Familiarity brings comfort, including holiday meals.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/185309443/JoyRestaurantNov232023
November 24, 2023
Thanksgiving dinner sketch
November 12, 2023
A political balancing act
A small island, squeezed between two big powers, has only a very narrow path to navigate, and requires high political skills to do so.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/184406335/UnicycleTWCNUS
November 7, 2023
Stuck in traffic
I tried to take bus 281 from Palo Alto transit center to SJC18 and the bus got stuck in traffic on university avenue near highway-101 for more than an hour. (It took me about 40 minutes to walk the same trip.) I got a chance to draw a painful facial expression of one of the passengers.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/159829079/FingerPortraits/modules/1040399645
November 6, 2023
Septology by Jon Fosse
An aging painter recorded his activities within a few days interleaved with flashbacks and reminiscences of his life and monologues about art, religion, and relationships in a single continuous sentence spanning seven volumes of this fiction.
Several characters in the story, including the writer himself, have doppelgangers with the same name and similar appearances but different life trajectories.
There can be multiple interpretations of this, such as mental confusion and imagined alternative lives as a reflection of the writer who possessed talent in art but deficiency (and regression due to aging and substance abuse) in other mental aspects.
I read volumes I-II (the other name) in an e-book version just to see what the Nobel literature prize is all about, and finished III-V (I is another) and VI-VII (a new name) in audio book versions as I found the audio format perfectly suitable for the continuous verbal style of the story without any visual structure.
A painting titled “St. Andrew’s cross” is repeated mentioned in the story, which I tried to visualize.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/183974007/StAndrewCrossSeptology
November 5, 2023
Restless dreams
When waking up around 5:36 am this morning, my Fitbit tracker gave me a sleep score of 49 (out of 100) which is much lower than the usual 70+ scores I received.
My brain felt fine despite a bit “dry” (not moving as fluidly as it used to which I attributed to the time switch), but the tracker might have a point given that I could recall having a lot of vivid dreams from earlier this morning.
In the dreams I first encountered a bunch of intruders in my home. I told them that I am going to “incapacitate” them one by one, but before any excitement could happen my dream switched to the realization that I have a bunch of unfinished blog posts (which I guess is a metaphor of all these pending tasks awaiting me) about a city monk, altruism and selfishness, personal finance, french fries and mussels, which I plan to expand into real blog posts later.
Later in the night I created a visualization of my dreams by Adobe Fresco and Photoshop, iterating between manual drawings and generative fill so that I can have some control of the content without having to draw everything by hand.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/183897605/DreamsNov52023
November 4, 2023
A frivolous drawing of a serious topic
[The title of this post is suggested by GitHub co-pilot, and I decided to keep it for fun. A more suitable title would be “spot the difference, by generative fill”.]
Seeing the original photo under https://www.famsf.org/stories/whos-that-lady-tudor-portrait gave me ideas about changing some of the objects for fun, and later I realized that this can be an exercise of applying Photoshop generative fill to create a “spotting the difference” game.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/183818983/SpotTheDifferenceByGenerativeFill
The file is under https://photoshop.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:d22a5ee5-42b8-49dd-8af7-110256990e77 in case you want to see the detailed editing prompts and region masks.
October 29, 2023
Spider web 3D drawing
Spiders are fascinating creatures that can weave intricate webs much bigger than themselves.
October 25, 2023
He either reads fast enough or pees slow enough
Seeing some people peeking into their phones while doing other stuff, I always wonder if the small screen is really more interesting than the big world around us?
October 24, 2023
Sketching with finger instead of stylus
The ease with finger sketching over a smart phone made me realize maybe I should try to do this on a tablet as well; maybe my hands are inherently not all that stable holding a stylus.