紙飛機工廠

It's Friday

2011-08-19T13:33:00.002+08:00

Once upon a time...

2011。夏。

2011-08-19T11:29:00.002+08:00

開始。加油加油!!

Merry Christmas

2011-01-15T16:41:00.003+08:00

2010-11-16T16:57:00.001+08:00

2010-11-16T16:51:00.002+08:00

2010

2010-03-04T15:15:00.005+08:00

How's 2010 going so far guys? Here's sth I worked on last year and now it's finally released. I'll just leave the intro page to where it should be. Enjoy! (All images are property of Keystone Game Studio - Sliding War)

Practices

2009-10-09T17:58:00.005+08:00

2009-10-09T17:26:00.008+08:00

Trying to make it rough in the begining stage.

Ruined City

2009-09-21T15:17:00.003+08:00

Thanks Alex' advices. You're the man, bro. ^^

Faces

2009-09-21T15:09:00.004+08:00

Yup still doing sketches EVERYDAY!
More to come so stay tuned ^^

Old Sketches

2009-04-25T05:14:00.005+08:00

These were done for the caricature class I took couple months ago.

Some Sketches

2009-04-25T02:50:00.013+08:00

Was thinking about setting up a sketch group blog and invite some firends to join and contribute. The purpose is to motivate each person practicing drawing/painting everyday.

But I believe there are many similar blogs out there, and people get lazy easily.
So, I'll hold that idea for a while to see if there's a better solution.

Btw, Jordu Schell is one of the artists that would sketch and post everyday.

Final Fantasy

2009-04-17T19:35:00.009+08:00

Coloring on a red skin creature in dark scene with fire in the background is kinda challenging...

Hope it reads well.
(don't know why but it looks flat when save as JPEG)

Practice

2009-04-11T21:25:00.007+08:00

Environment Wk05

2009-03-26T12:38:00.002+08:00

Road to....

Lately

2009-03-26T11:37:00.021+08:00

甲、
兩個高中同窗不約而同結束了一段感情，對象都是高中同窗。
雖然沒有緣份留在彼此身邊，可希望彼此還是會記住高中那段曾經青澀的回憶阿。
有緣相聚，無緣就好好過好彼此的人生吧。大家都加油!

題外話: 聽到光陰的故事片尾曲就想起許多高中的回憶。

乙、
其實這一兩年的個性變得內斂很多。改以畫交流。
藝術家成長的路上總是孤獨的。一句加油都會令人覺得很溫暖的唷!

丙、
發大夢要做好多事情。
所以要學很多東西，
學了很多東西就有能力可以做很多事情分享給別人幫助別人。

丁、
這三個月都將會窩在這裡:

自己大概都是這麼煮給自己吃的:

在星巴克幫自己買了個小蛋糕過生日:

戊、
環球影城

己、
史瑞克電影美術設計帶我們上戶外寫生課。
他也是電影阿甘正傳的場景設計。(可見其經歷之資深)
拿出骨董級的畫透視用工具想嚇唬我們。哈。

庚、
好好把握人生僅有的機會!別留下遺憾。
如果過去已經有了遺憾，就讓它去吧。
未來依舊值得我們奮鬥珍惜!!

Get Back Up!

2009-03-22T11:19:00.003+08:00

Saw this clip on Imaginism Studios Blog posted by Bobby Chiu.
Very inspiring!

寫生

2009-03-15T03:34:00.005+08:00

其中一堂課帶我們去街上畫場景，就出現了以下的有趣畫面。
一群人拿著筆記本在大街上畫Sketch，感覺就很棒。

最後大家把各自畫的放在桌上彼此欣賞欣賞。

Environment Design Week 01

2009-02-15T20:10:00.006+08:00

場景設計作業

晚餐

2009-02-10T12:48:00.005+08:00

晚餐做了高昇排骨，我最會做的菜。大家都很喜歡，很棒。

來這裡之後，也稍微觀察了其他同樣在這條路上奮鬥的朋友是如何計劃每天的行程。
如果要突出，自己就應該要更加努力。

專心!

洛杉磯

2009-02-09T19:03:00.003+08:00

洛杉磯的天氣跟台北一樣，下雨、晴天輪流交替著。

成功的ARTIST要具備很強的技術之外，良好的溝通能力以及大方親切和善的做人也非常重要。
這邊每個講師的能力都很強，業界經驗也很豐富，更重要的是每個人都很親切很無私的跟同學分享，一點架子都沒有。他們都是很好的榜樣，我想這是除了向他們學習技術以外，所學到更有價值的東西。而這個價值觀跟態度可以讓我未來的人生走的更有價值更有意義。

在此謝謝學校的Kevin還有Estelle。能夠認識你們真的是很開心，也很感激你們這麼熱心在各方面幫助我們。謝謝:)

Figure Drawing Week 01

2009-02-09T16:34:00.006+08:00

Instructor: Kevin Chen

Class Syllabus:
This is an introductory course to help beginning student develop the foundation skill set needed for figure drawing and figure invention. This class will cover topics including proportions, gesture, weight, form and design of the human body.

Note:
Observation -> Understand -> Communication
Process of breaking down a figure:
1.Gesture
2.Porportion
3.Form
4.Planes
5.Constructions
-1到5按照順序來

Demo:
-畫中心線: 了解身體各部位離中心線扭曲的幅度多少
-畫各部位: 如頭脖肩三者為一體
-腿部支撐重心線
-各部位中心線延伸出各部位圓柱體

HW:
-Memorize Human Porportion Chart
-3 proportion overlay drawings (tracing paper) on top of photo reference (Male, Female, side)
-3-15 min. figure studies applying the proportion idea
-20 drawings
(Practice with Characoal Pencil)

Environment Sketching Week 01

2009-02-09T15:37:00.005+08:00

Instructor: Ed Li

Basics of Sketching in Environment Design

Note:
-永遠想著你要表達的畫面重點在哪？
-地平線->上線稿->麥克筆Block-In
-Deep Space
-Flat Space
-Limited Space
-Abstract Space

HW:
20 Environment Sketches

Creature Design Week 01

2009-02-09T15:13:00.007+08:00

Instructor: Jerad S Marantz

Class Syllabus:
This is an in-depth introduction to Creature Design for both the Film and Game Industries. We will explore designing within the genres of Horro, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. (nice!!)

Note:
-Draw small & starting loose and fast
-Sketch (doodle) on paper -> Explore Possibility -> Design Details
-Do tons of doodles without falling love with details of each doodles
-用灰麥克筆打底稿
-參考: 古典人像畫的姿勢、宗教圖騰可用在皮膚上、美式足球球員、動物資料照、Photos that look scary
-研究昆蟲、動物運行的方式，運用在Creature Design上
-Paint on photo to make it a monster/creature.
-Working with limitation might create some happy accidence.
-90% of the design is about FORM/SILHOUETTE.

HW:
40 full body silhouettes that have significant range in design and shape.

The Creative Personality

2008-11-05T15:53:00.000+08:00

The Creative Personality
Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality.

By: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. What makes us different from apes--our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology--is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.

When we're creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes dose to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy--even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace--provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.

This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always "on." In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it's not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.

One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the "g factor," meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.

The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not necessarily imply higher creativity

Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.

Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.

Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.

Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and this selectivity involves convergent thinking.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.

Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: "Tell anybody you're a sculptor and they'll say, 'Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.' And I tend to say, 'What's so wonderful?' It's like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don't wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn't fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?"

Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: "When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail. If I'm in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it'll take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, 'My God, it's not working,' and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence."

Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: "What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while his wife called him back to bed with no success.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas. as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality At the same time, this "escape" is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists--musicians, writers, poets, painters--are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted. We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton's words, "on the shoulders of giants." Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They're also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they're usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.

This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person's ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is "her home," nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:

"This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means 'not like this' and 'not like that.' And the 'not like'--that's why postmodernism, with the prefix of 'post,' couldn't work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one."

But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: "I'd say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They'll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it's going to be interesting. It's not predictable that it'll go well."

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:

"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help."

10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow's words: "Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them." A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.

Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.

Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

From Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published by HarperCollins, 1996.

Let's have some CARICATURE!!

2008-11-04T00:24:00.005+08:00

I'm having a caricature class with one of the greatest caricature artists, Jason Seiler. That is really amazing! I finally could have a chance to peep on how master works!!
This is one of the first assignments. Took some time to get used to draw in digital. Have a look!

諾貝爾物理學獎得主

2008-10-08T09:57:00.004+08:00

節錄自中時電子報-

今年的諾貝爾物理獎在台灣時間今天(7日)晚間揭曉，由日裔美籍的南部陽一郎、和兩名日本物理學家小林誠與益川敏英共同得獎。

前諾貝爾物理獎得主小柴昌俊回憶說，他廿幾歲時，南部曾在大阪市立大學當教授，因此曾在南部的研究室睡覺，做了一個月的研究，也曾到南部家用餐，南部是個對任何人都親切的人，他早就應該得獎了。

小林的妻子惠美子在接受日媒採訪時說，「他被很多單位推薦多年，他母親一直期盼兒子能得獎，可惜母親在去年九十歲時過世，若能早點得獎就好了。」小林就讀高一的女兒由佳則說，他只是平常在家發懶，喜歡玩電動、數獨的普通老爸。

益川的妻子明子說，家裡沒有書房，也沒看過丈夫讀書，他通常都是拿著紙筆到咖啡廳沈靜的思考，平日則喜歡按照時間計畫作息行動，早上固定八時二分出門，晚上固定九時卅六分洗澡。

In honor of their great contribution to the Physics.