The view from above

A few sketches from a couple of recent business trips.  Airport and airplane moments, and the world from above.  Gotta get a window seat!  These were done with watercolor pencils: You can put the color down in pencil mode, and add water later.  Handy, since working with watercolors on an airplane tray is awkward at best, and the brush pens have trouble working normally when the air pressure is changing (they either won't give you water or they are little hoses).

Boo

Season's Greetings!

Decor and more

Halloween decorations are up, and one of the little cafes has skulls and pumpkins with their napkins and straws.

There was also a street fair recently, with lots of booths and some classic cars.

This pickup truck he said he still drives every day.  Seven miles to the gallon, but lots of fun.

And a dragon was spotting climbing a bouncy slide:

Hot off the easel

"Mediterranean Summer" Based on a sketch from a trip to Paris and Nice a few years back.  8x10 oil on aluminum.  Really fun to paint on!

Some random sketches

Last concert of the summer!  Eagles cover band.

Mints & Honey - I like the vanilla scones.

The shed in my backyard:

CalTrain commuters.  Sometimes it's just a rolling office.

And don't forget lunchtime at the park:

SIGGRAPH!

SIGGRAPH started with a bang - and that was just the plane landing.  But as the saying goes, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing." So that was a good landing.  There was also some nice landscape out the window on the way over.

I had a half a day before the conference started, so I headed for the dinosaurs of the Antarctic, currently conveniently located in Los Angeles.  Really quite beautiful, and the diorama for the big lovely showed a very bird-like appearance.

I picked up my conference badge on the way back to the hotel since sessions were starting at 8am!

Really good material, including how to image a black hole.  First you do some math...

Then you run some tests of your math...

And then you snap a picture...

There were also some great sessions on using machine learning for retargeting facial mapping, stylizing video, spatial computing... But I think the award goes to the exhibitor session that had eye-watering PowerPoint that kept bringing her laptop to its knees.  I mean, Digital Domain could take petabytes of data and retarget and render them in VR in real time, but her PowerPoint caused a laptop to blue screen three times in 10 minutes.

Actually, the best part was the reunions with folks I used to work with at DreamWorks, and the chance to see the amazing work of other artists and technologists. Most of which you cannot take pictures of since the studios own the work, but trust me, it was awesome.

At the the trade show there was a lot of real-time rendering, facial capture, avatars... those are the big themes.  My favorite part was how Unity - a gaming and VR platform - was printing real-time t-shirts: They had silk screeners set up and would print you a shirt on the spot.

Meanwhile, volunteers were handing out posters for next year's conference.

After the conference, it was back to the museum to draw the more modern animals in the dioramas.

But I couldn't resist some older ones, too.

Then it was on to the airport and another short flight home.

The Forbidden City

It's huge.  I mean nuts huge. It's made up of about nine sub-palaces, you know, for when you're friends drop by. You walk miles, and if you're me, you get completely disoriented.  I'm trying to imagine sacking this place and how embarrassing it would be to find out that you've been running around in circles.  It also gets like 80,000 visitors per day.  The day that I went, it was pouring rain, which probably kept things at a slightly more sane visitor level.  It did not make it any smaller, though, and according to my handy phone app, I walked about 9 miles, a few of them unintentional. 

It really is like Kung Fu Panda with the Hall of Supreme Harmony and the Hall of Mental Cultivation, and by 1pm I was ready for the Hall of Eternal Lunch and a Most Honorable Cup of Tea. And while it has enough restrooms for the number of visitors it gets, it only has one place for lunch, and it isn't that big.  There's basically one big long table and then some smaller tables and like a European cafe it's about the chairs not the tables (you share the table).  First you grab a seat, then you go to the counter to order, but don't leave anything valuable there.  Which makes it tricky if you're on your own.  Some 900-year-old guy who looked oddly like Michael Palin tried to grab my seat, but the nice group of friends who were right there chased him off for me, which is good since I was starving.  Lunch was good, and I had some ice cream to go (in the pouring rain).

Then it was on to more Halls of This and That, and I was having the damdest time finding The Hall of Paintings.  There were a million and one dragons, 

 Even the turtle is a dragon!

The emperor also had a load of clocks and a ton of broken pottery. By the time I found the Hall of Broken Pottery I was Over It.  On my way out of the maze (which took a few tries), I dropped by the Hall of Literary Brilliance and ta-da!  Paintings!  Beautiful ink paintings.

Of course, then you have to actually find your way out of there, which is harder than it sounds since you can't go out the way you came in and end up walking another few miles in the wrong direction, which is not helped by the fact that there is indeed a moat.  And to think that this did get sacked but no one ever made it to the Great Wall.  Of course, there's a handy subway station near this but the Wall is on the spine of a mountain range.  There's a lesson here somewhere.