Various Artworks

Here I collect a few random pieces of my visual artistry.

This drawing tells me what I want to do and be in the future.  In particular, it tells me two things: I wish to draw pictures with words as a writer, and I wish to fade into the background as the words of this parable is the real message.  This drawing was done in pen-and-ink on paper by hand before being scanned into computer and color added.

My first attempt in many, many years to combine computer science with art.  I call this a cuneiform binary fractal tree to 19 levels of recursion.  If you have Googled for fractal tree, you will have seen similar trees.  What makes mine unique, I think, is that it is entirely algorithmically generated and yet it has a semi-natural shape by my adding a small amount of uniform-random noise to the branching angle and also choosing a random order for growing the left and right child branches at each branch point.  I think it strikes a balance between too regular and too irregular.  I also like the fact that it is composed entirely of such a simple shape: triangles.  Oh, and I also prevent overlap among all branches in the tree by keeping track of points on lines and pruning any branch before it crosses an existing one.  You must understand, my intention is to refine the two-dimensional appearance, preventing most or all appearance of depth.  I could do more.  I plan to leave more space between branches to prevent the crowding-look.  I could also add a little noise to the branch length.  Needless to say, there are more trees to come.

Drawing Megan

This is the story of how I drew Megan.  Sorry that most of the photographs were taken by my extremely cheap phone camera.

There once was a beautiful young woman who got married to a nerd.  Before the wedding, there were pictures taken of the beautiful young woman.  The nerd has ever since been especially fond of one picture in particular.

So I decided to use this picture as the basis for a large pen-and-ink drawing.  Here is the beginning of the initial pencil drawing of the main elements.

Here is the completed pencil drawing of the main elements (darkened so you can see the pencil lines better).

I had originally planned to draw a plain cross-hatched grid for the background, like you can see in traditional engraved portraits.  Then I realized that I should fully execute my plan for practicing techniques to put in future illustrations by adding something more fractal-like.  What I needed was a fractal-like curve that had similar properties to a grid: it filled the space evenly with a uniform line thickness.  It did not take me long to discover the Hilbert Space-filling Curve, or Hilbert Curve for short.  What did take me a while to find was an existing image of it pre-rendered at a sufficient level of detail to cover my entire picture.  But then I had to draw it without being able to trace it.  That required more time than it took to find it.

Next is the Hilbert space-filling curve print-out that I traced with pencil on the print-out, itself, as I copied it line by line to my large drawing's background on a pencil-grid that I had already drawn as a guide.  I drew a few tiny line segments at a time.  At one point I discovered that I had drawn a section of the curve (maybe a few hundred line segments big) in the wrong place—it was shifted by one unit of the grid.  I had to erase that part of the background and redraw it.  Thankfully I had first drawn the curve in pencil before inking it.  I remember doing much of the inking of the Hilbert curve while I "watched" the extended Hobbit movies with my family.  Actually, I also associate this pen-and-in portrait with a number of fascinating audio-books that I listened to while drawing it, including biographies of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris, Phantastes by George MacDonald, a lecture-summary of the book "Goedel, Escher, Bach", a long series of lectures about life in the Middle Ages, the extended Lord of the Rings movies, and several others.  One can listen to a lot of good material in about 150 hours.

Here is the final drawing sitting on my drawing table.  You can see my lap top plugged in to my big Altec Lansing speakers in the background ready to play me another audio-book.

Here is the final pen-and-ink drawing professionally digitally scanned at Replicolor in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Here I have digitally made some minor corrections to the black and white line drawing and have added color.  I consider this the final version.  This is the same version I have listed in my American Frame Art Galary.  The coloring is subtle—on purpose.  On my laptop, I can barely see the colors, while on my desktop they are easier to see.

After finishing the color version, I tried out some of the filters that come with the free image editing tool called Gimp.  This image shows the mosaic distortion filter.  I love the blending of the colors in tiles around the top of the rose, including the brown of Megan's hair, the pink of her lips and the rose, the subtle blue of the background, and the green of the leaves.

This image shows double-thresholding—that is, mapping light and dark greys to black and middle-tone greys to white.

That about wraps it up. 

What Does the Blog Say?

Hello blog-lovers, who also happen to be parody-lovers, and who also happen to be "The Fox" lovers, who also happen to love commentary on digital and social media.  Yep, I knew that included all of you.  I proudly present a refrain that woke me up in the middle of the night, last night, as I lay in bed, unconsciously merging two things I had been "listening to" the evening before. 

"The Blog"


Pandora goes woof, YouTube goes meow.
Twitter goes tweet, and FaceBook goes like.
Flickr goes snap, MySpace goes croak, and LinkedIn goes toot.
WebMD says quack and eBay goes bling, and CNN goes OUCH OUCH OUCH.
But there's one sound that no one knows...
WHAT DOES THE BLOG SAY?

Blah-blah-blah-blahbublahbublah!
Blah-blah-blah-blahbublahbublah!
Blah-blah-blah-blahbublahbublah!
WHAT DOES THE BLOG SAY?

...

I'll finish this later.   

If anyone would like to collaborate to finish this, perform it, record it, let's talk.  

Three Stages of Leadership

Hello leaders and followers

A quick thought about levels of leadership.  There are three stages or levels of leadership because there three stages of followership.  There are three stages of followership because there are three stages of developing independence. 

1. The employee needs to know what to do, so you tell them what to do.
2. The employee needs more independence, so instead of telling them what to do in each situation, you give them a policy, and that policy tells them what to do in each situation.
3. The employee needs even more independence and can create his own policy, so instead of giving him a ready-made policy, you give him values, goals, and resources, authority and responsibility. They can come up with their own policy or strategy. 

This idea must have come from a combination of three things: (1) being a parent and parenting, (2) reading popular business/management books, and (3) thinking about AI and designing intelligent agents. 

More later

Web Page Layout Analysis

Hello web and printed document analysis people

Some of you may find this paper interesting. They advocate using layout analysis to improve information extraction from web pages and in preliminary results find that rendering a web page and treating it like a printed document provides better clues than using the HTML DOM tree.

Online Medical Journal Article Layout Analysis

There are other people who believe the same thing:

Towards Domain Independent Information Extraction from Web Tables

Extracting Semantic Structure of Web Documents Using Content and Visual Information

This makes sense as web page writers are primarily concerned with how the browser renders their page, and how their audience reads the rendered page, not with how the HTML code looks.

Within a domain, visual layout can be used in the same way as domain knowledge (ontologies), in that both sources of information tend to be more invariant across documents within a domain than the particular HTML tags used.

Reasons given in the paper for not relying on the DOM tree:

1. The DOM nodes may not be in a semantically meaningful order.
2. Simple text lines can be broken into several nodes at different levels of a DOM tree.
3. Visually similar pages can have completely different DOM trees.

Of course, an approach that combines DOM tree information, domain knowledge and visual layout is probably best.  This gives me some assurance that I’m not wasting my time focusing my research on printed documents in which there are no HTML tags. It is also applicable to web extraction.