mannicken

Well, when you're drawing from a long pose (week or longer), the model is bound to change her/his shapes slightly.. So just drawing what you see is not enough, you have to understand the 3-dimensional structure of the thing you're drawing at least on a basic level.

But also, I agree -- foreshortening is hard until you learn 2-point perspective and can "see" perspective points that you can easily build up the foreshortened feature from.

It's just not seeing, but also knowing. That's why some art schools have dissection labs where art students learn how human body is structured. And when you know anatomy, you can draw from imagination which is really a lot more valuable skill than copying a person's photo using a grid method :P

The ones that helped me the most were:

Universal Principles of Design

Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life -- this is not related to design that much, but it's a staple life drawing book and once you can draw a person's face well, everything else becomes easier to draw.

Our brain is capable of creating several personalities that argue with each other (see split identity disorder). Of course it can handle multi-tasking.

http://www.nida.nih.gov/infofacts/heroin.html about 23% of users become dependent. Alcohol has 15% addiction rate, I believe.

Heroin (diacetylmorphine) is merely a cheap and potent painkiller, cheaper than other popular ones like oxycodone. It's used in UK to treat severe pain. It's not the strongest one out there (fentanyl is stronger), nor will it make you addicted instantly.

You will probably get addicted if you have easy access and some recurrent pain issues: psychological or physical. A lot of people start off with prescription pharma, and then as their prescription or money runs out, they are forced to use cheaper street alternatives like h.

Others just like to nod once in a while, and only a small part, I believe, makes heroin their ultimate priority enough, willing to kill their own grandmother for a fix. Unfortunately, those junkies are also the most vocal and noticeable ones.

I mean, heroin is not entirely safe and it's very pleasant and it can be addictive just because it's so fucking nice. But I think a lot of people use the idiotic societal stereotypes to justify their own lack of maturity to handle detox, and right now, with the plethora of unaddictive painkillers, rehab, methadone, suboxone, support groups, antidepressants detoxing is easier than ever.

"It always seems to be the idiots and suggestibles that end up with the heroin addiction."

Really? You mean like, W.S. Burroughs, Kurt Cobain, Patrick Kroupa, Edgar Allen Poe (although he used opium), Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Belushi, Jim Morrison, and a lot of other people who like to keep their addictions hidden least they be stigmatized as junkies?

I know it's so tempting to just classify a certain class of people as undesirables based on what drugs they prefer or what their skin color is, but that's not smart.

So DNA would be 'the code', and our environment would be 'the input' and we would be the code processing the input? Cool.

It's funny how the title reads as:

"[THEY WILL GIVE YOU] $149 for a Touchpad if you sign up as a developer [THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY JUST TAKE IN CASH]."

When the reality is: "This Touchpad costs $149 if you go through a bunch of complicated forms, give away your info.. oh, and in reality, it costs like a lot less than $149 even so we'll still be making a shitload of money from it."

"People are symbol processors"

No.

"Since most people aren't "haute" designers it becomes difficult to relate to and use their designs."

No.

It's easy to judge how realistic or beautiful a face is, but much harder to draw it. Similar concept with design.

I think you're making a fundamental assumption that design/drawing/visual disciplines are symbol-based, when they are not symbol-based.

I highly suggest reading "Drawing on the right side of the brain". I've studied art, and in every drawing class something along the lines of "No, symbols are bad, boo egyptian eyes, switch to the right side of the brain" was said at some point.

I study art and freelance as a designer. As you can tell, sketching is a big part of my life. Doodling, sketching, brainstorming, laying out wireframes on paper, value and abstract studies all involve touching some sort of a pen tool, be it a tablet pen or a graphite stick.

From what I found, I prefer sketching with a 2H pencil to tablets. There is just a lot more feedback, and like the author describes it, I'm a lot less likely to get unfocused when sketching on paper than when sketching in Illustrator.

I'm 20. I dropped out of high school, studied for a couple of years in community college and am taking classes and workshops at an art school right now (no accredited degree). For me this provides a solid compromise between the extremes of fascist discipline and anarchist chaos.

The first extreme relies completely on papers, degrees, and the value of adderalled-up memorization of facts and focusing your life on passing the tests. Life isn't about passing tests and I didn't want to go that route. So I dropped out of high school.

The second extreme is an anarchist, 'fuck the power' immature, spontaneous chaos. It disregards discipline, it ignores the beautiful life-rhythm of doing something everyday. It glorifies chaos and disorder, and ultimately for me it would probably lead to jail and homelessness. I decided to ignore that, since I realized the value of discipline and the value of education in a classroom (but not for a degree).

I have very little interest in the opiatish dream of a 'start-up that will make me filthy rich' too. Hence why I avoid startups. In fact I am skeptical of everything that alludes to 'becoming filthy rich'.

I am not a typical successful dropout like Bill Gates (yet) nor do I think I will be, and I'm not a stereotypical dumb lazy fry-flipping dropout (yet). As an experiment to test my discipline and knowledge, I decided to spend a year working in a full-time IT job, and I have spent exactly one year there.

So yeah, I'm that other guy :) Your mileage may vary.

I was earning $80k at 18. No college degree, no high school diploma... Long resume and a portfolio. I worked in UI R&D prototyping field.

Ditto that. I've read somewhere that the ability to handle critique properly is what makes or breaks designers.

Quite frankly, I crave critique because I need feedback. When I don't get feedback, I feel dead. Getting positive/negative feedback on my work makes me feel alive. I particularly like negative feedback because it seems like my skills are magically transformed for the better afterwards.

Yeah, perhaps the cause of my depression might be being pushed into programming from a very young age. Just like people in ballet/gymnastics, I was kind of expected to write C++ code when I was 11 even though I rarely enjoyed coding/solving algorithms.

Yeah, actually that is true. I've been taking community college classes for about three years or so. Dropped out of HS in 10th grade, started community college instead of 11th grade. Taking classes helped define what I like.

I thought I wanted to be a chemist, but after taking Chem 161 I realized I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT CHEMISTRY. I thought I wanted to major in math but I barely passed Calculus III and the class was a huge drag. Then I started taking art classes and realized art was awesome. I've stayed for hours before and after the class finishing paintings, going to the galleries, hanging at the galleries, it was just so fun and I stuck with art for over a year.

But then I realized there's not a lot of money in art (for me) so I started studying design (especially since I have background in web-development so that helps).

I guess I'm better off than 100 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2725893) in that I at least am somewhat more determined with goals in life, somewhere in the arts/design industry. And that comes from actually designing/drawing and enjoying it, rather than liking the "idea of being a quantum mechanics professor".

The only problem of course is that it'll never happen because apparently I'm destined to slave away at C++ legacy code all my life. Which is really what depresses me.

I'm hanging out with the homeless sometimes. It puts a lot of the shit in perspective.

"The Dip" does seem to exist. The worst and most painful part of the long distance race is at its end but if you get through that, you feel much better. And in the end you are better after the race than before it, in all terms.

>I find this really interesting because we often see a psychopath represented as a remorseless beast void of any human emotions yet, looking from this perspective, it almost paints psychopathy as a dibilating disorder.

That is true. I only met one person who seemed to act sociopathic (as well as admitting lacking the capacity to feel empathy) and she seemed to be shut off from society. It's rather sad. Falling in love with her was a rather bad idea too :)

There might be some truth to Steve Jobs' view of LSD.

There have been studies that link psychedelics and aesthetics: http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/story/2011-09-29/Magic-m...

I'd say LSD is like steroids for artists/designers/creative people or Adderall/Ritalin for students. Sure it won't make you creative overnight but it will reaaalllly help, and it's kind of dangerous. Most of the danger comes from illegality, of course :)

It is just a lot easier to come up with new ideas when your mind is open and sketchbook seems to be a direct extension of your brain, where you can just 'think' ideas with pencil.

Actually, it was easier to emigrate from the USSR for Jewish men and women than for the rest of the nation due to refugee programs that US offers for minorities suffering persecution. I think other countries offer those two.

I am one of the people whose parents emigrated in 2004 as Christian refugees, btw. They had to prove they suffered from religious persecution (bible raids, not getting into colleges, etc).

The whole 'give me your poor and hungry' thing never really went away ;-)

I never exercise. I hate exercising.

I do dance several times a week, however, and like to walk around/be jittery so I hope that helps me stay in shape. I don't stay in the house much -- it makes me depressed.

Essentially I'm getting a kick out of using my body to move me around, make it do things. And I keep a daily chart of weight that helps me intuitively feel when to stop eating. Right now I'm at around 78 kg at 189cm which feels good.

My new favorite exercise would be punching people who tell me to eat more in the face.

What if you programmed a human to enjoy finding sandwiches?

Well, now that you think of it we are all in a way programmed to enjoy certain things through classical conditioning.

Obviously. From what I know, ego is created by memories from a subjective experience. Death is nothing but destruction of memories. Some of the memories and experiences are selected and stored in global consciousness (like art/writing/design/etc). Same thing as death would probably happen if all your memory were to suddenly become unavailable within a context of staying awake as a physical body. We're all in linked system (your memories come from others, your ego is build from global consciousness + the context of your physical body) so "death" as in the end of phenomen of consciousness is possible but hardly achievable. Even if we kill every living being on earth, who's to say consciousness won't recreate again or it hasn't already. I'll come back to this at the end.

What's funny is memories are also re-created and retouched when we recall them. The whole thing is very complex and when people say they 'know for sure' something about life/death it irritates the hell out of me.

Individual death isn't bad or good. Death just is. It's more fluid and complex than bad or good. Not to mention "dead/alive" itself are fluid concepts. People choose to interpret death as good or bad because people are idiots.

If death was ultimately bad people wouldn't commit suicide all the time. If death was ultimately good people wouldn't apply so much effort to keep alive. People choose to think suicidals are by definition mentally ill also because people are idiots. If you're in a burning building, you most likely will jump out of the building committing suicide because the alternative (being burned alive) is much worse. Similar thing with a lot of suicides.

My point is: people are naive idiots and we still have no idea what exactly happens after death, and what exactly is 'after' or before. The idiocy of people when it comes to the subject of death figuratively speaking makes me want to kill myself.

The comforting thing is, within a context of individual consciousness you're pretty much fucking immortal. Whatever happens outside of the context of functioning consciousness should really be none of your concern. It is impossible to "feel dead". "When I'm alive death isn't here, when I'm dead I won't be there to witness it".

I'm gonna have to agree with this.

I grew up in a poor town in Ukraine. Up until the age of 9 or so, I was on a steady diet of potato soup. No videogames meant my only source of entertainment was reading or drawing. New cloth? Forget about it, haha. A candy bar (mmm Bounty) was something to buy on a holiday. Walk to the school and get ostracized/bullied by kids who somehow resemble wild animals.

The entire last 8 years in USA felt like a walk in the park. No food? Pshh, food stamps, food banks, whatever. Food takes about 5-10% of household's income anyway, compared to like 50% of the income in Ukraine. No housing? Millions of relatives with giant houses, homeless shelters, etc.

It's even easier to lose weight just because of the access to millions of gyms, dance clubs, and healthy food.

What's my point? I don't know :)

You're missing the point here. The author was typing from a world where only a few have been, where things melt into the floor, music turns into objects, objects turns into people, and your mind is on a huge emotional rollercoaster. Imagine being fired, then getting a date, then you remember your sister died (many years ago), then you realize you are awesome, then you feel AWFUL because you said something you shouldn't have at that party two months ago, then you realize everything is actually one whirling organism of energy and you can never die, then you hear loud noises and think it's the cops and get scared. All of this in a very very short span of time.

You start sketching or typing and you realize you can see blood flowing through your hands, and then you realize you're actually an animal for whom it's hard to form coherent thoughts because everything is just so wobbly and undefined. Then you become amazed at how human language is actually a form of learned "symbols->sounds" synesthesia. And writing is "sound->visuals" synesthesia.

People have pissed their pants from fear on psychedelics, the fact that the author of the document was able to jot down his experience is a remarkable addition to the knowledge of humans.

Not all psychedelics are illegal. There is salvia and dxm; which are perfectly legal in many states but are more powerful than mushrooms (psilocybin). DXM is closer to ketamine, but it appears that all of them are capable of having psychedelic (revealing) properties.

Legality doesn't always define harm. I think THC (active psychedelic ingredient in cannabis sativa) is much, much safer to do than DXM.

Another interesting one is kratom. It's an opioid drug which is highly illegal in Thailand but perfectly legal in US (can be ordered online, which is awesome). It is also much more addictive than marijuana (being a pseudo-opiate and all) but obviously not close to being as addictive as diamorphine/oxycodone.

Seriously, why is marijuana illegal again?

People like a degree of anthropomorphism in, well, anything. But when designing things with personality, keep in mind that there's, what I call, a valley of creepiness which happens when you add too much realism. E.g. it's probably okay to have a coffee-machine that kind of looks like an animal, but it's not okay to have that coffee-machine defecate perfectly realistic pieces of shit on your carpet.

Universal Principles of Design calls it the uncanny valley: http://books.google.com/books?id=zXAx9_Y8GiEC&lpg=PA243&...

Well, it's a great idea but it doesn't really work in FF 4.0.1 :(

Well, you said that you can't just 'drop the project' but that's not true. No one is forcing you to work on it but yourself.

A lot of the barriers are in your head ;-)