GlitchNYC.com

Three Droplets

Watering my plants at work left three perfect droplets on the waxy leaf of this baby cherry tree. I was insanely busy, but sometimes you just have to stop, take a moment, and appreciate the beauty around you.

This little trio sat atop the leaf until they evaporated, being perfect photography subjects as I snapped away. I was even able to get the Empire State building in the background of the last shot.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

11:10 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Moonlit Clouds

Our first night in North Carolina was amazingly beautiful. The harvest moon was bright in the sky, illuminating everything in the eerie white glow that defines edges but fails to give you details or any depth to the world around you. The effect was much like looking at a frozen daytime, and I couldn't resist snapping some shots.

The way the clouds are rimmed with light here, masking the full moon, makes me think of classic old werewolf movies. I threw a lot of shots away, but these really captured the amazing brilliance of the moon that night. It was like a sun on a black sky.

There's lots more photos from North Carolina in the album

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

11:04 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Coloring in the Lines

A few years ago I roughly followed one of merekat's tutorials and learned how to add some pretty good looking colorization to existing line-art.

I came up with this little gem, and it was (and is) the most popular thing I ever posted on deviantart.

Recently I've been reading and extremely impressed with Colleen's friend Kilo's 10,000 Drawings project, and decided to get my old skills out of tool-shed and see if they'd gone rusty. She's re-teaching herself how to draw by doing 10,000 drawings (as a series of slice-of-life and fantasy comics) and she's not even 1/20th of the way through and they're already amazing.

After finishing up the color-job on one of her recent comics, I'm really really happy with the result, especially the clouds and ocean in the "reveal" shot of the second to last pane.

I also got a lot more familiar with the free and open source Gimp working on this project, and I feel like I can do just about anything I do with Paint Shop Pro with it, although I'm still looking for the "lighten" and "darken" brush.

• Read Kilo's 10,000 Drawing project
• Check out Colleen's webcomic, Fluff In Brooklyn. Her photoshoot at Coney Island is featured in this comic.
• Merekat's photoshop tutorials will make you an excellent color artist in a few insomniatic nights.

12:02 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Spiderman, Spiderman, Radioactive Spiderman

Lots and lots and lots of spidermen, in the "crane game" at Coney Island. I think this one would make a really fun desktop background. The top left is even kind of dark and our of focus - good for placing icons!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

4:12 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Shattered Glass

Shattered glass on the F train. The spider-web pattern just looked kind of cool to me.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

4:07 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Photo Fun at Coney Island

Last weekend, a bunch of us went to Colleen's and then to Coney Island for some Fluff in Brooklyn fun.

I was hoping to catch Ravi the contortionist at the freakshow and see how he's doing but I guess that he's thought better of a career in the sideshow industry. According to the barker there, his wife talked him out of it. Hopefully he's pursuing college like he planned. I interviewed and photographed Ravi last summer after meeting him twice in a week by pure coincidence. He's a really nice kid.

This weekend, I took quite a few pictures, and continued on my macro photography and long exposure kick. You can check out my photos here and then see what Colleen did with her set in today's comic here.

Speaking of comics, I hear-tell that our friend Chris Moreno's real ink+paper comic #2 is hitting stores right about now. King Arthur Vs. Dracula sounds silly, but honestly, it's the first comic I've enjoyed reading in ages.

Well, 15 straight hours of coding an IT Help Desk system in PHP/MySQL later, I'm finally getting tired, so I'll close this up before I fall asleep at the keyboard like I did last night.

Before I go, I figure I ought to mention the amazingness that is the picture at on the right here. I didn't intend to do a patriotic photo shoot, I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time, and although I think the picture's ridiculous, it's just funny enough to be my new favorite. That, and I'm really still quite enamored of my tattoo. I guess that's a good thing seeing as I've had it almost 2 years now. I figure if I can make it to 30 without regretting it, I'll have done better than your average tattoo-getter.

"I do not regret the things I've done, but those I did not do." - Lucas, Empire Records.

4:01 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Seashell Cluster

Did I mention I was on a macro photography kick? I'm obsessed with the detail in this one. You can see every single grain of sand, down to its translucency and the little glint of light shining off it. This one will definitely also have a round as my desktop wallpaper.

Anyone know what once lived in these little shells? they were about 2 cm long each.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

11:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Vista

Before I even got 3 feet on my photo hunt, I was struck by the vivid contrast of the blues and greens in this shot. The sky was almost unnaturally clear and the grass was thriving in the sea-spray and the hot sun of the dunes.

I'll probably set this to my desktop wallpaper on my linux machine at home just so I can say I had a Vista on my Desktop long before Microsoft trademarked the word.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

10:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Beach Plum Blossoms

I was all set to do some snorkeling in the ocean Sunday, but it turned out to be super windy and the surf was up, meaning I couldn't see more than 6 inches in front of me. No go.

Instead I went on a photo-safari, and got some amazing shots of the different flora in the area, the dunes, and the amazingly rich colors of that sunny day. Check this one out in full res, it's all about the macro focus. I've always loved photos with a tight depth-of-field, bringing just your subject into sharp resolution, but hinting at what's nearby with fuzzy images and vibrant colors, and I spend a lot of time playing with it that day.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

9:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

The Sunset Panorama

This sunset in Cape Cod was unbelievable. Over the course of an hour, the sky turned every possible color,and some I didn't know it can do. In this picture alone, there's yellows, greens, blues, purples, pinks, and reds. It was even more stunning in person.

If you click the picture, you can see it in all its super-high-res glory. This was 6 pictures stitched together, and will be hanging on a wall here in the apartment sometime soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

2:18 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

The Photostream

I've been taking a lot of photos lately, and I'm really happy with how some of them have turned out. Since I've got my own webserver, I don't need to host photos at Flickr, but lately I've been jealous of the cool tagging, sorting, and photo-stream functions there. For example, check out the "cute" clusters to get a feel for how it works. Neato.

If you want to see the whole bunch, you can check out the Cape Cod photos here, but I'm going to be featuring some of the best of them right here in my blog over the next few days, as my own sort of tagging and photofeed, letting google do the sorting for me. If you check back later, you'll probably see a bunch of photos here, but those "reading the feed" (I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird or Feedreader if you don't have an RSS reader already) will get to play along as I pick my favs and fill in some details.

Enjoy!

2:17 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Drawing Blind

Anya and Marianne started playing what will forever be known as "The Best Game in the World" at the fireworks last monday.

They would take a piece of paper, draw a head, and then fold the paper down so that you could only see the very bottom of the neck. The next person had to draw the torso, repeat the process, and repeat the process. The art that came out of these was so spectacular, you've just got to see it for yourself.

Marianne's holding a naming contest over at her blog - go check it out and name your favorite, you might end up with your entry printed on some cafepress schwag!

12:14 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Ants on a Log

I've finally completed the second "Ardvark the Aardvark" story. I'm much happier with this one as a "children's book" as far as length goes, and I think I'll probably put this one together in book form first.

Many thanks to Christina for helping me put the pieces together one night at Arthur's Stellastarr* show, and to everyone who's encouraged this project along the way.

Read the story [PDF]

As always I'd welcome revisions, edits, and new stories or drawings - this is all under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 2.5, so feel free to share it, remix it, print it, sell it, or whatever, providing you 1.) Give proper attribution and 2.) release any derivative works under the same license.

You can contribute and edit collaboratively right on the wiki

No clue what this is all about? Check out my other posts on the topic

5:14 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Ardvark The Aardvark: The Teacher

Just a mini-update today to keep the Ardvark the Aardvark work going. I finished the first concept design for The Teacher today. He didn't come out exactly as I'd pictured him in my head, but after looking at the actual adult vervets for a while I decided to keep him a bit closer to their actual form rather than just super-sizing the babies.

It's amazing how different the young of this species look from the fully grown. I think it's the fact that the babies are virtually naked, allowing their skin to show through their peachfuzz. That, and the fact that their heads are pretty much fully formed at birth, making their bodies disproportionately small (and so cute!) when they're young.

• Download the editable SVG

3:40 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Update: Ardvark's Got a Wiki

I've created a page at WikiMedia for Ardvark. If you haven't worked with a Wiki before, they're really pretty neat. Once you register (free and quick) with WikiMedia,No registration needed! Just click edit at the top of any page. you're able to change the text of any page there and submit your own new information and artwork.

This is how most of the web should just work. You log in to a page, see a mistake or missing info, and simply fix it right there. Wikis have been most effective in bringing together knowledge bases like the open encyclopedia WikiPedia and technical manuals, but I'm very interested to see how this collaborative medium lends itself to a purely creative project.

There is an implicit trust in letting others have full access to edit your pages, and I'm excited by the idea of easily letting others make what they will of Ardvark, much in the same way that CVS lets developers easily tweak, change, and even fork projects. Inkscape, the tool I use to draw these characters, is the product of one such fork, splitting off from the Sodipodi project and quickly surpassing its progenitor. For security, the Wiki also keeps a comprehensive version list allowing you to restore the page if someone, for example, spams the page with links to Chinese Viagra to boost their google rating.

Ardvark The Aardvark, once completed, will be a fully paginated children's book that you can download, print, edit, share, and expand upon. To get to that goal, I'm going to need help. I need editors, artists, and writers, anywhere from amateur to pro, to work with me on the project and add their input.

If you're interested in helping out, take a look at the Wiki and play around with it a bit. You can directly make changes to book one, start on book two (or another branch of the story not related to this linear plot) upload drawings easily.

To add a new page, simply go to the address where it would be. For example, book two has not yet been created, but you can create it yourself by going to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ArdvarkTheAardvark_BookTwo. Just don't forget to update the main page to point to your newly created work! You can also leave notes on any existing page without disturbing the text itself by clicking the "discuss" link.

• Ardvark's Page at WikiMedia

4:56 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Of the Two Famous Foucaults.

We went out to dinner with Arden tonight, and she mentioned that she'd read the rough draft of Ardvark the Aardvark and had a suggestion: If I was naming the little vervets in the Ardvark story after great philosophers and thinkers, I may want to reconsider including Foucault (pronounced "foocau"). Her reasoning was that it may bring up several questions with the youngsters when attempting to explain who he was. His writings on sexuality and his notoriety for promiscuity aren't exactly on the grade school curriculum.

I stopped for a moment and thought "Oh, so THATS who the other Foucault was!" I'd seen a book by him at Borders just a week or so ago with Ali, but really wasn't sure who he was, aside from the fact that he was famous in 1980 instead of 1890.

The only Foucault I know is the one I learned about in Physics and Astronomy, the inventor of the aptly named "Foucault Pendulum"

It seems fitting that I'm learning so much while attempting to write an educational story! I've found good resources for both Foucaults.

• Learn more about Foucault's Pendulum - one of the founding proofs that the earth rotated about its axis.
  • Great illustrations and animations make this is a very fun site! The work of Jean Bernard Leon Foucault is presented in a way which makes the concepts accessible and fun.
• Read more about Michael (pronounced "Michelle") Foucault, prominent philosopher of the late 20th century who sought to understand the nature and history of the fundamental concepts of society and the author of The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception and Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, among many others

12:41 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Ardvark The Aardvark - Book One v0.5

I've completed the rough draft of the story for Ardvark the Aardvark With the Back Leg Named Bumpus - Book One. I'd welcome revisions, edits, and new stories or drawings from anyone that wants to take a crack at it!

I'll be getting a wiki set up to facilitate content creation, but for now, send submissions to "Ardvark" here at GlitchNYC.com.

As I wrote, a few themes began to emerge, and I think they're good places to start for anyone who wants to contribute.

• The book should be fun. First and foremost, it should be an interesting, whimsical, and even eccentric read.
• The book should be fun to read aloud, both for kids and parents.
• Onomatopoeia, new words, and new concepts make books fun to share and talk about
• The book should be educational
• This doesn't mean it has to be stodgy or include anything quite so obvious as the classroom scene in book one. Instead, education and exploration should be intrinsic part of the book. To quote Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, "don't talk down to kids, just talk to them." Leave long words in, include advanced concepts of math, physics, astronomy, music, whatever - education begins with curiosity!

Ardvark the Aardvark With the Back Leg Named Bumpus - Book One

(Download the story as a .doc with some of the character designs embedded)

Ardvark was an aardvark who lived, as most aardvarks do, in the lush forests, great fields, and dry savanna of Kenya. Each day he would play in the dirt, happily romping from anthill to anthill in search of friends to play with and food to eat. Most days he found no friends, but kept himself company by having conversations with his back-left leg, which he had named Bumpus, for no good reason at all.

See more ...

3:31 pm | permalink | /life/art | 5 writebacks |

And Then There Were Three

I've finished the 3rd Vervet, Hypatia. She's named for the "earliest woman scientist whose works have been documented"

What stuck me funny as I came back to this drawing this morning after finishing it late last night was that I know these three characters. It was completely and utterly unintentional, but very obvious who they are when you look at the picture.

Does anyone else see it, or am I going crazy from too many hours of looking at monkeys and aardvarks? Leave your guesses in the comments

Download the editable SVG

9:57 pm | permalink | /life/art | 2 writebacks |

Aristotle and Galileo

Noticing a theme with the names yet? Ardvark meets these little guys as a class of little monkey scholars. There are about 8 of them in the pack, and then probably 30 in the class along with the fully grown Vervet teacher.

I want to complete at least 4 distinct designs for the babies before I start to place them on the page. Galileo here is number two, and I'm feeling a lot better about the process again. Now that I've worked out the basic design ideas for the Baby Vervets, it's a lot easier to turn them out without having to go through an endless draw-revise-redraw cycle.

I've got the first few pages of the book done in my head. I think i might try to put what I have into a fully laid out PDF "teaser" once I get the character designs I need done. The nice part about this project is that it's essentially a bunch of mini projects. SVG is completely modular, so I can use these exact designs in the fully composed page just by dragging and dropping. Each drawing I finish is another step closer to having a full book.

I can't wait to get Ardvark on the page with the baby Vervets - they're so tiny, they could ride on him like humans on an elephant!

Here's the Inkscape SVG: Aristotle and Galilelo

2:42 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Meet Aristotle, the Baby Vervet

I've finally completed the base drawing for the Baby Vervets, the first characters Ardvark meets on his little adventure.

All in all, the drawing wasn't that difficult once I'd worked out how to simplify the source photo down to match Ardvark's style, but I did have quite a bit of "artist's block" trying to get myself to sit down and work on him. I was afraid it wasn't going to come out, so I wasn't going ahead with it at all.

Now that I've gotten the first draft done, I'm pretty happy with it. I have to decide if I want to leave him with articulated hands and feet or if I want to simplify them down once more to "mitts" to facilitate drawing lots of these guys, but I think I'm going to leave them as is.

Meanwhile, for those of you interested in playing around with the source drawings, I've made a bunch of updates to the SVG's. Remember, you'll need the free and open Inkscape to open these properly. Here they are:

• All 3 Drawings of Ardvark laid out on one page.
• Aristotle, the Baby Vervet

11:57 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |