Brand new Dave Cat artwork – GO! :D I assimilate your kitty, for we are Dave Cat and we are many…
Marlon Brando – ALL YOUR KITTY ARE BELONG TO US!
So it begins. I’ve created a new twitter feed here:
twitter.com/IamDaveCat – @IamDaveCat hashtags: #davecat #IamDaveCat #allyourkittyarebelongtous
…and a Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/I-am-Dave-Cat/171399959561629
Lots more silliness to come – for I am Dave Cat – ALL YOUR KITTY ARE BELONG TO US!
All 15minute poses this week, so low volume of drawings. For some reason it all ended up going a bit mental! The first head worm of the new year makes an appearance alongside a raft of Dave-style distorted weirdness. Don’t ask me why, I just work here… :D
As ever click the thumbnails below for Full size images – enjoy the stupidity!
Today I’ve been geeking out taking photographs of a couple of etchings that I created yesterday. I’m still testing out techniques of replicating the drawings from my sketchbook, but I’m happy that I’ve got a good way of doing it now. I’ll do a step by step run through of the process at some point. I certainly takes a lot longer to re-create a drawing than produce it live at life class, that’s for sure. Here’s a stack of photos to nerd out with…
Click the thumbnails below for more… enjoy!
It begins! :D
Had a really weak session (IMO anyways…) on the standard drawing front this week – but I think that’s in no small part due to the fact that I was itching to get on and try my hand at dry-point etching live at Life Class! :D – Its exactly how I hoped it would be, I’ve already caught the bug… Here’s my very first ever proper etching from life:
Apparently Aluminium plates are the thing to use for dry-point etching, not copper plates like I expected. Maybe its cost, maybe its an easier material to work with, who knows does the job tho! I was very pleased with how the 2nd one also turned out:
Cool beans! I’m going to enjoy this etching lark :D I couldn’t resist having a little play in photoshop to give an idea of what a print from the image will look like, so I tweaked the levels for contrast, reversed it out to a negative image and flipped horizontally:
Cool! Its always a bit odd looking at the mirror image of something that was drawn ‘the right way round’, but heh ho, there’s no way round that if you are etching from life and straight to print. I’ll be using some of the images that I have been previously testing to see what happens over the weekend when I try to etch plates from drawings that are pre-reversed out so the final print is the right way round.
So, I’d say that was a successful first run – all systems go for project print the shit out of everything! Here’s the other sketchbook images from tonight for posterity:
And as usual click the images for full screen versions and use the arrows top and bottom of the screen to navigate (apologies for repetition of the prints, not sure how to selectively display images in slideshows and galleries…) – til next time… :D
I wrote this in response to someone talking about the Horizon program on last night called ‘what is reality’ – at this point I still haven’t seen this program yet, but it made me think about a program with Ben Miller last week called ‘what is a degree’… this is what I wrote:
here goes… *deep breath
So while I enjoy shows that proclaim to uncover reality, what they really do is explore a certain model of what they think reality is.
That’s why the ‘what is a degree’ show was so fascinating. It peeled back the layers of what we know and experience right down to pure simple science. I wish I’d paid more attention, but there was an experiment to show what happens to liquids when you approach absolute zero – if I remember right (and I fucking hope I do!) it showed that liquid can flow through previously solid objects because of a weird quantum effect near absolute zero when the molecules in the liquid have no energy. You can never reach absolute zero, its a physical impossiblity – like running out of numbers calculating pi. But temperatures approaching absolute zero cause matter to act in a quantum way. Heat as a concept was discounted in the programme as the measure of heat is simply how quickly atoms etc vibrate due to the amount of energy they have. Higher energy, the molecules vibrate faster = more heat given off. Lower the energy the molecules vibrate more slowly, less heat is given off. If you take away all energy you are at absolute zero and all molecules are still, which is a physical impossibility. But at temperatures approaching absolute zero molecules are as near as fuck it still, and begin to exhibit quantum behaviour. There are no ‘bonds’ between the molecules, no movement or energy to keep things together so they just flow. The only law of physics left to cause an effect on the molecules is gravity, so liquid stays at the bottom of the jar in the experiment and simply falls through anything at the same temperature.
‘Edit’ – Excellent, here is the clip in question from Horizon ‘what is a degree’. Lets see If I have remembered correctly…!
So, what I’ve learnt :D Without energy the entire universe would be still, matter (and antimatter, whatever else is out there I suppose) would be entirely still, but if you were to push it, it would just flow. There is no gravity, because there is no mass, as mass requires energy to exist by definition (this is what E=MC2 states). But we have established that absolute zero is impossible, so that means there is always a chance of a wrinkle, or a kink setting in to motion something that starts very small but eventually grows in to something very very, big and very very hot and full of energy, until drawing together unfathomable amounts of matter BANG it explodes until everything eventually dies back to cold and lifeless. Then like shoots in the spring it begins again. There is no concept of the amount of matter in the universe, nor of the concept of time, they are both irrelevant – the only thing that matters is that you cannot reach absolute zero, so ‘mutation’ will always spontaneously occur – friction making energy grow into gravity and all that.
…and that is the life the universe and everything in a nutshell. :D
e2a. There’s a couple of points obviously!
What is the Maximum temperature you can reach? I’m sure plasma has some weird properties at those mega high temperatures.
And what happens to solids at near absolute zero? … mind you they had roses in liquid nitrogen (or whatever) that just shattered because the bond between atoms are so weak, because they have so little energy. So I assume solid rock would just crumble to dust under its own weight and fall under gravity to the bottom of a jar
ee2a: It could also be part of everything that exhibits this behaviour of expansion/contraction – or everything all at once, or all at the same time, or not. How long it takes to do things is relative only to the thing it is being done to. Quite a lot of possibilites…!
eee2a: Reading the post again this morning, I think I now understand E=MC2. A couple of nuggets from Wikipedia (thanks Jimmy Wales):
The equation E = mc2 indicates that energy always exhibits mass in whatever form the energy takes
Mass-energy equivalence is also explained:
Mass–energy equivalence does not imply that mass may be “converted” to energy, and indeed implies the opposite. Modern theory holds that neither mass nor energy may be destroyed, but only moved from one location to another. In physics, mass must be differentiated from matter, a more poorly defined idea in the physical sciences. Matter, when seen as certain types of particles, can be created and destroyed, but the precursors and products of such reactions retain both the original mass and energy, both of which remain unchanged (conserved) throughout the process.
…and finally when you look at what the equation actually means, you see that it very neatly fits in with the quantum properties of materials near Absolute Zero:
where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum. The formula is dimensionally consistent and does not depend on any specific system of measurement units. For example, in many systems of natural units, the speed (scalar) of light is set equal to 1 (‘distance’/’time’), and the formula becomes the identity E = m'(‘distance’2/’time’2)’; hence the term “mass–energy equivalence”
so in this instance if E = 1, then M = 1 and C2 = 1.
so there!
eeee2a: More information on Particle theory, as explained on QI! Seems I’ll be looking into the ‘Higgs Field’ for future posts…
Happy New year! :D
Another year, another life drawing session – that’s the way we roll… ‘Rusty’. Rusty is the word I’d describe the way I felt during this session, but nothing a bit of artistic WD40 won’t sort out. Its all very exciting here, I’ve signed up for a couple of 1 on 1 refresher courses in Dry point etching and printing at Spike Print, Bristol – so this year I will finally put my plans into action and put versions of my life drawing up for sale! exciting – much! :D I’ll write a whole bunch more on this in the months to come, but for now, here’s the drawings from tonights’ session – warts and all as ever – I draw it, you see it! :D
As ever, to view the images in glorious full screen-o-vision, click one of the thumbnails below and use the navigation arrows top and bottom of the page to scroll through the images – catch you soon!
A few more tests for the dry point etching process…
Tried this one using a pre-prepared 1:1 ratio grid/image:
This was a bit frustrating because I didn’t have the detail available in the original source image because it was that bit smaller, so even though I thought it should make it easier – it didn’t. I thought I’d give it a shot overlaying the 2 images to see how close I got to the original by trying to do this 1:1 technique by eye:
Quite difficult to see, but looking at the 1st image the waist doesn’t quite work, makes the new image a bit shapeless… hmmm.
So the last test was a mix of everything I’ve been trying. I used a 1:1 image as well as an original A4 sized image with grid using that for the detail and the 1:1 sized one for size reference:
This gives the most pleasing result, getting quite close to what I want to achieve. It looks quite natural and close to the original, so lets see what it looks like overlayed:
Definitely closer than the previous test, especially on the back, but still quite a ways off in other areas.
I think I’ve taken testing as far as I can here. The next step is to get myself on a refresher course and in a print studio. There I can look at techniques like printing the image reference onto shiny paper and ironing that directly onto a copper plate and scratching through the heat-laid ink using that as a guide – very similar to proper animation clean up from blue pencil drawings to solid lines for scanning and digital painting. Not sure if that will work or whether it will kill the energy of the drawings as I’d just be replicating the image exactly and not adding that extra spark and energy that free-hand drawing from reference gives. There’ll be a happy medium somewhere, and I’ll find it!
Dave Cropley 