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.

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.

I found an old art book while I was looking in my shelves for some ideas for my daily art. It’s a Japanese collection of Ralph McQuarrie’s concept for Star Wars. Towards the end of the book, there’s this amazing painting, simple and striking, amongs ideas for Coruscant and the Emperor’s Throne Room. Flattened out, but with glare, here’s that incredible, minimal vision. I built a really simple model in Blender, which took a few hours.

I briefly worked, as part of Google Robotics, at a wonderful place called Bot + Dolly that made artwork with giant robots. Everything they did was inventive and playful. They had this ancient Kuka 6-DOF robot that they had acquired from parts unknown. They never got it to work, and eventually sold it for scrap. On the day before it left, I took a few hundred photographs of it, and used them to do photogrammetry inside the open-source software Meshroom.

I’m dipping my toe into Blender and Cycles. I’ve been snobby in the past about Blender, as it didn’t always measure up to more expensive professional tools like Maya. However, as Maya has become bloated and unwieldy and poorly serviced by Autodesk, the passion of the Blender community and the surprising polish of 2.9 makes it pretty fun to get into. For this one, I’m just exploring with path-traced participating media.

I’m dipping my toe into Blender and Cycles. I’ve been snobby in the past about Blender, as it didn’t always measure up to more expensive professional tools like Maya. However, as Maya has become bloated and unwieldy and poorly serviced by Autodesk, the passion of the Blender community and the surprising polish of 2.9 makes it pretty fun to get into. For this one, I’m just exploring with path-traced participating media.

I briefly worked, as part of Google Robotics, at a wonderful place called Bot + Dolly that made artwork with giant robots. Everything they did was inventive and playful. They had this ancient Kuka 6-DOF robot that they had acquired from parts unknown. They never got it to work, and eventually sold it for scrap. On the day before it left, I took a few hundred photographs of it, and used them to do photogrammetry inside the open-source software Meshroom.

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.

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.

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.

I found an old art book while I was looking in my shelves for some ideas for my daily art. It’s a Japanese collection of Ralph McQuarrie’s concept for Star Wars. Towards the end of the book, there’s this amazing painting, simple and striking, amongs ideas for Coruscant and the Emperor’s Throne Room. Flattened out, but with glare, here’s that incredible, minimal vision. I built a really simple model in Blender, which took a few hours.

NVidia OmniVerse is a joy to play around in. Being able to use a real-time pathtracer, with real-time depth of field, it completely changes the way you experiment and explore. I didn’t clean up the scans at all from Meshroom, this is just a straight import into OmniVerse. I used a wood shop HDR dome light, but I found that it was distracting even when defocused. I tried to think physically, how a theater set designer might.

OmniVerse is so much fun to goof around in, particularly with the path-traced volumetric fog. I’m a huge fan of just tying out simple shapes and setups, to just see how the fog affects a scene. This is just a bunch of solid glass cylinders with a large purple area light on the left, and several smaller area lights on the right. It has a fog volume that tapers off as it gets towards camera.

After goofing around with Blender and Cycles, I wanted to compare how the experience of doing path-traced fog in NVidia OmniVerse. This is what I’m working on at work, so using this daily artwork as a way to learn my way around the software is killing two birds with one stone. One of the things that OmniVerse lets you do is have multiple artists collaborating in the same scene at the same time, like collaboratively editing a Google Doc.

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.

Every day does mean every day, even when sometimes that’s hard to find time for. One of the things I’ve learned with this process so far is that you have to explicitly set aside time to do the work, you can’t just hope to find time after the day’s insanity. This one is terrible, and I know it. But… it made me laugh, and it made my friends laugh. Also, I painted this while satching the Snyder Cut of The Justice League.

I had a teacher in art school a long time ago who was really enamoured with painting the light you observed, rather than the objects you perceieved - a single layer of light, rather than outlines and shapes and boundaries. He was particularly interested in semi-transparent surfaces like windshields, with their partial reflections, painted as a single layer. I tried that approach here. One thing that I’m struggling with is that my eyesight has degraded pretty significantly - just age-related presbyopia.

I made a commitment to create a new piece of artwork - digital or otherwise, every day. Part of keeping a commitment like this is being comfortable with some of the entries being not very good.