Anatomy and Art

I started working on something new recently.  I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing yet, but it’s the first time I’ve really felt like I’m getting somewhere with a piece since the move, so that’s exciting.

I often start with a photograph when I do these, and this time I’ve started with one of Keith Allen Phillips’ (aka Lucky’s) shots of Sylva.  I mentioned them before when I wrote about ayearwithoutclothes.com. Having seen so much work from those two this year, it only seemed fitting to play with something there, even if I don’t intend the final piece to actually be a likeness.  Fingers crossed that I can keep the momentum going throughout the work week now, and on however long it takes me finish it.

A friend of mine who has been struggling with health problems recently posted a link to The Spoon Theory written by Christine Miserandino.  The basic analogy boils down to expressing the energy one has in terms of spoons.  And when someone is sick, they don’t have a full drawer of spoons to draw from in their day.  So they have to budget the way they spend their energy, sometimes down to such nuances as deciding whether to shower or eat in a given night.

It’s been a helpful analogy for a lot of people, so I thought that I would post it here as well.  And if nothing else, it’s just a lot easier to tell someone that you’re low on spoons than it is to go into the details of what it is to not have the energy for things that might seem simple to someone in better health.

The hosting website is called ButYouDontLookSick.com and it’s intended to be a resource for people struggling with those diseases which aren’t necessarily visible to others.

Goodness me, it’s the 4th of July and I intend to go jump in a pool and play in a little while.  But first I wanted to pop in and say a few words over here.  Lately over at Sapling I’ve been pretty consumed with an animation that I’m putting together over there.  It’s been a whole lot of work, and it’s nearly finished now.  I get excited at times like these.

The animation is about the translation process.  From a technical standpoint, it’s been interesting how much time I’ve been spending in the program, After Effects.  I usually do a little compositing there, but then have generally brought my work into Final Cut Pro or something like that to finish up the actual shot arrangement.  With this one, I’ve found it made more sense to actually just put the whole thing together in After Effects.  I’m having to be really careful about organization and use a lot of pre-compositions. And even so, I don’t believe that I have ever taken on this many layers of video to wrangle for another project in my entire life.  That’s the thing about animation though I guess.  You literally make all of it from scratch.

One thing that I don’t care for in After Effects as opposed to your more editing and less effect driven software, is it’s insistence that every little thing have it’s own layer.  This has been one of those pieces for which I’ve wanted a lot of layered subtlety going on behind the scene.  It would have been nice to be able to dedicate a couple of tracks for that, rather than adding a new one for every piece of footage used.  That being said though, After Effects does a great job at handling image sequence footage and you do have a great deal of control over a lot of details.  Still, if anyone from Adobe happens to read this, maybe the next version could at least give us the ability to group tracks into folders.  For when you don’t quite want to create a pre-composition and send your tracks to another timeline, but you still want to clean them up a bit for viewing sake, or to add some sort of matting to the whole bundle, just that one little thing would make After Effects so much better in general.

I especially thought that when I got into the part of this animation that I like to call the breakdown.  Textbooks often use similar static illustrations to represent things that may or may not atomically look like the molecule in question.  And really it’s only rather recently with the work of Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan (video link to a  lecture of his about the ribosome and translation process) that we even fully know the exact structure of the ribosome.  So one of the things that I’ve been excited to do with this one is to create some more standard looking images and then layer them over the 3D animation.  I then keyframed the individual components to follow their 3D counterparts so we can actually see the connection between those representations and a more 3D space.  I have been simultaneously irritated with myself for coming up with such a time consuming and intricate thing to create to tell this story, while also really psyched to get to break everything down so clearly.  As it’s come together, every codon in the 2D overlay has had to have it’s own layer in After Effects, but now that I finally have everything placed and animated, I’m really excited about it.  Back in school, I recall one of our teachers, John Daugherty, telling us about how every piece that you do has to have that thing that makes it really interesting to you as an artist.  Whether it’s a concept, or a technique, or whatever, and I think this part of this animation is that for me.  It’s something that I don’t see other animations doing, and for me it’s like wrapping up that little aha moment that you get when you’re watching these sorts of things and you finally figure out how one representation relates to another and start to get what it is that you’re seeing.

As you can see, though, I’ve got these huge blocks of layers in the timeline there.  At one point, I had more than 60 in there, and that’s with many of them being pre-compositions that lead to more layers in another timeline.  But it’s working.  And I just love it when things work.

This is going to be a good one.

It seems that I’ve been short on time, but overdue for an update around here.  Work with Sapling continues to go well.  Lately I have been moving into the post production phase of a 3D animation that I’ve been working on for some time over there.  It’s about the translation process wherein individual strings of our genetic code are translated into a polypeptide chain and eventually form a protein.  It’s exciting stuff, and I’m anxious to get it all strung together and finessed.

I also managed to get in another vacation.  I went back up north for the big regional burn event that is held in Michigan.  It’s called Lakes of Fire and I had an amazing time.  I also got a glimpse at my old Chicago neighborhood and I have to say that the people and places there still hold a pretty big piece of my heart.  That and they’ve gotten me thinking about plasma cutters.  All the computer art I make starts looking a lot cooler when I start seeing such things used to create real things.  And this weekend I learned that one can design an image in Illustrator and use that design with a plasma cutter to have it cut into steel.  Nothing about that is anything less than awesome.  Seriously, my friends made this, and I’m ever so impressed.

Just sayin’.

Anyway I promise to write more soon.  And thanks as always for reading.

I’m soon to be out of town for a bit, and not a lot of time for writing, so I thought that I would post some old paintings again.  Hopefully when I get back, I can get back to such endeavors.  Been missing the act of painting lately.

These are some of the figures that I’ve done over the years, and sort of the development of a particular style.

I think that maybe the starting point was when I did “Frantic” in early 2002.

Then years later it came together stronger with “Scream” in 2007.

Then I made a teeny tiny painting later in 2007 playing with the same style of line movements.

The following year I painted “The Fall” (this one was pretty big, especially after the tininess of my last effort).  You can tell that I was getting into anatomy here, because it’s less chaotic and features actual muscles where they lie.  I think this was the first piece of this style I did after starting to learn to sculpt, and it was done shortly before starting school at UIC.

Then in an effort to create a gift for my friend Scott before leaving California, I diverged from things a touch into a swirlier style while trying to paint something that was neither quite a warm tone or a cool tone (Scott really likes purple.)

And lastly, before leaving for school, I attempted to combine themes and use my more chaotic line style on a tree.  I often paint trees.  I’ll probably do another post like this of them sometime.  But I can’t say that the combination of styles quite worked.  I still keep it on my wall, and sometimes I kind of like it, but I don’t consider this one much of a success.

When I got into school, it took me a while to find time to paint again.  I got sick around the end of my 2nd semester and held up in my apartment, probably longer than was exactly reasonable, and fell right back into paint again.  The first thing I made was “Pour.”

And goodness I honestly didn’t realize that there were going to be so many of these when I started this post!  But I’m in it now, and up next is one of my, and seemingly many’s favorites, “Tom Tips His Hat.”  I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to get this one out between semesters.  Someone had told me that all the men I painted were creepy.  That combined with having studied likenesses for sculpture shortly before coming back to school, I thought I’d try painting a man who I happen to be quite fond of.  Tom Waits, being his beautiful awesome self, fit the bill perfectly.

Then, the likeness bandwagon went on, when a couple friends of mine got married.  I couldn’t go to the wedding, but I could play with their faces!  It took me forever to get this right, but I finally got Ellen and Joe down in paint.  Take that you crazy lovestruck fools!

I did a couple things in other styles, and then went to Dallas for my anaplastology internship.  When I got to the end of that time, I couldn’t wait to put paint to canvas again and painted what may be one of my favorites in really a just a period of a couple of days.  I love it when that happens.  It really doesn’t happen enough.  But that’s when I made “Illumine.”

Then back in Chicago I picked up another tiny one that I had started some time before.  It had started in a more realistic style, but I painted over all of that, moving it into more of this style and changing the colors.  Thanks to Scott, I can paint in purple now.  And I made “Feel.”

It’s not my last painting finished, but it is the last in this style.  And goodness, if you’ve made it through all of that, thank you.  That was more pieces than I’d originally thought I was getting myself into showing!

And I hope to have some new ones for you all over the next year.  It takes me so long to adapt to a move, but I can feel it coming.

Tonight I discovered Nerd Nite.  It was pretty sweet.

A friend of mine, Cynthia Phelps, gave the opening talk.  It was on “The Neuroscience of Logo Design.”  Her talk included a lot of information about emotional responses to color and symmetry the way we read shapes.  I’ve often struggled with the idea of committing to a logo.  As someone who tends to pull from a lot of different areas, and wears a lot of different hats, even in my freelance years I could never settle on a single image to represent it all.  Maybe tonight I will dream of something with Cynthia’s inspiration.  I don’t need it now as much, but it’s always good to have ideas like that filed away.

She was followed by Bruce Leander’s “Advanced techniques for digital fine art nature photography.”  Bruce got into the advantages of HDR (high dynamic range) photography, focus stacking, and panoramic images created from stitching images together virtually.  Really technology has come so far in being able to put images together like this.  It’s something I’d like to get into if I ever find the time.  As digital cameras get better and better, some of these techniques have become much more accessible to the non-specialist.  Bruce was actually a specialist though, and his work was beautiful.

And lastly Jason Neulander spoke on “How The Intergalactic Nemesis Started Taking Over the World.”  I was not familiar with The Intergalactic Nemesis before tonight, but it sounds fun and I hope to catch a showing sometime.  He’s basically writing comics/radio plays that are performed live with foley and music and projected art work.  I’d like to see it sometime.  And I really appreciated his talk about getting the show launched and his path as a creative.

Anyway, it was a fun night, a fun crowd, and interesting speakers and topics.  Apparently they do these nights in a lot of different cities.  Someone in Chicago is doing podcasts and recently interviewed an actual ninja, and there’s a magazine, and people posting videos of talks to Vimeo.  It’s a whole little world I never even knew about.  I have to admit, I’m a little tempted to try and give a presentation myself sometime.  I could talk about anaplastology, or educational media, or maybe talk about anatomy and art.  Could be worth doing if I were to manage to summon up the nerve and energy to put something interesting together.  And whether or not that ever happens, I’ll definitely be going back to more of these.

The world lost one of the good ones yesterday.  Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles at the age of 91.

I got to meet him once, back when I lived in LA.  I went to a book signing just so I could shake his hand and tell him thanks.  He signed my copy of The Martian Chronicles and a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes for a friend who couldn’t make it.  He couldn’t believe I was such a fan of work he’d written over 50 years prior.  But The Martian Chronicles continues to be one of my all-time favorite books.

There wasn’t another sci-fi author out there with so much heart.  Really, I’m not sure there was another any kind of writer that got people like Bradbury did.  You might say I was a bit of a fan.

This is him, in his home.  According to the Google News link where I found it, he said that he never threw anything away.

From everything I know about him, he was about as good a guy as they get.  And Los Angeles always felt a little bit nicer knowing he was out there in it, still madly in love with Hollywood after all those years.  I’m sorry to see him go.  He planted magic into the hearts and minds of millions.

In the afterword of the short story collection “Driving Blind,” Bradbury writes of a dream wherein he was taken in a student driver car (he never did learn to drive) by a blindfolded Greek muse, who “whispered notions, concepts, ideas, immense truths, and fabulous lies” as she drove him along a country road.  She told him that it was okay not to know the way, and to just reach out.

I don’t know where you’re headed now, Ray, but I like to think of you reaching out, and I hope that it’s wonderful.

So last weekend (and the days surrounding) I took the first paid vacation of my life, and went to Flipside.  It was beautiful.  And I am again inspired to want to build awesome things.

I posted here sometime back about The Gallery of Dreams that my friend Nobo was putting together.  The idea was a gallery of artwork that would never be photographed, to be shown throughout the event, and set on fire at the end of it all to live on exclusively in our memories.  My own contributions to the gallery were small.  I painted a little bit on one of the walls.  But some of the contributions inside were amazing.

I have one photo that I can share of the final burn.  Anything closer would have revealed the art inside.  It was a good fire, and watching the pieces go inside is something that I think I will remember for a long time.

I made silicone!  Ok, I made virtual silicone, but it’s still exciting to me.  It was a work thing, so I hesitate to go into the details of the particular need, but the exciting part is that Marvin Sketch really is as cool as I thought it was, and I was able to draw out the individual atoms of a silicone polymer chain and produce a 3D model of that chain.  And after working for years with varying kinds of silicones and studying their properties, that was just really cool for me.  I’ve never really known the chemistry side of all of these materials I’ve been working with.  I mean, I have notes somewhere about long polymer chains producing a different effect than the short ones (without looking it up, I want to say that the short ones were more brittle), but I really think that I could understand that so much better now with all the exposure to chemistry I am getting.

Oh drat, I wanted to show an image of the simple illustration you get out of Marvin Sketch, but it seems that the recent security hazards in allowing Java on a Mac (maybe this hits PCs too, I’m not sure), have my Java access shut down here at home for the time being.  Anyway, I remain enthusiastic about this tool.  And I’ll have it working from home again soon.  And here, I’ll grab an image from Custom Silicone Rubberparts to give you an idea of what I mean.  Hopefully they won’t mind because I am linking to them.

But yeah, we get to create models like that, which make me think about what it would take to literally make materials like that.  It all starts with the knowledge, right?

And in the meantime I shake my fist at all those hackers and spammers out there that keep mucking up perfectly good tools for the rest of us.  Java is a good tool.  There’s no reason to mess with that.  And all the spam comments I get here and even worse on my photo site, not cool.  But making silicone, virtually, or for really really real, very cool.  And all you real people who sometimes leave comments here, absolutely cool.  🙂

Well, it’s happened.  I’ve become one of those people who gets annoyed by anatomical inaccuracies.  I don’t think I’ve gone completely twitchy about it.  I can live with something stylized, or an honest admission of what one does not know.  I can handle the occasional honest mistakes too.  But I’ve caught myself a few times lately, cringing in the face of just blatantly misleading or flat out wrong information out there.  And since the world at large isn’t really known for always being on the level and explaining things well, I think this is going to be one of those things that is going to keep on bothering me.  Yup.