Just a quick update. I’ve been meaning to get this started for several months now: an informal blog devoted to my bad cell phone photos. Minimal editing, just raw, stupid photos with captions. Enjoy!
For years, I have been studying myself carefully and deeply, trying to understand who I am – how I think, feel, react – in order to more completely understand my identity, and more practically, how I might be able to most effectively motivate and inspire myself while addressing my glaring weaknesses. Noticing how much social anxiety was hampering my connection to others, I have repeatedly forced myself to give concerts and performances in public – around 60 in the last four years, which might be more than I had in total for my entire life until that point – and to try to speak at such events when possible. I’ve tried to attend parties where I know almost no one so that I can’t just lean upon “easy” conversations with familiar people. Even though stomach-knots and blushing cheeks are probably never going away, it’s become possible to genuinely smile and to keep my memories instead of blanking out.
Now, it is time to enter the “second phase” of self-evaluation, shifting from focusing on personality and looking into ability. When I was a child, I believed that I could be anything I wanted to be, as long as I put the effort into it. This is of course not true, but there are still many options to choose from. To this point, I have developed most of my interests and hobbies more or less simultaneously and equally to a decent amateur level, the point where the output has merit that people will acknowledge, but not crossing that threshold where it’s something notable and viable. What I want to do now is to focus “flexible time” (i.e. time when I don’t have hard commitments) onto large-scale single projects (on the order of 100-1000 hours) to test my actual, differential aptitude in various interests and hobbies and truly grasp what my limits are – it’s hard to tell with half-hearted efforts whether it’s just lack of dedication or a lack of talent that causes the perceived shortcomings.
I started out with some easy ones – last November, I tested “sequential art” through the daily drawings project. In no way am I cut out for the mechanical discipline and the steady flow of creativity needed for such endeavors, and while the result was “cute,” it wasn’t noteworthy. In December, I decided to audition to be concertmaster of one of the orchestras I play with regularly – this required learning, reviewing, and memorizing several pieces of challenging music. From this effort, I identified limitations on my ability to play with a strict tempo and to execute certain leaps reliably, no matter how many times I practiced them. On the other hand, I realized that my memory is actually not deficient or deteriorating as I had thought – I was able to memorize 40 minutes worth of music with basically no errors in the end. Additionally, after initial skin peeling and a little bleeding, I was able to build up callouses that pretty much allowed for indefinite playing, debunking my belief that I couldn’t build up the stamina to practice for hours and hours every day. However, I became rather tired of practicing 2-3 hours a day after a month or so of effort. While I didn’t get the position in the end, I was satisfied that I played with the feelings I intended, was able to mesh with the pianist despite never having played the piece with accompaniment before, and did not encounter the “cold-fingers/wandering-mind” syndrome that led me to swear to never perform solo again after high school.
Presently, I am undertaking a massive animation project (begun several months ago) that serves not only to be functional (i.e. conveying something through motion) but also artistic. While not the longest animation I’ve worked on, it involves many hand-drawn sequences, nested animations, text animation, and scripted (programmed) animation. I will go through the formal motions of working out the timing, writing out the flow, designing the characters, sketching the key animation, and then creating the final animation at a fairly high frame rate (15 fps – in the past, I’ve used 10-12). Unlike the prior two focus-projects, where I became “sick” of the required effort, I have yet to lose interest and motivation, despite the hours I have committed, and moreover I feel that the end product has, thus far, reflected the vision of what I wanted to create, whereas the sequential art and particularly the solo violin playing did fall short of what I wished to have in the end.
Following this project, next will be writing: I have a science-fiction novella sketched out, but unlike past writing projects, I will meticulously plan, edit/cut, revise/rework this manuscript. I want to see what comes out when awkward/superfluous passages get cut, the diction is tightened, and the plot arc is predetermined from the start.
I think this is going to be interesting, and out of this, I’ll have a much better idea of where my true abilities lie. Though I’ll lose confidence in the skills I know I’m limited in, I think I’ll gain confidence in those that just need the extra commitment and attention. It’s time to focus on specializing and honing what I can do well – it’s nice to have breadth and versatility, but it’s better to have certain highlights and to leave the rest as back-ups.
Short summary:
VISUAL ART:
Sequential art / Daily drawing project / Hours spent: ~80 / Fidelity to vision: 70% / Fun: 50% / Assessment of final product: 80%
Animation / Hours spent: ~200 and counting / Fidelity to vision: 85% thus far / Fun: 90% / Assessment of final product: TBD
Graphical design: forthcoming
Digital painting / Real “art”: forthcoming
Not to be tested: 3D art, fractal art
MUSIC:
Violin performance / Audition / Hours spent: ~90 / Fidelity to vision: 65% / Fun: 60% / Assessment of final product: 55%
Violin improvisation: forthcoming
Music composition: forthcoming
CREATIVE WRITING:
Novella, short story / Sci-fi story / Hours spent: ~5 / not yet underway
Not to be tested: poetry, nonfiction
Although not tabulated as such, I am also going to make big pushes in work: that is, spend focused effort on research and medicine to see what my abilities and limitations are for my chosen career path. This should be interesting, and I will try to update periodically, though the large-scale nature of these projects means that they’ll be far less frequent than in the past. I only have 2-3 hours a day to devote to non-work projects, so it may be take several months to complete each one.
Compilation of all the daily drawings and bonus drawings!
Statistical breakdown of the drawings
I’m trying out that thing where you draw a picture each day for a month (with some sort of overarching theme), inspired in particular by Mikiko Ponczeck (Zombiesmile on Deviantart). I think it’s a nice exercise for shaking artist’s block and a chance for me to try to produce more consistent drawings – I’ve never been able to do sequential art because my characters and art style vary too much from frame to frame. We’ll see if I can keep this up! It seems crazy to me that I could have 31 of these things by the end of this …
For formatting purposes, the drawings won’t be posted on this dinky blog, but rather at a separate Tumblr located here.
La la la!
Been having fun with quick 100% Flash sketches lately! This sketch is the protagonist from my dream last night. It was one of those dreams where so many plotlines unfolded simultaneously, over such a large area, that it ended when I simply couldn’t hold all of the information in my head at once and had to give up. In any case, the protagonist was part of a small women’s choir (about 10-16 people) planning to perform in a few days in what seemed to be a makeshift stage in a busy mall corridor. However, it so happened that the rehearsal in that location (at a later hour when there were few others around) was happening on July 4, and the mall actually overlooked the river where they were going to launch fireworks, and crowds were gathering outside. The mall itself, despite the modern interior, was enclosed in a very large, seawater-damaged building of drab green and red (rust). I can only remember bits and pieces of the dream, but they include a very large and luxurious hotel (where presumably I was staying in between choir rehearsals) with a generous all-day buffet on one floor (the hotel was a tall, cylindrical skyscraper with floors as rings and the stairwells darting across the center open column. There was also a scene where I was running across a large parking lot. In that same parking lot, James Bond (Daniel Craig version) was speeding across, though I can’t remember what his mission was. It did eventually involve jet skiing in the large oceanfront around the piers near the mall and the fireworks. Anyway, I can’t recall any coherent plotline, sadly.
Two months ago, I was reading some quartets with a fellow violinist for fun. At some point, I brought up my concept of “subway karma” – basically, that there was some quantity of good fortune I could build up (by waiting long times), and that it would dissipate at some point in the form of the train arriving immediately when I got to the station, ideally – and usually – when I really needed to get somewhere quickly. I also threw out concept that when in a rush, the occurrence of either just missing or just catching a train was much higher than usual, and that this was somehow tied to some subway spirit’s judgment of me.
He of course told me this was ridiculous and that if I were really a scientist, I should prove it with data. So I’ve done just that – I’ve recorded the majority of subway rides on the Red Line that I’ve taken in the past two months, notating the amount of time I waited (note that 0 = the train is right there as I enter the station and I’m able to board it; -1 = the train pulls out just as I’m entering the station – I did record the actual wait times for these, but those data are not presented here).
Here are the wait times for all the rides (n = 78), in chronological order. I did not write down exactly what time I took each ride.
While it’s impossible to prove whether there’s a subway spirit or not, this looks pretty convincingly .. random. No pattern of build-up and dissipation or anything like that. But what about being in a rush? Being in a rush was defined for these purposes as me having to get someplace at a set time, and that I was not leaving more than 5 or 10 minutes of extra wiggle-room in the estimated trip duration. n=28 for being in a rush, n = 50 for not being in a rush.
What’s interesting here is how much more likely it is that I will catch a train just as it’s arriving at the station when I’m in a rush. Most likely it’s something like the increased frequency – and increased stopping times – of trains during times when I’m likely to be in a rush (near or just after rush hour). And it’s confounded by the fact that I can see people walking out of the station, or even hear the train pulling into the station, before I even enter the station, and make my own judgment about whether or not to book it. But it’s interesting that my perception reflected a dimension of reality in this case, even if the magical interpretation is nonsensical.
Other notes: I never actually realized before how frequent the red line trains are, especially in comparison to the very long times I was accustomed to waiting on the green line. My average wait time over this period was 2.6 minutes (here I’ve used the real wait times in place of the “-1” notation for missing a train), which makes sense given that I travel about half during rush hour (every 9 minutes per line, but I don’t care whether it’s Ashmont or Braintree so it’s every 4.5 minutes) and half during other times (every ~12 minutes per line, so 6 minutes per train) – the expected value of waiting would be 5.75/2 or ~2.9 minutes. Weekend frequencies are lower, but I did not notate a lot of the weekend trips, because they were rarer and the “wait time” tickers are often shut off, so that it’s harder to keep track of how long I wait. Overall, 62% of the time, I waited 2 minutes or less for the train. Not too bad!
I can’t believe that it’s already been 11 months since I posted about trying to catch up on a backlog of nearly 5 years’ worth of incomplete projects. I’m long overdue for some accountability on that list :). Without further ado:
Writing: I’ve completed Andromeda, though I really dislike the prologue and portions of the epilogue, so I’ll probably revisit this one again. But the bulk (the middle 48 pages or so), I’m pretty happy about.
La Petite Princesse remains incomplete. I don’t presently have any plans to start new stories, so that I can focus on science and art, as well as musical performances I’ve committed to already.
Scientific Projects: The communicating nanoparticle paper has been accepted and published; the lung tissue engineering paper has been revised four times amongst us primary authors and is now awaiting approval for submission by the PI for the project. The anticoagulant nanoparticle paper is nearly at the same stage.
Art: Two of the drawings I listed are complete – the Nisuna and Faxuda portrait, the remake of the Angel. I’ve elected not to finish the Andromeda portrait, primarily because I was practicing techniques that I’ve since improved upon. The recent completed portrait of the girl on the rocky beach can be considered the technical equivalent in terms of the goals I had. I think the next step in my artistic development will be to really nail down materials and textures so that I can create more convincing backgrounds and have characters belong the same “world” as the surroundings. I’ve gotten several comments about my characters looking like they’re green-screened into some scene, which is fairly accurate, and lighting and overlap can only take you so far.
Music: I haven’t composed music for awhile. Among other things, I’m experiencing strange problems with Finale and might have to completely reinstall. I think it’ll be interesting to get back to composing, given the extensive chamber music and orchestra performances I’ve given recently (I’ve had 11 concerts in 2013 so far!), and particularly really getting into Mozart and Beethoven. In the next year, I hope to transition back to composition/improvisation – I’m looking for musicians who would be interested in doing this sort of thing with me.
Games: I finished Tales of Graces f, FFXIII, and Disgaea 4. Atelier Totori is, needless to say, a pretty low priority haha.
Additionally, I am updating my website (writing and 2D art). But you guys have already seen all that stuff on this blog first :)!
I have plans for a “real” blog post in the near future, focusing on my dismay at recent articles I’ve read in the New York Times where statistics are being reported rather dishonestly, a glaring blemish amongst otherwise very respectable reporting and writing.
It’s been way too long since I posted here – I’ve been playing catch up on all sorts of things this summer. Two long-overdue papers finally got moving (the five-year-old data was published a couple months ago, and I’m getting ready to submit the four-year-old data). I’ve done a ton of marker-based drawings since those early dabbles. And I’ve even made headway on a huge writing undertaking that I’ve been planning for years (will discuss in a later post!).
To commemorate my resumption of blogging, here’s a CG (first one in a long time)! It’s based on the subject and color scheme of the “girl in snow” I drew back in 2007.
Girl on a windy, rocky beach
Close-up of the face – I always feel like faces are more attractive close-up
More after the cut!
I had planned for the 800th post to be a bit more interesting, but things came up so that’ll have to wait for later. Here are two quick tests I did to get an understanding of Copic markers, really basic things like how many shades I can get from a single marker, how to blend two colors together, whether the marker would solubilize the pen ink, how much accuracy I can get with the chisel tip etc. Still can’t get them to work quite the way I want, and the only suitable paper I have is watercolor paper, but I’m making some progress.
Trying to nail down this new approach to color and light. I’ve been trying to keep layers to a bare minimum, and abstaining from the smudge brush completely. I’m using 20-50% opacity brushes, mostly completely hard but also using 30% hardness brushes for trickier details to make the blending easier.
Chinese New Year card for my parents and parents-in-law
It’s of course very restricting to only be using bright, pastel-y colors, but I don’t think that this color-illumination scheme precludes dark and heavily desaturated colors. Since I’ve only drawn one or two nighttime settings in the past, I decided to use a soft light layer to make life a little easier, because I have a hard time picturing what shade my color of interest would be with reduced lighting.
In the following Valentine’s Day card, I used desaturated, high value yellows and greens to signify light (which is coming from an unspecified source just outside the field of view) and a mixture of desaturated, low-to-medium value purples to signify shadows. I think this highlights, by constrast, the reds and pinks of the skin to give more life and bloodflow to them. On the other hand, these lighted regions give an iridescent feel to the periwinkle top, and a mossy organic luster to the gray denim, which are interesting side-effects.
I had to use layers to prevent myself from smashing my head against the desk when it came to depicting my wife’s and my hands, but at the same time, I’m sad that the hard edges bouding each layer look almost like paper cut-outs. I want to keep trying to find ways to intermix the layers to give the feeling of a single unified canvas. I’ve started using “overpainting” layers to attempt to blend some of these hard juxtapositions and let objects from different layers interlock, such as hair and grass weaving around fingertips.
Valentine’s Day card for my lovely wife