Orange in Green
Yesterday I had a hankering for marmalade. Perhaps with bits of ginger in it. Maybe a bit of whisky. On fresh bread. […] Click to continue reading this post
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Author Archives: Clifford
Nine Points
Although the planning of a panel on a page is entirely freehand pencil or pen work, it is indeed the case that sooner or later I start detailed placing of subjects, and I often use perspective to do the layouts. Not just for skyscrapers and so forth, but for down to earth things too. I do it the old-fashioned way, which is repetitive and time-consuming, but I must admit – It is fun! Take some time to look at everything around you – real or represented in drawings, photos, etc – and you’ll likely see perspective cues that help give sense of depth and placing. It is all about geometry, which our universe seems to like a lot, and which we use to navigate in it. Learning a bit of this geometry, and how to build it in projection in two dimensions on the page (and it is much easier than this sentence makes it sound!) allows one to make reasonably convincing recreations of the universe (or simulacra of your choosing) and how we perceive it. Real artists (not hacks like yours truly) use geometry a lot, in one way or another, to interpret, represent, or distill aspects of the world, and so in a sense, they are companions on the same road as those of us in (especially) the physical sciences.
Babble aside, here you can see parts of the interior of a cafe taking shape. I did it using three-point perspective*:
This will be the skeleton upon which I build the flesh of the rest of the piece. It is based on my knowledge of a real cafe that I location-scouted (well, I happen to drink coffee there from time to time), but you’d never get this view without (a) perhaps being able to fly, and (b) removing the ceiling. Trying to be somewhat discreet in this […] Click to continue reading this post
Leaving Home Ain’t Easy
Mum’s upstairs packing to leave after her lovely visit of a month and I’m already upset by this. It was such a great time, and I’m so very sad to see her go*. But I can’t keep her all to myself. My sister and brother will no doubt be expecting her back by now, and so I must give her up. 🙂 This blog post is a lame attempt to distract myself from her packing activity, which is a bit sad for me. On the other hand, a rather sweet aspect of it is that I can hear her in the distance singing along to songs from Queen’s A Night At The Opera** and other albums while doing her packing. This makes me smile from ear to ear.
The last few days had lots of activities, including more picnics by the seaside, walks, cooking, shopping, visits to some old favourite haunts (including a surprise Sunday […] Click to continue reading this post
Back to Basics
Well, today was the first lecture of the string theory course (part 2) that I mentioned in the previous post. And I applied the “when they think you’re going to zig, you zag” principle. They have been expecting me to dive into the whole business of open strings and D-branes and so forth (the subject of the book), and I did not. Sure, that will come, and sure, we’ll explore what they mean and what they can tell us about string theory beyond perturbation theory and so on and so forth. But I want first to spend a couple of weeks on getting to the heart of the matter. They made several standard choices along the way in doing their first semester of study of string theory. What did they mean? Why did they work? Were those the only choices? What is underlying a lot of it all, and what, when stripped down to the essence, is at the core of string perturbation theory and beyond? In other words, let’s look more closely at the path integral definition (such as it is) of a string theory (slightly schematically):
[tex] Z=\int [{\cal D}g {\cal D}X] e^{-S(X,g)}\ ,[/tex]
and make sense of all the bits. (Er, for the two of you still reading, [tex]S(X,g)[/tex] is an […] Click to continue reading this post
New Semester Approaching
I’m feeling strangely cold, although the heating is on and I’ve got a jumper (“sweater” to readers in the States) on. It has been this way all day, so I suspect it is something to do with my frame of mind. I’m feeling a bit reflective with it too, so I’ll think out loud (as it were) a bit before going to bed early.
Well, it is almost time to start another round of teaching. This semester, starting Monday, it is a graduate course that I’ll be teaching, the second part of a year’s sequence of string theory that we teach from time to time. My focus will be non-perturbative issues, focusing on much of what has been forming the foundation of research in various areas of string theory since the 1990s. Should be fun. Some of the material will come from my book, D-branes, that was published back in 2002. It seems so long ago now. I actually looked in it today, as I was discussing a research issue with a colleague, and could not recall some details. Happily there was a chapter with it all in there. That’s rather nice. The book serves me well as a personal reminder of things I used to have at my fingertips all the time back then, and as a bonus, lots of people around the world still use it as a handbook/guide/intro/etc, I hear.
I joke, of course. The cart and the horse are the other way around.
Speaking of books, I’ll be doing my best to continue working on the current book project, with all the excitement and adventure in developing it. (And the occasional […] Click to continue reading this post
Inkin’
Remember the skyline in an earlier post? Well, I forgot that I’d taken a snap of myself doing the inks for it last month, knowing that I’d ultimately be sharing it with those of you curious about the process. So there you can see me about half way, inking with a cartridge ink pen on the 11 in. x 17 in. Bristol artboard where it sits as a sort […] Click to continue reading this post
Paints
Oh, I finished the painting of the page that, perhaps annoyingly, I’m showing you only a corner of. Now you’ve seen three stages of development in the production process, from pencils to inks to painting. See the other two pages (here and here) for comparison.
I digitally paint for this work, using a variety of techniques. This is a big silent single-panel splash page early on in the story, and I’m using it to root the reader in reality, the location, and the principal character, and so I’ve broken out the special effects a touch. Yes, I am a traditionalist, as I’ve explained before, with most of the final look of my work not being so different from what could be done in the pre-digital era, but I am not pig-headedly so, and from time to time I use (lightly, […] Click to continue reading this post
Knots from a Master
Ah. This is just perfect. I actually looked into my Institute For Advanced Study news magazine this time around and noticed a gem I’d like to share. Edward Witten gave a lovely talk entitled Knots and Quantum Theory for a (sort of) general audience, and there is video of it available. Ever wondered why mathematicians study knots? Why do physicists care? What do they bring to the table? Well, this could be a talk for you to take out a bit of time to watch.
Not long ago I wrote a post about Ed, his huge influence on the field of theoretical physics, and some of his role in my own development as a physicist during my time […] Click to continue reading this post
Black Lines
Ok, I have inked the pencils I constructed earlier, showing parts of two real buildings that form the background to the opening pages of one of my stories.
In the end I did the curves freehand instead of fiddling with French curves*. Now for these objects, the inking (done freehand with ink drawing pens – I sometimes use brushes or brush pens too) is actually pretty much just networks of black lines since they are background details and, moreover, very simple skyscrapers. There are some others in this page that are more […] Click to continue reading this post
Happy New Year!!
Well, let me be among the first to wish you a Happy New Year! I hope you achieve many treasured goals in the coming year.
On balance, I liked my 2010, with its mixture of joys and sadnesses, triumphs and failures, findings and losings, departures and returns. I managed to more or less maintain a good level in my regular comings and goings, while finding room to grow, explore new ideas, and develop them.
My old habit from youth of deciding that I’m just going to hunker down and […] Click to continue reading this post
Constructing
But before we left on the trip (see previous post) I did get a little bit of work done on The Project for the first time in about three weeks, by making an early start in the morning. There’s this big single-panel splash page with lots of tall buildings on it that I’ve been meaning to finish for a while.
Tall buildings mean… windows. Lots of them. For this piece, this means lots of drawing of construction lines to place the windows. So I’ve been messing around with a T-square, rulers, vanishing points, diagonal vanishing points, a bit of free hand winging it (will enhance with French curves […] Click to continue reading this post
Picnicking
I love packing picnics. It has been a while since I’ve done it**, and so this morning, upon seeing sunshine behind my bedroom curtains, I decided to take the visitors off for a picnic. After breakfast I set about giving them a time to get ready to leave, and busied myself in the kitchen. I made sandwiches (mustard, pastrami, tomato), cut slices of the delicious Christmas fruit cake my mum made two days earlier, put in some fruit (grapes and satsumas/clementines/tangerines/Idontremember), and 
made two thermos flasks of tea (mint and honey, and ordinary black tea with milk and sugar), and a couple of kitkats for emergencies.
My smaller Sainsbury’s shopping bag (imported) is just perfect for carrying all this, I discovered.
Our destination? Santa Monica beach and pier! It was a perfect […] Click to continue reading this post
Merry!
Well, I wish you a peaceful holiday weekend. If you don’t celebrate any of the holidays around this time, such as Christmas, I still wish you peace. If you do celebrate Christmas, then… Merry Christmas!
I’ve been doing lots of things with my visiting family the last two days since we’ve had some non-rain days. I’d tell you a bit more about it, with stories of sugar-plum fairies, mice, tinsel, and more, but to be honest I am very tired, it is 7 minutes to 3 am, and so I’m going to pop into bed and sleep in on Christmas morning, waking up and listening to the radio in bed sleepily for a long while, perhaps sipping […] Click to continue reading this post
Rain, Dear. Games. (2)
Later in the early evening of rain, rain, rain yesterday I broke open the tin of ten games I bought on a whim in K-mart a few days back.
While the rain continued to fall, chinese checkers provided some good, easy-to-learn fun for us all, with a span of about 75 years in the age gap from youngest to oldest. (Yes, some physics thoughts crossed my mind fleetingly once or twice as we played. This time I […] Click to continue reading this post
Rain, Dear. Games. (1)
So today’s rain-storm-driven activities involved staring out of the windows at various impressive downpours and marveling at the lightning and thunderclaps. This latter formed an interesting coincidence since I was reviewing grant proposals this morning, and one of them was about the science of certain types of high energy phenomena associated with lightning bolts. They were good to see, since Southern California (at least the LA part) has relatively few and relatively lame offerings in the way of thunderstorms. I miss them terribly.
In the early afternoon, we finally decided to go off to a museum. A good indoor activity. However, we got caught in a downpour between parking and museum and decided that, despite the two giant umbrellas we had deployed, our coverage was wanting and we were all too damp to continue. So we returned home. It was a good […] Click to continue reading this post
