LM3 Design – Page 3 – Hybrid Design • Video • Photography

Forward in Reverse

I’ve taken to drawing/sketching on an almost daily basis. It’s something I feel let’s me get back to my roots; wanting to be an artist or some sort. This sketch is somewhat symbolic of how life seems to feel for me right now. Keep in mind, I asked three different people what they thought and I got different answers. Depending on your current state of mind, it can be optimistic, pessimistic or c’est la vie in nature.

I think that’s what I love about art. Just like a song can have multiple meanings to whomever is listening. A painting, drawing, sculpture or anything else can mean that one thing to that one person. Enough philosophical procrastination. On with the art!

You’ll see the original pencil, colored pencil, digitally colored and then colored and made to have a painted effect in Photoshop. Hope you enjoy.

Valentines Day

We’re not super big into Valentines day but I felt like it would be fun to sketch up something. I’m trying to do a sketch a day and this was the result of a few minutes of tinkering. I then took it into Photoshop to give it a little more life.

Circles and Waves

I found a compass and went to town while waiting for the local community theater to open up so I could see my wife perform. I kept adding more shading and lines and went a little nuts with it. From left to right is digital to original pencil with color and just regular pencil.

The Elements

Every day this month I’m trying to draw and digitize a piece of artwork. I haven’t drawn a lot since I was a kid. So, this is a nice exercise to force me to think creatively about how I want to approach how something looks.

This kind of looks like some kind of elemental, something or rather. For some reason, I tend to put celestial objects in my drawings.

Finished piece:

Original pencil:

Elemental Power - Pencil — Elemental Power – Pencil

Phoenix Tree

I wanted to get back to my roots, no pun, ok maybe a little pun, and start doodling, sketching, drawing again. I did this immensely as a kid and teenager. To the point I thought I might like to work in the comic book industry. Alas, I wasn’t great at human anatomy and, well, I was a little lazy and had moved on to guitar and girls. Oops! I still liked drawing things that weren’t people and I still do. Most of my art is conceptual or metaphorical. I just kind of go where the pencil takes me. I treated this image with a couple of filters in Photoshop to give it the desired dramatic effect and color.

It kind of reminded me of a Phoenix a little bit. It seemed appropriate to call it the Phoenix Tree. Forest fires are devastating but there’s always hope of a greener future ahead. Those little seeds of hope are literally all around us. It’s up to us to take better care of the planet and live more in harmony with nature.

Trees may burn but from their ashes they can return.

My Take on the Pixel Stretch Effect

When I saw this tutorial by Yes I’m a Designer, I knew I had to add this technique to my list-o-skills. I also made some slight modifications to it because I went entirely from memory after having watched it a couple of days ago.

The concept is very simple: Stretch the pixels on the outer most edge of the image. This is best done with a figure that’s performing an action. Say, a runner, figure skater, baseball pitcher, or in my case, a football player. The effect conveys motion or speed but it also just looks interesting. If your action is moving (your) left to right you’ll want to get the pixels on the left edge and vice versa. You’ll see what I mean.

There are so many ways to vary this effect to ones liking and I did that a tad but I tried to stay fairly close to what I learned in the tutorial.

The steps are very straight forward:

Find a good action shot that can be silhouetted/masked.
Duplicate the subject as many times as needed to get a good single-pixel vertical cross-section.
Stretch this cross-section to fill the canvas left to right and set that layer as a Smart Object.
Use transform/warp to manipulate the layer to your liking making sure that the edge lines up with the stretched cross-section.
Do whatever else you like to stylize it.

Here’s how my first go turned out. Quick disclaimer: I’m a Falcons fan but Marshawn Lynch here was the first “football player running” that Google presented to me. So he beat everyone to the punch!

Anyway, it’s a nice pic and it’s a high-resolution photo. It was also already transparent so, I was able to skip a step! You could do this with any pic though, just mask the background out.

There is a section where I used some creative license. His left arm has the stretch going outward but, it’s also extending in toward his body. I tried to stretch the uniform to his arm but it just looked weird. So, I left it alone and went back to having it just be the color tone from his arm. You can literally work on something like this for hours if you wanted. Here’s an example of the duplication process, the cross-section, and the stretching. Here’s the original file I worked from.

Space Shuttle Main Engine – Go For Main Engine Start

What you’re looking at is a cavalcade and culmination of hundreds of things all going right, with no room for error. It’s slowed down a bit so you can take it in a little easier and enjoy the view and the sound. By the way, the sound I added in because their high-speed cameras don’t have mics. Also, a mic in such close proximity to the stack at liftoff would be virtually useless as the acoustic shockwaves are enough to kill a human being. So, I took existing launch sounds and manipulated them to fit what you see.

So, what in the world is going on here? Well, there is an excellent write up on this topic. I am going to post it here because I don’t think reinventing the wheel is necessary. Read the excellent work (with video clips!) here.

In short, a LOT of things happen in the last 10 seconds before liftoff. To massively over-simplify the process:

The command is sent to ignite the engines.
They are started in a staggered sequence to ease the stress on the system.
The hydraulics are temporarily disengaged so that the shock of starting the engines does not break the mounts they are on.
The engines noticeable wobble as they are fired and once fully running, stabilize. This is when we see the Mach diamonds form.
Hydraulics are re-engaged and the engines swivel into position for liftoff.
At T-0 the computer checks that all are running and healthy. If so…
The hold-down bolts are blown along with igniting the solid rockets.
Liftoff!

This all happens in 6.6 seconds.

From nothing to running at 104% of rated thrust to flying; in 6.6 seconds. Not many machines can do that. Space Shuttle could. You could literally write an entire dissertation on just the main engines and how they work. That is how complex they are.

She was flawed, yes, but she was my generation’s spaceship. I hope future generations can remember the triumphs as well as the tragedies.

Ad astra per aspera – loosely translated, it means “To the stars with difficulty”. It just means it’s hard to do and will likely always be hard to do. Hence, my respect for the people that do it.

Hey! More fun Space Shuttle facts!

Just one more. I promise! 😉

Apollo XI – Shameless Plug For The Mightiest

As we draw nearer to the 50th anniversary of mankind taking the first steps on the surface of another celestial body, other than Earth, I wanted to post a video I made a few years ago to commemorate the very machine without which that feat would have been impossible. I needn’t say anything else. As of this writing, it is STILL the most powerful rocket ever to be put into service. That could change in a few years but hey, 50+ years isn’t a bad run.

As a side note. I was working on remastering this and remixing it a bit but I have to be honest, the more I tinker with it, the further away it gets from the sound I wanted. This is the sound I wanted. If you want to hear a wee bit of the inspiration behind the tempo and beat of this song, listen to Royksopp’s Keyboard Milk. One of the most powerfully written, mixed and mastered songs on the planet. I’m not being subjective either. It’s textbook in how you want to construct a song from start to finish. Obviously, not everyone will like it, but the methods are flawless.

The artsy cool music video version

The “holy crap we’re all going to die” version (this is where I first heard it)

A New Take On Something Old

A while back I created a mission patch for a fictitious space mission. I “styled” it to look kind of like an actual cloth patch. I was never fully satisfied with it and figured a way to make it look more cloth-like had to exist. After all, we can create entire movies where no one ever actually sets foot off a sound stage.

So, I found a group of actions, brushes, and styles to help in doing just that. I would love to say it is just a click and forget process but it does take some work. Each color has to be isolated and then recolored. Not hard by any means but it does take effort. Anything worth doing is worth a little extra effort, right?

This time I decided to take the patch and remake it to commemorate my actual favorite spacecraft(s); Voyagers I & II. Both launched in 1977. Both still transmitting data. As of this writing, Voyager I is the most distant man-made object we have ever launched. As of this writing, nothing has the ability to overtake it, either. It also took the famous Pale Blue Dot photo that inspired, in my opinion, one of the greatest writings of all time by the late Carl Sagan.

So here’s the patch without any effect applied to it:

After a bit of work, you can finally see how it might look if it were actually embroidered into a real patch:

Sure, it could use some extra work but it’s more of a proof of concept. I think mission patches are works of art in themselves. While these are just my own creative ramblings, who knows, one day I might actually get to create a real one.

The Many Faces of the Moon

A proper blogger would have already written up an entire post and made it live the moment the lunar eclipse of January 20/21 2019 was over. The only problem with that is that if you don’t take the time to analyze your data, you could miss something amazing. I would have suffered that fate had I not waited. Without further ado, let’s get into it

The moon was scheduled to pass into the shadow of the earth starting around 10:30 EST. The interesting bit is that during totality of a lunar eclipse, the moon is technically, 100%, full. Meaning that if draw a line from the sun to the earth to the moon, it would be straight. Ironic that it’s also blocked by earth, eh? This particular eclipse was nice because of the timing. It was due to be full and reach totality at roughly midnight, local time. Also, it was a “supermoon” meaning it was at/near perigee in its orbit around the earth. Lastly, it was a “Wolf Moon”, so named for the time of year in which it occurs. I guess? Yep, it was a Super Blood Wolf Moon. How could one not want to step outside to see that unfold?

I gathered my gear, a humble Panasonic FZ70 (superzoom) and a sturdy tripod. Armed with that and my years of photographing the moon, I figured I’d shoot in the very clunky manual mode. Automatic mode gets spazzy when it comes to focus and exposure of partially lit moons. I began shooting at first contact and would continue to shoot every few minutes until totality. I won’t go into the details of every single photo. I’ll get to it and post the progression.

Why am I posting that image so soon? There’s far more to this than just some neat images of the moon being in shadow. You see, while I had been shooting stills for most of the night, something compelled me to shoot a few minutes of video during totality. It was about 8 minutes of total video footage. I thought nothing of it and that it held almost no value. I almost deleted it but got sidetracked. Later the next day I learned of something extraordinary; an impact event during totality. WHAT?

I was at work when I read this and didn’t have access to my video footage. After a few agonizing hours, I finally got to my computer and pulled up the footage. It wasn’t anything spectacular by any means but maybe it was there. Maybe. I had to take it into Premiere to go frame by frame. Yep, 8*60*30 frames. 14,000+ frames. It all looked the same. This was going to suck. The first pass yielded nothing. Time to adjust my levels and make everything brighter. It had to be there as the lighting was identical to the Griffith Observatory image. About 1/3 of the footage is me knocking the camera around so that footage was out. The initial footage also had the lower part of the moon partially obscured. It was cold and hard to keep it centered! Anyway, I figured the best part of the footage was going to be the last 2 minutes or so. There I was, advanced the footage frame by frame, sometimes skipping a few because, yeah, it wasn’t exciting at all.

Sadly, there was nothing in my footage, after all.

I’m totally joking. I wouldn’t write all that up there if I hadn’t found anything. Nope, I managed to scrub past an area that caught my eye. I scrubbed back and forth and there it was. It was one single frame of a tiny distinct ‘pop’ of light. I was elated but I had to make sure it wasn’t just an artifact or sensor noise. I gathered the image from Griffith and overlayed it. It was a bang on match. How amazing is that? Out of sheer luck on top of more luck, I caught that impact event. It was all the buzz as several others had caught it too. My meager 1080p, grainy footage wasn’t anything spectacular, visually, However, the impact was there and I was, well, over the moon.

I was grinning ear to ear after finding that. All that cold? Worth it.

As one last hurrah to the event, I took a few images and spliced them together to simulate a time lapse. Seriously, it’s only 9 images. It does give a sense of how it unfolded over a couple of hours though.

Lunar eclipses aren’t as dramatic as their solar counterparts. That said, they’re unique and special in their own way. They also let you see things you might not otherwise have seen such as stars and, in particular, that impact. A full moon would have been far too bright to easily detect that.

Keep looking up.