Beading Crochet Workshop

Susan Goldstine, one of St. Mary's math professors, had a session for learning how to bead crochet. This was an interactive workshop where we all learned how to do basic beading crochet. We started out with some crochet that had already been started. From there, Susan taught us how to continue beading and how to fix our mistakes if/when we made them. This was my finished product of the first beading I had done:

As you can see, the beads line up and spiral around. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to follow!

After finishing the first one, we had the option to either undo our original work to practice some more or start a new strand of our own. I started my own strand and starting is a bit awkward and confusing. Susan was there to help though, and I eventually got it. You start out with about a foot of yarn for every 9 beads, so she told us to pick five colors and get ten of each color. Therefore, 5*10 = 50, so about 5 feet of yarn (more or less...more probably would have been better). As I mentioned before, starting a strand was a bit difficult, but after getting into the swing of things, I managed to make this:

This was a bit smaller than I expected, but it turned out fairly well! I needed more string, but otherwise I was very happy with it.

This was a very fun workshop and Susan even showed us some of her own work. One can make bracelets using this idea and smaller beads (much more difficult). It is a good pastime and I will hopefully continue it and learn more soon!

The Viewable Sphere: Mathematics Meets Photography

Dr. Bruce Torrence had a lecture about photography that incorporated math. He began by speaking about the "viewable sphere" . The viewable sphere is something very much like the picture above. The reason this came about is because a spherical photograph is difficult to print, so they have this concept which is similar to the concept of the panel photo app on the iPhone (sorry if that's not the right name for it). They call this concept the Equirectangular Projection. Using this concept is the easiest way to change images (it uses the same format as maps do--longitude and latitude).

There are four steps that need to be taken in order to do an equirectangular projection:
Step 1: Take an ordinary photo. (Later an application of mathematical transformation to the digital image will turn it into an equirectangular projection).
Step 2: Take another photo from exactly the same vantage point.
Step 3: Continue to shoot photos covering the entire viewable sphere.
Step 4: Stitch together to make a complete equirectangular panorama (The equirectangular panorama will be exactly twice as wide as tall).

A neat trick that Dr. Torrence suggested is if you are doing it handheld, use a string with a penny tied to the end and tie the other end to the camera to keep a mark on the ground in order to keep the distance the same. It is very important for all the photos to be the same height!

The horizon in the 3D scene corresponds to the equator of the viewable sphere while the sky (which is everything above the horizon on the sphere) lands outside the horizon circle.

It can be shown that any circle in the stereographic image plane corresponds to a circle on a viewable shpere. A line in the stereographic image plane corresponds to a circle through the North Pole in the viewable sphere. Any line in the original scene corresponds to a great circle on the viewable sphere corresponds to a line/circle in a stereographic image. Lines are helpful because it means you can tilt the sphere which allows us to emphasize certain features while keeping the horizon circular.

Other interesting tid-bits are if you tilt the sphere completely upside down, you get a tunnel wall. If you tilt the sphere 90 degrees, the horizon (equator) becomes a straight line.

I really enjoyed this talk, I thought the images were fascinating and I learned a lot! I had not seen pictures like these before and I learned that it takes a lot of sophistication. I would definitely encourage others to look some of these pictures up because they are really amazing!

Edited Chrome logo

Original

New

I decided to use the new Chrome logo, which is a 2-D image rather than the old 3-D image. When I saw it, I thought of elements and decided to go in that direction. It seems very simple, but that was my goal; because you have central colors, I didn't want to do too much.

For the red, I decided to do flames (which were harder than expected). Blending was especially hard, and as one can tell, I still hadn't successfully blended the reds together.

For the green, I thought of earthy things, like leaves! I purposefully chose a different green for the leaves because I wanted the leaves to be falling and I like the slight contrast.

For the yellow, I automatically thought of the sun and thus decided to to rays of light, and I'm pretty happy with it. (The side got cut off, but you can still understand).

I decided I had to do something for the middle, and since it was blue, I thought of the sea. So I did little waves, but just to make sure my point got across, I put a little boat in there. It didn't seem like it was enough, so I added some stars which led me to use the white as a crescent moon (which I was originally going to put in the blue, but I liked the idea of using the white better).

Thus, here is my elemental Chrome logo!

Tony Robbin

Tony Robbin is an author and an artist who works with painting, sculpture, and computer visualizations. He has done over 25 solo exhibitions and has been included in over 100 group exhibitions in 12 countries. He is known for his application of Quasicrystal geometry to architecture, and has even been able to implement this geometry for a large scale sculpture in two places, one at the Danish Technical University in Kongens, Lyngby, Denmark, and another for the city of Jacksonville, Florida. 

This is an example of a quasicrystal image:

                Robbin’s has been successful in combining such things as Cubism and contemporary physics that he has created two- and three-dimensional representations of four-dimensional space (Hertz 15). This caught my eye because I really liked the color scheme as well as the way the objects break through the frame of the picture. It almost has a linear sense to it, but having objects come out of the frame seems to break that a little. I also really like that he uses a color pallet that goes well together. One is able to pick out familiar shapes which is very interesting because you can see the framework of the objects.

                If I were to critique this at all, I wonder how he would be able to press through the paintings he does; that is, how could he make it even more intricate? If he were to apply non-geometric shapes along with geometric shapes, I think that would be very interesting. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Robbin

"Art, Code, and the Engine of Change" - Paul Hertz

Progress

So progress is coming along slowly but surely. The hard part is that I have already created lines and now I have to go back and make them connect to make actual shapes. It's a slow process, but I'm getting the hang of it.

Music Line Illustrator

These are six random portraits that I found online (Google images: Portraits)