#200 - The Making Of Things That Last Forever
Will our work last over time?Tempura is painting with egg yellow mixed with pigments. You’d think the color goes yellow, but it doesn’t. Tempura paintings last long, too. Hundreds of years so far. So do oil paintings made with linseed oil mixed with pigments. These are tough materials that last forever.
Humans probably made an order of magnitude more art than what has remained, and in the above examples, what remained was because of the sturdiness of the materials used.
But that is not the only reason things last.
Don Quixote still resonates with modern audiences because Cervantes based the characters on people he saw around him. People then were not that different from people who are living now, and so the story has a sense of authenticity about it, as if we could know these people.
Stories based on the moralities of a time don’t survive as well.
Rembrandt’s portraits are the same. He didn’t make idealized, perfect portraits of people but rather portrayed them the way they were, as they were, giving his paintings a sense of realness, of being portraits of people we could meet today, just in different clothes.
That’s not the only reason Rembrandt is remembered, though. In his time, master painters had apprentices make the paintings. The master would finish the paintings and put their signature underneath. It was vital that you could not recognize separate strokes because they would betray the hand of another artist.
But Rembrandt showed that seeing the actual brush strokes, certainly if his virtuoso ones, elevate the piece quite a bit. Many modern artists try to make beautiful marks in one stroke and are indebted to him for that insight.
Insights that last forever.
We have an urge to survive, to become immortal, and art has that promise. We remember a selection of works made in the past for various reasons: they were made from sturdy materials, still resonate with us, or teach us how to do things. We remember them for that, and they make the creator immortal. The artist left something lasting on this planet.
I had to think about that this week. My server went down two weeks ago, just as I was away for a long weekend. I could not do anything! It turned out to be a corrupted database. I have no idea how it could get corrupted, but I fortified my code against it.
Before that, I had been migrating my code that draws 3D models to a more modern version of the 3D engine I used, and it turned out they had deprecated certain features I was using. So I had to scramble to change the code to use a different approach, lest I not be able to use that engine anymore.
Last week, my newsletter stopped working. It turned out I was using a deprecated method of communicating with the daemons that send emails.
I should carve my drawing exercises in marble. My 3D models would certainly benefit from it.
We all want to make things that last for ages and make us immortal. Most of what we make does not survive. We can’t read the newspapers published in the seventeenth century anymore, and we won’t be able to see all the garbage put on social media a decade or two from now either.
I want Practice Drawing This to last for at least decades, so I must do some code cleanup in the coming period. The code base has survived for a while, but I need to check if there aren’t other deprecated things I am using in my code. Marble, this ain’t.
I did add new resources. See below for more. I see hints of word of mouth spreading about Practice Drawing This, which is cool! I need to carve it all in marble so it doesn’t disappear.
With that said, this is what was added recently.
Someone asked me in a DM about a model of a half sphere. I coded a generalized version of it.
I made two models inspired by handouts created by Zefdraws , a channel mentioned on our Discord. Watch! It’s a great channel.
I have also been wanting to make three models for a while. I had code that rotates shapes to form 3D models, and I think I can do more with that. Here are two models.
Marshall Vandruff has this fantastic course on George Bridgman’s anatomy, another great watch, and it now seems free! . One of the things I took from his course was that Bridgman’s anatomy isn’t as much about accurate anatomy as it is about having fun creating approximations of human anatomy by combining interlocking shapes. As I studied these, I wished I had a 3D model of them, so I could rotate to study that anatomy idealization from different angles.
I have long wanted to create this anatomy, and so here it is: an example of one of his arm simplifications.
Here is a demo showing how you can go about drawing it.
Yours sincerely,
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