OffSetLab

It's been a while since I last assembled my thoughts regarding artwork. The 365 challenge is progressing nicely. The sketchbook I mentioned was filled and closed some weeks ago. I bought a new one and am over two thirds into the challenge now. I used that opportunity to get some felt tip pens so I started inking as well. I did a small motivational post about art on my deviantArt account. I try to upload images weekly in the scrapbook so there's a rhythm to it. Right now I'm trying to relax as much as I can so it becomes a second nature to me.

Reading up on the last art post, here's what I've learned so far. Go small and don't be afraid of doing thumbnails. It is good to create a composition this way. For detailed work, go big. It's easier to scale down digitally when needed. Drawing from observation is very different from drawing from imagination. Having something displayed in front of you makes it that much easier to depict it on paper. You still have to construct and you know by comparison if what you're drawing is wrong. When doing things from imagination, it's that much harder because you have to keep an image in your mind. The concentration is crucial in this because it helps you become more observant. Although, when you do get something of the imagined object on paper it becomes easier. There's something to hold on to. This leads me to the reference lines.

Aside from the vertical and horizontal lines on your paper of choice, it is possible to help yourself by drawing vertical and horizontal lines where needed. They help angle the subject and keep it vertical or tilt it if needed so when you do it it's on purpose and not accidentally skewed. Having those, and having the construction lines helps a lot.

People traverse through various stages of drawing. First is capturing the gesture. You don't have to be careful here and can be as messy as you want. The point is that you should be quick because in this way your mind doesn't get the time to overthink things. Only to feel. You can practice this. It gets something quickly on the paper so you can use it as a reference and it gives a natural energy to the result of the drawing process.

The second is constructing the object. Depending on whether imagination is used, which requires knowledge (anatomy for instance), or whether observation is used, which requires a keen eye, the object can be measured and constructed. Take your time here. Use construction lines. This is like building foundations. A good construction is the key to a successful image. Ignore all the other aspects like values, color, texture. Focus only on the shape and the form.

Taking your time is crucial because people usually focus on speed. Speed will come with experience. Even though you can set up the pomodoro technique alarms for yourself and work with constraints to achieve creativity, you don't want to stress yourself. You will want to enjoy the making of the art. This is what will keep you pushing. If you want to digress here, you can check out the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Back on track. If you are satisfied with the drawing, you are free to clean up the mess. Either with an eraser, with a new tracing paper or with a new layer if you're working digitally. You might get frustrated with erasing here because the paper cannot take erasing anymore or cannot absorb graphite. These are common problems that don't happen digitally. It has happened to me and here are some things that helped me. For one, you can do everything digitally. Or you can ignore that there's a mess and clean it up after scanning it. There are non-photo blue pencils that you can use and eliminate them after the scanning process as well. The most important thing that you must come to terms with is not taking it as a failure. You can always throw it away and start anew. It's not like you lost time. You learned something while doing it. Count your blessings.

In the line drawing, depending on the light source, the lines in shadow can be fat, and the ones in light thin or broken. You can further emphasize that in your work.

The method can diverge from now on. I tend not to bother myself with texture and color at this stage and instead focus only on values. The key is representing the object simply enough to get the mind of the observer to fill in the blanks. I lightly draw the outlines of the shapes that represent the values here. The values can be simple enough to be represented with three to five shades. You can ignore the transition and group together what you can. They say squint your eyes. This just bugged me to no end every time I encountered it. When I contract the lenses in my eyes it just puts the entire image out of focus and blurs it. You can also take a photo of the thing you're drawing. Convert it to grayscale, blur and posterize to get the shapes to appear.

You can start thinking about the texture information before doing the values. Metal has a high falloff so the values are separated more than on skin. If the material is smooth, maybe you want to blend and if it's not, maybe you just want to hatch or stipple. The last two techniques are mandatory when inking because ink is binary. It's either there or not. I find that the hatching with the lines following the form of the object works for me. The end result is not that flat.

When doing the texture you need to know two things. You can emphasize the texture on the contour and the texture is only a repeating pattern. You can put dots, lines, circles, hatch, i.e. do whatever pattern you think of and just repeat it. The texture, for example, scales of a fish, can just be hinted and you let the observer fill in the blanks. Draw a few of them and that's usually enough.

Depending on how your mind works, you can jump from technique to technique without thinking too much. Speaking of which, think in layers. It's easier to put the value in first and then texture over it. Also think of layers as the distance in depth between objects. The distant objects can be drawn thin, light and broken, but the close objects are using bolder strokes. Depending where the focus is, right?

Nowadays I tend to finish a sketch by using an inking pen over a pencil and I have to be careful in that part of work. That's why I allow myself to be messy with a pencil. Remember the binary thing? I have to use heavy texturing work where needed here. Of course, some things I fill in with black because I simplify it that way and it makes that distinct effect that the ink has. You can also go wild with the texture. When the ink is dry, I clean up with an eraser and all that I'm left with is the inked drawing.

With the detail work in the end you can make the things pop. The devil is in the details so make sure that you emphasize the things that matter and obscure the ones that are not important to the image. We tend to focus only on one thing. Don't make the background of the composition important because you'll distract the viewer's attention from the main object. Of course, if that is your intention, then ignore what I said. The rules can also be broken.

You can always fix the mistakes in the post processing on a PC. Keep that in mind, but don't use it as a crutch. In the following artsy posts, I'll probably talk about color if I manage to feel confident using it. Anyway, remember to have fun.

In the wake of the announcement of Breakthrough Starshot where the humanity plans to scale the distance between our star system and the Alpha Centauri, we're also publishing the new Solar Projector. The majority of it is only a cosmetic makeover, but a new satellite source has been added. It is the DSCOVR, which is currently publishing data in the experimental phase.

Vesna played around with ES6 here, but the general concept is still the same: learn the fundamentals first and move on from there. I updated the back-end and created some bugs with it. They should be fixed now, but since there likely aren't many visitors coming to this site, things occasionally being broken should not be a big deal. As far as hobby projects go, this one might eventually be ready for other eyes as well, but we'll think about putting it out there more once we feel satisfied with it.

For the reference, this is the old version:

and this is the new version:

We still have some plans with it, but these should be implemented in the coming months with yet another new version.

While the nations are bickering over Panama papers, the climate change news are worrying with every day passing. The matters of politics are going to become second hand when we're facing the ecological catastrophe and possible extinction. Vesna and I want to visit the Great Barrier Reef in the coming years, but it could be a sight not to see due to coral bleaching event encompassing most of the reef now.

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest biomass conglomerate on the planet and it was selected one of the seven natural wonders by BBC. It can also be seen from space. The rising temperatures and the ocean acidification brought about by human activities are causing the coral to expel the symbiotic Zooxanthellae that, among other side effects, give it the distinct vibrant color. When the temperatures get lower, the protozoa return. If not, the coral is in danger of dying. The bleaching has been occurring more frequently in the past several years and I hope that by the time we get to visit the reef, the El Niño period will have passed and we might still see some color in the reef.

Considering the temperature shock and the change in the ocean chemistry where the acidity and temperature will rise, it is estimated that the coral will die off this century. The melting ice layer causes the redistribution of the mass on the planet and it affects the rotation wobble. After the loss of the Aral Sea and Lake Poopó and now the wobble incident, the extinction of the coral is not difficult to imagine happening in the future. Furthermore, the recent study from the Science magazine shows that the estimated increase in temperature might actually be bigger than expected. This is a serious blow to the biodiversity of the planet.

With Japan reporting it's whale killing and that we're still seeing the whale population going extinct with the Southern Right Whale dying off in spite of "being saved" I am really skeptical about the future.

James Hansen in the interview for the Yale Environment 360 last week mentioned a series of alarming facts like losing coastal areas, affecting of the oceanic current, extinction of species... The list goes on and on.

We went to Greece just recently and that explains the absence of articles on the web here and the general slowdown of the things I have yet to do. My phone is dying and I'm coping with its demise by photographing the drawings in various ways. I'm still waiting for the ARA initiative to kick off. In the mean time, using CyanogenMod is making things faster sometimes if nothing.

Ingredients:

• 400 g tomatoes
• 1 red chili
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 medium eggplants
• 2 leeks
• 500 g button mushrooms
• olive oil
• basil, oregano, white pepper, salt, sugar
• medium hard to hard cheeses
• lasagna leaves

Preparation:

Blend the tomatoes, chili and garlic. You'll need them later. Peel and cut the eggplants into 1 cm slices and rub some salt into them. Let them rest for half an hour or so, so they lose the bitterness, and then drain them. You can rinse them with boiling water if you're afraid they might still be bitter. Cut them additionally into 1 cm cubes. Prepare the mushrooms by cutting them into 1 cm pieces and prepare the leeks by cutting them into small rings.

First heat some olive oil and put the leeks in. Sauté them until soggy and then add mushrooms and eggplants. Sprinkle some salt to speed up frying. After it's nicely fried, add the blended tomatoes with garlic and chili and mix everything well. Keep it on medium heat. It will eventually shrink in volume a bit. You can add more salt (but keep in mind that the cheeses could be salty as well), and add sugar to counter the sourness of the tomatoes. When it's to your liking, add other spices (basil, oregano, white pepper). Mix well and remove from heat.

In a deep pan prepare the lasagna by oiling the pan and adding the first layer of lasagna leaves. Add the mixture, cover with grated cheese and repeat the steps until you fill the container or run out of ingredients. I leave the last layer uncovered and I don't use béchamel in this recipe. After it is layered, put it in the oven for 20 minutes on 200 degrees. Serve warm with some rocket salad if you want.

Notes:

You can probably use tomato sauce here and chili garlic sauce if you don't have a blender. It would also be OK to add béchamel if you want, but we didn't want to overload the meal with extra calories or blanket the other tastes. Basil and oregano are here to enhance the tomato. Otherwise, the idea is to have a good filler for lasagna.

The year 2015 has so far been the warmest year since we started measuring the temperatures. The rising average of temperatures due to the climate change is coupled with the El Niño dry period so the droughts we experience in this period are even further exacerbated.

What's El Niño exactly? It's a dry and warm period of the temperature cycle in the Pacific Ocean that mostly affects the coastal countries in the tropical area.

The influence of El Niño, and the corresponding wet period coming after it, La Niña, is not geographically localized because the winds and the changes in the ocean affect global weather patterns.

As the temperatures rise due to the climate change, the land is dried up of any moisture. Over time this even leads to extreme alterations in the planet's geographical features.

Remember the disappearance of the Aral Sea? The same thing is happening again now with the Lake Poopó drying up.

Because of the cycle of water, the evaporated water comes down in form of rain in other locations, sometimes causing massive floods. This flooding happened in 2014 in Southeast Europe, and this winter in the Great Britain and Ireland. In many instances the aged infrastructure is not prepared for this influx of water and the soil itself is hydrologically unable to absorb the excess in a short amount of time. People lose their homes and lives.

Aside from the Great Britain and Ireland, people were affected by flooding in 2015 in South America and North America in the eastern Missouri area as well. China got hit a couple of months ago, too.

We're already witnessing again the death, homelessness, hunger and poverty due to this, and the sustained damage across the globe will affect the structure of financial aid (as financial resources are spread thin) and the global resource distribution (destruction of agricultural areas, for example).

These catastrophes unmistakably bring to light the inefficiencies and fundamental flaws of the mitigation measures already in place, as well as the state systems' negligence and inertia when it comes to preparing for the inevitable next round.

However, no amount of shouting into the void (or the favorite comment section) how the system is broken can help, but rolling up our sleeves and working on our own habits is something we can do - reducing our carbon footprint and doing our part to lessen the effect the humanity has on the environment.