Birthday Painting, Step 3
November 20, 2008 - Thursday
Here's the final painting. In retrospect, it was a little ambitious to do four of my daughter's favorite animals. It felt almost like I was doing four separate paintings at once. The elephant was by far the easiest and most fun to do. Its skin is forgiving to paint because even a stray bush stroke just looks like an intentional wrinkle. It's no Renoir, but I think my daughter will enjoy it. I can't wait to give it to her on Saturday! Once again, click the picture below to see the larger version.
Birthday Painting, Step 2
November 19, 2008 - Wednesday
Now it's time to start the actual painting. I went to Dick Blick and got some Liquitex acrylic paints. Acrylic paints are the bane of my existence. They dry much too fast, and it is impossible to match colors because they change color as they dry. I would so much rather use oils, but they have the problem of being super messy and requiring some sort of ventilation. They're just not practical to use in most circumstances. So I'll have to bite the bullet, and make due with acrylics.
Anyway, here's the progress after the first day of painting. As you can see, I am far from finished. In fact, I suspect I'll have to repaint most of this. At this point I'm just trying to get a feel for what color scheme I want to use. Also, since I paint so infrequently, I'm trying to get my hand reacquainted with a brush, and figure out what sort of style I want to use. It would probably be better if I didn't try to do these things at the same time as I'm trying to create a finished piece, but I don't have this luxury. Things look pretty crappy right now, but don't lose hope, because there is plenty of more work to be done. By the way, my daughter walked by the painting and excitedly named each of the animals see saw and then said "Dad paint! Dad paint!" so the painting has already been worth the effort.
Birthday Painting, Step 1
November 18, 2008 - Tuesday
My daughter's second birthday is this weekend, and I'm going to paint her a picture as a present. She's really into animals right now, so I thought she'd get a kick out of a collage of some of her favorite animals. I figured you guys might also enjoy seeing a different side to my artwork. Therefore, over the next few days I'll document the progress as I continue to work on this painting. Be forewarned, I have almost no formal training in painting, so I cannot take responsibility for the final product. My approach is to basically throw paint on the canvas until I get something that I can stand to look at.
Today we have the first step, which is drawing the sketch. The canvas is 24 inches wide by 36 inches high. I was going to hide the picture from my daughter, but instead I decided to let her see it. She was pretty excited to see the large animals. It will be fun to watch how her reaction changes as the painting advances. Click on the picture to see a larger version.
Implicit Association Tests
November 14, 2008 - Friday
In a previous blog post I voiced my concern about whether the Bradley effect would rear its ugly head during the 2008 presidential election. Now clearly this did not come to fruition, but it does not change the underlying issue of what effects a subliminal bias against African Americans can have in our society. Following up on this, my brother e-mailed me an interesting online test you can take to find out if you have a racial bias. Now you might think, that's crazy, how can an online test determine this? I must admit I'm generally skeptical about things. But try taking the test yourself. It's thought-provoking to see the strategy that the test writers employ (which is called "implicit association").
In the interest of full disclosure, the test said I have a moderate preference for whites over blacks (about 25% of test takers have this). I guess this is better than the almost 50% that had a strong preference for whites, but it's still a sad admission. Interestingly, this test has been used to show that conservatives have a significantly stronger bias against blacks than liberals (although both groups still favor whites over blacks on average). Now before you complain this is just another example of liberal scientists that are against conservatives (as the RNC has), this test have been around for many years and taken by millions of people. The statistics are therefore much better than most other scientific studies (such as the ones that determine which medications you take).
If you're interested in information about tests like this, visit projectimplicit.net. If you want to take other implicit association tests (like on gender, obesity, etc.), check out this site. And don't forget to report your results back here. I need to know which of you I can still consider to be my friends (just kidding)!.
Let the Debates Begin
November 13, 2008 - Thursday
I jammed my thumb pretty badly playing basketball tonight. It's slowly turning blue as I type this (well, actually more black and purple), so please forgive me if I make a few more typos than usual. Fortunately, it's on my left hand, so it shouldn't affect work or drawing.
I'm excited to announce that I've finally added the option for commenting on Calamities of Nature. This is something I've wanted for awhile, but was never sure how to implement since I'm not using any blogging software--all the code is written by hand by yours truly. Then I noticed Joel Watson of HijiNKS Ensue and Kris Straub of Starslip Crisis (and a couple other webcomics) using this thing called IntenseDebate. It's basically a free commenting system that you can import into your existing blog and get a bunch of cool extra features. It's especially nice for me because with a little editing of code I was able to add it to a site that didn't have any commenting capabilities before.
So hopefully this will facilitate more conversations on this site about politics, society, webcomics, or whatever else is on our minds. IntenseDebate makes the commenting system really flexible. You can comment on the main blog and comic postings or even other comments. You can vote on which comments you like or dislike. You can make a personalized avatar so that everyone knows who you are at a glance. Also, to help motivate you guys to start commenting, I've added a widget on the left sidebar listing the top commenters. This will give you a little publicity as a thanks for helping the Calamities of Nature community grow. Also, if you find any problems with the commenting, please tell me. Already on Wednesday a few bugs were found, which forced me to erase all the comments thus far and start from scratch. Hopefully this won't happen again!
Merry Christmas!
November 11, 2008 - Tuesday
I know it's a cliche thing to ask, but doesn't it seem like the Christmas season comes earlier every year? This year the local department stores were already setting up Christmas decorations the week before Halloween. This is two full months before December 25th--we're basically celebrating Christmas one-sixth of the year! I was asking my brother about this, and he made the observation that it might have something to do with the poor economy. Businesses are really looking forward to the holiday season and hoping to recoup some of their loses as soon as possible. I think there may be something to this. It's crazy to think that the retail businesses in America basically operate all year long under the assumption that they will make a large fraction of their sales for a single day. If Christmas was suddenly taken away from us, would it mean the collapse of the retail industry? I'd be interested in hearing non-Americans perspective on this. The American view of what Christmas is all about must appear pretty bizarre to everyone else.
