Design Tool Archives

Reuleaux Triangle

The Reuleaux Triangle, named after Franz Reuleaux, is this odd roundy triangle, which would hardly seem worth naming after someone, except for one unusual feature: However you turn it, one side is always the same distance from the opposite side. If you were to put a board on a couple of Reuleaux Triangles, it would have a perfectly smooth ride rolling on them. So what you say? A circle does the same thing? You know how whatever shape drill you use, the holes always come out round? A Reuleaux drill can drill square holes. Not even Chuck Norris can do that.

There are three dimensional equivalents as well:

These shapes of constant width have other uses besides looking funny and drilling square holes. Any time you invent a different way for machines to translate one type of motion into another, you have great potential for new inventions. I suspect this one is under-utilized.

Pastels on the Plaza 2011

Pastels on the Plaza time again. My entry above (click for actual size), for the lovely and talented Genevieve Schmidt, a local landscape designer and garden writer. See her work in this month’s Fine Gardening Magazine pages 42-47, as well as this month’s issue of Pacific Horticulture.

We arrived at the Arcata plaza at seven in the morning with a fist full of sidewalk chalk, art ideas in the other hand, and a bag full of new tricks to try out. The weather was ominous. I’d heard rumors flying for a few days about the big storm coming in and estimates for when it would hit.

The weather was great though. It was overcast and warm, though I imagine it will all be washed away in a muddy rainbow in a day or two. Keep in mind that these vary a lot in size, most being either three by three feet or three by six, but I’ve mostly cropped them to the same width, so if the rectangular ones look more detailed, it’s because they are shrunk twice as much. It took me about five hours. These entries are all done by local artists and paid for by donations from local businesses for a local children’s charity. Let’s take a look at this year’s event:

That pastel for Moonstone Grill in the front with the fun shape was done by local author Joan Dunning. I should really take more of these shots, but things are usually so crowded. If you look at the upper left of the image you can see a rare Tibetan Mastiff. I love the red reinterpretation of Starry Night as well.

Above we have the entry by Leah Vaughn for Holly Yashi Jewelry. And below, her husband, graphic designer Casey Vaughn for Tomas jewelry.

This was the first year for Susan Fridley, the artist of the below entry for A to Z Eye Care. Pretty good for a first try!

This one by Primal Decor Body Art Studio is a contender for best of show in my opinion.

I wish I had gotten to watch Renaissance Painting Company work. I’d be interested to see their process.

Duane Flatmo was there of course. It just wouldn’t be the same without him. When I mentioned to him that I had seen his SteamPunk octopus from Burning Man on The Huffington Post, he hunted down a flyer for me, which I’ve put a scan of below his entry below.

The Humboldt Area Foundation had real leaves mixed in with the pastel.

B&B Porta Potties clearly has a healthy sense of humor with their flowers below.

I’ve worked in the rain before. I’ve worked in the wind. I’ve worked in the sun. Each has its own challenges. For anyone out there who may be attempting this kind of thing for the first time, I’ll pass on a few of the things I’ve learned.

You can work wet, or you can work dry, but you really need to decide at the beginning, Trying to spray water on pastel after it is on the ground just kicks up chalk and then beads up and sits. Working wet will get you richer colors, smoother blending, and an almost total inability to deal with mistakes. Once the wet chalk goes somewhere, trying to remove it or alter it just makes mud. Working dry lets you change everything as you go, and gets you finer detail, but builds up dust and sometimes doesn’t adhere well. Below is this year’s entry by Alan Sanborn, a talented watercolor artist. He works wet and with brushes.

Paintbrushes are great if you are working wet and those foam ones work better than expected. If you are working dry, it just flings everything about like a broom. This year I was working dry, and I brought an old towel and cut it up into pieces. It worked much better than a brush for blending crumbs into the sidewalk and mixing colors. We also brought a Dust Buster for when we had chalk buildup and didn’t want to blow it on the neighbors. I highly recommend it.

I prefer to work dry, but sometimes the weather doesn’t make it an option. I work wet when it’s raining or windy. Morning or evening sun casts a lot of shadows, which add to the difficulty of keeping track of perspective while sitting on your work. I end up sitting on wet grass most of the morning, but this is easily solved by getting a good bath mat to sit on with a solid rubber backing. If it’s thick enough, it is also a good alternative to knee-pads when kneeling on cement.

I leave you with a few more honorable mentions:

Update:

Looking around for press coverage I came across this youtube video posted by radmul:

And an image from someone flying over:

Arcata Plaza overhead

Your Problem May Not Be What You Think it is

Dailymail has a story about a 21 year old girl who destroyed the left hemisphere of her brain in a car crash. It may seem strange to even be alive at all with only half of your brain, but Taisia Sidorova has shown an artistic ability she didn’t show before the crash, as seen in the painting above.

I often hear people saying they don’t have artistic talent, like it is just something other people are born with. There are aptitudes certainly, but mostly it is about getting the overly analytical portion of your brain to stay out of your way and let you work. When most people try to draw someone’s portrait for the first time, they start by drawing a head, or an eye, or a nose. The results are cartoonish and unflattering because they are drawing their mind’s stereotype rather than just looking at what is right in front of them. If you look at Taisia’s painting above, the overall effect is like a photograph, while the art is in the color, brush stroke, and impression of the scene.

If you’ve ever tried to learn how to draw from a book, it goes something like this:

This just isn’t the right approach. Drawing isn’t a step by step process. My first great sketch I drew in a circle, like the movement of clock hands, fully completed. It seems like a crazy way to work to me now, but the ability in in perception, not in technique.

Years ago, I read a book with some great tricks for getting around those mental blocks. I recommend to anyone who would like to improve their artistic abilities, even if they feel like they are starting from nothing. Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. She’s also got some other good books on things like improving creativity and getting around the artist’s equivalent of writer’s block.

Ten Million Dollar Idea?

I’m a big fan of X-Prize style innovation. Instead of hiring a research team, and building a whole facility to research a subject, just start adding to a prize fund for whoever the first person is to give you the answer you seek. This way, you end up getting facilities, minds, correlations, and other resources you may not have realized existed working for you, all without paying a cent until you see results.

Several years ago, Google started a project along these lines, asking the public for their ideas to change the world. They offered big connections and prize money to those ideas they chose as the best. They ended up far behind schedule, and I wasn’t that impressed with their choices in the end, but I like that they tried. My submission is below:

A data path exists for processing credit and debit transactions at stores. Use this system to upload store receipts to online accounts. The customer could then use their account at home (like online banking) to use this information as they see fit, and the aggregated data could be used to varying degrees (allowing for privacy) to better the retail system.

Like online banking or Amazon recommendations, it could be both secure and useful to all involved.
Allows people to track their own spending in an interactive fashion while saving manhours.
Potential for adsense like contextual marketing.
Could merge with personal finance software, calculate nutritional intake for dieters, alert people with allergies. etc.
Affects a large portion of the world (everywhere you want to be).
Employers can keep tabs on company credit card usage.
Checkboxes to make easy tallying and splitting of bills for roomates.
Reminders or suggestions for recurring purchases.
Easy to find one click tech support, manuals for bought products.
Competing stores could send advertising telling you how much you would have saved shopping with them.
Quicky target customers with product recalls. This could have prevented many deaths recently in China.
Could integrate with massive medical databases to find hidden correlations between products and health.
Manufacturers could target customers with coupons and offers.
Environmental: Saves paper on receipts, manuals, coupons, advertisements, as well as the other impacts from creation and delivery of such products.
Google is one of the very few companies with the resources, expertise, and trustworthiness to make this a reality. If you don’t do it, who will?

What problem or issue does your idea address?

Waste Management
Deforestation
Clutter
Wasted man-hours
Unnoticed product recalls
Compulsive spending
Allergic reactions
Credit Fraud
Running out of milk
Lost product manual/warranty
Advertising wasted on the uninterested
Medical research
Landfills

Involuntary Collaboration

Involuntary collaboration- Monsters in landscape paintings

Involuntary collaboration refers to a project contributed to by multiple parties in which at least one of those parties did not intend to be working with the others. Examples include things like covers of songs, spoofs of movies, and in the case of the pictures above (painted in part by Chris McMahon), unwanted landscape paintings bought at yard sales, which he then painted monsters into. I think they’re brilliant, and would be a perfect DIY project to hang in your kid’s room, or send to your grandmother.

A similar process (seen below from The Monster Engine), has adults upgrading children’s drawings of monsters to add realism. Sometimes the toughest thing for an artist can be just sitting in front of the canvas wondering what to paint, or going through all the trouble of painting a whole landscape when what they really want to paint is a big hairy monster, and it can be hard to throw away original artwork, even if it is boring.

Children's Drawing Collaboration

Update: It looks like more people have been picking up on this idea.

Dave Pollot and his thrift store paintings:

UFO stuck in the mud

Involuntary Collaborations

Plastic Molding

plastic molding

Liquid plastic casting resins tend to be expensive and have set properties that limit your flexibility. Mikey77 has come up with his own material out of materials so common, chances are you already have them. Best of all, you choose the color, viscosity, and set time yourself based on your needs.

He calls the stuff Oogoo, a name reminiscent of Sugru, an off the shelf product with very similar properties. In a nutshell, his recipe is very simple, just mix corn starch with silicone caulk.

The problem with silicone is that it takes a long time to dry from the outside in, the corn starch allows it to dry from the inside out, and very quickly. The ingredients are pretty safe and stable, so you can mix in your own dyes and other ingredients. Check out his full instructable here.

Getting Through Math Class With ADHD

If you are anything like me, math class was only good for one thing: Quieting down that analytical part of the brain long enough to get in some good doodling, which is why, in order to pass a math class, I had to stop bringing paper and just hope I could absorb something from the lecture before passing out from boredom. Now I find I just had the wrong teacher. If Vi Hart were my teacher, I think I would have learned at lightning speed. Check out the videos above for a sample.

Here’s another:

If you like the concept of learning math, but don’t relish the slogging through textbooks, I highly recommend her site. I actually learned some very helpful things in most of the videos I’ve watched so far, and I enjoyed it. http://vihart.com/

Hologram Maker

Cityscape Hologram

ZebraImaging is by far the best hologram maker I’ve seen. Their ZScape™ holograms are huge, hi resolution, color, have a strong 3D effect, and are almost perfectly smooth in motion. These things compare to the bird on your credit card like an Etch-a-Sketch does to an I-Max. Check out the video below, it’s pretty stunning.

Zebra Imaging sells their pulse laser hologram printers, as well as selling and making hologram prints. Their pricing isn’t bad either, considering the quality and size. Most people could afford a print if they made it a priority in their life. Hopefully the price will come down further soon.

Tilt Shifting Paintings

Tilt shifting in photography is when you deliberately put your lens out of line with the sensor in such a way that it changes the focus on the sensor/film rather than just based on distance of objects and depth of field. The resulting photos and videos trick the eye into thinking it is seeing a tiny scale model rather than something miles away. A similar effect can be created through video/image editing. In the above pictures, artcyclopedia has added an effect similar to tilt shift via software to several of Van Gogh’s works (click the picture to see their full gallery and the originals). I love the effect.

I think the kind of visual cues we take from tilt shifted photography are to some extent a product of the photographic age. We are used to seeing two dimensional representations of three dimensional space as seen through the single eye of a camera. When you look at a real scene through two eyes, whatever you are looking at is in focus, while anything out of focus is blurry and doubled (and by definition, not what you are currently looking at). One of the flaws with the current round of 3D movies is that while things have depth cues based on sending a different signal to each eye, there is no adjustable depth of field based on what you are looking at. The focus of any given object is chosen by the camera, rather than the viewer, and the whole image is the same distance away, even if each eye sees a different angle.

I did a little experimenting on my own to get a better understanding of things. I think the choice of impressionism is a good one. Impressionists have a tendency to capture the soul of a thing crisply, but without much detail. This means that when you blur a background, it looks believable rather than smeared. Creating this effect in Photoshop can be pretty simple.

Part of what makes tilt shift photography make things look miniature is the difference distance makes to depth of field. In tilt shift, focus is much more independent of distance. In a large scale photo, once you are focused a ways out, it tends to focus to infinity. Painters tend to make their paintings fully focused at all distances, which improves clarity, but degrades the feeling of depth. With a tilt shift effect I wanted to choose a subject in the composition, bring the eye to them, and then create the illusion of depth in the rest of the image by virtue of knowing where the eye is already looking. This is counter to one of the usual goals of composition: To keep the eye moving. Below is a Monet I found with a quick image search that served my needs nicely for a very simplified test.

The alterations I made can be seen below. I don’t think it made the image nicer, but I think it accomplished my compositional goal of directing the eye and holding it on the subject.

I chose it because it covers a vast distance, contains a subject to draw the eye, and has a tree that exists within the plane of focus, but in front of an area that I planned to blur. The clarity of the tree is what makes the end result different from what you would see with a tilt shift lens. This only took a few minutes. Below are the steps I took. If you have a copy of Photoshop, give it a shot. It’s a good skill to have in your repertoire.

After opening the image, duplicate your background layer and work in the duplicate.
Select anything outside your intended focus area that needs to remain sharp. In this case, the tree and the canopy on the right.
Click on Select/Inverse.
Click the add layer mask button in your layers pallet.
Click select/Reselect.
Click on the gradient tool and make sure you have it set to a black to white reflected gradient.
Click on the part of your image that should remain focused and drag toward the edge of the picture perpendicular to the intended strip of focus and release.
Right Click on the layer mask and click on Apply Layer Mask.
Click on Filter/Blur/Gaussian blur, and drag the slider to create the blur.

I’m sure you can find a more long winded tutorial somewhere, but if you have a moderate knowledge of Photoshop, this should suffice as a bare bones process to get you started.

Self Sharpening Pencil

This mechanical pencil from Japan has an internal gear system that automatically rotates the lead as you go, keeping it sharp at the tip. I’m he kind of person who will just walk into a pen store and spend fifteen minutes trying them all out to find the best ones. I can’t stand writing with those gummy-inked bic pens. that always leak, fail, and skip. It’s about time the rest of us started to appreciate quality again. It’s one of the things that made this country great. What we purchase makes a difference to what is made, who succeeds, and who does not. Buy quality. Buy Innovation. It will lead to more of the same.

This Kuru Toga pencil can be found at amazon