skyfall

i saw skyfall tonight, the latest james bond movie, and it had some gorgeous scenery as they drove along the a9 in scotland, up through the highlands. then along smaller roads, till they ended up at this isolated old house in the middle of nowhere. it was eerily like this story i was writing (last year already?), about a girl driving up the a9, then her car dying, and walking to an old house. i just wasn't quite sure what the a9 looked like, if it was a big highway or what. it probably is. which spoils it. but it was heading towards the point in scotland that was closest to the faroe isles. which was the point. as i remember it.

so why is there no picture of all this amazing scenery here then? because i'm about to fall asleep.

i miss you blog. i shall try to write more often.

the electric v

back in 1984 when we first had a cd player, my dad got a cd, the electric v, and some years later i came across it and listened to it. it's a kind of reworking of vivaldi's four seasons. i really liked it, so he let me have it, but it was only one of the two cd set - i found the other online used. it's been out of print since 1984, as far as i can tell.

the music is reworked in different ways, and he adds sound texture to some tracks - birds chirping, rain and thunder, leaves crunching underfoot, a dog barking, a bell tolling. and the track titles are imaginative - the electric bird, the movie, the glass bead game, idyll (with birds), the san marco sequence, dancing (at crystal palace).

he only has one other cd that i'm aware of, called transforming v: variations on vivaldi. i found it used as well. it has titles like this game (round for four alienated players), balancing the night, silent journey, the minimal event, landscape with chime, music for a small room, sea the soul.

i uploaded this song from the electric v to youtube, the meditation, from summer - it's 11 minutes but is good as background music. or foreground. the painting by brian froud seems to go along with it.

the only other wilbrandt song on youtube was this one, the movie, from spring.

anyway, i find his music inspiring. i just wish he had made more.

the golden tarot

i used to have a tarot deck, but i would get spooked out about getting bad cards, and i wasn't crazy about the artwork. so i got rid of it some years ago. but recently i felt like doing some tarot readings. i found this deck online, the golden tarot, and ordered it. it's made of parts of medieval/renaissance paintings put together on the computer. i put some cards above (pardon the reflections/poor contrast).

i've done one reading so far, and it was about as grim as i expected. but i figured i can view it as a warning, or a challenge - like, can you avert this fate? or else, as some kind of consolation. to put an underlying story to life, to give it some meaning.

i also wrote last night for the first time in some weeks. i told myself, i am going to turn into dust unless i do something creative - my life will have been meaningless. i hope i will be able to keep it up. i'm looking forward to writing again tonight, which is a good sign anyway.

cardboard box robot

for a recent computer graphics project, we had to make a stick figure that played some motion capture data (where someone does some actions wearing a bunch of position sensors). we could do various things for extra credit, so i made him into a cardboard box robot. he gets pushed around a lot. the purple boxes i just threw in there - he can walk through them.

the cardboard doesn't look very good - i was hoping for something more realistic. but something like below is probably out of reach for real time rendering, at least for a while.

a drawing

i have this little sketchbook, 4x6" or so, and tonight felt like drawing something. it's something i was trying to paint last fall and it went nowhere. it's not much, but it was fun to do, and it makes me want to do more.

her body is too big though. i might keep working on it. i had started to fill in the folds on the dress, but it seemed like it was distracting from the rest of the picture. but it looks kind of blank now. and i might add a tree in the window.

 

the reference is jane morris, photographed by dante gabriel rossetti -

ray tracing

for the next assignment in one of my classes we're going to be doing ray tracing. it's where you trace the path of the light rays to draw a scene. they won't be as nice as these, though - we're not doing soft shadows. these look almost like paintings.

tattoos

some tattoos, collected over the years...

a bird and a cage

ultraviolet ink

constellations
(actually it looks like she was playing connect the dots with her moles, but still)

a trail of birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

and finally, a 7-circuit labyrinth -
it would make a nice tattoo...