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.
2019-09-14
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
2019-09-08
2019-09-06
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).
2019-09-03
2019-09-02
OKR 2019
For OKR 2018, I rated myself 40 percent:
- Published 4 top papers (with 3 student first authors).
- Have helped shipping Fresco, a flagship Adobe digital painting product.
- Have continued regular sketching exercise.
- I read the book of change as part of my drawing exercises, but have yet to resume the Baroque cycles.
The default period is from July 2019 to June 2020 unless stated otherwise.
Publish top papers
Publish at least 4 papers in top graphics/HCI/vision/ML venues: ToG (including SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia), CHI/UIST, NIPS/ICML, CVPR/ICCV.
Build top products
Ship at least one product as a manager/developer and file at least two patents.
Develop top talents
Help at least 4 students publish in top graphics/HCI/vision/ML venues individually.
Be a better manager by helping the team not only ship at least one product (above) but also publish at least 4 papers in top venues with at least 4 student first authors (without double counting with my own above).
Have fun, be awesome
Practice sketching to a professional level, and expand into animation.
Continue learning a Middle Eastern language to elementary school level, complementing the one Asian and one European language I already know.
Practice meditation to the level that I can enter the God mode immediately, anywhere and anytime.
Finish the book of change, to renew my (now rusty) Chinese and crack the only Chinese classics that my grandfather did not during his life time.
Finish the baroque cycle, which I lost focus in the middle of the first volume (quicksilver).
Restore a common biometric, which suddenly deteriorated, to the previous excellent level, and continue improving the art I have started learning for about 3 years to the stage of practical applications.
2019-09-01
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.
2019-08-30
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.
2019-08-24
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.