1. Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/
2. Keep refreshing until someone photodumps from their last party
3. DRAW!

This works for just about anything really but you get a particularly good variety of humies.

A few days ago I wrote down/explained as much as I could on some scrap paper. I’m finding a lot of holes in my knowledge — a LOT of them have been patched up lately, in a relative sense, via obscure things on the internet. It’s a shame that took so long, so that’s why I made the art refs page.

it’s easier to list what confuses me or what I don’t know than what I do.

• Light is a ray and a particle, it comes out of something then bounces around.  I understand it’s part of a spectrum and the frequencies(??) add to form different ones.  What’s the precise nature of this adding?  I know that if you shine a red and a green light on something, you’ll end up with yellow.  But I don’t understand the physics of that.  Is the ‘addition’ only insofar as it’s perceived by the eye?
• Speaking of eyes, I know basically nothing about them beyond the basics.  I know what focus is but not what mechanism creates it — I know you can focus on something really far away with those wacky telephoto lenses, but not why.  I think depth of field is the ‘amount’ in focus, or possibly the opposite of that, but I don’t know?  I know wide angle/fish eye/other variations on lenses work by bending light, and I have a rudimentary understanding of that, but I wouldn’t be able to manipulate it given the opportunity (and because of this, I don’t trust myself to render water surfaces correctly).
• And speaking of water, why does it only reflect light at a certain angle?  I think this might have something to do with me not understanding how ricocheting works in general
• I know that X material has several properties: opacity (how likely it is to reflect? … I may be misunderstanding this, I think it only happens when it’s part of another, translucent (what does this even mean) material), color (the particular spectrum, offset in whatever way, it reflects?  How is this chosen?), and the spectrum it … transmits, ie lets through.  Absorb, reflect, transmit — and when stuff’s mixed, depending on the way it’s mixed, those numbers can interact in different ways. Is that exhaustive?
• I do know that for most materials (ie solids) the texture of a surface (and therefore how light bounces around on it) is a huge thing.  you can’t polish paper to a mirror, because it’s fibrous at a very small scale, so you have to put something else on it.  Not sure where I’m going with that

I’ll add on to this over time.

two things voted ‘least cared about’ in a recent survey of myself

(made with Muro)

(made with Harmony)

So apparently deviantArt released their web drawing thingy called Muro a while ago, and everyone noticed but me.  I posit this is because I delete the ‘news’ notices they send their members on sight, so I didn’t see all the oft-maligned “IT’S COMING!” alarms.

anyway, I was bored, so I gave it a spin.  HTML5, right … wait, could it be … it’s responding to the pressure on my wacom?!

apparently so.  It’s my understanding that with HTML5, Javascript, pretty much all client-side web stuff that isn’t a plugin, any obfuscation of code goes out the window.  It can’t be “locked up”.  so … this was HTML5.  Why hadn’t I seen this before?

a google for the answer only left me with more questions.  Why does Wacom have a javascript API but not, say, a more profitable one like Flash (or if they do, why hasn’t aviary implemented it)?

Not that I’m complaining, far from it.  Muro is surprisingly powerful, but paying for brushes is BS.  I want something that can replace Photoshop for my sketching and sampling needs.  (Maybe not my painting/vector needs, as an HTML5 application is still a damn sight less stable than a … what language is Photoshop in?  C++?)

Take all that and add some network ability (openCanvas, Sketcher) and … well, I don’t guess the market is really huge, but I’d be doin’ some backflips or somethin’.  Paintchat between iPad/PC/whatever would be really, really neat.