After the summer heat and before the winter rain, autumn is a good season to spend weekend evenings at the Stanford Rodin garden.
His dark bronze sculptures are hard to draw though; I had a great deal of difficulty with the eye sockets for this one.
September 14, 2019
Head of Pierre de Wissant, burgher of Calais
Needle through brick
A master of a traditional art form recently told me that nowadays it is becoming harder to find apprentices with required patience and will power to really learn the craft, probably due to the modern lifestyle accelerated by modern technology, such as social media and mobile devices.
He was considering modifying the curriculum to fit this modern world.
I have the opposite opinion. I will keep the bar as high as possible so that only the most motivated and talented will come to me.
千軍易得一將難求
September 8, 2019
Digital oil painting experiment
This is a caricature/stylization of a real object.
September 6, 2019
Mistake of the day
I mistakenly did a sudo “chown -R $USER $HOME” under Ubuntu, which trapped me into a login loop.
When I Ctrl-Alt-F3 into the machine, I found out that I cannot edit any files, even though the permissions look the same (“sudo echo $USER” will still return my original user name).
So I have to redo the above chown command with my plain user name and home path (no variable substitution).
September 3, 2019
September 1, 2019
Finger + pencil sketching
In this series of quick exercises, I finger-sketched on my moto x4 of what I saw on the BART trains/stations, and penciled over on my iPad the next day.
For some reason, the files are separated for Android and iOS, even though they all have the same sizes (large portrait photo) and present on my creative cloud.
August 30, 2019
Train sketcher
After settling down across the aisle this passenger asked me if the train is heading to San Francisco. Soon afterwards he took out several drawing pencils, all short likely due to usage, and started to finish some drawings on a sketchbook. With intense focus he crouched over his work without noticing me sketching him.
August 24, 2019
Illustrator leaves tile
This is an exercise to help me experience the process of creating repetitive element patterns and tiles.
Basically, I can draw one element, and copy/paste it with different positions/orientations for an initial pattern.
I can then create a grid pattern from the entire selection, fine tune the elements with the handy interactive preview, add the pattern to the swatches, and use the pattern to fill a new rectangle (with the same size as the original pattern).
I can then test it via various tiling tools, such as html or this pattern checker.
During the pattern creation stage I somehow altered the aspect ratio away from the initial square, so the result is a rectangle. I plan to fix this in my next exercise.
August 23, 2019
SIGGRAPHickness
A co-author added a typo “SIGGRAPHickness” into a bib entry today; I guess it means sickness induced by working too hard for SIGGRAPH.
🙂
August 19, 2019
What I told an intern today based on recent experience
If we do not figure out what we want to do, someone else will, and they might not have our best interest in mind.