Audacity vs. The Road Warriors

What a match-up this is!

It’s funny the things you happen across online. I’ve been editing audio with Audacity for many years, but never thought I’d be using it to make visual art. Turns out you can! If you’re able to convert images to Raw format, then you can load these into Audacity and be presented with the ‘sound’ of your art to bend and break in any way you should desire. Export it, and marvel at the glitchy results. There’s really not much more to it than that; the full walkthrough can be found here.

Wanting to jump right into such an experiment, I turned to a drawing of legendary wrestling tag team The Road Warriors that has been laying around for several months. It’s not very good – which explains why it was never posted until now – so I thought it a worthy candidate for ‘glitching up’. It might even improve along the way.

Here is just a selection of the results, purely made in Audacity. I actually ended up producing about seventy pieces in total, for it was quite addictive, and somehow felt more organic than Photoshop; perhaps it was because I wasn’t seeing the results before exporting. I’m sure someone paying more attention to the various tools and their corresponding visual effects could create something exciting with this.

And here’s a second batch, with a little help from dear old Photoshop, though really only for adjusting hues and contrast:

I daresay those are all more interesting than the original drawing. I actually quite like the texture of the pinkish one, it seems to suit them, so this process has already proven worthwhile.

The Road Warriors are featured characters in a brand new retro wrestling game, y’know. It’s coming out early next year. Should be good…

Jokers

The Joker has come a long way since Cesar Romero’s day, now over fifty years ago – and even his incarnation changed over the course of the TV series. While not my absolute favourite, it’s hard not to enjoy Cesar’s Joker. I note that neither Jack Nicholson nor Heath Ledger had the balls to challenge Batman to a surfing contest.

The new film, of course, gives Joaquin Phoenix the luxury of no Caped Crusader to steal his airtime (though, having re-watched the 1989 film recently, you could argue Nicholson was almost there himself). The characters are so inter-twined, it’ll be interesting just to see what exactly he gets up to and where the film goes with no yang to his yin. One thing is for sure, though: Joker is the Bat villain who should be able to pull such an exploration off, and Phoenix’s interpretation of the character certainly piques interest from the trailer, even if I do still wish someone would give the classic comic book/1989 Joker another serious shot.

This portrait was a something of a botched experiment, really – as well as a desperate attempt to shut out the unholy row of Strictly Come Dancing. I was going for a glitch effect between the two Jokers, but my attempts at the effect really did not work, so I separated the two and gave them a clean relief. That’s why I love digital: easy re-purposing. Maybe it should be grittier and maybe I should have spent some time planning the composition instead of rushing in. I suppose there are a few more Jokers to choose, should I want a second go.