(Dry) Watercolour

watercolour_share_26_oct_2016All change! Last week another style change took place, in service of a new story/chapter for the book. I’ve transitioned to a looser style, with final line art done with a charcoal-like finish, and the colour done as watercolour. (Click for a slightly larger view.) It turned out that back in March when I went and hid for a week to work on the book, I thumbnailed and roughed a lot of pages (on two stories I think?) in a pretty tight manner, and so I’ve decided that I’m simply going to go in and sketch the final material all by hand, with no elaborate construction work for placing backgrounds (neither analogue nor digital), no measurements, no drawing of perspective grids, etc.

This turns out to mean that I can get the pre-colour work done pretty swiftly on some pages. Rather than take this as an opportunity to sprint ahead and make up some lost time, I decided to […] Click to continue reading this post

Relaxin’…

relaxin_panel_share

Well, since I just lost the last two and a half hours’ work to a mystery crash (and Illustrator CS6 has no autosave*), I figured I lose another 20 minutes and prep a panel from a page of the book I’ve been working on today to:

(1) Share something from the project after a while of not doing so, and

(2) Show what I’d much rather be doing right now. I’m annoyed but trying to imagine myself in the picture… breathe…

Ok. Back to it. Looks like another 3am bedtime coming up…

-cvj

*I know this, I just forgot to hit cmd-S for a bit. I’ve got very good at doing it regularly, but this time… Yeah I know…
Click to continue reading this post

The 2016 Physics Nobel Prize goes to…!

Wow! Topology in the mainstream news. I never thought I’d see the day. Congratulations to the winners! Citation:

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 was divided, one half awarded to David J. Thouless, the other half jointly to F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”.

Here is a link to the Nobel Prize site with more information, and also, here’s a BBC breakdown of some of the science.

An important (to some) side note: Duncan Haldane was at USC when he wrote the cited papers. Great that USC was supportive of this kind of work, especially in that early part of his career.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post