What strikes me about this sketch is how much better the pencils looked. During the inking, my pen frequently "jumped" around on the paper, causing some of the lines to end up in the wrong place (particularly the right (drawn on the left) eye and the left (drawn on the right) jaw).
Perhaps another recommendation to re-visit my arm position (or perhaps the pen; this was a Pilot V5, which is a pen I love for writing, but not as good as the Microns and other pens I normally use for drawing).
My wife eats vegan almost exclusively, and I often try to eat vegan when I'm with her. But she's experienced a lot of difficulty in finding vegan food, even at restaurants that claim to serve it; it's not resistance to veganism per se, but a strangely baffling lack of understanding that vegan means "no animal products".
On our recent trip to Asheville, we got a BIG set of clues as to why this is happening: purely by chance, a number of people inadvertently exposed to us why there's so much confusion around the concept of vegan as "plant based food".
First, there's no such thing as an "egg vegan" - but, apparently, there are a lot of people who are going around claiming that they are, and confusing the heck out of restaurants because of it. At one restaurant in Asheville, the host stand told us they had a "vegan southwestern benedict" but there was nothing vegan about it: it had eggs, butter and hollandaise sauce (which is egg AND butter). Our server then let slip that many people claimed to be "egg vegans" and this dish was aimed at them.
Well, maybe they THINK they're "egg vegans," but there's no such thing: the word for someone who eats eggs is "vegetarian", or if you want to get specific, "ovo-vegetarian". Regardless, the FOOD is not vegan if it has eggs in it, so it is really unhelpful to people who have chosen to be vegan, or who are avoiding eggs for health reasons, to mislabel food with eggs in it as vegan.
"Egg vegans" remind me of another group of people: those who say "they're mostly vegan, but they eat fish". The word for that is "carnivore", or if you want to get specific, "pescatarian". I actually knew a real vegan who added fish to his diet for about a month for nutritional reasons, but he was clear to everyone and himself that this was a departure from the vegan diet.
Second, some people literally do not understand that vegan is different from vegetarian - and if that person owns a restaurant, he's going to have many unhappy customers. At one Japanese restaurant we visited this weekend, there were dozens of "vegan" items marked as such on the menu - but a kindly waitress stopped by our table and warned us that the owner did not know the difference and repeatedly labeled food with butter and eggs as "vegan", despite being told otherwise.
This reminds me that some people do not understand that any animal products makes a dish not vegan. My wife's mother frequently tried to get her to eat food cooked with a ham hock in it because "it's just for flavor". The P.F. Chang's we used to go to put fish flakes in most of their vegetarian items, which makes them not just not vegan, but not even vegetarian. And so on.
Third, even when a restaurant is trying, vegan and vegetarian are confusing because they both start with VEG and end with N - and there's no standard abbreviation for either of them which can be used to unambiguously label a meal. I've seen "V", "VG", "VE" all used to refer to both vegan and vegetarian, and if you look around I bet you'll find some menus using "VN" for both purposes. Regardless, at one or two restaurants this weekend, even the waitstaff got confused as to what was vegetarian or vegan due to the "V/VE" issue.
And finally, sometimes the waitstaff just gets it wrong. And at another restaurant this weekend, the waiter didn't write our order down and completely messed it up in her head - but fortunately came back to ask before passing the wrong order to the kitchen. As another example, the staff at a very vegan-friendly local pizza joint told us that one of their pizza sauces was vegan, only to discover months later that it was not.
So it's seemed strange to us that some people can't seem to wrap their head around what vegan is. But if some people are running around claiming to be "egg vegans", the owners are mislabeling the meals, the meals are not labeled clearly enough even for the staff to tell, and sometimes people are just mistaken even when they're trying to get it right, it seems more clear why things get messed up.
But really, vegan is just plant based food, and if it's not plant based food, it's not vegan.
-the Centaur
P.S. Fine, fine, bacteria and fungi aren't technically plants, but they're vegan. Just nothing with a face or a mother, and nothing from something with a face or a mother, okay?
Pictured: Sunny side up eggs, bacon, and French toast, NONE of which are vegan.
2024 is shaping up to be one of the most consequential American elections in recent history, in which our first twice-impeached ex-president is running AGAIN for the highest office in the land. When he ran for office the first time, it wasn't clear precisely what he would do if elected, and Clinton had her own problems.
But now, what Trump stands for - and would do - is clear. Even if you forget the two impeachments (no convictions) and the many indictments (not conclusive yet), Trump was more than just a poor loser hawking false claims of a stolen election: he actively tried to overturn it, and stoked the fires of insurrection on January 6th. He's a proven threat to American democracy.
American democracy is the light of the world. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, you should register to vote, and vote for almost anyone else than Trump. And if you're a Republican, you should contact your congrescritter and state your opposition to Project 2025.
Democracy is a wonderful thing - if we can keep it.
Some people wonder why me and my wife are so strict about not using pesticides and weedkillers in our yards. Well, there's the general principle of not contributing more toxic chemicals to the environment, and in San Jose there was the concern that our cats walked in the yard, then slept in our beds, and we didn't want them tracking in chemicals (other than dust and pee and poop, but, oh well).
But in South Carolina? We have a well. Our yard is our source of drinking water. And the recent unexpected excess precipitation event really brought that home by making the water drainage channels visible:
We get enough chemicals from our neighbors poisoning their lawns. We don't need to add any more to it. In fact, we're busy enough trying to slowly clean up the waste that the previous owners left on the property ... it's a nice house, but someone seemed to think that the woods around it were a dumping ground.
One step at a time. But one of those steps is, don't add pesticides or herbicides to your own drinking water.
-the Centaur
P.S. Yes, I understand a lot of chemicals get filtered out by the dirt. There's still no need to add to it.
More from the Goldman book. I have a tremor in my hand which you can most readily see on the lower left; I traditionally have attributed it to the RSI that I picked up back in the late 90's during grad school (a combination of an internship with a bad ergonomic setup at work and at my apartment, during which I was also writing a proposal for the PEPE robot pet project and playing Dungeon Keeper at night; I woke up one day with a throbbing wrist and couldn't type for nine months).
But my wife pointed out I'm drawing in my wrist, not with my arm, and that can also cause wobbly lines. So I'm going to try the next drawing with a slightly further notebook position and more arm movement. Perhaps the tremors aren't something I have to accept after all. We shall see.
Moar Goldman studies. Now far into the book enough to start reading his section on tools, which normally I ignore as I have my own preferred methods; but this time, I felt I could see what he was saying. Who knows, maybe I'll actually try some of his pencil methods this time, and not just ink.
When we decided to live in a place where water falls from the sky, we didn't realize how much we meant it.
The good news is that there's more places to go swimming. The bad news is that you can swim in only one direction, much like a muddy simulation of the interior of a black hole.
Honey, I hope you didn't need anything at the store.
Still working through the Goldman book, which has the inspirational quote: "I hope you wear this book out from overuse!" And that's what you need when you're practicing!
-the Centaur
P.S. My wife and I were talking about learning skills, and she complained that she hadn't quite gotten what she wanted to out of a recent set of books. It occurred to me that there are two situations in which reading books about a skill doesn't help you:
It can be you haven't yet found the right book, course or teacher that breaks it down in the right way (for me in music, for example, it was "Understanding the Fundamentals of Music" which finally helped me understand the harmonic progression, the circle of fifths, and scales, and even then I had to read it twice).
It can be because you're not doing enough of the thing to know the right questions to ask, which means you may not recognize the answers when they're given to you.
Both of these are related to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development - you can most easily learn things that are related to what you already know. Without a body of practice at a skill, reading up on it can sometimes turn into armchair quarterbacking and doesn't help you (and can sometimes even hurt you); with a body of practice, it turns into something closer to an athlete watching game footage to improve their own game.
So! Onward with the drawing. Hopefully some of the drawing theory will stick this time.
More sketches after Ken Goldman's "Drawing Hands and Feet". Generally, when I do construction lines in pencil, then ink it, then erase the lines, it usually comes out much better than when I draw freehand ink. This should not be surprising, but it is something that I need to come back to again and again, given that I am trying to squeeze a new drawing practice into an already packed day.
The star Dilmun, its planet Tylos, and the hypothetical exo-Io Failaka, to scale. For comparison, if our Sun, Jupiter, and Earth took those positions, this is what they would look like:
What's funny about the Dilmun system is that normally you have to say "planetary distances and sizes are not to scale". However, Tylos is so close to Dilmun, orbiting only 4 million kilometers away with a year of 1.25 days, that the top diagram IS to scale. And this is in real life, not fiction.
It's fascinating to me how concepts far from our daily experience can help us understand our world. Far out in the galaxy, many planets like Earth orbit far closer to their suns, and can become tidally locked - always facing their parent star, the way that the Moon always faces the Earth.
As you might imagine, the light side gets hot, and the dark side gets cold. But what isn't clear is that the atmospheres of such planets are bistable - there are two different conditions many of these planets can exist in, even traveling at the same distance away from their parent stars.
If the atmosphere is hot enough, then greenhouse gases trap heat at the surface, sustaining the atmosphere so it can warm the night side through convection. But if the night side ever gets cold enough, the greenhouse gases can freeze out into ice deposits, which act as a cold trap.
As greenhouse gases disappear from the atmosphere, the atmosphere loses its ability to retain heat, and the night side gets colder and colder, harvesting more and more of the atmosphere to the cold trap. Eventually most of the atmosphere freezes on the night side, creating an ice cap.
Either of those states - a hot greenhouse world with a thick atmosphere, or a hot light side world with a thick frozen ice cap on the dark side - is stable enough on its own. An active greenhouse world stays hot, and an ice cap world stays nearly airless. But the transition from greenhouse to ice cap is a vicious cycle.
So many things in our world are like these cold traps: we don't always see good things when we have them, and once the runaway process is started, it's hard to stop.
Belief is one such thing: an open mind can interrogate itself, but once an ideology starts to take us over, it actively attacks conflicting information, until we're left with nothing but a thick crust of conspiracy theories.
Where's your cold trap? It may feel something like a blind spot.
If you want to get better at drawing, you really need to treat it like any other skill, and practice ahead of your performance. We may learn by doing, but you don't get enough learning time or variety just from actually performing the task. Basketball players need to cross-train in addition to shooting hoops - not just play games. Chess masters practice with coaches. Writers scribble in their notebooks. And artists sketch.
Dilmun is a yellow-white star hotter and brighter than our Sun (itself white, not yellow), and Tylos orbits so close its parent star that its orbit takes one and a quarter Earth days, cooking the planet to a sizzling 2500 degrees Kelvin (about four thousand degrees Fahrenheit). Failaka is a cometary remnant, and if it exists, it could only survive in the shadow of Tylos, which itself appears as a bright orange, hot as a hot coal.
SO, to make the story more grounded, I worked out where Failaka would have to be (Tylos's L2 point, currently calcuated as about the distance from the Earth to the Moon), how relatively bright Tylos and Dilmun were, and how large Tylos and Dilmun would be in the sky, as well as their colors.
The above renders this in Mathematica. Tylos is the orange circle partially occluding the white disk of Dilmun behind it, and Failaka is the blue plain of ice below - ice which, if it really was this exposed to Tylos and Dilmun, would be rapidly sublimating away, as the plot demands that the planet "roll" due to an orbital shift, leading to plains of former darkside ice shifting into the light and rapidly disintegrating.
Oh, and the tiny dots to the right of Dilmun? The white dot is the Sun, in natural color. The next dot is the Moon, rendered in grey, as the moon's albedo is actually kinda like charcoal.
And now, a helpful safety tip: do not stand on Failaka where you can see this view of Tylos and Dilmun. The radiation would be thousands of times as bright as the Sun seen from Earth, and you would rapidly have a very abbreviated day.
... or you're not blogging every day. And I even went down to the library TO blog, but forgot what I was supposed to be working on when I got here, and did a whole buncha other tasks.
So, anyway, here's a margarita. It was strong. Enjoy.
Well, logically speaking, if I want to "plan for success" in my art, and I've drawn a centauress with some hooves that I don't like, I should focus on getting better at drawing hooves. From Foster's "Drawing Horses" book, sketched in my little "One Trick Pony" sketchbook.
-the Centaur
P.S. I am totes going back and renaming the last art post "a second pony trick".
One of the productivity tools I use is a technique called "plan for success." I mostly use it for todo lists, and for that topic it's worth a blog post of its own, but, briefly, when taking on a task, I like to start off with a "plan for success" sheet where I list:
What the project is (e.g, going to Dragon Con)
Where I currently am on the project (e.g, about to leave, just arrived)
What the context of the next work block is (the next 4-5 days, or the next month)
What success would look like (e.g., attend all my panels, meet all my friends, hit the dealer's room)
Once I have that, I start listing todo items, then categorizing them into the four Stephen Covey quadrants - Urgent and Important, Not Urgent yet Important, Urgent yet Unimportant, and Not Urgent and Not Important. Making sure that the "Not Urgent yet Important" stuff gets done is the hardest part, so I usually tranche the TODOs into "do immediately, do today, do before I leave".
But the whole "plan for success" idea came from an artist - I don't remember who - talking about the difference between professionals and amateurs. An amateur may produce great art, they said, but on accident, even if they're skilled, because they don't know how they're doing what they're doing. A professional, on the other hand, makes a plan to ensure that their art piece succeeds. They may not always succeed at it - plenty of professional artists have to start pieces over - but they don't paint themselves into a metaphorical corner as much because they've taken steps to ensure the piece comes out well - for example, by getting reference art, doing perspective or construction lines, or practice drawings.
I wonder if this idea also works for learning art? Let's find out.
Let's see you do that, ChatGPT / DALL-E! Wait, what happens if we try it?
Ha-ha! Three strikes, you're out! (ChatGPT tried and failed three times to generate this image). DALL-E may be a better renderer than me, but it isn't better at imagining the things that I want to imagine.
No plans on giving up drawing soon.
-the Centaur
P.S. This is Porsche the Centaur again, this time with construction lines drawn in pencil, later erased. The upside-down nature made it hard to get the hooves right, and I didn't want to re-draw it, so it could have come out better. But! It went much faster practicing in the smaller "One Trick Pony" notebook. Onward!
