Watching paint dry

Whoever uses the expression "as boring as watching paint dry" has never tried painting in watercolor.

(S)He shouldn't have dressed that way

The scientists and engineers landed a machine on a comet, and all the crowd is interested in is the way one of the scientists was dressed. He was bullied to tears - because he wore a shirt, painted by his girlfriend, which featured some women in swimsuits.

Apparently, he invited that on himself because he dressed too provocatively.

A street scene somewhere in the east continent of the focco home world.

Pastel, 50 by 70 cm. Way too many working hours.

Enjoy.

Kill all humans

Look at the face of this guy. Would you believe that this is the face of someone who wants to kill you, and everybody you know?

Yet he does.

You are looking at the professor of philosophy, John Zerzan. He is an “anarcho-primitivist”. That means he wants the humanity to return to pre-agricultural, forager lifestyle, claiming that it would solve all problems that we are facing and make us happier.

If only we got rid of this huge mistake called civilization, Zerzan says, everything would become just great. After all, Zerzan says in an interview, “early humans had a workable, non-destructive approach” that kept them “intimate with nature”.

Oh, you are such a hoot, Professor. Tell all that to those early human guys who hunted the megafauna into extinction, burnt forests into desertification, and had general clean fun like epidemics, cannibalism and death before thirty-five — and kept inventing things until they (us) became what we are.


Zerzan not only decries technology and science for being removed from the reality. He even laments the invention of language, which he calls “a mediation between ourselves and reality”. He says:

“We lived more directly, immediately before these dimensions arrived, fairly recently. Freud, the arch-rationalist, thought that we once communicated telepathically.”

Telepathically. Right. Communing with the spirits of happy little trees. And he calls science removed from reality! I am a little surprized that Zerzan did not bring up Atlantis, Lemuria and ancient alien visitors from Nibiru, but perhaps these imply too much technology for his taste.

He popularized the "noble savage" legend in 1754.

The idiocy of this philosophy is so thick you need an axe to cut it. How comes Zerzan does not realize that the early humans did have a "workable approach" — it is called technology, which they improved from sticks and stones to bows and spears to agriculture to industrial manufacturing to information age? The approach is the same, and bettered along the way — and he wants to throw all that away for the tired, ages-old Rousseauist fallacy of the “noble savage”. 
 
It does not come to Zerzan's mind that even if you could strip all the technology from the whole of humanity, how are you going to control the neo-primitives' technology development and prevent them from inventing the whole civilization thing all over again?

How is he going to make everyone left on the planet to forget that they used to have machines, powered flight, firearms, libraries, long-distance communications, infrastructure, medicine, law, and keep them content with the subsistence living at the mercy of elements? How is he going to remove all traces of technology from Earth? How is he going to control the warlords and feudal chiefs that will spring up the next day he gets his Rousseauist dream? Does he think he is going to use bows and arrows to stop the reinvention of steel and firearms — or is he planning to keep a contingent of military-industrial caste, armed with the modern technology to keep everyone else in the stone age?

The fact is, the longer you think about this silly fantasy, the less silly it seems and the more grim and terrifying it becomes.

Because if you and your followers do it voluntarily, you will end up being a hypocritical colony of hippies depending on the civilization they pretend to not exist. But if you try to do it on the planetary scale, you are talking either about installing a monstrously oppressive regime over the whole world to keep your primitive fantasy from evolving civilization again, or killing nearly all humans on Earth.

In fact, you cannot even have the oppressive regime without killing nearly all humans on Earth. If you go back to the hunter-gatherer level, the planet can sustain about one hundred million flea-bitten Noble Savages. The other seven billion must go to make this dream of Zerzan's happen. Who is going to do the culling, Professor?

This is beyond ghoulish. Yet there he is, blithely preaching his little post-apocalyptic paradise, sitting on an imaginary mountain of seven billion dead people, in an air-conditioned room, wearing correcting eyeglasses, with tooth decay in check by his dentist, wearing machine-made clothing — and calling for civilization's suicide over the Internet. (Before you find this ironic: he calls the Internet "a necessary evil", to be used to dismantle the civilization. And then got rid of with disgust, I imagine, or perhaps left in the hands of the select few who will ensure that the "mistake of agriculture" never happens again.)

But he is a dangerous waste of intellect not only for this reason. He professes unfeasible plans for us to become throwbacks, stop all evolution and sit there waiting for the nearest asteroid strike to wipe us out — when he could have studied the actual human group psychology and invent ways to make the existing society as happy and sustainable as his imaginary Noble Savages are supposed to be. One group at a time, or, with luck, as an influential thinker swaying the culture to higher functioning. But no, he sits there advocating insane plans to return to savagery, using for his proselytizing the very technology he decries. I have to wonder: if language, as he says, is the source of the whole detachment from mother nature thing, then wouldn't it be best to abandon it with all technology, and become apes again? Why doesn't he advocate a return to animal state, rather than savage state? Perhaps he thinks that if we do, telepathy will kick in?

Oh, I forgot. He is a philosopher. His job description forbids looking at the real world.

Slow slide into madness

Summary of PZ Myers post about Robin Williams: "a distraction from depressing news about brown people". He does give lip service to the family's grief and then waves it away as unimportant because some political issue does not get enough news coverage. Can you spell "insensitive", PZ? Or is "bad taste" easier to understand?

PZ had been sliding into... something for a long while. He started out with good articles on developmental biology and explaining why creationism is wrong. Nowadays he hardly mentions biology and prefers to just call creationists idiots. (And he is a professor who ought to understand the value of education versus dismissing people with a handwave. Even if they are saying stupid ignorant things - that's more reason to favor education, not contempt.)

But this hijacking of a death to promote a political issue... Even with Myers' blog nowadays consisting mostly of "idiot!", "atheist X says bad things", "minorities are discriminated" and "Israel is evil", this is a new low for him.

Sad to see a relevant, smart person's gradual degradation into rabid activism for a cause-of-the-day. I hope it's just his Internet persona, not his personality.

August 9, 2014

P. L. Travers and Tove Jansson had been both born on this day.

Trippin'

Day one. Madrid. Prado, jamon, las Meninas... No time for Facebook.

Day two. Airplane, Miami airport, Samuel Adams summer ale... No wifi for Facebook.

Day three. San Francisco, Chinatown, three hours of tea tasting, North Beach... No time for Facebook.

Day four. Oakland zoo, San Jose Rosicrucian Egyptian museum, Ethiopian food. No time for Facebook.

Day five. Disembarked at Embarcadero, walked in a big circuit along Market, Polk, Washington, and Powell, took BART to Fremont to meet with Chris, bought Silvia a new tablet, played poker... No time for Facebook.

Day six. Golden Gate park, Japanese garden, Haight-Ashbury steampunk stores, then more Chinatown, dim sum, roast quail... No time for Facebook.

Day seven. Lying in bed with a torn fascia from all that walking on uneven streets. Plenty time for Facebook now, dang it...

The artist's brain: they are both right!

A new neuroscience study surfaced, focused on what makes artists' brains different from non-artists' ones!

The scientists used MRI to find out, put plainly, what areas of the brain got bigger in people who could draw from observation, and in people who went through artistic training, compared to the average.

Their findings?

"Observational drawing ability relates to changes in structures pertaining to fine motor control and procedural memory, and that artistic training in addition is associated with enhancement of structures pertaining to visual imagery."

The changes also seem to be in proportion to artistic skill.

What is noteworthy is that the three structures that visibly develop more gray matter in us artists are in the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, and the right side of the cerebellum. There is no "artistic side" neatly located in the "creative" right hemisphere, as the pernicious myth propagated by Betty Edwards claims. Instead, unsurprisingly, drawing is a motor skill supported by visualization.


The science journalists, of course, are blowing this a bit out of proportion. I have encountered the claims that it means that artistic talent may be innate. Even the long pop-science article published by BBC states that:

"The research, published in NeuroImage, suggests that an artist's talent could be innate."

The research suggests little of the sort, yet. It is more than equally likely that the changes in the brain are the result of training than preexisting, because some the same areas are enlarged in people who learn fine motor control, like musicians.

The only way it could demonstrate any support for innate talent would be by finding that children who had preexisting enhanced brain areas ended up in art schools. But that kind of study was not done - and children aren't born able to draw, we all have to start from zero. At most, such preexisting enhanced processor would enable you to learn to draw a little faster. But you still have to learn.

Instead, it is now known that the brain is malleable and adaptable. What this enhancement of brain areas means is that with enough exercise, you can learn to draw. With enough exercise, you can learn visual imagination. There is no magic, just hard work.

Here is the BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26925271
Here is the original abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811914002237

April 12, 1961

Dougal Dixon's Greenworld surfaces in an interview

This is a page from Greenworld, by Dougal Dixon known for his speculative evolution books like the seminal After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Unfortunately, the two-volume work detailing the prolonged human impact on an alien planet had been published only in Japan:

I hope there is going to be an English version. I haven't even heard of this until I stumbled upon an interview with Dixon by Darren Neish which I recommend to read. Dixon and Neish discuss the creation of After Man and its spin-offs, the complications of getting it published, the new Greenworld book, and assorted tasty paleontology. There are illustrations aplenty, including Dixon's sketches and even maquettes.

 Incidentally, Dixon called Man After Man a "disaster of a project" in that interview. This makes me glad: the thing is as abysmal as After Man is delightful, and this dismissal demonstrates his true integrity. He didn't give detail on that, but you can catch hints of him being co-opted into a spin-off which went into ludicrous deviations he was not happy with.

Go read the interview.

Dancers

A housewarming gift for a dancer we know locally.

Ink (Kuretake brush and Micron technical pen) on Strathmore drawing paper.

Oom pah oom pah

Spritzing is not reading

These guys: http://www.spritzinc.com/ are in the news. They claim to have reinvented reading, they even call it "spritzing" in an attempt to go viral on the net, and claim that you can do it at the whopping 250, no, even 500 words per minute!

Problem is, this is a STEP BACK. I, like many people, already read 600+ wpm without their tech, and skim at 1200+ if I don't need full comprehension. I stop comprehending at maybe 1600, but I still get enough glimpse of the text to know if I want to read it attentively.

I know that there are a lot of people who read slower than the speed this app offers. But what the app does is not reading. They flash the text one word or syllable at a time at predefined speed and claim this increases reading speed because you do not have to move your eyes along the lines.

Why is that a problem? Well, they might as well say it increases reading speed because you do not have to move your lips as you spell out every word.

You see, speed reading is exactly about the level of comprehension of written word where you do not have to follow the lines. You just look at the paragraphs and move the eyes only a little side to side, to register the full width of the text if it is too wide, or nearly not at all if it is, say, a newspaper column. As your reading skill grows, you stop focusing on letters, then on syllables, then on words, taking them in whole. Then you begin to take in whole phrases in an instant. Then you begin to be able to glance a few times around a whole paragraph and see its meaning without effort, reconstructing the whole from fragments even out of order.

As an example, I cannot look at a piece of text in English or Russian anymore without comprehending its meaning automatically. It's like not being able to hear a clearly said phrase without knowing its meaning. (I am near-dyslectic in Hebrew, but that is a different writing system.) If you learn "speedreading" the Spritz way, you will never go to that level because you are never shown the whole phrase, you are fed syllables through a straw. And you cannot go back and re-read; reading becomes a linear experience like an audiobook.

They might as well claim to increase your moving speed by teaching you to crawl really fast, instead of letting you run.

Did people lose reading skills so much that this throwback to syllabic reading is what we have come to?

Fairytale Reservation 2014

Illustration for the Fairytale Reservation project (Заповедник сказок).

The Fairytale Reservation, in its fourth year now, is a collaboration between writers and illustrators. Writers submit stories, illustrators pick the stories to illustrate, and the whole resulting collection ends up published as a book. Fantastic stories of all kinds are encouraged.

I ended up illustrating an actual Christmas carol, believe it or not. I mean it as a genre, not a religious holiday thing - a story of redemption and new life triumphant that happens around the longest night at the turn of the year. Here an old ex-military officer who all but lost his will to live after his wife died, finds it again after deciding to play an impromptu, awkward Santa Claus for his grandchildren.

The book is going to come out in the middle of 2014. You can subscribe here: http://kroharat.livejournal.com/381309.html

Print testing

New prints in making. Strips of test printout laid over originals (and in a couple cases, previously calibrated printouts) for color matching by eye.

There is no other way to achieve color fidelity. No matter how good the hardware is, in the end you have to test the actual printout - and tweak, tweak, tweak. You can see my notes on the test strips, specifying what needs to be done to the spot colors and the source images overall.

Primary colors

The pink of sakura flowers is precisely the same pink of spring kimono fabric.

We also have all primaries - red, green and blue - here.

(Photographed in Jerusalem arboretum yesterday. Girl in kimono from here. )

Old books: Manual of Graphic Techniques

I have a number of old (and sometimes odd) books in my library.

Now, my library is heavily skewed towards books on art, picture books for children, art manuals and reference material. And I love used book shops, so I have accumulated a few old and mostly forgotten specimens of treatises on how to make art.

One of these is the Manual of Graphic Techniques for Architects, Graphic Designers, and Artists by Tom Porter, Bob Greenstreet and Sue Goodman. I had first encountered it in a friend's collection, and knew I had to find one of my own.

The Manual is not a single book, but rather a set of four numbered volumes. It was published in 1978.

This is probably the single most disorganized art manual I had ever seen. Its volumes are not thematic; it jumps from topic to topic like a wild antelope, covering bits and pieces on everything from what kinds of pen nibs there are and how to construct the quick-and-dirty perspective plots from an elevation to fine points of silk-screen printing and mixing plaster of Paris. Then it starts all over again, discussing other ways to do perspective plots, page layout for print, using a modelscope and ways to simulate halftone in ink drawings. And so on. Some topics (like silkscreening) are presented only once, but some (like perspective) get sections in several volumes. It is organized somewhat thematically (most of presentation technique is concentrated toward the end, most of the drawing toward the beginning), but is still haphazard enough to make finding something for quick reference a bit difficult.

But what it lacks in organization of material, it makes up in thoroughness.  It covers topics from abstract composition and type design to marbling paper, etching glass and tips on working with glue when making models.

There is little wonder that the contents are heavily leaning towards architect's interests - I was not able to locate Tom Porter with certainty, but Robert Greenstreet teaches at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Wisconsin. But there is a lot of general drawing, plotting and presentation techniques. Not everything here is of use to an artist, but nearly every artist could find something of interest in this book.
Speaking of presentation, the book itself is beautifully designed. It forgoes long text for short, clear snippets with relevant illustrations, arranged in almost comic-book panel layout. The graphics are more reminiscent of technical manuals than of art books, all crisp black and white, relenting for only a few pages to color. Even the typeface the text is set in is reminiscent of a typewriter: each page feels like an architect's presentation. And the condensed but very readable layout matches the very practical content. This is not a theoretical book; it is hands-on and focused on you getting the job done.

Of course, any art manual dating from before the personal computer revolution inevitably reads a little like a history of forgotten techniques. There are a lot of pages in the Manual dedicated to methods which are no longer used or fallen into disfavor. But for me, it only adds to the charm. And just like knowing how to do calculations in one's head or on paper is slower than using an electronic calculator, but gives you a ground on which to base your intuitive grasp of arithmetic and predictive skill, knowing how to plot a perspective by hand greatly enhances your intuitive grasp of its laws. History is not dead; the past still influences the present with tradition, terminology, context.

That's why I love old books.

Africa

In 1903, the British government had offered the revitalized Zionist movement a strip of land in Uganda.

The Ottoman empire held what is now Israel, Jordan and parts of Syria under its rule. They weren't in any hurry to let the Jews live there, and large parts of Europe, especially Russia, also didn't like the Jews much. By early 1900s, another wave of pogroms in Russia sent the Zionist Congress seeking an urgent escape way, and they did consider Africa as a very possible venue. Some considered it as refuge  until the return to the actual historical Land of Israel could be made; some thought that any place to live in peace would be better than living in hostile countries, historical ties or not; and some thought that temporary solutions often become permanent, and agreeing to go to Uganda would de facto void their claim to the Land of Israel. Nonetheless, the Zionist Congress went as far as sending a investigatory expedition there, which found that the climate was suitable but the land was wild, and the local Maasai warlike. In 1905, they decided to decline the Uganda solution.

This tiny piece of history is still remembered in Israeli politics, however.  Uganda is tossed around whenever someone gets accused of not caring about the historical ties of the Jewish nation to the Land of Israel, and putting the importance on a safe haven alone.

So you occasionally get little puns like this final project of design student Yoav Gati, fusing the Israeli paraphernalia with African motifs. Not that it would really happen if the Jews had settled on the Mau Escarpment in what is now Kenya: they insisted on carrying their old colors and symbols everywhere, and though the orange-green-yellow-blur-violet flag is quite decorative, they'd probably still fly the same blue-and-white one anywhere.
 

I find it highly ironic, though, that Yoav's takes on the African-Israeli currency actually look better than the real modern Israeli currency:

Dancer lighting study

Lighting calculation for a picture in progress. This is easily the most complicated study of this kind I've done to date.

Drawn in black and grey pencil. The stroke direction follows the light angle: this is to keep track of the correct angle at all times.

He needs to be about 20% cooler

So I have watched Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

If the first installment was mostly material from the book with bits of new material, the second one turned out to be mostly new material with a few bits more or less from the book.

I get a distinct idea that Peter Jackson is trying too hard to out-LoTR the LoTR movies. Unfortunately, where LoTR was epic and faithful to the source, Hobbit throws the source off Orthanc and tries to lay the epic too thick till it gets ridiculous. Dol Guldur must be bigger and cooler than Minas Morgul! Dwarf king statue must be bigger and cooler than the Gondor king statues! Legolas must be bigger and cooler than... Legolas! Oliphaunts are old news, we need giant jackrabbits! Pulling sleds! Viserys Targaryen got a pot of molten gold? Feh, we shall drown a dragon in molten gold! (What, Viserys is from a different saga? Who cares, we shall still drown the fireproof dragon in molten gold, because it is cool. And have a dwarf paddle on it in a wheelbarrow first, just to show how cool he is.)

P.J.? We've thought this world and these characters were cool back when we had read the books.

There is no need to try this hard make them cooler. Honest.

I used to be an adventurer like you

You have to join the Guard now. It's the rule.

100 years of breeding

I've long thought that a lot of dog breeds suffered grotesque misshaping in the recent years, due to poorly worded standards. Recently it has been happening to cat breeds too. When you have statements like "nose as short as possible", soon the animal's nose is liable to recede behind the eyes - just look at what happened to Persian cats. Even something as innocuous as "chest wide and barrel-like" can distort a bulldog's body into something out of a freak show. Breeds like Cocker Spaniel, Chow Chow, Dachshund, English Bulldog and more have become caricatures of their former selves. And still, breeders will insist that a Pekinese's flat face, which nowadays often requires surgery to let the animal breathe, is "functional" and necessary in "a working breed". (I am not making this up, I heard it stated in an interview.)

Here is a collection of photos showing how distorted some modern breeds really are.

http://imgur.com/a/LVV1A

Perspective can be refreshing. It can also be terrifying.

Re-Ti gets an award

Re-Ti design got an Honorable Mention at the creature design contest!

Here is what they wrote about it:

Spot-on professional orthgraphics and anatomy make this creature easy for a studio production team to build, rig, and animate for a feature, game, or film.

Thank you, Terryl Whitlatch, David Bober and other organizers!

https://www.facebook.com/events/452193294886894/permalink/475657312540492/

Remember Tunnel 17!

I had backed the omnibus edition of Ursula Vernon's Hugo-winning Digger on Kickstarter.

And now the book has arrived. And a T-shirt. And stickers. And cloisonne pins. And poster. And extra dust jackets in case the book feels cold in winter.

And, of course, the pickaxe. Never leave your warren without a pickaxe, young wombats, and if you ever think it is not important, remember tunnel 17!

Oh, and I have a picture that I painted in the book, too! Thank you, Ursula!

The volume is literally as thick as a brick. You could probably kill a dead god with it if you accidentally dropped it on top of its black heart. And it is lovingly made, with clear print, appendices, and all cover images. If you want one of your own (and how could you resist?) you can buy it from Amazon.

Re-ti: creature design for Helpful Bear contest

Helpful Bear is a company at which Terryl Whitlatch works as creature designer. I have admired her work for years, so when they have announced a creature design contest, I decided to take part.

I know that I say I never participate in contests; but this one was not the sort where a company tries to get a lot of designs for a nominal prize. This was a contest by artists for artists, the reward was PR, and it was a chance for creature artists to get together. Just participating in such a contest is already good PR; I went through the complete list of submissions, and the amount of highly skilled and talented artists was impressive.

So I had decided to design something fresh for this contest, a creature that would be "readable" by us human beings but be completely alien in its anatomy, apart from the obvious biomechanics.  The  Re-ti was the result. 

 It may seem almost Earthly, but if you look closer, few things are what they seem at the first sight. Its "head" is not the actual head, its "hooves/suckers" are neither hooves nor suckers, its muscles can lock up in contracted position which enables it to use hydraulics for "pushing muscles" along with the more conventional pulling muscles, it communicates in two-voice tonal song, its hands were originally copulatory organs, it is neither biped nor a quadruped, in fact it is not even a vertebrate. Even its real name is unpronounceable for humans: it is a musical note D7, followed by sustained combination of D7 and B7 (hence the short-cut solfege designation of Re/Ti).

But it is still something we hominins could relate to. 

This creature is built on specific design logic, an imaginary Bauplan, if you like. I believe that  thinking of evolution of anatomy rather than inventing it straight away, offers more freedom for truly alien creatures than tweaking existing animals or combining their pieces. 

It is no paradox; nature always has to work with constraints, base its designs on prior designs, and reassign existing structures to novel tasks. If you set constraints for your creature and try to work with and around them, the result will be more natural, more believable, and in fact more creative than if you begin with unlimited possibilities.

Because this creature was developed with a body plan in mind, it is easy to design more creatures of the same phylum, which would be as diverse as fish, tigers, crocodiles, and birds. Here is a small sampling I generated in less than an hour:

The concept was planned on Dec 25, 2013 during a three-hour car trip to an airport. Most ideas that went into the creature had been devised at that time. Developed between Dec 27 - 29, rendered mostly on Dec 30 and 31, between other tasks.

The development sketches and high-resolution files can be found at http://chiseledrocks.com/main/concepts/reti . The contest submission is here.