image – Page 12 – NaN magazine

Everything Vermeer

http://essentialvermeer.20m.com/index.html

The Essential Vermeer provides a wide range of in-house resources for studying the work and life of Johannes Vermeer.

This site is simply awesome. It contains a huge amount of information on the great painter: no matter what you’d like to know, you’ll find it here. I wouldn’t know what to highlight, but I found very interesting the articles on the master’s technique and those on the palette he used. If you feel like an expert after all the reading, you can participate in the controversy about the authorship of the recently attributed “A young woman seated at the virginals”.

Make your walls glow with sTILE

http://www.designboom.com/

The tiles are layers of glass and colour fused together, with a specially made LED pcb contained at the back, which illuminates the bubbly texture of the glass.

Great! I’ll never again have trouble finding the bathroom at 4 am! The article doesn’t make any comments on how are the tiles powered and the pictures don’t show any type of plug, so I hope it won’t be necessary to knock down the walls in order to change the batteries 😛
Very nice idea, and practical too. The whole designboom site is just as interesting, whether you’re a contemporary industrial design lover or just want to see some cool, -even useful- stuff.

Draw with Loomis

Updated 14.01.06

www.saveloomis.org

Art-Instruction Books of Andrew Loomis

My friend Tucho told me that he was using the books featured in this site to improve his technique, and actually I found them all very inspiring, not only for artists as talented as he is, but for everyone whith an interest in illustration. The page is also relevant since it´s hard to find printed copies of the books.

For more info on Loomis himself, you can read his biography here.

[Update] In a recent visit to the site this article points to, I found out that the books are no longer available there due to a letter of removal. On the other side, you can now find the books for sale in various online stores, like amazon.com.

Glest 1.1.0-rc7 – Tools 1.3.2 released

www.glest.org

This includes G3Dv4 with packed structures, so it has broken previous G3Dv4 models. Affects Glest, G3D viewer and G3D exporter.

It seems that things are moving really fast these last days; there’s now serious work being done regarding the Blender plugin.

Glest 1.1.0-rc6 – Tools 1.3.1 released

www.glest.org

Fixed a bug involving double sided and custom color in exporter/viewer/game.

The ZPrinter

http://www.zcorp.com

The ZPrinter 310 System creates physical models directly from digital data.

It may be “the ideal entry-level rapid prototyping system”, but at a price of $25900 (Options, shipping, local taxes and duties not included), it’s just a little too expensive for my budget. Yet it is so sweet! Just take a look at the technology video (skip some corporate blah blah) and see for yourself what it can do. With one of these and a 3D scanner, you’ll be able to replicate just everything! (evil laugh*). Ok, but I guess that any 3D-er would love to see these machines down to an affordable price.

*Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any misuse of these technologies, may it happen now or many years from now when everyone will be able to copy objects with ease. I’m just saying that it could happen. The evil laugh is intended to be a joke, it’s not really evil. I do my best to be a good citizen. Really. 🙂

Easy life through practical origami: fujimoto explained

Today I got an explanation on this technique. It is basically an iterative method that allows to approximate the measures until a satisfactory value is achieved; this comes to mean that you make an initial guess, you apply an operation on it and then repeat that same operation over and over, taking the result of the previous step as the starting point for the next, which will give you more accurate measures each time.

For instance, if you want to divide a segment of paper in thirds, you would do the following:

1.-Fold one side the paper into what you guess could be the right measure for a third of it. Don´t mark the folding completely, just mark the end of it so that you know where it is.

2.-Fold the other side so that it reaches the point you just marked, and mark the folding.

3.-Fold the other side so that it reaches the point you just marked, and mark the folding.

Keep doing this. In a few steps you should have accurate thirds.

Now for fiths:

1.-Fold one side of the paper into what you guess could be the right measure for a fith of it. Mark it just enough to know where it is, as I explained for thirds.

2.-Fold the other side so that it reaches the point you just marked, and mark the folding. Now make and mark a fold which is the half of this.

3.-Fold the other side so that it reaches the point you just marked, and mark the folding. Now make and mark a fold which is the half of this.

Keep doing this. In a few steps you should have accurate fifths.

… Now that I think about all these thirds and fiths, this looks a lot like the way one would tune a musical instrument 🙂

Thanks to my friends of the origami group in Santiago de Compostela for sharing these techniques with me.

Easy life through practical origami: cd case

Last Updated 25.06.06

http://www.papercdcase.com/

Use this website to create a PDF file which can be printed and folded to create a paper CD case.

Actually it´s better to learn how make the case by folding since you never know when you´ll need one. But actually there´s a tricky thing about it, as you have to divide the top in five equal parts. How do you do this? Well, the instructions say “use the fujimoto approximation technique or something“… A friend of mine taught me a way to get the first segment, as shown in this little step-by-step guide.

Update 25.06.06 I just found these other instructions to make a case -simpler and less precise, but it does the job 🙂

Related Article: Fujimoto technique explained

All you need to make a notebook

http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/

I cannot anticipate all needs, but the grids below should cover most common ones.

http://www.crbond.com/score_paper.htm

Here you will find a set of Acrobat (*.pdf) files which will print out music score paper on your printer.

Print this over the previously printed grids to finish your empty notebook

😉

http://www.sff.net/people/Brook.West/bind/bindit.html

Make or repair books with this easy technique.

A shmup is a shmup is a shmup

http://www.shmups.com/
http://shmup.com/

the last real classic game genre still alive – games in which score, skill, technique, replayability, and finely honed 2-dimensional gameplay are all-important.

Underrated by some as if they were relics from ancient times, the truth is that shmups are everlasting, because in their core lies the essence of the videogame: easy to understand, hard (but rewarding) to master, challenging and enjoyable. From time to time I would go back to the old black&white (yellow and green?) gameboy to see if the experiences of life have made me more skillful and I´m finally able to finish R- Type (you already know the answer, save me the shame); but then, if someone asked me for an example of a high- quality modern videogame with all the lusty graphics and powerful sound, my trouble would be whether to answer ikaruga (Dreamcast and Gamecube) or rez (Dreamcast and PS2)… I think I´d say ikaruga and save rez for if I was asked if videogames can be art. 😉

Wait… dunno what a shmup is? Look it up in the dictionary. C’est facile á lire!