This is a frequent sight of my family dinner, which I managed to draw when we sat together on the same table after a long while.
January 14, 2020
January 13, 2020
Working in a dream
Since I have this habit of thinking about stuff all the time, even when I am dreaming, I sometimes could not tell if I have done something for real.
For example, earlier today when I looked at a comment I made in a paper draft, I found it missing a part that I thought I have added, but then I realized that I only did it in my dream a few days ago.
January 12, 2020
Meditation
The best way (for me) to relax is to tackle the source of the stress/pressure head on.
January 11, 2020
Touch contour exercise
Following the instruction under “the natural way to draw”, I have been practicing touch contour, in which one fixates at the contours of a subject and synchronizes the eye gaze and hand pen movement so that they move together (i.e. the pen point should correspond to the eye point all the time) without looking at the drawing (except when backtrack from inward bending contours).
So far I have found it difficult to synchronize, as my eyes tend to saccade away frequently and my hand can go out of the boundary of the canvas.
For such exercises, it is the process, not the outcome, that matters.
Nevertheless, interesting results may appear sometimes.
I was hoping to finish a normal drawing afterwards with the same subject, but it was too dark to see anything.
January 8, 2020
Drawing a portly hand
I felt the need to draw something before going to sleep, and recalled this visual image from a morning news post to spend some twenty minutes.
January 5, 2020
Fountain figure 4
I saw this sculpture in Anderson collection at Stanford and captivated by its structure.
I started with the contour exercise and still found it hard to coordinate my sight and touch and finished too quickly in about 10 minutes.
I then switched to ordinary sketching for about 30 to 40 minutes.
Because it sat high on a pedestal, it was difficult to photography.
January 4, 2020
Compensational drawing
I was frustrated by the hand-eye contour coordination exercise from the natural way to draw, and compensated myself with a normal sketching of the same subject.
January 1, 2020
Sidetracked from physical to digital
I was sharpening a drawing pencil pondering what I should draw, and found the setup intriguing and ended up drawing it on an iPad.
December 31, 2019
Pocket-size watercolor
My dad gave me a watercolor sketch book and a watercolor paint set, both in pocket size.
This is the first pencil sketch and watercolor experiment.
I did another watercolor for a guava. My dad said I approached watercolor with many dense strokes, and showed me how to use a sparse set of quick, watery strokes.
December 29, 2019
Some good stuff in Taiwan compared to the US
Every time I traveled to another country (Taiwan at this moment of writing) I almost always observed something nice that I wish could exist in my current resident country (which would be the US right now).
The top item will be medical service, always.
With a universal health insurance, you only have a small amount of out-of-pocket co-payment and hospitals (for non-serious issues) are as common as convenient stores.
But that has been the case since decades ago.
A few relatively newer things I noticed are:
Have you ever had difficulty finding your cars in a large parking area?
Some parking garages in Taiwan already have systems to automatically scan the license plate of your car when it enters, guide you through available spaces, and tell you where your car is when you access the pay kiosk. (I could imagine a mobile app version.)
There is this company, Owndays, which can make eyeglasses on-site in about 20 minutes, from measurement to lens making and glass fitting, with very reasonable price.
In the US, even with Warby Parker, you would still wait for days.