while I can still feel it.
December 10, 2019
Rotten orange sequence
Mold growing on an orange reminds me of humans growing on earth; the natural instinct is to consume available resources until nothing is left.
I doubt if humans have the collective discipline for sustainable living.
PS: Orange mold should be safe for humans, but it started to smell weird so I finally dumped it in the compost bin.
December 5, 2019
Networking/recruiting events
Personally, I never found networking/recruiting events very useful, especially those requiring registration fees.
It is OK to go to parties to have fun and increase the chance of random encounters, but networking by itself is a quite shallow goal.
All my best and deepest connections and recruits are established via other means, mostly shared interests.
It is much better to spend time and efforts to motivate others to find us, which in turn can help networking and recruiting.
December 3, 2019
Confidence
Confidence is not about knowing I am good at something; instead, it is about sucking at the bottom and still being able to win.
I did two drawings on a long distance flight.
The first one I drew from memory, taking me a lot of time and still sucks.
The second one I drew from a frozen in-flight movie frame in only a few minutes.
I wish everything can go as smoothly as the second drawing, but life moves forward regardless.
November 16, 2019
Oil blocking without pencil outline
Pencil outline is a common practice for initial exploration and planning, but could steer the attention towards contours instead of shapes.
I watched some practices using large color strokes (watercolor, oil) for initial blocking without much (if any) contours, and tried to experiment one myself.
November 11, 2019
Distant view of the east bay
I did a quick landscape sketch inside the Edgewood county park in a late Sunday afternoon.
November 9, 2019
Practice drawing from memory/imagination
as a next step from drawing with references (including live subjects and captured photographs)
November 4, 2019
Creation is a dialog
About a decade ago, Evvia felt like a place for old people to me.
It was livelier a few days ago when I visited again.
I wondered what has changed and realized maybe I got old.
Artistic creation and scientific research share many similarities, such as picking the right subject/topic, and trusting the iterative process.
When I start a research or drawing, I usually do not have a very concrete idea of what I want to do, at least for more innovative projects. (If I can see a clear road-map from the beginning, the project is incremental.)
Just start doing something, and the process will guide me.
I did not really want to draw this one but felt compelled to finish the third of the Evvia series.
November 1, 2019
Deadline ruining your holiday?
I never understand why people want to complain about how deadlines ruin (their specific) holidays.
Everyone is free to finish the job before the holiday even if the official deadline is afterwards.
I remember Hugues Hoppe told me that he usually had a complete draft of his submissions before late December, and in one instance he didn’t even touch the paper between X’mas and the January deadline.
Nowadays, one can submit to ToG anytime and still present in SIGGRAPH; I am not sure what is the real difference. And there are other related venues like CHI or CVPR.
Personally, SIGGRAPH crunch is kinda fun for me, so I won’t mind one way or another.
October 28, 2019
Evening train sleeper
This dude sat across the aisle on the train. I pondered a bit whether he is interesting enough to draw as I brought my iPad to work for charging.