I ran across this beautiful laser-cut light box design a while ago, maybe from Colossal? These first two images are not mine, they come from this cool Light Box on Amazon (Not an affiliate link, I just think it is cool). Anyway, I found it really inspirational, and since I have a fast path-tracer to play with, I decided to try to make a digital one of these as a sketch.

This is a my friend’s recently departed, and dearly loved cat, Milo. His fur reminded me of the amazing work of the artist Aaron Horkey, and so I did my best to emulate that style. I really struggle with my vision not being what it once was, I’m painting blurry a lot of the time, which is hard. This is a work in progress, there’s still a lot of cleanup to do, but I kinda love it.

There’s this incredible San Francisco artist named Amos Goldbaum, who does these wonderful line illustrations of different neighborhoods in the city. He’s done a few murals, including one on the side of Pinhole Coffee, and I love his style. In addition to using a really consistent line weight, he maintains this very even spacing and curve, and I think it is really beautiful. Here’s one of his neighborhood drawings: I decided to try to (respectfully, and admiringly) mimic his style, just as a way of learning more about Affinity Designer, and getting practice.

After looking at all of Ralph McQuarrie’s Star Wars concept art, I had minimalism and Star Wars on my mind. I started in OmniVerse with a single cube and a single rectangular area light, and built this using only the duplicate function, as well as scaling, rotation, translation, and grouping. This took, all told, about two hours. The system kept crashing when I created more than 3000 or so lights, so I had to prune them.

OmniVerse has real-time cloth simulation in it. After waiting about an hour for Blender to produce a jittery, unstable simulation, it was incredibly fun to make these. As with other simluations in OmniVerse, the result is nondeterministic, different every time you re-run. It was meditative to replay over and over, watching it change in subtle ways.

OmniVerse has a plugin extension in it called “Blast” which breaks objects apart using Voronoi cells. The resulting fracture pieces tend to have very regular, convex-hull shapes, and in this particular implementation, they are also very evenly sized. This tool is not deterministic - every time you run it, it produces a different result. I found that I really loved this - as the physics are in real time (or nearly so), it lends an emphemeral quality to every project.

Towards the end of the day, time was running out. This was an idea that popped in my head, and I was surprised to find that my comfort with general sketching has increased. I think it is a side effect of doing daily aesthetic work, the sketching is flowing more easily.

After inadvertently evoking a forest fire with an earlier image of trees, fog, and red lights, I decided to re-imagine this with green lights instead of red. My original intention was to evoke a cheesy, spooky, x-files type of scene. The green lights achieve this a lot better.