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Entry tags:
Cable
I love living where I do, but there are definite downsides to living in the stick. Such as, for example, loosing your internet for a full day because a someone accidentally cut the wire between your entire neighborhood and the outside world. The story I heard was that some road construction guys got sloppy with their earth moving equipment, or so I've heard.
Really, it was fixed quite quickly, in the grand scheme of things, I was just forced to spend the whole day touching grass, instead.
I spent a lot of that free time playing with my digital oils on my art program. So far, I've succeeding in sketching a cloud. I'm pretty pleased because realistic clouds of any kind have historically been hard for me - something about the rounded nature of cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds in particular tend to get me, rendering them as both three-dimensional objects without making them look like felted props is harder than you would think. Historically, I've always cheated and either slapped some 2D pillow clouds in the background, or put thrown in high-level, cirrus-type clouds that are so far up in the atmosphere they don't look too weird despite a lack of depth.
But part of improving is trying new and challenging things, and not spending forever agonizing over getting something perfect when its better to just move on. That's hard for me, too.
Oddly, I can draw trees alright, despite them operating according to the same basic principles as clouds - they're fractals. Once you figure out the big, overall shape of the thing, you can just doodle in smaller versions of the same shape until it looks adequately detailed, at least in theory. I typically draw cliffs, rock piles, flowers, and meadows with the same mindset. They're all different expressions of repeating patterns, iterated and layered over to create natural-looking forms.
I've heard you can use geometry to create more realistic shadows (since light functions as a ray, visually speaking, an artist should be able to trace a straight line from the light source, to the solid object, then hit the point of the imaginary wall or floor where the object blocks the light, thus forming the outline of a shadow.) And I've played with it a little with geometric shapes, but struggle to evoke it with complex scenes and figures.
Prewitt has just met his good friend Maggio down in jail in From Here to Eternity, and oh boy, I don't think he's noticed, or is willing to notice, but this guy's humanity is fading fast. He hasn't succumbed to despair or given into the beatings and become obedient - rather, the guy is openly defiant, but it's a twisted thing, a strength wound up in embitterment and hate. You can hardly tell this is the same 18-year old who loved vodka martinis and paged through his family photo album with his friends.
This book is huge, and much of the first two thirds is largely slice of life and long conversations, but it makes what's happening now hit that much harder. We, the readers, have gotten to know these people, have gotten to see and ride along with them in G company in their mostly ordinary lives, so it hits that much harder, when the prison arc takes over, ordinary life is taken away, and personhood is treated as a privilege they are no longer allowed to have.
Really, it was fixed quite quickly, in the grand scheme of things, I was just forced to spend the whole day touching grass, instead.
I spent a lot of that free time playing with my digital oils on my art program. So far, I've succeeding in sketching a cloud. I'm pretty pleased because realistic clouds of any kind have historically been hard for me - something about the rounded nature of cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds in particular tend to get me, rendering them as both three-dimensional objects without making them look like felted props is harder than you would think. Historically, I've always cheated and either slapped some 2D pillow clouds in the background, or put thrown in high-level, cirrus-type clouds that are so far up in the atmosphere they don't look too weird despite a lack of depth.
But part of improving is trying new and challenging things, and not spending forever agonizing over getting something perfect when its better to just move on. That's hard for me, too.
Oddly, I can draw trees alright, despite them operating according to the same basic principles as clouds - they're fractals. Once you figure out the big, overall shape of the thing, you can just doodle in smaller versions of the same shape until it looks adequately detailed, at least in theory. I typically draw cliffs, rock piles, flowers, and meadows with the same mindset. They're all different expressions of repeating patterns, iterated and layered over to create natural-looking forms.
I've heard you can use geometry to create more realistic shadows (since light functions as a ray, visually speaking, an artist should be able to trace a straight line from the light source, to the solid object, then hit the point of the imaginary wall or floor where the object blocks the light, thus forming the outline of a shadow.) And I've played with it a little with geometric shapes, but struggle to evoke it with complex scenes and figures.
Prewitt has just met his good friend Maggio down in jail in From Here to Eternity, and oh boy, I don't think he's noticed, or is willing to notice, but this guy's humanity is fading fast. He hasn't succumbed to despair or given into the beatings and become obedient - rather, the guy is openly defiant, but it's a twisted thing, a strength wound up in embitterment and hate. You can hardly tell this is the same 18-year old who loved vodka martinis and paged through his family photo album with his friends.
This book is huge, and much of the first two thirds is largely slice of life and long conversations, but it makes what's happening now hit that much harder. We, the readers, have gotten to know these people, have gotten to see and ride along with them in G company in their mostly ordinary lives, so it hits that much harder, when the prison arc takes over, ordinary life is taken away, and personhood is treated as a privilege they are no longer allowed to have.