Sketching For March '13

I don't have much to say today.  Yes it's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, and yes this sketching post is a bit late this month, and yes I have yet to complete part two of the last A Musing post.  I could give reasons and excuses as I usually do but what's the point?  Sure, my wife was sick last week but since she spent most of that time in bed I could still have snuck off and written a blog post, but obviously I failed to.  No, I was far to busy playing video games (Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider mostly, I preferred the later, but they were both pretty solid, even if I preferred the original Bioshock to Infinite), and watching TV.  And sketching!  I did do a lot of sketching this week (though you don't get to see it until next month of course).  OK, more at the bottom, lets go look at some "Art."   I'll keep writing it to a minimum until the end of the post though.  Most of it would be what I say every month anyway...

Free Sketching

Given how divided my sketching topics have become of late I'm thinking of simply calling Free Sketching Head Sketching or Face Sketches from now on.  Nothing terribly exciting came out of March, but there's some reasonably solid stuff and I'm getting better at necks and positioning the head on a pair of shoulders (I've done well at that a few times in the past, but it was usually more down to luck than judgement I think).

Figure, Anatomy and Form

Again, nothing earth shattering here, but some half competent stuff all the same.  Very happy with the progress I'm making on twisting forms and a feeling of solidity, but it's clear there's a long way left to go before I'm actually happy with most of what I produce.

Sketch Failures

The only really good thing I can say about most of these is that 18 months ago these would have been in the other sketch collections and something far worse would be in the failure image.  It's an odd way to gauge progress, but it's the only objective one I really have.

I realized that the only way I was ever going to improve at this anatomy m'larky was to just draw, and draw, and draw some more, and refer to my books and such as I went along, and I've been really trying to do that over the last few weeks, even when I've not really wanted to.  I still have a long way to go, but I'm doing better with the abdomen and chest and a little better with the hips.  You can see a little of that progress in today's images, though not as much as I would like.
I need to work on poses a little, and a lot on the back, and then a huge amount on the legs (I'll probably get to that in earnest next month).  It's slow progress, what with me pushing 40 and my brain not being as fast to pick up on things as it was, but I'm hoping that this time next year will see me able to draw a full figure as well as I can draw a head now.  Not perfect, but much improved.  Time will tell if I succeed in that goal.
Okay, for someone who had little to say today I've sure just said a lot.

And that's it for this month (probably).  Next month will mark the third anniversary of the blog, and I plan on looking back at some of the progress I've made in that time (That may be a short post then ;)).  Until then, have a good one, and stay out of trouble.

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 3)

If a blue box making a strange Whooorp-ing sound appeared next to you right now, and turned out to be a time machine containing an eccentric alien with a British accent, what would you do?  You wouldn't need to go back in time to read the first two chapters in this exciting adventure because thanks to the wonders of the internet you could just click HERE for Part 1 and HERE for Part 2, allowing you to catch up in mere minutes, freeing you to see the end of the world (risky, but with tree people), the fall of Rome or the birth of your great-great-great grandchild with the Doctor.  When clicking those links do be careful of which wi-fi provider you chose though, you never can be too careful...

So yes, this is the third cover for The TARDIS Eruditorum, and the second by me.  If you've just read the previous two parts you'll note a distinct change in style for this one, and we'll get to why in just a moment.  Clicking the image will bring it up at half the final print resolution - even that is pretty large.  If you wish to order the book you can get details from Philip Sandifer's related site HERE, and I'll update with actual links for purchase later.

Incidentally, I don't know that I ever posted a photo of the actual book resulting from the last one.  Let's take care of that now.  It turned out darker than I was expecting, and the glossy cover reduces the "Old book" effect a little, bit otherwise it's very nice:

So the preamble to the new one isn't as involved as for the last one.  Philip emailed me and basically said "You still interested?" and I basically said "sure," and got to work on some ideas.

The Third Doctor was the first shown in colour, was trapped on Earth (specifically in the UK), worked for the military (more or less), had the largest supporting cast thus far, introduced the Master, was far more action oriented, and was at the dawn of the glam rock sensibility of the 70's (a subject covered heavily in the book); So I tried to aim for something that hit upon at least one or two of these elements in each of the cover roughs.  Some were very successful,  others less so.  My Brother pointed out that the one on the right of the first row is actually far more early 80's than 70's, and took to calling it the "Unexplained Mysteries cover"  as it looks just like the covers to a series of books focusing on UFO sightings, Ghosts and other unexplained phenomena that were around when we were kids (I run a lot of things past my Brother - he's an artist too and I value his insight).

The last cover on the right in the second row is the closest to my original vision of the cover, but as you already know we went with the one next door.

Funny thing is that this one, which is my far the most witty of the designs (with part of the British Isles forming the shadow of the Doctor's coat, shirt and face), was the only one that came about wholly by chance.  I was shuffling elements around for a very different idea, moved Britain out of the way of an element that never made any of the covers and went "Oh...  Yeah, that's cool!"  And just had to shuffle it around and make it negative space to the background rather than a different colour as it originally was.  the happy accident strikes again.

Philip liked the design of that cover, but much preferred the text layout from "The Incredible Shrinking Doctor" cover on the far left, so I set out to combine them, and also to come up with the rear cover for another rough draft.

The first go didn't work that well, though it's still recognizable as the final cover, if from a universe one slot over.  I felt it would be difficult to make out all the text with the original colour scheme and went with something more somber (the text on the back is from the second edition as a placeholder by the way).

Phil, quite rightly, wasn't to keen on the changes.  They still look pretty cool, but it's completely lost the Glam Rock Colour Explosion that drew him to that design in the first place.  Let's try it again...

Several variations of typeface and colour with the same layout.  Eventually it was agreed we'd go for the version in the lower left.  All through this Phil had been very keen on the dot pattern in the Doctor's profile, and at some point I thought I'd try it on the rear cover as well, and I also decided I liked the rounder typeface for Phil's name, even though it didn't fit with any other type elements - Making it distinct to compensate for it's relatively small size.

Around this time Philip asked me to also come up with a logo that he could place on other books, as the TARDIS style emblem from the previous volume wouldn't look so great on a book about Wonder Woman (for example).  A fair point, and so I set to sketching up some ideas.   Phil liked the idea of the EP being part of a scroll, which was the very first idea I'd laid down, and the monogram type thing in the lower right, which was the very last thing I'd done.

As you can see I never managed to make the Monogram work to my satisfaction, so I threw some other things into the mix.  Phil stuck with the scroll, and while I liked it I also had a great liking for one of the others for graphical reasons.  I even tried it on a mock-up of the cover, but eventually Phil decided he really liked the scroll, so we stuck with that for the final.

All the above elements came together for this final rough, here at the actual size I created it (if you enlarge it at least).You'll note that very little has changed between this and the final cover, even though I had to re-author many of the elements in order that they be scalable  up to the final print res.  Naturally tracing the outline of the map took a rather considerable amount of time, especially up in the Scottish parts, but the rest was fairly easy. You may also note that the TARDIS outline on the back has now changed - that's because I was using an outline of the wrong TARDIS - Pertwee's was much boxier than the more recent ones.

The only other difficulty was the dots that Phil had liked so much, and my notion to carry that through to the rear cover.  Since the underlying design is vector based rather than bitmap this was actually quite a task, and took quite a chunk of my computer's memory to handle.  As a result this cover was a lot more intensive than the previous one, and I'm very happy that I'll finally get to upgrade in the next few weeks.  Should make doing the next cover a breeze.

I won't show work in progress shots of the other revisions as mostly it was a case of adding the usual grime and creases and other minor tweaks to the design (the rear text, the spine width, the quote on the back and so on).

As with last time, here's the cover without any of the wear and tear (and using slightly different dimensions as this was from before the spine width was final).  Very colourful, very graphic, very 70's, and hopefully really nailing the Glam Rock sensibility crossed with action-man espionage look that Phil was likely hoping for.

A Musing 5: It's just an Illusion (Part 1)

Let's talk about optical illusions.

Usually when you think of optical illusions you're thinking of something that's messing with your brain; "Look all the dots are wobbling!" "Look, that staircase is impossible!" "Look, the candlestick is two faces!" and so on.  But really we rely on optical illusions all day, every day.  Without them could we look at a photograph and make sense of it? Understand a representational illustration? See a movie, without the illusion of motion?  I'm going to say that no, we probably couldn't, and that such art forms are as reliant on illusions that can fool our brains into seeing something that isn't there as novelty videos of dragons who's heads follow you around the room.  Illusions are central to our understanding of art - they make art possible, and yet at the same time they make art very difficult.  We'll get to the why of that in a later post, but first let's look at some common illusions and why I believe they make a case for art, in general, being dependent on them.

Before we continue I should point out that this essay is going to be a bit of a ramble, and will be split into two parts (the next coming soon).  I have a copy of Sketch Book Pro open in one window, and I'm writing this in the other. I am hoping it will all tie up neatly with a nice bow, but I'm not writing it for my English lecturer so I'm just going  to go with the flow and hope for the best (If you're lucky I'll proof read it before publishing).  As usual in these posts there's the caveat that I'm not an expert in this stuff, and I'm definitely not qualified in these areas, so you probably don't want to quote me in case I'm an idiot :)

What we have above are quick examples of the Kanizsa Triangle and the Phenomena known as Pareidolia - here specifically applied to faces and expressions.  No, I didn't use a ruler, obviously.

The Kanizsa Triangle, also known more broadly as Illusionary Contours, and sometimes specifically as The Pacman Triangle (which is a great description) was first described by Gaetano Kanizsa back in 1955, although people had at least been aware of it for at least a few millennia before that; but if you don't make notes you don't get things named after you I guess - unless you're awesome, like Pacman.  It's fairly easy to ascertain that people were aware of this illusion before 1955 because it's a fundamental aspect of our understanding of art (and of our visual understanding of things in general - It's called Amodal Perception).  Not all art, but rather a lot of it.  It's also a key element of the Rubin's Vase Illusion (Sometimes called the Candlestick and Faces Illusion), which dates from around 1915.  Examples of it can also be seen in woodcuts going back centuries, but I'm far to lazy to go and find any as an example right now.

Pareidolia is considered a psychological phenomena rather than an optical illusion,  but since so many optical illusions are really a result of what out brains do with the information sent to them by the optic nerves I can't help but feel that that's splitting hairs a little.  It does occur with other stimuli as well though; A creak in the house you perceive as a footstep, or an itch that feels like a bug is sitting on you (at least that's how I understand it).  For visual stimuli it's what's responsible for us seeing elephants and horses in the clouds, hungry helicopters, faces in cliffs (naturally that is, Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore probably don't count, although they likely only really work because of the same phenomenon), or deities in common bread products.

So these are two fairly common illusions, ones we're fairly used to, and ones that we generally put down to either our eyes, or our brains playing tricks on us.  Yet both of them (and many similar optical illusions) are fundamental to our understanding of art and the world.  Lets take a look at a couple of other images.

On the left we have Sherlock Holmes (as depicted by Basil Rathbone -though the likeness is terrible, it wasn't the point of the exercise), while on the right we have a portrait of a woman (based on a photo of Jean Ackerman, though again the likeness wasn't the point - I'm trying not to spend very long on these images, and this failure of likeness will actually feed into a point in the next related post).

And we can see what they are - they are very clearly a profile of a man in a hat with a pipe, and a woman seen from about 3/4 view.  There is no tonal detail here, just black and white shapes that would be nearly meaningless if taken in isolation (more for the picture of Holmes than Ackerman).  The illusions mentioned above working in parallel to fool our eyes into seeing an image that does not actually exist; more so because we don't see the world like this, even when it's dark and we only see in monochrome, this is an entirely artificial construct within our minds.

Here we have three images.  The first is a collection of shapes; the same ones that went into making the image of Sherlock Holmes, but this times moved and rotated into an unrecognizable jumble - although you can probably still make out his pipe.  Despite this being a random rearranging of those previous shapes if you're anything like me you will still find your brain trying to make some kind of sense of the mess.  I can see a man's profile and a stylized animals head - I have to wonder what it is you might find.

The second and third images are just quick tests to see how little information is required for the brain to do its thing.  One of these two men is made up of only two specific dark shapes, the other consists of only one, yet we can tell they are most likely male, roughly what their hair is like, their expression, and can make out certain features explicitly.  If these were based on photographs they might even be recognizable.  Our brains are mad powerful.  I didn't take it any further than this for this post, but before the next one I'll see if it's possible to create a recognizable face with even less (faces tend to be much easier to make out than other things, at least for me).

The last image for today is basically the same image twice, but showing two different things  (I had to open Photoshop for this one, but I needed to crop the other images anyway).  On the left we have another example of Illusionary Contours and  Pareidolia working in tandem to create a relatively complex image from only three main shapes.  On the right the same image is used as an example of how little additional information is required to add the illusion of solidity.  This second also demonstrates another common illusion (although not terribly well).  The squares on the cube look as though they are illuminated from within due to them being so much brighter than the cube itself, especially the one in the darker face, but beyond and despite this the square on the top of the cube; which, you'll note, is not really a square at all, looks fractionally darker than the one facing us.    

So with these in mind, we can extrapolate (because I'm done typing for now) that other optical illusions are also at play with our understanding of art.  Motion pictures use the persistence of vision for example. (I'd put money on a publication or letter dated between 1830 and 1860 having described a zoetrope, then called a daedalum, as some arcane optical illusion (they also called it the Wheel of the Devil, so you can bet they didn't think this phenomenon was exactly common place, while today we consider it perfectly normal.  Amazing what you can find out on Wikipedia).

The reasons for many of these illusions, and the ones I'll cover next time are twofold as I understand it.  Firstly the brain's job is to make sense of what the eyes can see as quickly and accurately as possible.  Given the choice between accuracy and speed, speed is going to win every time.  Better to run away from that cluster of shadows that looked a bit like a tiger than to stay put and get eaten because the brain was still trying to make sense of the stripes against the shadows of the grass.  

The second reason is that all that information needs to be stored, and as amazing as the brain is it's probably not as efficient as most computer memory.  So there's an enormous amount of information needing to be stored in a very small space and not the most efficient method for storing it.  As a result things need to be compressed in the most efficient manner possible, and while most of that occurs during storage (probably between short term memory and long term if I was to guess - if I knew neuroscience I'd likely be better paid), I'm willing to bet that it begins with the decoding of the visual information into information we can understand.  I'll go into my thoughts on that score next time around when I'll discuss how the very illusions that make art possible also make it surprisingly hard to produce.