Untitled

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

TED The hilarious art of book design | Chip Kidd

This is interesting. It is nice to see what the process is.

People do judge a book by the cover, but this helps a lot.

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

Dark Fluid with negative mass. That sounds like just the stuff for a sci-fi story.

It’s not really a surprise, I would think. If you have dark matter and dark energy there has to be dark chemistry.

This is different from antimatter which would explode on contact with regular matter. Dark fluid has negative mass so the more you push it away the more it moves toward you. Or the more you pull it toward your the more it moves away.

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

Designing a space faring race is really interesting. There is a lot to think about. The level of tech is the big one. Are you looking at the Expanse (near future-ish hard tech), BSG (fairly well grounded but some handwavium), ST (lots of handwavium), or SW (magi-tech). Now you have the concept of negative matter, which is unlike anti-matter in that it had negative mass and wouldn’t annihilated if you touched it but is pushing everything away from each other. The interesting thought is how hard it is to farm in space. You need about 200 pounds of wheat berries to make a 1 pound bread twice a week for a person for a year. You need about 4000 square feet of ground to grow that. The ISS is about 32,000 cubic feet in size. Yeah a farm space ship is not very practical. This does tell us that the habitable planets would be very valuable, for farming if nothing else. That would be a factor into the economy of the galaxy. The expensive part is still getting stuff into space.

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

Every once and a while I run into people who just want to be the “idea guy.” They never realize just how little value ideas on their own have. Other people are terrified because someone might steal their idea. Others are paralyzed because their idea isn’t original enough. Its not the idea that is important, its the implementation. There are a slew of Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks films (A Bug’s Life/Antz, Finding Nemo/A Shark’s Tale, Coco/Day of the Dead, &etc.) where they each started with the same idea and made movies out of them. Star Trek and Firefly both start with the premise of “Wagon Train to the stars”. There are thousands of idea assaulting me most the time (except when it is time to write, of course) and in any case whenever you have multiple people try to execute the same idea it comes out radically different. I did an experiment with a friend we both did a take on a fairy tale and they were barely recognizable as the same idea. I have also found that pretty much any idea you can come up with the ancient Greeks had a take on. Then you have the thought that nobody wants the idea. One of the reasons that Harry Potter wasn’t picked up was because the boarding house fiction genre was “dead.” It is still obvious that audiences are hungry for a good story. Go create your story and set it loose.

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

A Quick History of Pencils

In 1565 near Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England, some shepherds found under a fallen tree a new mineral deposit, which would eventually be called graphite. They found that it was good for marking their sheep so they could tell the herds apart in the commons. The first pencils were lengths of graphite sawn into square rods and wrapped with parchment and string. And they soon became quite popular. Why did pencils become popular so quickly? Because they were significantly better in many ways over the main form of writing at the time: quill and ink. With a quill you had to dip into into ink every few words, and quills wore out within days of heavy use. The pencil on the other hand never dried out, and was always ready to write. It was a lot less messy and lasted for weeks until it was too short to use. The modern pencil we use today was invented by Nicholas-Jacques Conte. Napoleon needed pencils to run France but since France was at war with England there was a blockade and smugglers were not getting enough pencils through, French graphite wasn’t very pure. So Napoleon put his best scientist on the job who came up with the processes still used today for the manufacture of pencils and the pencil grade scale.

[drakontomalloi]

Leonardo da Vinci – A Maiden with a Unicorn. 1480 

[leonardodavinci-art]

Head Of A Young Woman With Tousled Hair (Leda) 1508

Leonardo da Vinci

[v-ersacrum]

Flowers studies by Leonardo da Vinci

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

Someplace to start is lines.

I used a ruler to make a few standard lines and drew some of my own freehand.

They are okay, but it is a place to start.

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

Assembling Supplies I want to learn how to draw and the cheap and easy way to start is with pencil and paper. I have a bunch of pencils collected over the years and some printer paper for the printer we barely use. There are a few accessories needed for drawing:

Pencil sharpener

Clipboard so I can draw anywhere convenient

Eraser because it looks like most of the pencil’s erasers are worn down. Looks like my daughter has an extra.

Yeah, that should be a good enough place to start with.

[theoldstone]

Chauvet Cave, located in southern France, is a cave that contatin the earliest—and best preserved cave paintings in the world. The images are from the Upper Paleolithic period and are at least 37 000 years old, but aside from the intricate paintings, the cave was also discovered to contain the fossilized remains of various extinct animals and plants.

One of the larger cave painting sites, Chauvet Cave is embedded into limestone cliffs and the sheer quantity of paintings and artwork is in itself spectacular, nevermind the size and quality of the pictures (which are themselves remarkable). What the images depict is also unique compared to other finds of this nature. As opposed to specifically painting typical herbivores (likely the quarry of prehistoric human hunters), the cave also depicts predatory animals as well, such as cave lions, panthers, bears, and hyenas. All told, there are at least 13 different species depicted in the paintins, including rhinoceroses. These images do not exist outside of context, however, and many of them depict complex scenes or interaction between species and other artistic and more abstract depictions (such as red ochre reliefs of hands, and other lines and dashes).

Chauvet Cave recently re-entered the public eye just this past March when a researchers recently claimed that the cave depicts various volcanic eruptions and that such paintings are the first time humans recorded and depicted those eruptions in history. Splashes of red ochre and what appears to be an impromptu dive into deeply abstract imagery (a notable departure from some fairly realistic animals) would seem to support this hypothesis.

The cave is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but unfortunately has been off limits to the public since 1994. As with the caves in Lascaux, frequent human activity inside the cave slowly cultivated a species of mould which could have damaged the paintings. A replica was opened to the public in April, 2015.

[drawingwhilebroken-blog]

Why this blog?

A drunk driving crossed the median of the interstate early one spring morning: killing himself, his friend and our unborn daughter. He also caused substantial damage to my wife and I. I had attempted a panic stop but it doesn't do any good to stop if the other vehicle is moving but there was an attempt. The crash caused both of my wrists to shatter. The orthopedist said after the surgeries, that my wrist bones looked like sawdust. I am able to write with a keyboard and recently I’ve been working on my handwriting, still not great, but it seems more readable lately. Now I want to learn to draw. Actually, I’ve been wanting to do that for a while now, but now I am committing to it. Therefore, this blog. This blog will be primarily about exploring creativity through drawing while having broken hands. I hope you aren’t expecting anything wonderful because I have my doubts as to how far I can go, but I do have goals. I would like to draw about as well as those artists who made the cave painting so many tens of thousands of years ago. In any case, I’m not getting any younger and I want to learn, so hang on.