www.BrettDaniel.com

I started reading deeply in my first source for the history paper this evening. I briefly mentioned (second to last paragraph) that I was considering moving away from the history of machine tools as a topic. I am glad I did not return the books on that feeling because it has turned out to be surprisingly interesting. These early industrial pioneers were able to create, with their own hands and almost from scratch, powerful and precise means of shaping material. The enginuity needed to devise these machines was quite impressive. By 1776, John Wilkinson could "[bore] a 72-inch cylinder being not further from absolute truth than the thickness of a thin sixpence in the worst part." The book captures the essence of this innovative thinking, and is much less dry than I had feared.

It also has a lot of cool pictures. The last half of one of my other sources is filled with several hundred schematics, patent illustrations, and photographs of modern reconstructions of industrial tools. House-size engines, borers the size of a person, water-powered lathes, grinders, drills— all sorts of interesting machines. Very steampunk.

I made heavy use of my highlighter for the Kepler paper because I owned my main source. I cannot do that with library books, so I bought about 200 sticky tabs with which to mark important lines. Two chapters in, and the book already looks like it is supporting a jagged, neon pink fungus.

A book a week, then another week of writing, and this paper could be almost doable.

My todo list grew threefold today [He means yesterday. -ed.]. It was bound to happen. I got a short, unexpected break over the weekend and now the wave is cresting once more.

I expected to be programming all weekend. We had to do some multithreaded interprocess remote procedure calls for the latest OS project, and I had not started to any meaningful extent until Friday afternoon. I was not worried. From classmates I knew I could get it done in two days. I put programming aside on Friday night and went bowling underneath the Union with Eric, Mel, and a girl named Jennifer whom I have not mentioned here before. I bowled the worst two games of my life then hung out with Jennifer for the rest of the evening.

On Saturday I got a pleasant surprise when the project started working after only three hours and two earnest tries. Suddenly I had an afternoon and Sunday free. I should have driven home Saturday night for Easter. It did not occur to me that without programming I no longer needed to stay. Sorry, Dad. Sorry, Sue.

My Easter consisted of surfing, reading, a video game, and some personal programming. College students must make the most of these lulls in work, and I certainly did my best.

I knew Monday would be tough. I had two project meetings after classes and no chance to go home until after 7. The first meeting was for the research project. I have built the language parser; now we need to make all the internals needed to make it draw things. Four weeks? We can do it. A paper explaining the thinking behind it? Sure.

The second meeting was for the mock mutual fund in my Economics class. The professor has been telling us about this project since the beginning of the semester but only now decided to assign groups and a due date. At the meeting we delegated the required tasks to each of the six team members. I am writing the fund's objective, philosophy, and assesment of risks. It went surprisingly well for having so many people. Two of my teammates were especially on the ball, bringing some actual mutual fund literature from their own financial advisors.

Somewhere in there I also went to the engineering library to get some sources for this semester's history paper. I am starting earlier than I did last semster. My topic right now is the history of machine tools. I find the evolution of precision and the inventiveness of the early innovators like Watt and Maudslay interesting. However, the writing on machine tools is very dry and filled with tiny, incremental changes that do not lend themselves well to a general term paper. I may change topics within the next day or two.

So in the next month before finals I have: a research project (language + paper), a mutual fund prospectus, a 15+ page term paper, one or two more OS projects, a string of exams, and my normal homework.

[Brett has curled up into the foetal position and is whimpered quietly to himself. -ed.]

High time for another list o' links.

• Eleven Cool Things You Can Do With PHP – Ignoring its odd slideshow format, this series of pages collects many interesting uses for PHP. It even mentions making graphs with libraries much more powerful than my my simple function.
• Memory Alpha: A Star Trek Wiki – The amount of detail alone is amazing, but what I find more impressive is the degree in which this wiki retains its internal consistency across five live-action series, ten movies, and countless other bits of media.
• A Guide to Ripping and Encoding Music – A very involved primer on how audio compression and encoding work (and, of course, how to rip music yourself).
• What's Special About This Number? – I can now sleep easy knowing that 24, which corresponds to my initials, is the largest number divisible by all numbers less than its square root. 244, my full initials, is the smallest number (besides 2) that can be written as the sum of 2 squares or the sum of 2 5th powers.
• Huge Timelines – I love large visualizations of data.
• Spew, The Great Simoleon Caper, and Jipi and the Paranoid Chip – Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. I had just finished reading The Confusion when I came across these three short stories. I have not had a chance to read them yet. Also of note is this updated and annotated version of In the Beginning... Was the Command Line.
• College Shenanigan Stories – A few from Purdue, even.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I do actually take notes while in class. Everyone has their own personal notetaking system. Mine relies heavily on several "typefaces" I have used for years.

I usually take notes in outline form. The rigidity of the outline depends largely on the organization of the teacher. Sometimes I indent up to six layers while other times I default to just section headers. Chapters or large sections beginning with a header written in bold, underlined, sans-serif capitals:

Subheadings are normal weight without an underline.

I normally write in cursive because it is fast. Oddly, I can still type faster than I can write by hand.

With all the computer science notes I have to take, I needed a (nearly) monospace font for code samples:

I need the rest of the ASCII characters:

... and even greek for my math notes:

What kind of typefaces do you use when taking notes?

I went into the day expecting to be productive. I had a short math assignment and a little bit of programming to do before I could wring the final drops of spring break out of my Sunday. I woke up around noon because my internal clock is still screwy from vacation hours. After my normal "morning" websurf, I went to get lunch at the Roly Poly on the levee. I had a number 11, the Wild Turkey.

I like Roly Poly (at least as much as I can bring myself to like a nationwide sandwich chain) because their wraps taste good and contain all sorts of healthy ingredients. Their menu has at least 60 sandwiches. I ate at my hometown franchise at least twice a week during the summer. One of the servers even knew my name and would cheerfully say, "Hello, Brett. What will you be having today?" every time I came in.

I say this to contrast the poorly-managed Roly Poly on the levee:

• It is chronically understaffed.
• The food takes much longer than my hometown Roly Poly, even at non-peak hours.
• The paint on the walls is flaking off where giant vegetable stickers used to be.
• It is closed Sunday evenings, the one time that none of the dorms serve food.

I can set these problems aside because, as I said, the food is healthy and tastes good. However, I will not go back to that franchise after today. Today I got to add one more bullet point to the list: food poisoning.

I was about three quarters of the way through my number 11. My stomach started feeling funny, but I dismissed it as queasiness from eating so late. It was about 1:45 by then. I went home feeling fine, but two hours later I was lying in bed with chills and a thoroughly upset stomach. I stayed that way, drifting back and forth from sleep, for the next (I will have to guess here) five days. At first I thought it was one of my infrequent migraines, but the visual aura and headache never came. Just a persistant nausea. I am only now feeling good enough to sit up and type.

I am sure no one wants to read about a sick college student, so let me pose a question to my readers: what should I do about the food poisoning? Should I call the Roly Poly franchise? Send an email to the corporate feedback address? Contact the county health inspector? I am leaning toward calling the franchise; I am curious whether they heard of any other cases.

Update

I called the restaurant. They did not have any other reports. It may have been that the sandwich just did not agree with me.

My single class yesterday— history— had maybe a dozen people. One could tell it was everyone's last class before break. I packed quickly after that and drove home through dreary, half-frozen sleet. As I crossed the last bridge before my neighborhood, the clouds parted and a golden angelic glow bathed the road, welcoming me into spring break.

I did not make any plans. More accurately, I should say none of my half-formed plans reached fruition. No sunny beaches, no roadtrips. On the bright side, I have very little pressing work.

On Monday I posted a new drawing of a sheriff on the main site. I wanted to use that drawing to give a peek into how one of my pictures progresses from sketch to main site.

Disclaimer

Might as well get this out of the way. I am not an artist, though I play one on the Internet. This is how I draw pictures circa March 2005. I am sure my style will change as I improve, experiment, and learn new techniques. I eagerly welcome any critiques you may have on how to make the drawings or the whole drawing process better. You can either leave them in the comments or contact me directly.

I hope someone out there finds this post useful.

Tools

• Digital camera
• Adobe Photoshop: I still use version 7.
• Adobe Illustrator: Even older than Photoshop; I am still using version 8.
• Drawing tablet: I use an Aiptek 12000U.

Setup

I start out with a very rough sketch, usually a particularly promising notebook doodle. Because I do not have, nor particularly need a flatbed scanner, I take a picture of the drawing with the macro setting on one of my digital cameras. I do not have to worry about quality because I am going to be tracing over the lines anyway.

I take the digitized picture into Photoshop where I crop the image and play with the contrast to make the lines more visible. Again, quality is not the issue. I save the modified picture in a dedicated directory where I keep all the files relating to a particular drawing. By the end, I usually have seven or eight files in the directory: the "scan", the Illustrator line art, the high-resolution TIFF of the line art, the Photoshop document with all the layers of the final drawing, the high-resolution TIFF of the final drawing, the web version, and the web thumbnail.

I open the sketch in Illustrator and resize it to fit the page. I then make the layer a template, which lightens the drawing and makes the layer uneditable.

Finally, I make a new layer above the template layer to contain the line art.

One annoying quirk of Illustrator is that it does not save brushes between sessions (as far as I know). Every time I trace a drawing I have to create a new brush. Here is how to do it:

• Click the Brush tool
• Click the "New Brush" button in the brushes palette
  
• select "New Calligraphic Brush" on the dialog that pops up.
• I use a circular brush set to 4 points with a variation of 2 based on the pen pressure.
  
  I have found this size scales well and offers the best balance between the cartoonishness and detail that I want. I have heard of professional cartoonists using multiple pens per drawing, but I have not tried that yet.

Line Art

With a brush in hand, so to speak, I can start drawing. I have found three main benefits to tracing in Illustrator:

1. It automatically smoothes lines. This makes the drawing look very clean and precise. Illustrator adjusts the smoothing and number of waypoints based on the speed of the stroke and the zoom level.
2. One can adjust lines with amazing precision using the direct selection tool .
3. Undo, undo, undo! No need to erase or worry about ruining a drawing with a stray pen stroke.

I use the original pencil lines only as very rough guides. I will often depart from the lines or hide the sketch and completely redraw a portion. I tweak continuously throughout the drawing process. That is the key to drawing in Illustrator. Move a line, scale entire sections, tweak a pose. For example, I moved the sheriff's head to the left and made it slightly larger than the original drawing.

I switch to the pen tool when drawing inorganic objects such as the sheriff's badge and shotgun. While the brush tool allows one to make sweeping freehand curves, the pen tool is perfect for hard, machined edges. The pen tool takes some getting used to, but it is very powerful once one gets the hang of it.

I initially draw angled objects horizontally then rotate them into place. It is much easier to make horizontal rather than angled lines parallel. I use Illustrator's "Smart Guides" to further assist in aligning the parts of the drawing. Smart guides allow one to snap objects automatically to lines extending from another object. They are a huge help. You can turn on the guides by going to "File" > "Preferences" > "Smart Guides".

Once I think I have finished the line art, I select the entire drawing and flip it horizontally. This gives me a unique point of view on what I have made. More often than not, subtle misalignments or skewed lines seem to appear. They were there all the time, of course, but looking at a drawing in a different way helps me discover mistakes that I would have missed otherwise.

After some final tweaks, I go to "File" > "Export", and save the line art as a TIFF file. I used to export at only 300 DPI, but since I started printing drawings, I have moved up to 600. I do not turn on antialiasing because I need crisp lines in which to add color. At that resolution antialiasing is invisible anyway.

Colors

This part is easy compared to the line art. I open up the TIFF file and right away save it as a PSD. Then, I use the wand tool to select all the black lines. This is easily done by unchecking the "Contiguous" option at the top of the window. I cut the lines and paste them into their own layer. I choose the paint bucket tool and fill the background layer with the blue (CCCCFF) I have used in the background of many of my pictures. I create another layer below the line art layer but above the background. This will be the color layer. Using the bucket tool again, making sure the "Contiguous" and "All Layers" options are checked, I start coloring the drawing.

I use colors from the "Web Spectrum" color set. It has a good variety of bright colors, and they are organized nicely. To use a color set, open the "Swatches" toolbox by clicking "Window" > "Swatches", click the little arrow at the top left, and choose a set that you like.

After coloring, I have three layers: background, color, and line art. The drawing looks very plain. Time to add shading.

Shading

If drawing the line art is the hardest and coloring the easiest, then shading is the most fun. I really enjoy seeing the drawing progressively take on depth.

I break out the pen tool once more and set the foreground color to black. I draw the first shadow, in this case the top of the sheriff's hat.

The pen tool will create a new "shape" layer. I move this layer below the line art but above the color layer. I right-click and select "Rasterize Layer". This creates a normal layer of pixels where the shape used to be. This will be the shadows layer. In the dropdown box at the top of the layers box, I click "Soft Light" as the blending mode. This allows the base color to show through.

As I draw more shadows, I merge them down ("Layer" > "Merge Down" or ctrl+e) onto the base shadow layer. For additional depth, I usually add a second layer of shadows in the same manner. Finally, I add the shadow on the floor.

The sheriff looks better at this point.

Highlights

There are two types of highlights: specular highlights such as on shiny metal and normal highlights on the bright side of clothing. I make both in the same manner as shadows, except using white instead of black. Specular highlights have a normal blending mode while normal highlights use "Soft Light".

Finishing Touches

The drawing is complete, but there are a few small matters to fix before it is ready to post on the main website. First, I had reversed the drawing without reversing the buttons on his shirt. A hard-bitten sheriff of the Old West cannot be seen wearing a woman's shirt. I mirror the drawing horizontally. Second, I tweak the opacity of the shadows and highlights until they look right. This usually ends up being 50-75% on shadows and 45-50% on highlights. Finally, I save a high-resolution TIFF for posters and a resized version with a border for the website. The thumbnail is just a section of the drawing that I have resized to be 80 pixels on a side.

The Final Product

Thus we have the finished drawing.