June 2005 Archives

Here's something I'm pleased to have been a part of. I computer-generated the egg. (Hey, maybe it's just an egg, but it's an egg on the cover of Newsweek.)

This May 31, 1993 Newsweek cover story is one of the articles that introduced the general public to the concept of the internet itself. They hadn't even settled on a common term for it yet, instead putting it under the general rubric "interactive."

Kind of a cool bit of internet history, don't you think?

We made a variation for stock. You can see it in use here - trying to get the goose to lay more golden eggs?

Painted in Photoshop

For a really good example of why you should develop your painting in all areas at the same time and not just throw in a background later, check out illusion #3 of these three optical illusions from echalk.co.uk:

Even if you know it already, it will amaze you to see just how much context influences your color judgement.

...and on a somewhat related note, here's an old (pre-blog) page of mine on how to hone your color judgement using Photoshop and a digital camera.

UPDATE 7/27/2009

/UPDATE

When I paint in Photoshop, I blend colors using variable opacity under the control of a pressure-sensitive Wacom pen.

Grad-based blending from one color to another is not true digital color mixing, however. A linear blend from yellow to blue, for example, goes through middle gray without producing any sense of green.

If you want to simulate color mixing with opacity falloff blending from one color to another, you might want to help the blend along by adding a third color along the way.

Color mixing (which has the unfortunate and misleading name subtractive color mixing) is closer in behavior to multiplication, or the sandwiching of color filters. A yellow filter that only lets through pure yellow light (a single wavelength at around 570 nanometers) sandwiched with a blue (475 nm) filter will not create a green color, because neither filter allows green (510 nm) light to pass. It's the same deal with pigments.

I'm in a dark room with grey carpeting on the walls.

In front of me is a lamp on a flexible gooseneck.

Here is a speed paint of it.

I'd like to do a lot more speed paints. They're good practice.

This is my understanding of how the two most visible heads of the triceps share the humerus.

The lateral head starts fully ON the humerus, and then fully leaves it.

The long head starts fully OFF the humerus, then comes to be fully ON the bone.

The bone seems to travel diagonally under the two muscle heads as they trade places. They don't share the humerus equally.

UPDATE 7/10/2009

I'm collecting crackle textures in a flickr set.

/ UPDATE

A little crackle medium, available at most art and craft supply stores, can give your digital paintings an aged realism.

Suppose you want to go at a linear rate from point A to point B in four frames. Where would you be at frame 1? At frame 2? At 3? At 4? You probably imagine points along a line similar to one pictured above.

Here's the thing, though: frames are not points in time. Frames are periods of time. It's not even meaningful to use the phrase at frame 1. Saying at frame 1 is like saying at September.

Think of it this way:

Suppose you wanted to walk from New York to Los Angeles over the course of a year. Suppose you set out at the beginning of the first day of winter. Where would you be at winter? At spring? At summer? At fall?

This confusion over how to represent time is why most 3D packages have a "fencepost error" that causes them to handle motion blur in a kludgey way.

Here's a link to an old (pre-blog) web page of mine that develops this motion blur idea further.

***

The earliest known fence-post error in history?

In the araeostylos [style of temple] it is only necessary to preserve, in a peripteral building, twice the number of intercolumniations on the flanks that there are in front, so that the length may be twice the breadth. Those who use twice the number of columns for the length, appear to err, because they thus make one intercolumniation more than should be used.

- Vitruvius via Robert K. Moniot

It'll take an investment in some specialized equipment (courtesy of eBay) but you can make your own View-Master reels.