Be a sole author, multiple times.
Sneak behind other more senior/established collaborators to become the last author.
September 16, 2018
MSR Asia single-author challenge
It has been 10 years since I posted up the single-author SIGGRAPH paper challenge to MSR Asia, and nobody has managed to claim the prize as far as I know.
Looking back at my writing, I was wondering who this blunt prick is.
🙂
If I could, I would tell my past self to be more graceful without compromising the strength.
Otherwise, I still stick with, and have faithfully followed by own edicts, after switching into these other roles.
September 14, 2018
The girl and the dog
Quick lunch hour drawing; I took a photo just for backup but sketched the scene entirely on spot for slightly less than one hour.
I picked this sculpture which I have noticed some time ago.
Daichi: volumes, not just contours.
I plan to place rough shapes (e.g. ellipses) in addition to (even before?) rough outlines.
This is the first drawing that I kind of entered the zone or flow. The exact reasons are not clear due to several confounding possibilities: sculptures/statues, or at least this particular one, are already abstracted/stylized with reduced visual complexity; I had difficulty falling asleep the night before, loosening my mental control; I am better at organic than regular structures (see e.g. my previous 3 airplane drawings).
Looking back at the photo (without actual trying to draw from it), I found it much harder to extract the relevant visual structures, compared to on spot drawing.
I guess there are tradeoffs between drawing from photos and on spots: photos facilitate framing, composition, and spatial-temporal flexibility, but are not as flexible and adjustable as human visual systems.
Father recommended NEVER using erasers and always keeping all the strokes.
I know this is a common debate point, but I am going to experiment next time.
Hierarchical, light/thin to heavy/thick strokes should help.
September 13, 2018
Airplane, drawing from a photo
I drew this one across 3 evenings, starting from the middle and moving to the left and right sides. I had some trouble with the curved perspective building facade and eventually lost patience.
September 9, 2018
Airplane, drawing from a photo
I focused more on the frontal building facade to improve the perspective issue in my previous drawing, using another photograph that has no foliage to divert my attention.
I marked the two vanishing points to begin with, both in the wrong locations.
The one on the sky should be more on the left but I adjusted it rightward a bit to have more converging window rows.
The left horizon vanishing point is outside the photo frame, so I fitted it back into the drawing canvas.
September 8, 2018
Airplane, drawing from a photo
Looking upward towards buildings is a classical exercise to practice perspective. It took me a while to plan the vanishing point at the sky and the corresponding vanishing lines of the building contours.
I did not do so for the horizontal vanishing points/lines because I was bored after spending over one hour and I would like to work on the foliage on the left side.
As a result, the windows are incorrectly structured and gave the impression that the building facades were made of crumpling papers.
Spot drawing was infeasible for this one; the airplane flew by in seconds and the weather was hot and bright at noon.
I have another airplane fly-by photograph to practice.
My goal is to correctly structure the windows without getting bogged down by details. For example, outline contours instead of detailing individual windows.
Culture throwback: an overhanging warplane is a popular motif in Japanese manga like Akira and ghost in the shell. I plan to draw one as well.
September 7, 2018
Photographic drawing
Daichi and I spent the entire noon hour taking photos around.
There are similarities between drawing and photography in both goal and process: observation, selection, framing, and composition.
Photography by itself is a faster and less flexible means to record and convey visual impression.
However, it can serve as visual memory for later drawing, relaxing space and time constraints.
For example, I am not fast enough to catch a fly-by airplane via spot drawing, so a photograph can help.
I have enough footage for at least a month’s worth of drawing, even if I draw every day.
I will gradually post up my progress.
September 3, 2018
Writing style for revision control Latex source
Put one, or at most a few, complete sentence(s) into one line.
Latex treats line breaks as spaces, so the compiled document will still have the correct formation.
Since popular revision control tools like git/svn are based on line diff, putting too many sentences in one line will cause excessive revision differences and obscure the actual changes.
Avoid artificial line breaks in the middle of the sentences, which tend to confuse the spell-checkers and the git/svn line diff.
September 2, 2018
Drawing a dried insect on a window sill
Life is full of hidden, fleeting beauty that one feels lucky to witness.
I was supposed to be writing a paper, the room was too dark, so I opened the window, saw the dried insect on the sill, and could not resist drawing it.
This one took me only a few minutes to complete; I look forward to accompany my dad during his speed drawing sessions.