Masha Falkov

Ink, Digital Art, Glasswork, Retro Videogame Art & Design - If you're here for the game Unstable Scientific, check out my other blog, unstablescientific.tumblr.com 

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Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it

Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.

Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback…

Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.

Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™ 

Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.

Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.

Keep reading

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Yay Unstable Scientific update!  I’m so proud of this right now.  Even with the craziness of early autumn, I still managed to get this rogue semiconductor lab animation finished.  Vapor deposition chamber, spinning band column extraction thingy, and inert-gas-glovebox!  This cute little background animation took more work than 85% of anything else I’ve made in the game so far! 

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I made a piece of Dune art and I’m hoping to get it printed up as 4″ vinyl sticker! It’s my first Kickstarter campaign ever, and it’s only $4 to get one of these!  Due to a shortage of spice, interstellar shipping is not available at this time.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mashafalkov/riders-on-the-worm

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A color/value sketch of Lev and Tau opening the door to their tiny new lab. It's for a part of the opening cutscene! Now I have to draw this as pixel art which will be a whole new challenge.

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Axiom Verge fanart I drew in Procreate. It's just moments before Trace wakes for the umpteenth time in an egg chamber - though it's not exactly in one. Elsenova is just sort of observing Trace, curious, kind of concerned and caring. Though she hates Athetos, this younger, kinder version of Trace has made an impression on her powerful AI being.

Specifically I made this for Wildragon, because their AV art has brought me so much joy this month, when I got into Axiom Verge. You know that feeling when you share a fandom with one other nerd across spacetime in exactly the same way? They brought me it a million times over.

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The Oil Rig - ink + digital color, 2019 - a vision of the future where oceans are filled with mutant organisms and abandoned oil rigs have been turned into scattered cities of free trade.  

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The Long Thread -  A man follows a thread deep into the bowels of an alien supercooled organic machine.  This is definitely not how today’s cleaning session was supposed to happen.  

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An Unexpected Landscape - Mandelbulb 3D + digital painting - An astronaut discovers a landscape that is neither organic nor constructed by sentient beings.  What is it?  How was it formed?  

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Rust and Dark Matter - I really love collecting photos of different kinds of textures and colors, and then seeing how they interact when placed next to each other.  I was going for the most rusty and eldritch feeling I could muster!

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Secret Spring - A piece I did back when I was experimenting a lot more with Hexels!  I really enjoyed going a bit nuts with M.C. Escher style geometric impossiblities.  

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Ameyoko, or Candy Shop Alley - an ink + digital color piece I did back in 2014 after a trip to Japan.  I took many photos hoping to at some point capture all the urban cyberpunk feelings I had just from wandering around Tokyo!  

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Intergalactic Space-Time Makeout! 

I used Mandelbulb 3D for the background, then a combination of photomontage and painting to create the foreground.  I saw this little hotel busser booth in Manhattan and thought it looked like a tiny TARDIS - and couldn’t help but eventually use it in an art piece, just for fun!

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The Big Bang (2007) 

ink, watercolor, prismacolor marker

It’s an abstract depiction the big bang of the human mind when we began to use symbols to think and communicate with each other.  I’ve always been really fascinated with the idea of what it must have felt like as an early hominid when language began to be used for the first time.  Nowadays it seems that transition wasn’t so cut and dry - we’re discovering that animals may have capability to understand basic abstract mathematical concepts.  But if you don’t have to imagine too hard to see how even a single idea can transform our understanding of the world so much that it’s like moving from black and white into color vision.  To be able to think in a way that lets you more easily store and recall ideas, and to share them with others more easily must have been a pretty huge change.

I made this at a time in my life when I wasn’t doing any pencil sketches, I just put the ink down right on the paper.  

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Cities of the Pacific Northwest - a digital painting I did back in 2011.  It’s the way that I feel about the super-techy cities such as Portland and Seattle that are also very closely entwined with the nature that surrounds them.

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Ink drawing, “The Place of Deepening” from 2010.  Whoa, that’s a long time ago.  But look, it’s a world inside of a butterfly egg!