It's 1:15. I'm cold. My parents would probably be upset if they knew I was still awake. I am upset because I am still awake. I'm out of water and my throat still hurts. My eyes hurt because I have forgotten how to blink. This is a picture of a wind turbine. You may have noticed it is flying. That is because it is a flying wind turbine. Flying wind turbines are cheaper, more flexible and more efficient than their ground-bound counterparts. For instance, a ground turbine would stop being effective if wind ceased. A flying turbine, if wind should cease (which it shouldn't; high altitude winds work differently) could just move to a windier spot. The mills would function in groups so if one malfunctioned all of the others could send out a signal for repairs. These turbines would provide power, but more importantly, WiFi to the area below them. They're pretty great. When I was painting this thing I realized I don't know how to paint dark areas very well. I tend to keep drifting back to light colors. Originally, I had planned for the picture to be rather dark so the lights on the turbines would stand out more, but it was not to be. I also thought it would be a good idea to make the turbine out of the same colors I made the clouds, but it was not a good idea to make the turbine out of the same colors I made the clouds. They blend in too much. But I like the painting anyway. My ear feels like it's trying to run away |
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This project was a breeze, surprisingly enough. I encountered no issues. I just scribbled in some colors and this picture popped out, it was quite uncanny.
It's a picture of a couple of bees meeting their robot counterparts. Robot bees are being made by some smart people at Harvard in order to pollinate plants (a vital process for agriculture) in the place of absent bees, which are becoming more and more common thanks to Colony Collapse Disorder. It is possible that these robot bees could go to an infected hive, carry out the tasks of a drone bee (note that robot bee =/= drone bee) in order to sustain the hive, while all of the infected drone bees fly away and die. After the colony rebuilds, the job of the robot bees will be done. Woohoo
What it does contain is a hover-sled thing in a future version of the Iditarod trail during the Iditarod. The Iditarod is the longest land race in the world, in which (traditionally) mushers get on their dogsleds (AKA Dog-powered snow chariots) and run around Alaska for a long time (9-15 days). The Iditarod has been encountering some issues these last several years, however, as snow on parts of the Iditarod trail are beginning to melt. This is a problem if you plan to travel by sled, a mainly snowborne vessel. In my painting, the issue has worsened quite dramatically, as you can see from the abundant presence of grass in what once was the icy, barren wastelands of Alaska. In possible future, the Iditarod has struggled to find new methods to travel across the suddenly varied landscape of the Iditarod. Then a large tech company (something like SpaceX methinks) would come along and say something like "Hey Iditarod people, we just made this speederbike thing and if you used it we could give you money" and the Iditarod people would be like "Thanks fam" because the word 'fam' will have been absorbed into the English language by the time this occurs.
In the past, group art projects have resulted is some very interesting amorphous blobs. This project is no different. Except this time, the whole point was to make an amorphous blob; which is characterized by being being too abstract to even slightly portray anything, even if that thing is also nearly abstracted beyond recognition, and not being abstract enough to be completely effortless and chaotic. This means that when my partner, Quentin, and I added a bunch of paperclips in an arc around a cutout of a head, and it looked really nice, this apparently made it look too much like a thing that the paperclips had to be uprooted.
Passive aggression aside, I think my Quentin and I managed to make the piece as good as it could be without a crown of paperclips. We got along well; he seemed in a way just as odd as I was. We acquired a Party City magazine and cut out every human (and other, sometimes) face we could find and glued them to a board, as odd people often do. We added some bits and bobs, there was a minor yet highly disappointing kerfuffle regarding paperclips, and then cut out smaller pieces of the board to take home and look at every day to inspire ourselves to become glorious warlords. I let him have the better piece.
I'm not the biggest fan of still life, or drawing things I see every day and things like that. So I'm not entirely sure why I chose to draw a bookshelf. Perhaps it is because I thought it would be simple. Oh, how naive I was those two weeks ago. My poor, vulnerable past self had no idea what he was getting himself into. Specifically, he was getting himself into hours of drawing rectangular prisms and only rectangular prisms. There is nothing in this painting that isn't a rectangular prism. I drew so many rectangular prisms that I had to allocate 70% of my brain power to keeping myself occupied enough to resist doing literally anything else. Everything around me could be interacted with in a way that is more mentally stimulating that drawing rectangular prisms. The rubber bands scattered around the table called out to me. All the neglected paperclips that could be attached to my fingers were laying, fingerless, throughout the room. It was a constant battle between me and my environment. A boring, monotonous battle.
Anyway, that 70% of my brain that wasn't drawing rectangular prisms started to idly imagine some names of the books I was drawing. It started small: "To Mock a Killing Bird", "The Mediocre Gatsby" and so on. This quickly escalated to the more obscure titles: "The Emoji Index", "C-SPAN: The Graphic Novel" until the titles became ridiculous beyond reason with "How Genghis Khan Faked the Moon Landing" and "Proof Vaccines Cause Global Warming". By the time I finally finished drawing rectangular prisms my will to continue drawing had returned. I liked this project a lot. Not necessarily because it looks good, which I think it kind of does, but because it was finished quickly and required little effort. My time was limited in this project not because of my procrastination for a change, but because I was so busy painting apples. So I chose of the sketches I made the one that would A) not look bad, and B) could be finished in ~3 days with minimal overtime. I did end up taking this painting home with me, but I only spent about fifteen minutes or so doing finishing touches. For comparison, this cursed herd of solar-powered robot giraffes I have been drawing for the last week has racked up 8-10 hours at home, and is still only about half done. I daresay I am not as good at drawing robot giraffes as I am at drawing hands, so that is probably a variable, but I am now finding myself wishing everybody just had small robot giraffes attached to their wrists rather than hands. Would that be detrimental to human civilization? Perhaps. Would it take less work for me? Definitely.
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April 2016
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