Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
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.
-the Centaur
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.
-the Centaur
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:
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.
Loki, trying to pull off his best Le Chat Noir:
He moved before I could get a good closeup, though, because Loki is a cat.
-the Centaur
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 Centaur
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.
What an amazing universe.
-the Centaur
Again from the Goldman book, this time the frontispiece.
-the Centaur
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.
-the Centaur
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.
My horse drawing book was too big to fit in my bookbag, so today's exercise is from the cover of Drawing Hands and Feet by Ken Goldman.
-the Centaur
So! I'm working on a series of stories set on a tidally locked moon called Failaka, orbiting a "hot Jupiter" called Tylos around an even hotter star called Dilmun. I don't know if anything like Failaka exists, but Tylos is a real planet originally designated WASP-121b, orbiting a star called, um, WASP-121, about 850 light years from Earth.
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.
If you see this unprotected, you will die.
The good news? Cremation is free.
-the Centaur
More practice from Foster's book. I was shy on time, so I didn't start with the proportions diagram, but with the parts diagram, and therefore the proportions of my parts are a bit off. But, it's a step.
-the Centaur
... 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.
-the Centaur
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:
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.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My drawing desk and books on drawing.
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!
Okay, I'm going to start out with the best of the images that I produced trying to create Porsche the Centaur using ChatGPT's DALL-E interface. The above is ... almost Porsche, though her ears are too high (centaurs in the Alliance universe have ears a little more like an elf, but mobile like a dog's). And, after some coaxing, the ChatGPT / DALL-E hybrid managed to produce a halfway decent character sheet:
But both of these images came after several tries. And when I tried to get ChatGPT / DALL-E to generate a front and back view of the same character sheet, it just disintegrated into random horse and human parts:
Similarly, the initial centaur image came only after many prompt tweaks and false starts, like this one:
There are legitimate questions about whether the current round of AI art generators were trained on data taken without permission (they almost certainly were), whether they could displace human artists (they almost certainly will), and whether they will have destructive effects on human creativity (the jury is out on this one, as some forms of art will wane while new forms of art will wax).
But never let anyone tell you they've worked out all the bugs yet. These systems are great renderers at the image patch level, but their notion of coherence leaves a lot to be desired, and their lack of structural knowledge means their ability to creatively combine is radically limited to surface stylistics.
One day we'll get there. But it will take a lot of work.
-the Centaur
The Neurodiversiverse submission window has finally closed, Liza and I have triaged the art and assigned the stories, and I'm now digging into my first chunk of the slush pile. Onward!
-the Centaur
Pictured: A universe of science fiction books from nearby Angel's bookstore.
Porsche the Centaur. The joke is, I spent some time organizing my drawing materials, collecting books of exercises to work through, and finding appropriate materials - and she's drawn in a sketchbook which was made from a children's graphic novel called "One Trick Pony".
Quick sketch of Ruby Sunday from "The Church on Ruby Road".
Extra challenging as I am just freehanding this and not using construction lines. Bleh.
-the Centaur
Now, it's not true that I have writer's block: I wrote +600 words on a new story, "Plains of Deathless Ice", a sequel to my recently-submitted story "Shadows of Titanium Rain". But I do seem to have blogger's block, as I had two or three ideas for posts but had great difficulty writing them.
This is not one of those post ideas.
Pfui on you, writer's block.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Some books from my "books wanted" album.
