I struggled a bit in earlier attempts to depict the fuzzy furry appearance this neighborhood cat, who got lost in a hot summer day (“18 years old, moved very slowly, with health problems”).
My progress was finally unblocked by switching to focus on volumes instead of starting from contours and selecting a wooden background color.
September 25, 2022
Emmy the cat
September 23, 2022
Stormtroopers marching
How many of them know or care that they are part of an evil empire?
icon source
September 19, 2022
Singing head
I quickly sketched this sculpture on my moto-x4 phone in the museum but opted to add motion graphics over a stock photo at home later.
September 18, 2022
A bygone moment
It was close to the museum closing time, so I took only a few seconds for a quick finger sketch of this mask sculpture on my moto-x4 phone.
Later at home I tried to refine this rough sketch on an iPad, but the spontaneous visual impression that I had on-site was already gone.
Lilith
I did a quick finger sketch on my moto-x4 phone of Kiki Smith’s Lilith, a sculpture of a (spider?) woman crouching on a wall, followed by some touch up back home.
Quote from Alison Gass:
Lilith is a biblical figure who has long been adopted by feminists. In Jewish lore, she is the first wife of Adam, exiled from the Garden of Eden for her unwillingness to bend to Adam’s will, and is ultimately replaced by Eve.
September 17, 2022
Depicting a power sucking process running amok on a wearable device
A few days ago I noticed that my fitness tracker was losing power almost as fast as it could be charged, which turned out to be caused by a very power hungry background process. The issue was resolved by rebooting the device.
September 15, 2022
Schrodinger’s terminal
A few days ago I noticed that my MacBook terminals switched only the foreground text color but not the background color during automatic switching between the light and dark appearance modes, making most of the texts invisible.
After some investigation, I realized that it was caused by my prior manual tuning of the terminal background color, which MacOS then kept fixing regardless of the appearance modes.
The problem can be fixed by reverting to the original default.
September 14, 2022
Impression of an evening lamp over an utility cottage
I painted from impression the scene of this little cottage, built around utility equipments, lit by a nearby yellow lamp after dark.
(For more background information, I recommend this.)
Stable diffusion can work well for this case.
September 11, 2022
I dreamed about making an U-turn on my bike over the side of a school bus
This is a dream I had over a year ago about taking a U-turn on my bike over the side of a school bus in a junction of the University avenue at Stanford university. (The dream might relate to my once getting stopped by a campus police for over-speeding on a bike.)
I have been having difficulty sketching what I saw in my dream, and finally decided to do the best I could with some visual references (bike turn, school bus).
Stable diffusion seems to have difficulty with such out-of-sample case.