Saturday, October 27, 2007

Mortality

Having a bad day. Spilled Cola on my laptop, unplugged it immediately, turned over to let it spill, left it to dry...and 20 minutes later realized that the damned battery was still in. Poor thing...now I'll wait 24 hours to see if it will manage to survive or if I shorted it to death.
Next, went to check on my backup, an external Western Digital...and it's dead! Bloody hell! It was working just last week!
I have years of work on those two drives, and lots of drawings. And pictures, memories, some not backed up anywhere else.

Yet, what is strange is this...somehow... I am feeling very cool about it. I know years ago I'd be out of my mind. Not now.

Is it possible that I am finally accepting mortality?

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Shiver me bones


I really really must get myself a proper skeleton model. a hundred anatomy books cannot substitute for a 3D model that one can actually touch and see from a continuum of angles(damn, is this an indictment of drawing??).

I can't resist saying it. Browsing this shop gives me a boner. :)

Forensics


"the only good way to clean the bones was to simmer them in a covered steam vat for the better part of the day, then scrub off the softened tissue with a toothbrush (not my own personal one, mind you)...Needless to say, [my wife] wasn't thrilled when she arrived home to the stench of cooking flesh and found a decaying human skull and femur simmering in her eight-quart kettle." (link)

No, it wasn't CSI that got me to nose around the field of forensics (though I was thrilled to learn of its exitence through a friend). From a love of the living body comes a curiosity for the dead, and a penchant for science leads to the need to pin down reality by measurement and classification. So drawing leads to anatomy and anatomy leads to forensics. And then you start roaming around life with X-ray eyes, enunciating insertion points and bony processes where once mere fleshy lumps used to lie.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Vanitas


Brush on moleskine, vainly a little bit cleaned up on photoshop.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

3 asian heads


In spite of different positioning, the pattern is clear. After scaling to align height of top of eyebrow and bottom of chin (let's call that "face") one finds facial features size (both height and width, though not shape) to be mostly similar: eyes, nose, mouth, mostly take up the same real estate on the face. What makes or breaks the portrait is skull proportions, which differ wildly: how high is the widest point of the cheekbones? On one example it happens just below the eye, on another just above the nostril. What is the shape of the skull's outline? How many eyes would fit between the outside of the eye and the outside of the skull? On one of them, about one eye, on another there is almost no space. The first thing to get on a portrait is the gesture of the whole skull, not facial details.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Brush Pen 1
























Just got myself a beautiful Pentel Brush Pen. Bled the first cartridge in less than a week, it is that much fun :)