Stars
2012-03-11

Linework | Fillwork

Two sides are mirrored versions of each other but still connected like if they were symmetrical.

Travel clockwise and you will only go downwards, anticlockwise and you will go upwards. Meanwhile the center makes it all flat.

I record just about every trip I do with my bike using my GoPro with very varying results, mostly due to the placement of the camera (shake, view) but it also depends on the time of day and the weather, obviously. This time was no different, the new thing was that I had mounted the camera vertically on my helmet with a suction cup arm. I can say that I will not be doing that again anytime soon as there were plenty of noisy turbulence and as it was to the side the wind pressure was not symmetrical so my neck muscles on one side were not happy the day after!

It did make for some interesting footage though, which is why I spent the time to make a video out of it. It was also hard to resist as the sun was setting during the trip there which painted everything in a golden light :) I can tell you the trip back was not as nice as it got dark and chilly, the wind made my fingers turn into frozen fish sticks, pretty much!

Of course I also took a number of pictures, that was one of the highlights of the trip :) Again, as the sun was setting the light was nice. I am posting a selection below, and I’ll do as usual an keep the people-pictures for Facebook and mostly post nature photos here. Not sure why I started with separating it like that, perhaps as this site is completely public while Facebook shouldn’t be.

One thing I have had problems with before when making videos like this one is that one pixel lines lose much of their color when encoding the final video. This time I pondered that adding a glow to the lines might help to avoid that, and it kind of worked :) I’ll try to remember that until next time.

Forks
2012-01-24

Linework | Fillwork

The two forks are connected at both ends while being perpendicular to each other.

This is the blended composite of 43 steps of perspective drawing. I removed the frames from the first version I made so this only includes the steps to the final artwork.

This is my second picture like this, I might make more, this time it was quicker than last time as I did it differently. I think this version got nicer colors but the lines are not anti-aliased so they might look a bit jagged.

As I got distracted with taking my motorcycle license last autumn I managed to forget about the contest again! Though by chance I stopped by their site the 22nd of February this year, that is about 1½ weeks ago, and I saw that they had extended the deadline to March 1st! This meant I had actually missed the original deadline already, which apparently was February the 14th, shock! Noting how lucky I was to have randomly browsed to their site and that they actually had extended the deadline I instantly decided that I had to do this project, and I had one week to pull it off. I quickly got started as I didn’t want to miss yet another year.

I will go into more detail of how I planned and executed this, but as that would spoil the experience of watching the video I am saving that for a later post. Right now, watch the end result below and hopefully your mind will still work properly afterwards :)

Update: I actually redid the video with another piece of music and with better timing. And I removed the annoying twitching, version 1.1 is much better!

Zigzag
2011-12-31

Linework | Fillwork

This is basically a broken tribar. If you follow the figure in one direction you will keep going up or down as well as forwards or backwards, continuously.

First things first, I did not really have an idea. This is the fourth year in a row I make a custom Christmas card, the one I made last year was a bit too ambitious, and I was already sick when I did it so afterwards I was in bed for a week with fever, heh. The years before that I added myself to Pixar movies, which is partially what inspired me this year.

When I was away taking a speed course in motorcycling I lived at my cousins’ place, and they are very much Harry Potter geeks, undeniably! While there I half participated in a Harry Potter movie marathon which we ended with seeing the last movie in the theater, as it was on around that time. As this week is what was most memorable from 2011, it was very intensive and slightly crazy, it just had to be the inspiration for my card.

I started looking around for suitable photos from the film in which I could insert myself, I was first eyeing a motorcycle picture where Hagrid is just leaving with Harry, but I couldn’t find it in a good enough quality, in the end I used a picture with professor Dumbledore instead. Lets start with how I shot the photo of me.

To get myself to sit at the right angle, at the right distance, and have my feet in the right spot I used my old and quite crappy projector to display the Dumbledore photo on the backdrop I had picked. It was my bed cover, the best colored material I got to match the tonality of the photo to make extraction of myself easier, avoiding getting too contrasty edges.

After matching the size of my head with Dumbledore’s, which was a bit tricky as his beard and hair covers most of his face in addition to him wearing a hat, I fixed supports for my feet to match the steps I would sit on in the picture. When happy with that I turned the projector off and set up lighting to match the other picture.

I used two flashes, one close to where I was sitting with a white translucent umbrella for the light coming from the left and one behind the camera as a fill light with a black reflective umbrella. In addition I had a reflector to the right to brighten up the shadows a bit. I used the reflective umbrella on the fill flash because I had to use it in slave mode due to the camera only triggering one flash if I used cables for both. Slightly annoying. At this point I had spent an hour on setting things up.

The last thing to do was to come up with a good pose which would make sense. I am holding a paintbrush I had borrowed from my parents garage, I should probably have included a can of paint too but I was too tired to match that up too. The final concept was to make it appear as if I had painted the professor with red paint, to force him into a Santa role, and that he would not be very enthusiastic about it. After yet another hour when I finally ended up with a picture I liked, which happened to be one of the first photos in the final series I took, I jumped into Photoshop.

I will use progress pictures to describe what I did in Photoshop. It’s pretty much basic photo editing stuff. Extraction, color correcting, blurring, painting shadows, adding sprites and a bit of distortion. It will make more sense if you click the images below, I will try to describe what I did in that step with the title.

I didn’t actually send the cards until the 22nd. I did some finishing touches in Photoshop the days after the actual shoot before I could print them and then I wrote a personal greeting on each one. It would just feel like I made an incomplete product if I did not use the space available to make the card personal for the receiver. As for delivery, It would seem like at least the local cards arrived on the 23rd, I had written most greetings on them assuming they would arrive after the weekend, but oh well.

Tribar8
2011-11-30

Linework | Fillwork

This impossible tribar has internal connections between two of the bars, the number of connecting bars are different for each side.

Not winning is of course a disappointment, but as I participate in plenty of contests I’m kind of getting used to it :P One thing that annoys me though is when the hosts of a contest ignore their own rules, and I have experienced this multiple times, and it happened again with this contest.

As I mentioned in the previous post a very big majority of the submissions lacked the required caption to be valid entries. After the public vote they announced the finalists and out of the 50 only 14 had a valid caption and another 5 had an almost valid caption. It does step on the toes of the people who expected the rules to be honored, like me, it feels like the people who wrote the rules would also follow them!

Again, this has happened to me before. It seems like when you host a contest it’s easy to make up rules but hard to get participants to follow them or to remember them yourself during judging. One time I participated in a Christmas rhyme contest to promote a brand and their hint for what to send in was “Longer is not always better!”, this while the winner ended up being a quite long poem that did not communicate what was sought after and did not even rhyme. Definitely not what was asked for, things like this puts me off.

I will also bring up a good example of how contests should be run, in my opinion. For a couple of years (during University studies) I was an active member of HBO. When they hosted a contest there were often strict rules and it was very clearly stated that if you did not follow those rules your entry would be tossed. If it was a creative contest it would be rules about what to make, what kind of files to submit, what information to include and how to submit it. Get one detail wrong and you were out. Very easy and very fair!

For this contest GoPro completely skipped specific things in their own rules, especially that both photo and creative entries “must be captioned”. I can see why they decided to do this as many of the nice looking pictures would otherwise be disqualified, among those the grand prize pictures. In a response to me on Facebook they did say that this contest was a learning experience and that more contests will come in the future. I do hope that they either make sure people read and follow the rules, that they themselves enforce the rules or that the rules are more relaxed to start out with.

I still love the GoPro brand, just not as much as before, they lost a chunk of goodwill for me. At least I still want to buy their products ;)

As a reflection, the nicest thing about this contest was to talk to people on Facebook whom I had not talked to in a while. And the most annoying part was the same, to have to hunt for votes, I really hope they skip this in upcoming events. Some people I contacted clearly stated that they wanted nothing to do with voting on Facebook due to privacy issues, and I fully understood that as I myself use very few apps on there.

As a last note, this was a very timely comic. Oh, and happy new year! Lets hope this year will bring less stress, I’m not so sure about that though.