me think a bit epinephrine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xaious, Master of Time Posted December 8, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 Well, the inspiration came from more than just the lyrics. The music itself did a bit of inspiring. Really heavy energetic and fast moving music, with slower parts that seem filled with concetrated directed anger and hatred. Thanks for all the reviews. And Ven, I'm now interested...What might you have called it without the music? What might you have seen without the picture? (really, for the full effect, you have to listen to the song...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Venefyxatu Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 (edited) Xaious, Now that I have seen the title and the picture linked, it's hard to think of anything else, but I'll give it a try I'll start with the God Machine, since I saw that before the picture. It sounds like something horrible, a thing of nightmares. The words God (generally seen as a caring and loving entity) and Machine (cold, heartless technology) can only combine into something bad, a gigantic machine that knows only cold, analytical thinking instead of compassion, love and reason and that is in some way connected to all of our lives and fates. Now that I'm thinking a bit more about it (as opposed to just saying what springs up in my mind ), I see that there is something of that in the picture as well although it is too much fantasy-tinted. The picture, on the other hand, is something I would've associated with a mage. Yes, I am "somewhat" obsessed with fantasy, which would be an explanation for that I probably would have connected it with a complicated spell that combines scrying, conjuration and warfare. The scrying part is pretty easy to explain : the eye set in a socket over a crystal ball. Warfare is still doable : it has something to do with the metal "arms" and blades. The conjuration? Tricky... it might be the way the crystal ball is filled and the cathedral on top, or it might be the entire composition. The lyrics (I don't know the song) almost make me want to cry - so full of hate and anger. It made me see images of murder, fire raining from skies darkened with rolling clouds, death, and anarchy. I hope that made some sense and that it wasn't too long-winded Edited December 8, 2004 by Venefyxatu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xaious, Master of Time Posted December 9, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 9, 2004 (edited) Yeah..And to make this more interesting.... I didn't actually read the lyrics until earlier today....(while listening to the song, coincidentally)....Yeah.....Almost kinda scared me how reading the lyrics didn't change my idea on how it should've looked...... (this came from a pm...I felt like informing the masses?) Hi, I'm left wondering... how does one make an image like that? I'm not asking for a detailed tutorial (I'd have to learn some more basic things first ), but more the general steps of the creation process. I assume it would involve making scetches on actual paper first, and then having a go at them with Photoshop for colours, effects, combination with the cathedral, ...? If it's not too much to ask, would you mind enlightening me a bit? Venefyxatu Ok, I'll see what I can do for this..... Mostly, I doddle something down on some paper, whatever I've been inspired to create, how it might look, in a very sketchy form. Usually, there's just a bit of gazing at the sketch, knowing that I love the idea forming in my head, which will, in the end, be much different from my initial idea. Once I get an idea of how it might look (for this, think: Machine, work a slight of religion into it [originally, there was no cathedral, and it was much more a staff-like object]). I follow this by setting the sketch aside, mostly forgetting about it, and from time to time looking at things that catch my attention, some of which remind reinspire and small alterations on the original idea. (This is where it became altered from a staff with pipes of machinery to a cathedral on a power-source). This is around the time where I start looking at how I want it to look, so this is about the time I ignore any and every sketch from beforehand and start working in Photoshop. The photoshopping is done in short spurts of excessively flowing creative juices (lasting a few hours at a time, rarely more than once every two weeks). As I'm working on it in photoshop, (ie, the period from beginning to end) I browse around the web (either stock image websites or google) looking for necessary components, as well as more inspiring images. For the most part, once I decide I want something in it, I decide where it goes, and how it should look (color, size, etc.), and work to get it as such. This is the part that takes the longest, and once I know where everything goes, how it's to look, I manipulate the pieces to how they need to be, so that I love the way it looks. And then, after I've got everything where I want it, (for this thing, it took about a month and a half or two to get here..no..wait...I've been working on this for 3 months...wow, holy carp....[no, not a spelling error]), then..um...*reminds myself where I am* That puts me right at the time where I start with the shadows and stuff, the minor things of greatest importance to the image (such as the shading on the lower blade-arms, around where the higher ones cross them, if that wasn't shaded, it wouldn't look good..). Now, this will help some: I do the shading all in one sitting, and this is always the sitting where I finish the image. I use the airbrush, set at opacity 8%, black. Typically use a smaller brush, or larger, depending (the top parts of the cathedral and smokestacks, larger, the arms, smaller). This is done with many short strokes, rapidly, generally right on top of each other. Now, to get things to look like they're all one thing (let us look at the bladed arms, the lower ones), this involves the eraser at a low opacity, everything being combined to be on different layers, and some cutting and pasting. For this, I used the Terminator arm. I cut the finger off of the hand at the knuckles, having each finger on a different layer. I also used a scythe blade. I moved the scythe blade (on a higher level than the arm) to the hand, to where it met the hand at the knuckles. I erased from the part where the blade hit the knuckles with the eraser at a low opacity slowly until they faded into each other. I then moved the fingers into positions to where they were all joined with the arm and the blade in a way to make it so that it seemed that if the fingers moved, the blade would. More erasings to make the fingers meld with the blade, a little blurring the fingers into the knuckles, and Ithen all I had to do was make it all a similar color. I don't recall the exacts on that step, but it involved some desaturation, some lighting effects, and a little bit of color alterations other than saturation. Then, well, I moved it to it's proper location on the image. But mostly, it's finding the right images and combing them as best as I can, finding the place that looks the best for them to me. Which happens to take a while... (What I've left out are the parts where we work on this for a couple of hours and get pissed off at the way it's looking, so we quit without saving it, so that when we start on it again, we only have to redo what we like, we don't have to undo what we hated.) Edited December 9, 2004 by Xaious, Master of Time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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