Category Archives: craft

Colour Face Study

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Been a long time since I did a face study of a real face. I mean one that exists out there in the world. This is not a live portrait, but instead a face from a magazine. I just thought it’d be a nice change from the face studies I’ve been doing (see several recent posts) that involve making them up completely, or turning them through various angles…skills I’ve been interested in a lot for The Project… A passable copy from a photo propped up in front of one is not so hard, with a little practice, since (among other reasons) the subject is very still and most of the 2D translation is already done. These are different skills from portraiture, I think, or pure expression of a face from the imagination, but useful and instructive to keep sharp, all the same. A close study of a real face from whatever source helps one remember what real faces look like when designing them from the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Science Film Logo

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So, here’s yet another project I’ve been working on. I forgot to tell you about it. After the success of the short films I produced and directed (etc) two Summers ago (remember? Shine a Light and Laser), the next step was to get more people involved in the film-making, to learn more about how it is done, and what is involved, both on the science side and the film-making side. Specifically, I want students from both sides of the divide (science, and film, journalism, communications, etc) to have to work with each other to learn more about communicating science.

So, Anna Krylov (Chemistry dept., and a collaborator on an NSF grant) and I wrote a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Handbook Extract, 2 – Warnings

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In addition to the CMC staff handbook, I also got the mechanical crew handbook, which was originally drawn by Jim McEleny, and then revised in 1974 by Ted Mullings, who I told you about in the earlier post. The pages are more sparsely done in this one, but there’s still some great humour here and there… (Click for larger views….) […] Click to continue reading this post →

Handbook Extract, 1

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Not long ago I was in Leadville, a mining town you get to from Aspen by going over Independence pass and then down into the valley. (It is apparently North America’s highest -in elevation- incorporated town, being at over 10K feet… Its roots are in gold and silver mining, starting back in the mid 19th Century.) I love visiting the big store that sells all sorts of curiosities and antiques there, and then after wading through lots of bits and pieces, going to the saloon bar for Irish coffees.

This time I actually bought something. Two things in fact – Some old handbooks for mine crew personnel of the Climax Molybdenum Company, from 1978. They are quite small, about 5 by 4 inches, but they are packed with delightfully presented dos and don’ts about how to do the job, including safety practices, and warnings about what might go wrong if you do things the wrong way. I particularly love the fact that the pages are […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thumbnailing

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Been back on The Project a bit more in recent days, mixing it in with various physics thoughts, projects, physics related duties, and so forth. More on some of that later. I’ve been writing some new pieces for the work, and have been flowing nicely at times. I write both in words (scribbling in my notebook in H pencil) and images, this being the point of some of what I’m up to. (See my discussion about the nature and intent of the whole business in earlier posts collected here.) So I write words, but also think about how the reader’s eye will move around the page, communicating intent, story, emotion, and concept, and so the words are supplemented by -and often guided by- little “thumbnail” images I scribble as well. (Actually, this is not so different from how I do my physics research, and I know that this is quite common. We think and reason using a mixture of words, images, equations, and so forth, and looking in my notebooks on physics will show a lot of commonality with my notebooks for The Project. Part of what I hope The Project will achieve is to help the general reader learn that this happens, while also benefiting from it by reading the form/medium they are reading…)

In the more familiar language of film, in my job as writer and “artist” at this stage, I’m directing the action as I write, and sort of doing the first pass at editing too, keeping in mind also things that will be taken over by my director of photography, costumer, editor, set designer, and so forth. Oh, those are also me in this case, since […] Click to continue reading this post →

Head Start

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This was sort of a quick doodle in Brushes while waiting*, as an exercise in just starting at a random feature and building (rather than the global construction approach seen in the previous post on this subject), using simple lines to hold and suggest form… but I liked the person who emerged, so I decided to finish her up a bit more and throw on some colour.

I actually think I sort of know her a bit. Something about the look in her eye, the tilt of her head, and the willful set of the mouth.

You know, I think I may use her as a character in The Project. She’d kick a few doors down, and not take any nonsense, don’t you think? (Scientist, or non-scientist? Must decide later.)

Watch her being built from blank page to finish by clicking:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Heads Up

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The last day or two I’ve paused from various things due to various other things intervening and competing for time. For work toward the project in the in-betweens, I’ve decided to do a bit of study (really, re-study and move things forward a bit) of head construction… mostly working on two key things: (1) Variety of types and (2) more solidity and, er, sculptedness…. This will help with improved production and character design and so forth later on, for The Project.

All while still keeping speed at a good clip. At the right is a quick study I did toward the end of the day today. It is rough, and I am focusing on overall structure, so forgive the crudity. I’d been working entirely with pencil earlier in the day, so this was a change of medium, and a change of pace, that is often useful for getting nice flow. The medium? I used the app Brushes on the iPad. So there’s the one thin stroke of black, using a stylus. I’d done a rough framework of blue underneath first, for layout and bulk.

Just for fun, I’ve included something else you might find interesting. I have […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sew What

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This morning, before starting what turned out to be a long day of work, I did some sewing. I realized the day before last that the umbrella that protects me from the sun’s rays a lot of the time was filthy with dust and mildew. Realizing that this was connected to it never having been washed in its seven or so years in my possession, I set about removing it from the frame (a task that involved 16 screws, interestingly) and popped it into the washing machine. It emerged with a lot of the mildew greenery still attached and so I soaked it for a while in diluted bleach* and then rewashed… It emerged rather splendidly clean, but then I noticed that all those years in the sun and other elements had rather taken a toll on a lot of the stitching in various places (perhaps the vigourous cleaning contributed a bit too?), and so before putting […] Click to continue reading this post →

Best Ice-Cream Van Ever!

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Monday, Memorial Day, found me at the MOCA Geffen Center downtown, where there’s a huge retrospective of graffiti and related forms of street art, including marvellous works like this – elaborately decorated cars. Wouldn’t you just love to get an ice-cream from this van? The artist is called Mister Cartoon. I am sorry to say that the shot I took of a small child looking at it in awe was too blurry (I was in such haste to get the shot before he walked away). The exhibition is quite splendid, with a huge variety of pieces, including some that were created specifically for the exhibit, said to be the largest ever retrospective of its kind in the USA.

One such site-specific piece was “Wish You Were Here”, by an artist called Mode 2, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Figure

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Dropped into a studio to do a bit of drawing to “keep my hand in”, late last week. It meant a lovely early evening out there after a full day’s work, enjoying the low sun and warm sky.

The drawing was fun, with a reasonably good model present. I decided at some point to listen to some Hendrix blues pieces on my headphones, and things went really well – maybe partly as a result. At the left is a sketch* that lasted a little over 20 minutes (was supposed to be 25 but, oddly, the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Great Graphite

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gallery_nucleus_graphiteOne of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s not an awful lot of focus on pure drawing in the art world here in Los Angeles. I don’t see a lot of it up in galleries, on artwalks, on people’s walls, and so on and so forth. At least not in comparison to painting (especially) or sculpture. That may be a function of my ignorance, not having studied all the aspects of the “scene”. It may also be a more widespread phenomenon than just Los Angeles. Not sure. Anyway, when an exhibition with a drawing focus does come along, I get excited and often go. (The Getty had two big ones in the last couple of years, I should say, focusing on da Vinci (hurrah!) and Rembrandt (hurrah!) and his students on different occasions. But what about contemporary work?)

Well, to my delight I discovered that Saturday had an opening event at Gallery Nucleus with two major highlights for me. The first was that it was focusing on pencil drawing by current artists (Lined in Lead: Works in Graphite), and the second was that Michael Zulli would be there (there were some works of his on display) for the opening. I simply love his work in the graphic novel art world. I’ve no idea if you read […] Click to continue reading this post →

Purépecha

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purepecha_woman_28_07_10_smallHere’s a sketch I did either in the airport or on the plane back from Morelia last June. Well, it was certainly finished on the plane, I think. You will recall that I was in Mexico to give some lectures on string theory at a quantum gravity school (see here and here and the related posts links below). As part of the practice and experimentation I was doing at the time (for The Project), I was drawing interesting faces, sometimes from photographs, like for this one. You just hold the photo in one hand (this one on the screen of my camera) and sketch it. I was working on a 8.5inx11in sketchpad with a charcoal pencil, I think. (I was trying to be quick, and I think it was about 15 or 20 minutes work.) The photo was taken a day or two before in the village of Pátzcuaro. I think I’d mentioned my visit there to you in an earlier post, but had showed you no images except some clocks.

Well, a funny/nice thing happened. The guy sitting next to me two seats over spoke […] Click to continue reading this post →

Heroic

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character_a_inkedStruggling for a post title, I went for a slight critique of the work I did on the character you’ve seen earlier*. She’s been grabbed from a panel showing her looking for a seat in a cafe where a conversation (about a physics issue) is to continue.

It is a large panel showing the layout of the cafe with all the people sitting and reading and talking and so forth, and she’s one of several small figures in it, so it is probably not that big a deal that she has somewhat heroic proportions here as compared to her more ordinary proportions in other panels.

Heroic here refers to the various choices of proportions you can give to figures, usually based on how many heads tall they are. You might have heard of people talking about how many heads tall a figure should be.

Well, there really is no “should be”, and different practitioners use different […] Click to continue reading this post →