A Collection of Pleasingly Structured Lies (№ 2)

I had meant to do a speedpaint tonight. This would allow me to write a blog post about it tomorrow, which would be good, since my artistic progression is probably the main reason people read my blog (Actually, that's not true - I get more views from people who want to know about my book covers, Red Faction or how to trace a picture of Mickey Mouse - but I'll take what I can get).

Anyway, I didn't do the speedpaint. I had read an article on io9 earlier today that inspired me to write some fiction instead. I'll link the article at the end of this post so as not to spoil the story that follows, assuming you actually want to read it.

Despite this having happened a few times recently my writing fiction is not generally a common occurrence, so it might be months or years before I'm inspired to write any more. Either way, you are free to ignore my random writings, and I assure you I will get a speedpaint done, and an art based post up in the next few days.

I wrote this pretty rapidly over a couple of hours, and it's now gone two in the morning, so I hope you'll forgive a few grammatical and spelling errors. If it transpires that anyone other than my wife actually bothers reading it I'll clean it up a bit (she's a good proofreader - well, she's good at most things, so that's no surprise).

OK, I'll cut to the chase and get on with it.

Die Zukunft (The Future)

The young man headed for the door to the heavy pounding, wondering what could be so important at this time of the night.  He hoped the thumping was not enough to rouse others in the dormitory; he was unpopular enough as it was. Tying his robe he opened the door, and was confronted by a familiar looking older man. He looked much, but not exactly, like his father.  A lost uncle perhaps? Possibly a cousin? He felt certain he knew the man from somewhere at least. The young man took in the elder's clothes, and found them to be unusual, certainly not suitable for this time of night at this time of year.  Perhaps this was why he appeared sick?

"Do I know you?" he asked, "Are you all right?"

The older man had sagged against the door frame, his skin a sickly grey pallor.  Sweat stood out on his forehead and he gasped as though he had exerted himself recently.

"Oh, you know me," the older man gasped, "Better than you think.  I am not all right, but I think sitting may help, if you would be so kind?"

The young man took his arm and led him to the seat in his small room.  That done, he seated himself on the narrow bed and awaited an explanation.  He thought he should be angry at this interruption of his sleep, but the man looked so frail he found that he was filled more with concern.  He noted the bag clutched to the strangers chest with some curiosity - it was of an odd material not dissimilar to leather, but with none of the texture that a good leather bag might have on it's surface.

The elder caught his breath and began to speak.

"You will find this difficult to believe," he started, "But I bring evidence to convince you of my words.

"I have travelled here from the future, and I am you."

These words were so alien to the young man that he did not immediately comprehend them.  He knew of the concept of time travel of course, having read Mr. Wells' Die Zeitmaschine. But that was a fiction, a magical tale to be sure, but still a casual nonsense not to be taken seriously.  And this man being himself?  Preposterous!  He had a familial resemblance , yes, but surely this was not the face he saw when he looked in the mirror each morning, even accepting years added to it.  He looked again, trying to see past the pallor, the age and the moustache, and gasped.  Could it be true? They looked far more similar than he had first thought, though in the dim candle light of the room, along with the other factors, it was hard to be sure.

He realised the older man was still speaking - he had tuned out the words in his shock.

"... brought with me a device that might persuade you of the truth in my words, for it is vital that you believe me before I can tell you my purpose for being here."

The older man pulled from his bag a small box, about the size of a thick book.  It was made partly of what appeared to be glass, and another material the youth did not recognise.  It had the appearance of luridly painted, heavily lacquered  wood, but again not with the texture he would expect of such.  Along the side of the box were four silver buttons, and protruding from it was a length of cord, ending in a curve of metal.  At each end of the curve were two disks of a black foam like material.

"This is a music player," the older man stated blandly.  Clearly this was a common device to him. "You place this over your head with these disks upon your ears; they are called headphones.  I will then press this button and you will hear music from the future.  Once you have heard it I will let you examine this device, so that you can see that there is no trickery.  I hope this will be enough to convince you that what I say is true."

The young man took the 'headphones' and hesitated.  This looked like some strange instrument of torture - what if the metal band carried electricity from the box to his ears, electrocuting him?  He was no expert on electricity - he still relied on candles and gas lamps, though the library downstairs had some electric bulbs. His hesitation was momentary though; why would this man come here to electrocute him?  There was no reason, and as insane as his claim sounded it seemed somewhat less insane than randomly electrocuting a destitute.

He placed the band over his head, the discs on his ears, and as he had promised, the older man pressed a button.

The sound that filled his ears was certainly melodic, but like nothing he had ever heard before.  He heard a man singing in English (which he did not understand), and mixture of known sounds and instruments unlike any he was familiar with.  All in all, while obviously music, the sound that filled his ears was quite dreadful. He quickly removed the headphones.

"Is all the music from your time this ghastly?" he asked.

"You are convinced then?  That I am from the future?"

The young man considered. "Yes," he said, "That much would seem to be clear, though I am less convinced that you are me."

"Proving that much is simple," the old man responded, and pulled a worn and battered book from his bag. The book was intimately familiar to the young man as it had belonged to his father, and there was an inscription within; "Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, Alois!" The book had aged greatly, but the inscription was as clear as when he had last seen it.  He was convinced.

"Now," The older man began after a heavy fit of coughing into a handkerchief "The reason for my being here."

"In four years time there will be a war.  The greatest war the world has ever seen.  You will serve in that war, as I did, and will be decorated for your bravery. Many on all sides will die, and ultimately our country will lose the conflict.  I do not believe anything can occur that will alter these events, as there is no time for you to gain a position to prevent it.  Germany had a difficult time for many years after this war, and times were hard, but eventually there was a ray of hope.  A man came to power who galvanised the nation. He made Germany feel vital again, and began the fight once more.  Rapidly he conquered much of Europe, and was held back only by the might of Russia, and the channel of water between France and Britain.  He recently allied with Japan, in the hope that they could come at the continent from the other side, and Italy to aid him heading south.

"It was not all good though, and despite bringing glory back to the nation the man was seemingly driven insane with his power.  Millions have died, anyone who does not live up to his ideals has been persecuted, and his tactics mean that people are fearful to speak out against him.  He has caused as much harm as good, and when I left it seemed that another war, far worse than the last, was about to break out.

"With this in mind, a team of American and British scientists came together to create a machine capable of sending a man back to stop this lunatic before he came to power.  The project was called Chronos, and the machine that came from it was known as Zeus."

There was a pause while the older man coughed again.  This time when he removed the cloth from his mouth it was flecked with blood.  Stable again, he continued.

"With our heritage and skills it may surprise you that I was called upon to work on this top secret project, but I traveled to London to help fight our dictator when it became apparent his rule would do as much harm as it would good.  I was given the task of drawing illustrations and floor plans of various buildings of government, many of which I have worked at over the years.  I fear to say that I had held a position that was little more than a glorified cleaning manager, but it gave me an intimate knowledge of the buildings few others have.

"The details in these illustrations drew the attention of the Chronos team, and they brought me aboard to do more of the same, this time focused on how these buildings looked in the past.  I have not been on the project long, and there are many things I still do not understand about it, but due to a quirk of fate, that I have neither the time nor inclination to describe, I was sent back accidentally, with only a small bag of random possessions and some money.  I found myself in London still, five weeks ago; fifty years in my own past. It has taken me from then until now to travel here to Vienna, as I knew you would be here at the Männerwohnheim.

"Since I am here, I believe you can stop this monster before he starts.  You can bring him down using information I have brought with me."

Another cough racked his body, and taking this pause as his opportunity the young man asked the many questions that had come to him.

"Who is this man you wish me to stop?  And how can I do this? You have told me already the way of the future, if I change it how will I end up in London, on a project that only exists because of the man I must stop?  This Zeus will have no reason to exist. I, as you, will have no way or reason to come back and have this conversation. And why are you sick?  Have you been poisoned?"

"Not poisoned as such, no," the elder began again, "A side effect of the accident. I fear I do not have long to live.  A week, a day, perhaps as little as a few hours.  I have been deteriorating rapidly, but if you can change the future this will have been worth it.

"I believe you can change the future still.  I gathered from overhearing the scientists that time can be overwritten, much like the tape in the cassette player from which came the music you heard.  There is music on the tape, but other music can be written over it, replacing the original.  The original music was still there previously, and can be recalled by the listener even though it has gone.  It seems that time too works this way, you will erase my past, but my past will still have happened in a sense, and I will still have travelled back here to -"

Another fit of coughing.  This one interspersed with dry retching and a horrible shaking.  A small trickle of blood came from his nose.

"Perhaps not even hours then," he said quietly, before changing tack.

"In this bag is a folder.  On my journey here I have written in it everything I can remember from the end of the great war until shortly before the rise of the Führer.  Use this information to hunt this man down and destroy him before he can bring ruin to the world."

The older man paused now, a slight glaze came over his expression.

"Funny," he said, "In my haste to write this history It did not occur to me to actually put his name in my notes.  What a ridiculous oversight." He sighed, the light fading from his eyes, blood now running freely from his nose and into the Handkerchief.

"He is a Jew, a Jew by the name of...  Of -"

He stiffened briefly, and then his body sagged.  The bloody cloth fell from his now limp hand, landing in his lap.

"Of what?" cried the younger man, rising to shake his older self. "By the name of what?"  But it was too late, the elder was dead, the name of the dictator, the Führer, the monster, taken with him to his grave.

He would have to deal with the body before dawn, but first curiosity gripped the young man.  He reached into the bag, already plotting how to eliminate an unknown Jew among millions, and pulled out the folder of papers within.  Despite what he had learned over the past half an hour he was still surprised to find his own familiar handwriting on the cover.

"die Zukunft," it read, "von Adolf Hitler"

The article that inspired this was published on io9, and can be found here.

Painting Class: A Head of a Time

And another post, coming in just under the wire for the month. And this may not be the last (don't hold your breath though). I have to be honest, this month has seen my art more or less go hang. I'm working on things at work, that while fun also leave me feeling drained of mojo at the end of the day (so there is lots of art, just not the sort of stuff I can share on here). Add to that a little mini-crunch this week and a bad, if short lived, head cold and I have very little sketching done, and very small number of speedpaints. I did finish another painting class at the start of the month though, and that's what I'm posting today (yeah, the title's a bit of a giveaway). If you want to see the previous painting posts then hit the tag at the bottom there and you'll be set.

Right, off we go.

So first up we did two tonal studies, based on white mannequin busts. I had to miss a chunk of the first class due to other commitments, so the first one was done from a photograph on my phone at home. It's actually not utterly terrible if you squint a bit I guess, but it's far too dark, and my orange bounce lights came out green (looking at the photo it's not actually all that close to it either - maybe this is the wrong photo).

I think it took about 80 minutes all told. Not going to sell, or hang in a gallery, but it was a useful learning experience. (all of these are in Acrylic on 8x10 canvas board by the way).

This is the second tonal study. Same head bust as the previous one, but this time in person and from a different angle. The black shape is the silhouette of my easel as I thought it would make for an interesting composition (it was in the way you see?). I was wrong, but it didn't hurt to try it. This time the values are far closer to the actual thing (I forgot to grab a photo this time though). 90 minutes this time.

For the third session Paula's daughter came in and posed for us (Paula McCarty teaches the class incidentally, I've mentioned that in previous posts). I'm not going to post a photo here, so you'll just have to take my word on this being an excellent likeness, if it was actually a painting of Paula's daughter from an alternate dimension where everyone is much uglier than they are in ours. Basically I think I didn't add enough shadow around the eye (although this picture of it does make it look lighter than it is in reality), and I made her nose far too big. You can tell who it's supposed to be (if you know her) but it is neither a good or flattering portrait. I think it took around 85 minutes.

This one took longer than any of the others. Again I couldn't attend the session this week and ended up painting this self portrait at home. I spent about an extra hour on it over the other ones. It's the only painting I thought to take a work in progress shot of, though it's not terribly exciting.

It's not the most accurate portrait; my nose is too long, giving me a bit of a horse face, but it is recognisable, which is a good thing. I discovered that eyes are a lot harder to do with real paint though, and here they look a little flat (though not as bad as in the next portrait).

And this was the one from the final week. This time the mirror was below me, and the lighting much brighter. The initial sketch was much closer to my proportions, but I think I made a bit of a mess of the actual painting. Not the worse thing in the world, and definitely a step forward, especially given that I think this was the shortest of the paintings (about 75 minutes I think). In person the painting is again a little darker, and the blending on the side of my face seems a lit smoother. Strange how hard it is to get decent shots of these - I'll have to look into how to set up better ones if I do more of these (they scan a lot worse than they photograph).

And I think that's it. The class ended a few weeks ago, and I have yet to pick up a brush again (for the reasons mentioned above). Paula has another class coming up in a few weeks, but I only just read the email (gmail had it marked as spam), so it may be too late for me to attend. Must reply to that tomorrow and see if there are any slots left. Anyway, until the next time faithful followers...

Sketching for May/June '13

I've not been terribly good at keeping up on the blogging of late have I (and long term followers will know this is nothing particularly new)? To be honest I've not been terribly great at keeping up on the art either. That's not to say I'm not doing any, but a good chunk of it is for work, so you'll either never get to see it or you won't for a few years. The work stuff is a big learning curve right now, and as a result it's having a knock on to the art-as-hobby area. In all honesty this last week I might have gotten back on the horse properly, but Saints Row IV was out and I was too busy playing to actually draw anything (I did work on it of course, but even so there were plenty of surprises in there I'd somehow missed during development, and I had a blast). Plus it's right in the middle of allergy season, and I hate drawing when everything is slightly blurred from the results.

So yes, the art and the blog have not been my priority of late (there have been other things going on too, but I won't bore you with them), but now SR4 is done and dusted and there's less pure knowledge being assimilated at work I should be getting back to it. But not this week - I have a deadline of sorts this week.

Anyway! Sketching.

Only two images this time, of which this is the first. There's nothing terribly great here, but there are some areas that even I can tell are showing improvement. There's an improvement in the way I'm defining twisting motions, I think my representation of the abdomen is getting better and even hands and feet are showing a slight improvement from where I was a year ago. So that's all good. The only reference used here was for the lower abdominal and legs image in the lower right, where I worked from my anatomical figurine, but had a go at making the results more feminine (it's a masculine figure). Not perfect, obviously.

I did draw quite a bit more of it, but it's not so much that it was 'bad' as it was quick. The figure in the top right is representative of the stuff I've left out. Just quick near gestures to focus on small things (in this case the jut of the abdomen as it meets the pelvis).

Not much to say about these. Some of them were very successful (I particularly like the girl in the top left and the one with the mohawk), some were pretty disastrous(There's something very Shelly Duval like about the girl in the top right - but not really in a good way). Not much else to say really. No references used across the board, and facbook friend identification though the woman in the lower centre was the same as the person leaning against the fence in the first image when I uploaded these to my gallery there. I'm not sure if that means I've fallen into a rut of drawing everyone the same, or if facebook just plays really fast and loose with it's facial recognition (I suspect a bit of both).

And that's your lot. For now. There will be a little more coming, very soon indeed.

A Pirate's Life

Yeah, I missed a couple of weekends and haven't sorted out the sketching from two months ago yet, but I was busy. I'm here now, and ready to show one of the things I've been busy with. It's the first really finished digital piece I think I've done since November, and it took a while. I have some other stuff coming up I'll briefly mention first though.
I was working on a cover for Book 4 of Phil's TARDIS Eruditorum series, but we've both agreed it would be better suited for book 5, so I need to come up with other ideas, while still working on the #5 cover (it's a reasonably big job). I've also got this months sketches to scan in, and then I have to decide if it's a separate post from the previous two months or not (probably not, I didn't do all that much), and another speedpaint post is almost ready (I just want to do one more speedpaint for it).
Saints Row IV is out next month (probably this month by the time I post this, which means I should probably do a post about my work on the previous one before it's irrelevant. Beyond that I'm almost done with another painting class, so I'll be posting the results of that too. Remember the last one and set expectations accordingly. But now, on with this post...

You can click that to get a rather large version.  Hopefully your browser can do a half decent job of re-scaling it to fit your window.  You can enlarge the rest of the images in this post as well if you want a better look, though none of them are this large.

The story behind this one isn't terribly involved.  It's based on this stock photograph from Dingelientje-stock on DeviantArt and has been in my Favorites collection there for quite a while.  In the usual course of things I would probably have forgotten about it unless I stumbled across it while browsing my Favorites, which I do on occasion, but this one just kept popping up for some reason.  Every time I saw it I thought 'that would make a good painting' and then I'd move on.  Finally, when I was in a mood to actually do a portrait I stumbled across it again and thought 'Of course, that one!' and got started.  Really I just liked the puppy peeking out of her shirt, and in fact the initial name for this one was just Puppy Shoulder.

So I actually spent a little time sketching the layout for this one.  Not enough time apparently as it's still way off (sometimes I get it almost perfect, other times I'm way off - this is somewhere in between), but somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour.  The image on the left here is simply a quick sketch to get the very rough composition, taking about a minute, and then I filled in the detail that you can see on the right over the remaining time.

This is the blocking in process.  It's not supposed to be particularly pretty, and it really isn't.  Mostly it's just getting the rough masses and areas of colour blocked out.  Unlike my usual technique, where I keep the line art on a layer above the painting for constant reference, this time I kept it below and painted right over it (as I would with real paint), trusting the blocked image as a guide. I  didn't go quite dark enough with the shadows and her hair is the wrong colour here, but it was more important to me to identify that there at least was a shadow, and get the rough shape of her hair - the rest could be tweaked on the next pass.

Which was this one.  Still a little rough, but you can see I'm smoothing out the transitions and adding detail to her features as well as getting her hair the right color.  There's about 90 minutes or so between each of these stages, and while I would do further passes on most of the image her ear pretty much stayed at this stage all the way to the end.  Likewise I didn't really adjust the shirt after this except to add the stripes.

I had a little panic attack at around the point I finished the image on the right.  I have one at some point in any work I do that takes more than a couple of hours.  I start doubting the picture and wondering if I've just wasted my time.  Usually I reach the conclusion that even if the end result is terrible, the time will only have been wasted if I don't finish it or give it my all, and then I'll get back to it.

You can see the stripes here.  I did cheat a little with the stripes, because rather than spend the effort of making them darker as they went further into the shadow I just painted them on another layer and then used ArtRage's Multiply Blending mode to do all the hard work for me.  I did go in and tweak the result once I'd flattened the image, but still.  Despite the 'cheat' adding the stripes still took over an hour - I could have done a speedpaint in that time ;)

No cheating for her headband though, except with real paint I probably would have needed t paint the scarf white, darken the shadows, and then paint the black over it, while here I could just paint the white and grey straight over the black.  I didn't notice until this point, but firstly I realised the scarf had Skulls and Crossbones on it, and then I noticed that the skulls had hearts for eyes, which is pretty awesome.  I was tempted to not bother doing that in the painting, because who'd notice?  But then I decided it would be a really nice detail and made sure I matched it as best I could. This was also the point I decided to change the title to A Pirate's Life (Originally it was going to be A Pirate's Love, but was she the love? Or the pirate in love? And would my wife get the wrong idea?  Life it is then!).

The final panel here may look the same as the preceding one at first glance, but her hair has had an additional pass along the top and side.

These three may look almost identical except for her tattoo, but I made a number of tweaks to her face, including smoothing some of the shading, improving her eyes, changing her eyebrows, tweaking her nose, adding detail to her lips, and adjusting her cheeks.  Hard to see at this size, but fairly obvious at the size I was painting.  Those changes may be more visible in the GIF below.

The tattoo itself I'd put off until the end as I thought it would be nightmarish to do.  Turned out that other than being a little time consuming (The line art for the flowers took about an hour, and the rest about the same) it wasn't too bad, and actually quite relaxing.

This is just an image from the end of each of the 4 main passes at the painting, to give a better look at the progression.

And this is a GIF of the painting stages at the end of each session I worked on it (mostly between 1 and 2 hours a time).  20 odd hours reduced to a few seconds...

Finally, just for a bit of fun I took the painting and ran it through some adjustments and filters in Photoshop in order to change the mood.  I think the left one looks more romantic as a result, while the right one looks more dramatic and candle lit, but the real one is the one at the top there.  Maybe I'll paint something candle lit looking next... Or not.

A Collection of Pleasingly Structured Lies (№ 1)

I have depressingly little to report. I have started several pieces, but most of them are some way off from being something I can show. I scanned two months worth of sketches, but have yet to arrange them into something I can display (and if you're a regular reader you'll know that's a pretty major undertaking, which is why I decided to do it less often, but now I realise that just means I have more to do when I get around to it). I haven't done any new speed paints (though I'm hoping to do one today), but I have done some speed sculpts. Digital sculpts you understand, if it was real sculpting materials I would just be showing off a blob of Playdough.
I also started a new painting class with Paula McCarty, so there may be something to show there in a few weeks. Other than that? Not much. Nothing to show anyway. But I don't want to leave you hanging, so since I can post pretty much whatever I want on here you're going to get a little fiction.

I don't write. I am not a writer. I am a story teller though, as I suppose many people with kids are. At bedtime my son insists I tell him a "Story from your mind," whereby he picks two random things (invariably robots and something, or, when that is banned for being overused, a cat and a refrigerator), and I have to tell a story about them. I have yet to write any of these down, although some of them may be worthy of me doing so.
I had to write this down though it wasn't a story for my son, it was a story for me. I had an incomplete dream (I rarely remember dreams), and decided I had to know how it would have ended, so I wrote it down and completed it. I'll leave you to it, and hope you enjoy it, as my tale telling is rarely something I draw attention to.

Until the next time - fiction!

Quite Another Dimension

Two men sat in the sunlit room, one either side of the table. Both men were highly regarded doctors in their respective, but unconnected fields.

"So," said one, "You claim you have succeeded in your attempts at trans-dimensional travel?"

"Claim?" came the others response, "Yes, I suppose 'claim' is fair, as I have no physical evidence that my experiments were successful."

He elaborated, "It is not my physical being that travels you see? Such a thing would be a physical impossibility, and in some dimensions a liability. No, it is not my person that travels, rather my consciousness is transferred into my closest biological equivalent in whichever dimension I arrive in."

The other doctor looked interested, "Closest biological equivalent implies you do not always transfer into your physical duplicate. Have you transferred into others?"

"Quite so. There are an infinite number of dimensions you see? Thus an infinite variety of alternates, only a small number of whom are my biological duplicate. There are a few billion versions of me out there, a few trillion at most. In the vast majority of accessible dimensions the closest thing I can transfer into is very little like myself. I have been a potential sibling a few times, some of them women; I transferred into my father's duplicate twice, once my great-great grandfather, and on one memorable occasion a snake."

"A snake?" the other cried in disbelief, "but how could you possibly operate the controls to return?"

"Well, I didn't need to. The machine works on a timed mechanism. As I said my physical being does not travel, and this goes for any other physical object as well, so taking controls to bring myself back would be quite impossible, and, as you have now realized, quite inconvenient.

I said earlier that this lack of physical transfer avoided some liabilities, one of them being that I may appear in a dimension where the natives breathe a mix of nitrogen and methane. Quite inconvenient to arrive as an oxygen breather in such an environment. But the problem is avoided, as is the problem of operating controls. the machine brings me back after a preset time, with my physical form being seated in a chair within the machine while I am gone."

"In the machine... unconscious?" The other doctor seemed to find this possibility even less believable than the snake, the incredulity evident in his tone.

"From your tone you will be happy to know that I am not unconscious during my travels, no. My physical form must have quite an interesting adventure of its own I gather, as the consciousness of whoever I posses in the other dimension must go somewhere, and so it temporarily occupies my form here. I discovered this the hard way when I returned to find some considerable damage in the lab. I couldn't afford to risk the machine becoming inoperable while I was out of my body, so I installed timed restraints. They lock when I leave, and release when I return. Quite simple really."

The other seemed impressed by this solution to the travelers problem, and made a note on the pad before him, one of many he had written in the last few minutes. He looked up again.

"Tell me Doctor, have you done this often? Does it hurt? And when will you do it again, I would be most interested in observing."

"Why yes, I have done it several times, although after the partial destruction of my lab I have done it less often, and to a more strict schedule. I had to change locations after that as well; the others in my building were quite disturbed by the violence of my dimensional alternate on that occasion, as well you might gather.

It is interesting you ask about pain. early on in the experiments I had very little, just a slight discomfort, but recently I have returned with a level of quite extraordinary pain. I had not thought to wonder why this would be until now, but it did seem to start when I moved labs.

As to when I am trying this again, I believe I have scheduled time in the machine tomorrow morning at about ten o'clock, if you would be free to attend then?"

The other stopped his now relentless scribbling and looked up once more.

"Ten AM? Yes, that sounds perfect. If you'll excuse me though I have other matters to attend to now, and I'm sure you could do with some rest before tomorrow."

He reached over to the intercom on his desk and pressed the switch,

"Orderly, would you escort Doctor Frederick back to his room please?"

After they had left he turned to a third figure, shrouded in shadows and obscured by sunlit dust motes in the corner of the room.

"I believe I'll see him in the morning for his scheduled cranial electro-therapy at ten. I'm afraid he's still quite delusional, although seemingly quite harmless. I doubt we'll have a repeat of his performance at the Davidson Institute here. Are you agreeable to the continuation of his treatment?"

"Yes," said the woman, the Traveller's wife, "He clearly needs all the help we can give him."

Slow; It's the New Speed!

Okay, okay, I'll post some of that art stuff this blog is supposedly here for. Today it's speedpaints (sort of) as you may have gathered from the title. A while back I said I would post these speedpaint updates every four paints or so, but this time there's a couple more. I've also said that speedpaints generally take less than an hour and a half... Not so here, for reasons I'll explain with each paint. I'm cutting my preamble short this time (though there will be general update info at the bottom), so let's go look at 'art'!

Time Taken:40 Minutes
Software: Art Rage Studio Pro

On occasion I like to just paint without any reference (or at least minimal reference, such as a photograph of something else entirely). This was one of those times. The result is not great, especially so for taking 40 minutes, but there is a reason for the extended time taken over this one, and that's that Microsoft are gits. How is Microsoft responsible? Well, every copy of Windows comes with tablet drivers installed. This makes sense, especially if you're using a tablet PC (there would be no way to turn them on if they weren't already), but it doesn't makes sense that these are so difficult to disable, especially when using a third party graphics tablet such as a Wacom (which I am). You have to disable the various parts of the Windows ones in several different places, and there is no documentation (that I could find) on where all these are located, or how to turn them off. So I had just done a reinstall and hadn't managed to disable the built in ones yet. This piece was painted with everything slowing down every time I made a stroke, weird little graphical do-dads appearing every time I clicked down and text popups obscuring everything whenever my cursor stopped moving. Really MS, would a button in the Tablet prefs allowing you to disable everything to do with your built in tablet stuff be too horrible to ask for?

None of this excuses the horrible result of course, but at least I could have done it more quickly.

Time Taken: 190 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: This set by Faestock
Stages: Link

Yes, that's right, I'm counting a picture that took over 3 hours as a speedpaint. At least this one turned out better than the last. Why did this take so long? Well, I still hadn't managed to remove all of Microsoft's Tablet stuff from my system, leading to a fractional (but significant enough) delay every time I made a stroke, but also because I was using Art Rage 4 for the first time. AR4 has made some fairly significant changes to the way the Oil Paint features work. In many ways they are now much more realistic and more like oil paint, but that change is disadvantage when speedpainting since knowing the medium is a good chunk of how you maintain a reasonable level of speed (after this I decided I could not get rid of Studio Pro, and would use both packages as my mood changed my requirements - more familiar or more powerful). So between the two things this was already trending to be a long speedpaint. Eventually I decided just to take it a little further than most, which pushed it even further over time. I like it though - if this was real paint I'd probably be ecstatic about how well I'd done.  You can see the stages for this one (and some of the others in this post) by clicking the link by "Stages", and you can click the image to enlarge of course.

A pause now to speak of Deviant Art, and more specifically the stock to be found therein. DA is an artists social network. Think facebook, but dedicated to art of all forms. Of course as something that basically amounts to a huge gallery with social extensions this does mean that a huge percentage of the things to be found there are people who use it for their personal pictures, people who hang out there to look at other peoples pictures, people who rip off other peoples pictures and pretend they're their own (or don't pretend, but post others stuff anyway), and people who delight in posting nothing but pictures of their penis/labia/nipples (bending the 'no pornography' rules to the limit).

All that has given the place a bit of a bad rap in some circles (I'm sure the name DeviantArt doesn't help), which is a shame because as well as all of that it is a community of amazing artists and aspiring amazing artists; storytellers, cosplayers, photographers, seamstresses, illustrators, painters, sculptors and more. Every time I go on there I'm just a couple of clicks away from something that will probably knock my socks off and make me feel artistically useless (and that's actually a good thing). As well as all that there's also a group of extremely generous people (mostly women, but some men) who take and make available stock photography.

Stock is great - there are usually a few rules (Such as 'let me know what you're doing with this' and 'nothing to naughty, thank you'), and more rarely payment is required, but after that you can do with it what you will, which is great (I'm not actually sure about the rules of painting based on stock, rather than using the stock directly, since I see people painting things based on not-stock all the time, seemingly without permission, and that doesn't seem to cause much of a fuss. Grey area? I dunno).

Quality is highly variable, but quite a few of these folks supply photography that is every bit as good as the fully commercial stuff you can nab from shutterstock or Corbis. Even those who are shooting under 40watt bulbs with their first gen i-phones are making an effort, and supplying inspiration and reference to unimaginative schlubs like me. So a large number of my speedpaints are based on photographs from DA's Stock community, and for that I salute their efforts. For your part, if you like a piece I've done that's clearly based on a DA stock piece (I usually say, as I do above and below) then please take a moment to go and check out their work as well as mine via the link provided. Thanks.

And now back to our scheduled programming.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: This Image by Random Acts Creative
Stages: Link

Not much to say about this one. I like it (it's even signed!), but it amuses me that it looks more like John Snow from Game of Thrones than the actual guy it's based on. Slow again - I think that's just going to be a common state with Art Rage 4 pieces as getting good results with the new tool takes a little more work (but as I said above it is potentially more powerful)

Time Taken: 80 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CS3
Source: This stock image by AmethystDreams1987

This one also took a while, but you'll notice these are A) getting faster and B) done in a wider variety of software than usual. I have real difficulty painting in colour in Photoshop for some reason, but I figured the only way I was going to improve was to start doing it more regularly. As a result you may see more PS paintings from me from now on. 'Funny' story with this one, I struggled and struggled with it, and then when I was done with it (gave up in frustration more like) I discovered the pressure sensitivity for the tablet was not working. Humph.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: Art Rage Studio Pro
Source: This Image (found while looking for car pictures. Does not compute)
Stages: Link

Back to Studio Pro for this one, and with all the tablet stuff working correctly at last. Still no earthly reason this should have taken over an hour, but I quite like the result. There, I can be brief, see?

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: This Image of 'Toolkitten' from Random Acts Creative
Stages: Link 

I was trying a new technique for this one, and it didn't quite work (mostly because I muffed her face :?), but the resulting style does sort of match the goth aspect of the original source if nothing else (IMO anyway). Really don't like how her face came out, but I am quite pleased with the corset. I'll try this technique a few more times and then, if it's working out, I may share it (I used it again below).  Oh, and Toolkitten is also a ridiculously accomplished artist as well as being the model for this, so go take a look at her stuff eh?

Time Taken: Not sure, but less than an hour each.
Software: Sketchbook Pro 2011
Source: Picture of my wife from a few years ago

Two studies of my wife, chosen mostly because of the really tricky angle. I did the first one (the pencil style one) and hated it, so I did another, which is a better likeness but I'm not sure about the style. Might try it again one day. As it happens the first was just eyeballed, which didn't go so well, while for the second I tried that new technique.  So, I guess technically these aren't speedpaints, but I have no idea where else to show them, so shush :)

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: Picture of Swansea's Castle square, taken a while back.

Not much to say about this, it's a picture of my hometown. Mucked up the perspective on the building in the background. Messed up most of it actually, but people I know from Swansea seem quite fond of it anyway.


And that's it. I did have some updates to write at the bottom didn't I? This post has been so long I've forgotten what they were though. I did finish out another sketchbook recently, so I guess a sketch post is due shortly. Other than that I still have several pieces planned, but I think I may finish something more spontaneous first. Stuff to look forward to either way. Oh, and as it happens I got a great comment the other day on one of my posts. I thought it was someone trying to sell me something at first because it was pretty glowing (better than my previous unknown commenter who simply posted 'this sucks'), but also because almost no-one ever posts (I've mentioned this before. I was even amazed when my wife posted on the last one - this is a very rare occurrence), which is why this is worth actually mentioning - yay :)

A Musing 5b: It's Just an Illusion (Part 2)

Let's talk some more about optical illusions.  If you missed the first part of this series (and this may be the last part, unless I think of something else worth saying) you can catch up here.  That's not required reading to understand this part, but it may be of interest.  So, illusions! Fascinating things.  In the previous part I discussed how illusions help us understand art.  This time I'll be looking at how they can also make the artist's life hell by lying about what we're seeing when we are trying to reproduce it.  This issue doesn't effect all artists - some people just have the natural power to overcome at least some of these illusions, and for others you can either learn tricks to get past them, or use "mechanical" means to do the same.  That is not what this post is about though.  I'm not going to go into every optical illusion that causes problems, just a small number of prevalent ones or I'd be here all week.

Shortly after writing my last entry io9's Esther Inglis-Arkell wrote an interesting post about people, blind from birth, who regain sight later in life and have trouble processing what they see.  You can read it here. It's not entirely relevant to the point of these posts, but it is interesting that it would seem the brain processing images into something useful is something likely learned while young, which tallied nicely with my 'Visual shortcuts and Illusions making the understanding of art possible' argument of the last part.  Especially relevant was the following passage:

"Another area that many newly-sighted people find inexplicable is paintings and other visual representations. They can comprehend real objects, but not painted ones. When they do understand what the paintings are meant to represent, the shadows that are meant to define space and give shape just look like dark marks on the painting. Which, technically they are."

This isn't especially relevant to the illusions I'll be talking about today, but I thought it was of interest to the general topic regardless.  But enough of that, onto today's subject.

So you're there with your easel, or your monitor or what not.  Beyond the easel you have your life model or still life, or a photo pinned to the frame, or (in the case of my speedpaints), your reference on a second monitor.  Great, your reference is right there!  Reproducing it on the canvas should be as simple as making marks in the same locations as the source and calling it a day, right?  But getting them in the right place is a lot more difficult than you might think (unless you actually are an artist, in which case you know exactly how difficult it can be).  Darn.

Between looking at the subject, and then looking back at the canvas (or monitor, or whatever) you're storing information temporarily in your brain that you then need to parse and turn into hand movements that reproduce what you stored.  It's not a long time, usually a fraction of a second, but even that is enough to garble the information a little.  This is not related to optical illusions of course, but the problem is compounded by the fact that what you saw and stored in your brain for parsing wasn't accurate to begin with.  And even when it is correct, what you put on the canvas won't look accurate when you compare the two at a glance.  Does that seem fair to you?  Me either.  Let's look at some of the reasons why.

The Leaning Tower Illusion

So there you are with the side by side reference and work as mentioned above, and you're drawing the arm of your model.  You check out the source to the right, and transfer it to the work on the left and it looks wrong.  The arm is clearly at the wrong angle.  Try again, and it's still not right.  You finally get it looking pretty close and carry on but the nothing seems to match up.  The arm can't be at the right angle, but it looks correct!  What gives?

The Leaning Tower Illusion, that's what gives.  I've known of this illusion for years, and I'm sure most artists have too, but (to my knowledge) it hasn't been formalized until recently.  Basically, when looking at the same angle side by side they will not appear to be the same - one side will appear to lean more than the other.  This effect seems to become more pronounced the more in perspective the object appears to be, which is not a great help when painting people, buildings, cars and the like where anything might be pointing into the distance.  For years I thought I was just hopeless at judging angles by eye, then I became vaguely cognisant that it was due to an optical illusion, but not to the extent that I bothered to experiment to find out if it really was.  But then, when researching this post, I discovered this:

Yes, that's the same photograph twice, and yes it's the leaning tower of Pisa, but you'll probably find the effect works on any form with converging angles (see below).  The right image appears to be leaning at an entirely different angle than the left.

You can click the image, or here, to be taken to the Best Illusion of the Year 2007 contest page where this is documented in more detail, though as I've mentioned I think most artists were at least a little aware of it already.

If the image on the left were a painting, and the one on the right a source photograph (or even the real tower) then you can see that the artist would pretty quickly begin to question the accuracy of his work, possibly second guess themselves, overcompensate, and then discover later (maybe when the painting was on the other side of the source) that his painting wasn't accurate at all.

Sad painter!

So why does it happen?  I have a vague idea.  If I had to guess, based on the fact that it seems to occur to a greater extent the more the apparent lines converge, then I would say it's specifically a quirk of perspective.  It's not due to the separation of our eyes as the same thing can occur if the images are one on top of the other, and it barely occurs at all if the lines are perfectly parallel.  Look...

In this image we have the same image of an approximate leaning shape twice.  They look parallel to one another, because they are.

Here's a similar image, and this time the two identical images seem to be at slightly different angles.  There is no actual perspective here, but when the brain sees lines converging it automatically reads it as something receding into the distance, even though it's just two lines.

So my theory is that since the vanishing point (the point where the lines would converge) on these shapes in the second image, and the photograph, is in a different spot, then the brain is convinced that they cannot be parallel, as two parallel objects in perspective would have their lines converge in the same place.  If they are not parallel then one object must be leaning more than the other, and thus that's what the brain tells us we're seeing.

Other Common Perspective Illusions

The above isn't the only way that perspective in images can cause problems, another is that the brain tries to compensate for it, a lot.  This is most obvious with bold and stark examples, but it does it in even very complex ones.  Take a look at the following image (you can click on it to go to the source):

That's quite striking right?  Visually the man is obviously smaller in both images, but on the left he appears to be larger than on the right, even though he's the same size in both.  The brain has adjusted the apparent size of the figure based on his location on the ground and is compensating for it in each case.  It would be difficult to base an accurate sketch just from glancing alone  in this situation because not only would the brain make mental adjustments to the source, but also on the work itself, compounding the problem.

 A similar illusion can be seen in reality.  Place your hands out with the palms facing you at arms length, slightly to either side of your head.  They seem to be the same size because they are the same distance away.  Bend your elbow to bring one of your hands closer to you, but still keep one to either side of your head so they don't cross.  The hand looks larger, because it's closer, but probably only by a little bit.  Now cross your hands one in front of the other, and you should see that that difference in size was much larger than you thought.

Your brain, what a complete git.

From elsewhere in the page I got the above example from is this wonderful nugget:

"The visual system compensates for perspective in making judgements about size. It is striking that we are so unaware of this."

Another thing, as well as size, that our brains compensate for is the angle of perspective.  I don't mean as in the Leaning Tower example, but rather the brain tries to make things look flatter than they actually are.  I've only been able to find a paper on the brain compensating and making sense of photographs and other 2D visual stimuli (such as TV, videogames etc) even when not seen from their optimum viewing angle, which you can read here.  But it is my belief that this applies not just to the photographs themselves, but also to the objects within the photograph, as well as other objects in the real world.  The brain tries to compensate for things being angled away from us by trying to make them more orthographic (that is, the lines appear slightly more parallel than they should in order to reach the correct vanishing point/point of convergence) .  I'll demonstrate this with a speedpaint at some point, but not today, although it has been in evidence on some of my previous speedpaints.

The Eye Level Illusion

Finally, lets look at one of the most significant things the brain likes to do, especially so when trying to match a likeness for a portrait.

It lies about the proportions of the head, and it does it constantly.  Weirdly I couldn't find any links referring to this phenomenon as an optical illusion, but it's common place enough that I can't believe it is anything else. How commonplace?  Well, almost every online guide and book about portraiture will have a list of common mistakes and how to avoid them in it somewhere.  Number one of those mistakes in almost every guide is that the eyes are commonly drawn to high on the head.  That's probably the most common mistake made by any artist starting out.  Evidence?  OK, how's this:

That's not one of mine (though I've made almost the exact same mistakes many times), that's Vincent Van Gogh's.  One of his earliest known sketches you can clearly see that the man's eyes have been drawn too far up the head and the ear looks a bit close to the eye (I still do this with alarming regularity).

Why does this happen?  Well, my guess is that there's nothing of interest above the eyes, or between the eyes and the ear, so the brain just say "Balls to that then" and edits it out.  And it does this when you're looking directly at the source!  So I know what you may be thinking at this point - "Okay, smartarse, if that's the case then why don't we go around seeing the world like the Van Gogh sketch above? Clearly we don't, so therefore you're wrong.'  But if the brain does this all the time, then it will still do it for an illustration just as much as it does on the source (be it a photograph or an actual person), and since the eyes on the illustration are too high, they appear even higher still.  Look, this one I can illustrate with an existing (albeit not very good) speedpaint.

Without taking too long or measuring, is the red line in the following image closer to the top of her hair, or her chin?

If you said closer to the top of her hair then almost everyone agrees with you, even though it's not actually the case.  Hell, I'd agree with you, and I painted it and know darn well that red line is right in the middle.  Don't believe me?  OK, here it is again, feel free to measure this time:

The green and red boxes are exactly the same size.  In fact if you compare their sizes at the side of the image, rather than in the middle where her face is it becomes very apparent that they are the same size.  If that's not an optical illusion I don't know what is.

And it doesn't just apply to eyes (although that may be where it's most apparent), but to all sorts of things - quite commonly the aforementioned distance from the eyes to the ears, or the ears to the back of the head, or the distance of the chin to the nipple line.

Just to be extra devious though it sometimes does the reverse, and decides that a gap between two things is much less than it actually is because of the extra detail it contains.  Take a look at this next image, and note that the black bar on the right appears closer to both the side of the image and the red bar, even though the distances to both are identical for the black bar on the left.  The extra detail of the circle pulls those details closer.

The Comparative Colour Illusion

Finally, there's the problem with accurately gauging colours and tones.  I'm not even going to write this one up as there are stacks of articles with very good illustrations of common problems in accurately identifying colours and shades in an image or scene.  I strongly recommend this one here.

So, WTF?

So with all these things happening to distort our perception of what we are seeing, it is extremely difficult to create a painting or illustration with any kind of accuracy at all.  Often accuracy is not actually desired of course, and it is the stylistic deviations from the reality of the source that make many images interesting, but even so if someone's commissioned you to paint their mother-in-law you should probably aim to get a reasonable likeness.  Some people do have an innate ability to see past some of these illusions, and still others have taught themselves personal tricks to work around them.  I am not one of those people, chances are you aren't either.  So how does anyone manage to reproduce anything with a reasonable level of accuracy?

Well, they either get things wildly wrong (which is often the case in my speedpaints you'll note), or to a greater or lesser degree, they turn to mechanical means to help with the problem.

But to discuss that in more detail there will need to be a part three (although despite the title it won't have much to do with illusions...)