An Illustrated Tour of My Evil Lier

Saturday, January 15, 2011
sketches
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More observational drawings from my sketchbook. These are all from my house / evil lier.

This is the fan in my bedroom. It sits across the room from by bed and doesn’t really point at it. I run the fan every night, even in the winter, because it drowns out all the creepy deep dark woods sounds that are outside. The table is an antique that came from my grandfather’s house and somehow ended up as my end table. It’s way too ornate for the rest of my room.

This is one wall of the room next door where we watch TV. You can see my overflowing book cases on the right. They’re full of computer books, most of which are out of date now but I can’t get rid of them. To the left of the TV are a bunch of magazine clippings I’ve thumb tacked to the wall. My favorite is a New Yorker cover painted by Wayne Thiebaud of two melting ice cream cones. Under those is my cat’s little scratching post thing. She likes my office chair better. On the far left is my piano.

And here is my nightstand, which is actually my dad’s TV tray repurposed as a nightstand. The lamp cost $4 and does not work, but it looks like bamboo! The cloth there is an old t-shirt. I use it to wrap around my alarm clock because the numbers are too bright at night. I cover over the face with the shirt and just lift it up when I want to read the time.

These are a few buildings from near my house. The one on top is a gym that has very nice architecture to fit into the rolling hills. The bottom building is a watertower that I think is one of the better looking watertowers around.

In the Company of Taxidermy, and other titles I’ve rejected for my autobiography

Saturday, January 15, 2011
sketches
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Over winter break I spent some time working on my observational drawing skills. I’ve been applying to a few art programs that require admissions portfolio’s, and most ask for recent examples of observational work. I’ve been doing a lot of art lately but it’s mostly illustrative imaginary or narrative stuff that didn’t quite fit the bill. I’m planning on posting a few things in the next few days.

This whole endeavor however (it rhymes!), brought me to this question:

Does taxidermy creep you out?

I ask because it completely fascinates me. It seems a morbid curiosity, I realize, but I can’t help it. Taxidermy animals and skeletal specimens have this atmosphere of victorian curiosity about them that harkens back to when the lines between science and art and philosophy were all blurry, biologists were “naturalist” and spent most of their time trekking through wilderness with firearms, and discovering something new meant you could name it after yourself.

I’ve never owned a taxidermic animal, per say, although I have several lucky rabbits feet I got as a child, which I suppose are sort of similar. Funny thing, you used to see rabbits feet for sale all the time in airports and gas stations and little knick knack stores all over the place but I haven’t seen one for sale in decades. I wonder if they’re illegal or just passé. I’ve always wanted a preserved raven that could sit in my room and be my friend, and I think an elephant or a small whale would be so cool, especially if you has a small apartment and it got a room all to itself. There was a trend for a while of preserving your cat or dog after it died – they have this whole fancy freeze-drying process – but somehow that doesn’t interest me all that much.

Here in Kansas we have what is probably the most impressive collection of taxidermy animals you’re ever likely to see. In Dyche Hall on the University of Kansas is the Panorama of North American Mammals. Developed from an exhibit originally built for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair the exhibit has over a hundred taxidermic animals displayed in one huge diorama that transitions through their native habitats.

The exhibit was built by Lewis Lindsay Dyche, one of those Teddy Roosevelt Victorian-style naturalists I was talking about, all from specimens he collected traveling the world. You can read about Lewis on the University’s website.

The best part of the exhibit are the walruses (which I find are the best part of anything that contains walruses). I’ve been going to the museum for years to sketch the animals. I find they’re much more cooperative than those fidgety versions at the zoo.

Here are a few sketches from the museum. The skeleton in the upper corner belonged to a manatee. I don’t know it’s name or if it was a boy or a girl, they don’t put that kind of info on the museum placards for some reason, but I’ve named him Lindsay after Lewis Lindsay Dyche, and because he kind of looks like a Lindsay.

Oh, and just so you don’t think it’s all about the dead, here are some sketches of my very lively cat. She was a very good girl to put up with me following her around with my sketchbook for as long as she did, but she’s not so good at sitting still just yet. We’re working on that.

Slug Model in 3D

Saturday, January 15, 2011
3D Modeling
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This week, 2 different approaches to building a 3D model. I’m still trying to find a comfortable way to approach the modeling process and build something up quickly. For a subject I went back to my slug friend from a few weeks ago.

At work we use 3DS Max for all of our modeling activities, so I’ve been making an effort to get used to the program. Both 3DS Max and Maya (and Blender for that matter) are general modeling programs and have basically the same kind of interface. Modeling is basically done by manipulating vertices, edges, and faces. It’s a very “engineering” like approach, and although there are some tools to help you build things up quickly — mirroring, soft selections, and stock primitives to work from — in the end it comes down to moving points around little by little.

Here’s my rough model of the slug in Max:

Another approach to modeling are 3D sculpture programs like Mudbox and ZBrush. In these programs you use 3d tools to sculpt and mold a model like clay. This has several advantages: you can sculpt something quickly, you can generate a lot of detail, and it feels much more “artistic”. However the final models are much more complex (they have many more faces, which means longer render times), and you don’t have as much control over the structure which can make the final model difficult to animate later on.

Here is the same character modeled in ZBrush:

It feels much easier to add the little details that give something character in ZBrush, but the resulting models are kind of messy. In practice I think often pros would make a basic rough model in Maya or 3DS Max and then import that into ZBrush or Mudbox for details.

8-bit Ada Animations

Sunday, December 26, 2010
animation
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I had the chance to play the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World video game at a friend’s house just recently and it got me thinking about pixel art. I’ve been playing a lot of animation lately and I thought it might be fun to make a short character cycle like the ready poses of the characters in the game.

First I needed a character to represent me. Ada volunteered. It took a few tries to get a good pixel version of her, but the third time was the charm:

Next was the animation. I spent some time looking at clips of the game to see what the other characters do while they’re ostensibly sitting still. Most do a simple 4 frame breathing cycle, but several are a bit more involved: moving fists, rocking back and forth, bouncing their hair, etc.

I decided to just make a run at things and see what I could come up with. Here’s my first pencil test. Key frames are blue, breakdowns are orange:

This cycle was a little too active. I also thought it might be nice to have 2 cycles, one general movement, and then one that I can throw in every few base cycles to break things up. Here’s pencil test number two:

This one turned out great. Here’s the finished version with color. This one runs 3 cycles of a fight stance, and then one cycle of Ada fixing her glasses. The animation runs 6 frames a second.

Press Start!

Quick Clouds

Saturday, December 11, 2010
sketches
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Cedar Creek Parkway

Friday, December 10, 2010
painting
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About a month ago the art gallery next door to where I work put up a solo exhibit by a local artist named Rich Bowman. Rich paints gloriously colorful cloud-filled landscapes in oil, you can see pictures of them on his website. Everyday as I walked in to work I was thinking “wow those paintings look great, I should really go in there and get a closer look”. Well last Friday (I know, a month later) I noticed they were taking the show down to make room for the next and so I rushed in and waylayed the poor gallery owner in the middle of her lunch to beg her to let me look through the canvases that were still up.  It was worth it, they are spectacular in person.

Anyway, after that I was in the local bookstore and happened to be flipping through an art instruction book about landscape paintings and there was one of Rich’s pieces as an example by the author. The other work in the book was pretty great too, so I broke down and bought myself a little early holiday gift . The book is Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice by Mitchell Albala.

I’m still only a few chapters in but so far the book’s been instructive. Ever since my oil painting class ended I’ve been thinking about doing some plein air painting but it’s a little cold outside here in Kansas at the moment. Instead I’ve been taking snapshots with my camera as reference for later, and reading through the book got me all ginned up to try something (plus I just wanted to say “ginned up”).

After all the fun I had with the gouache earlier in the week I thought I might give that a try again. It’s pretty small, 10 1/4 in. x 7 in., small seems to work a lot better with gouache.

This is the four way stop at the entrance to my neighborhood. I took the photo while waiting at the stop sign (I was stopped so it’s OK). All the trees here are bare save the evergreens, and the grass is dormant. At mid day it can look a bit bleak but around 4 in the afternoon when the sun is low it’s kind of picturesque.

White Coat and Goggles

Friday, December 10, 2010
painting
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I don’t know what this gentleman is up to, but I want in.

I’ve been playing with the oil paints for a few weeks and started in on this fellow from a fun old black and white reference photo I had lying around, but things just weren’t going well. For a change of pace I got out my watercolors and gouache. What a difference!

I decided to approach the gouache the way I’ve been doing the oils to see what would translate. I painted a quick underpainting in thin watercolors (you can see the remains of it at his feet) and then went back in with the opaque gouache over top.

This went really well, I can’t wait to try it again.

I painted a painterly cloud in painter (with paint)

Friday, December 10, 2010
painting
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A quick sketch to play around with the digital oil paint system in Painter. My laptop is a bit underpowered for Painter so I had to keep it small.

It kind of looks like a sky whale!

Cotton Wool Maquette Sculpture

Wednesday, December 1, 2010
concept art, craft
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Back at the end of September I read an interesting blog post by Dragan Bibin about his maquette making technique. Rather than clay Bibin uses cotton wool soaked in acrylic gesso to make a sort of cotton-mache sculpture. You can see examples of his models and the resulting illustrations in his original post.

I’ve been dying to try this ever since. I decided to give it a try with my little snooty slug, one of the orphan characters from this week’s photoshop painting experiment (bottom row, third from the left) . Here’s how things went:

Bibin says that he starts with a aluminum wire armature. I generally use steal wire for my armatures because it tends to be much cheaper. I’ve got a few spools of it in my maquette kit at different strengths. This base is made from 16 gauge wire, about the thickness of a wire coat hanger. This stuff is pretty stiff so it makes a good base but I generally have to bend it with pliers.

Just like a clay maquette Bibin uses foil to bulk up the model before any real material is added, so I did the same. I do the same thing for my clay maquettes. I’ve also wrapped things in a bit of 24 gauge wire to hold the foil and base armature together.

Alright, here’s where things start to diverge from what I usually do with clay. Bibin explains that the cotton and gesso need something other than metal to adhere to, so he wraps his armature in masking tape. I used drafting tape, same difference.

So I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard the term “cotton wool” before I came across Bibin’s post. From what I can tell it’s just the British name for what cotton balls and loose medical cotton dressings are made of, which I kind of like because I don’t seem to have a good word for it other than “cotton”. The important thing I think is that you’re using cotton that hasn’t been woven or spun into anything yet.

To begin the sculpture I painted a bit of gesso I’d watered down to about white-glue consistency onto the armature, then painted a bit onto a strip of the cotton, then stuck one on the other, and then painted more gesso on until everything was soaked. Then repeat.

Incidentally, if you’re following along at home might I make 3 suggestions. First, disposable gloves make this much easier and more fun. Second, have a jar of water handy to put your brush down in. If you let the gesso dry in the bristles of the brush its ruined. Third, spread a sheet of foil down on your work surface. This will keep gesso off your “clean” art table, and it won’t stick to the model while it’s drying.  After about 30 min here’s what I had:

At first the process was a bit slow. Looking back I should have added quite a bit more foil to bulk things up before I started. Having a thick layer of the cotton wasn’t a big problem, but it took a while to build it up.

After the first layer I left the model out to dry over night. The next morning the surface was generally dry but I could still feel some moisture from the inside from all that building up. It’s probably trapped in there forever now but I’m not worried. Up until this point I’d only been adding layers to the surface but now it was time to start adding features. I started with my slug’s posh lower lip.

The features that don’t have some sort of structure under them are a bit fragile when things are still wet, just like clay would be, but once things dry the model seems very durable. After adding the lip I took a break to let things dry but I really think I could have continued working just fine as long as I was careful.

On the next round I added a chin fold under the lip, and then in one last round I added eye lids and protuberances.

Bibin says in his blog post that once dry you can sand the surface. I gave this a try with a small rasp. The sanding is good for removing some of the larger bumps and uneven areas on the surface but unless you’re working with some sort of power tool I wouldn’t expect to use sanding to make a lot of detail. I did quite a bit of sanding on the model in the image just above but I doubt you can really tell the difference in the surface compared to the image before. You’re better of smoothing things out with your fingers and extra gesso while the model is still wet.

My model is still drying but once it has I’m planning to add a bit of paint to finish things off.

Compared to modeling in clay this method does not offer nearly as much chance for detail, but because you can do it with gesso and cotton balls I think it’s probably a bit more economical. I don’t really think things went any faster than they might have with clay, but if I were building a large roughed in model for reference photos or the like I would certainly choose this over the clay, and I wouldn’t feel bad about tossing it afterwords. Both this technique and clay are about equal when it comes to mess and cleanup.

Drawing My Studio

Tuesday, November 30, 2010
concept art, illustration
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Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you lived, say, a few hundred years ago? I think it’s kind of romantic to imagine myself living in a victorian manor house or as a medieval artisan but the longer I dwell on it the more I realize that, 200 years ago I would probably be considered blind.

Now, today, in 2010, I’m not blind. I have big thick glasses. Without them anything more than an inch or two from the tip of my nose is a blurry blob, but when I have them on I can see just fine. I pass my driver’s test, I catch things people toss to me, I do carom off furniture but that’s just because I’m clumsy. Vision wise I’m just fine.

The one caveat is that, to correct for my astigmatism, my lenses have a pronounced cylinder rating. This means that when I look directly on at a straight line like the corner of a room or the edge of a table it looks as it should, but as I turn my head and look at the line askance it begins to curve away from me as if the wall bowed outward.

When I first get an updated prescription the difference can be pronounced and things can look a little strange. For example with my glasses on it looks to me like I’m at least 4 inches further from the ground than without. But, after an hour or so my brain adjusted and everything looks ok again. After that I don’t notice the effect unless I consciously look for it. It’s not that I get used to things being curved but that my brain tells itself that the curved things are straight, which is pretty amazing.

I often wonder how this distortion effects the way I draw what I see. I don’t seem to have any trouble drawing things in perspective and as far as I can tell the straight lines I draw are actually straight. Still, it’s hard to say what the effect might be

It also makes me wonder what other optical effects my brain is screening out of what I think is the real world.

Consider this:

The lens in your eye focuses light on the back of the inside of your eye in an area called the fovea where the majority of your optical receptor cells are. However stuck in amongst those receptors in your optic nerve, which has no receptors on it. This causes a blind spot in your vision, an area where you see nothing. Everyone has this spot, but you don’t perceive it because your brain edits it out.

Or this:

When you fix your vision on something your eyes don’t stay still. Instead they’re continually making tiny jerking movements called saccades. This is because your brain will begin to ignore signals coming from your optical receptors that don’t change. If your eyes didn’t move then you would swiftly find yourself unable to see what you’re looking at.

Makes you wonder what you’re really seeing, doesn’t it?

Well this all brings me to what I’ve been drawing. I’ve been working on some backgrounds and interiors for my animation project and since it’s been a little while since I last did some real perspective work I was feeling a bit rusty. To sharpen things up a bit I parked myself on the floor in my studio on Sunday night and took a stab at drawing the room.

I have to admit I goofed off a bit, but after about 2 hours here’s what I came up with:

I’m pretty happy with it.

Part of that goofing off I mentioned was listening to things on my phone. When I was all done it occurred to me that the phone has a camera too and that got me wondering how my drawing and reality compare.

To draw the section of the room I did, I had to turn my head a bit. To cover the same area with the camera I had to take a few shots and stitch them together in the computer. Here’s what I ended up with:

I should say a few things about this image to begin with. First, it’s awful. The light in my room at night is not very good. Sorry. Second, in camera terms your field of view is determined by the focal length of the lens. For a 35mm camera normal human vision is in the neighborhood of 50mm. Lenses around 35mm or below would be considered wide angle (think fish eye) and higher around 100mm would be telephoto. My phone’s camera is equivalent to a 30mm lens. This means that there’s a degree of spherical distortion in the image. This is intensified by the fact that this image is stitched together from 6 pictures moving across the room.

So here’s the moment of truth. I’ve superimposed my sketch over the photo (deep breath):

It’s interesting to see what I got right and what I didn’t.

  • The general perspective lines (angles of the walls and ceiling) are pretty darn good.
  • I started the drawing in the back corner where the two walls meet, and based measurements of features near that location. As you move away from that center you can see that the differences increase.
  • Most of the things I measured carefully were rendered pretty well (windows, desk, back table with radio, computer monitors). Things I drew free hand did not fair so well (notice how big the lamp is compared to it’s photo).
  • Some things (the stuff pinned to the wall for example) I drew without regard to reality, so they can be ignored.

Keep in mind that there are three distorting factors here:

  • The distortion of the camera.
  • The fact that the drawing is in 2 point perspective, but reality (camera reality anyway) is in spherical perspective. This causes a lot of distortion towards the far right edge for example.
  • General “mistakes” in my drawing.

I put “mistakes” in quotes because I still think the drawing is pretty successful as a drawing. I also think it’s interesting to consider how my subconscious may be responsible for exaggerating the size of some objects like my lamp and radio while others nearby were basically the right size. I do interact with the radio and lamp a lot, and if I were doing an imagined drawing and wanted to emphasize certain elements in a room I might exaggerate their size. More food for thought.

To round things out I colored the drawing. I always wanted a green room. Here’s the final piece:

Unity3D Ladders

Monday, November 29, 2010
programming
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In case you haven’t yet had the pleasure, Unity3D is a modern 3D game engine akin to the Unreal engine or the Quake engine, designed as a platform to create 3D games for web, console, phone, and gas pump for all I know. We’ve been using Unity to design some of the games we make at work and so I’ve been learning the ins and outs of the API.

Unity is a fantastic engine with lots of built in features, but one thing that somehow hasn’t made it into the engine just yet is a system for ladders. You know ladders right? Those tall steppy things that get you up there from down here. Everyone loves ladders!

Well we needed some ladders for a project but good implementations seem to be few and far between, so I decided to make one myself and write up how to use it. Here’s a little excerpt from the docs:

In the game these ladders function as follows:

  • When the player comes into proximity of the ladder they will latch on. Once latched forward motion of the player is converted into vertical motion along the ladder.
  • At the extreme bottom or top of the ladder the player can move away from the ladder using the normal controls, or along the ladder.
  • While on the ladder, the player can only move side to side or up and down the ladder.
  • While on the ladder, if the player looks down below a threshold value, then forward movement will climb down instead of up the ladder.
  • While on the ladder, the player can press the jump key to jump off of the ladder.
  • When the player exits the ladder at the top or bottom they will perform a very small hop.
  • Ladders can be at any angle, however under normal settings the player can walk over objects at inclines under 45º, so in these cases a ladder may not be necessary.
  • Ladders can be any size and shape from wide ladders to narrow vines.

And here’s a little sample of what the setup looks like:

I put together a sample project from one of the tutorial projects that shows how to use the scripts. The scripts are written in JavaScript. For the documentation look in the Assets/Ladders Documentation folder. You can download it from from dropbox here:

Unity Ladder Example Project (zip file, ~ 85.2 mb).

note: since I wrote this script Unity has been updated to version 3. I haven’t tested the scripts on Unity3 just yet, but I think they should work just fine.

Painting Test Creatures

Saturday, November 27, 2010
concept art, painting
comments ( 0 )

I drew these characters for a project at work that ended up going in a different direction. The originals were simply sketches and they were begging to be colored so I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment a bit more with photoshop painting.

Each of the character I painted using a different approach. I still haven’t found a technique I really like, but I did realize that I have way too many photoshop brushes I never use, and probably never will again.

Kitty Rotoscoping

Thursday, November 25, 2010
animation
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It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the States, and today my Thanksgiving started, as all good Thanksgivings do, with Robert Krulwich, science corespondent for NPR news and cohost with Jad Abumrad of one of the best podcasts on the planet called Radiolab. Well on this particular Thanksgiving morning Robert was talking on the NPR morning program about walking in a straight line, which for all sorts of fascinating scientific type reasons turns out to be impossible.

Now I’m not here to rehash Robert’s story, in fact I suggest you use your clicky thing to go over to NPR and listen to it. But, while you’re there, you’ll see an accompanying animation put together for the story. What the heck, here it is right here:

This animation was put together by Benjamin Arthur from rotoscoped video of actors. It looks SPLENDID. I love the way he uses hash marks to interpret motion blur.

So I thought to myself, my phone takes videos, I have a cat, what am I doing sitting here listening to NPR for?  After a few tries here’s what I made:

The first part is the original video of my cat. I started out just tracing around the video but I quickly found out that doesn’t work. There needs to be a continuity between the lines in each frame otherwise things jump around and jitter and thats very distracting.

After a few tries I scrapped the tracing and blocked out my kitty’s masses so I could see where things were moving. That’s the middle section in the video.

After that, I took another stab at rotoscoping. It took a number of passes to get all the parts to look cohesive, and the lines are still pretty jumpy, but at least they are consistent. In short, I had a blast. And, what a great way to study anatomical structures.

Lots of Little Colored Things

Thursday, November 25, 2010
painting
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So I was waiting for a meeting the other day, and to pass the time I started doodling some little creatures. Four hours later my meeting never happened, but look what did!

Fainting Couch

Wednesday, November 24, 2010
painting
comments ( 0 )

This is a quick digital painting test. I’m still trying to find a good way to blend colors in Photoshop painting. I painted the couch with solid colors and then tried adding washes of complementary colors to create the shadowed areas. I chose the blue and yellow because they have similar values.

I like the hues I got. The values are too soapy and midrange for shadows. Keep trying!

greetings!

My name is Matthew. I'm a concept artist and illustrator and this is my blog. You can find out more about my work at my portfolio.

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