Ben Crowder

I’m in love with Instapaper. Seriously, it’s so, so, so awesome.

And it’s even more awesome now that I’m using it to learn things. I wanted to brush up on Python a few weeks ago, so I saved the tutorial to Instapaper and read it on my phone on my walk home from work. I’ve been wanting to play around with RenderMan, so I dumped the spec into Instapaper. I wanted to learn more French, so I found some tutorials on French grammar and put them in Instapaper. I wanted to catch up on some old BYU speeches, so I saved them to Instapaper. You get the idea.

Why is this cool? Because reading on my iPhone is more enjoyable than reading on my computer. (See @craigmod’s piece on the iPad screen — he’s got it right.) And I have my phone with me all the time, so I can read while I’m walking home from work or waiting in line somewhere or whatever. Much more accessible. Not to mention that Instapaper strips out everything but the text and formats the text nicely.

Even better, I just found that the first fourteen volumes of Hugh Nibley’s collected works are free on the Maxwell Institute site, and they load perfectly into Instapaper. Delicious.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s going to be an iPad version? I can’t wait.

A new illustration, “Hide and Seek,” painted in Brushes on my iPhone:

Painting at a pixel level like this is harder but really fun. (And it brings back the old days when pixel art was the thing. Anyone remember PCX? Yeah.)

Several people have asked me what’s with all the art lately. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that I declared on this blog that I was going to be focusing just on writing and designing, not on art.

Yeah, it didn’t last.

What happened? I kicked off my shackles, giving myself permission to make art and to code. See, I’d been telling myself that I shouldn’t do art because I wasn’t an artist and shouldn’t write code because I wasn’t a coder, blah blah dee blah blah. Hogwash. (Besides, even though I was telling myself this, I was still coding and making art on the sly.)

Trying to fit myself into the mold of what I thought I should be has once again proven a failure. I admire those people who just write or just paint or just whatever. I almost kind of envy them. But that’s not me.

No, I’m a got-to-do-everything kind of guy, rotating between a smorgasbord of hobbies all the time. One day it’s writing and coding, the next it’s illustrating and writing, the next it’s coding and animating and book digitizing. And that’s okay. It’s blissfully okay. Because artificial limits are stupid.

You know where the resistance has been coming from? There’s a little minimalist inside of me who wants to chop chop chop everything out of my life so that I’m only focusing on a few things. He’s only half right. What matters is chucking out the unimportant stuff so that the important stuff is what remains. I thought only writing and design were important. I was wrong. They’re important, yes, but so are coding and art and lots of other things. (And of course God and family and all that come first. I’m just talking about hobbies and interests here.)

This realization has been liberation. Sweet, blessed freedom. I’m making art and oh my goodness, it’s so much fun. (Which is why I’ve been doing so much of it.) I’m also writing code and reveling in being a geek, brushing up on my math skills by reading tutorials on Instapaper on my phone (along with the RenderMan spec and articles on chess strategy), and learning funky programming languages like Erlang and Haskell. And I’m still writing and designing, too.

So yes, there will be more art. Much, much, much more art. There will be more software and geekerie. There will be more stories and novels and plays. There will be more language charts and books (the D&C’s almost done).

Ironically, this is what I’ve been doing all along, just with a little red-with-horns guilt trip attached. “You’re supposed to be a writer, dude. Why are you wasting all your free time doing all this other junk? Go work on your novel.” That guilt trip is now nothing but a wisp of smoke in my memory.

Now to go finish up my next iPhone painting…

More art, this time two fractal-based pieces I made in FractalWorks and textured in Photoshop (as I am wont to do). The first is “Mandelbrot’s Garden”:

And the second is “Mandelrim”:

Fractals are fun. :)

I was reading Brenda Ueland’s excellent book If You Want to Write last night and felt like making some more art, so here is “Sleeping Bird,” a new illustration I painted in Photoshop. This one’s a different style from my usual:

It was (rather) loosely inspired by Chinese art. And it’s a ton of fun trying to achieve a not-so-digital look using digital tools. Next goal: learning how to do woodcut-style illustrations in Photoshop. Mmm.

Oh, and yes, I know that Brenda’s book looked like it was about writing, but it was actually about artmaking in general. But I’m still writing. :)

I’ve been using Blender 2.5 rather often lately, and I’m finding that there’s not a whole lot of documentation out there yet. (And enough has changed from Blender 2.4x that a large-ish chunk of existing documentation is at least partly inaccurate.)

Also, I’m getting tired of thirty-minute video tutorials on subjects that should only take thirty seconds to explain. Applying that concept to textual tutorials, I’m launching a new site. It’s called Blender Quicktips:

It’s bite-size Blender — small, simple tutorials that get to the point as soon as possible and then get out of the way. In other words, tutorials that make the minimalist in me oh-so-happy.

I’ve only got a few tutorials up so far, but I’ll be adding a lot more, on all sorts of Blender-related topics (bump maps, using Blender on a laptop, weight painting, moving the camera along a path, etc.).

“Secret Agent,” made in Illustrator with some final touches in Photoshop:

The full-size image is on Flickr. And I still haven’t gotten around to writing that post on why I’m doing so much art lately, but it’s coming. I’ve also got a new website I’ll be announcing in the near future. Lots of stuff going on. :)

Time for a bit of a potpourri post. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these.

1. I’ve moved both this blog and the Mormon Artist site over to my new host, and it went surprisingly smoothly. (Well, with a few hiccups like forgetting to enable mod_rewrite, forgetting to add the new domain zone, etc. And when I tried to import the 15mb WordPress XML file, I ended up with 7,000 comments instead of the 5,000 I actually have, so I had to dump the SQL directly and use that instead.)

2. The advantage of moving hosts like this is that I’ve been forced to decide what’s actually important and what’s not. I used to have around twenty-five domains registered. I’m paring it down to three. And I’ve gotten rid of years’ worth of cruft on the old server.

3. I love Linode. Everything feels faster and I’m learning tons (like how to use the MySQL command-line client, which I’ve always been meaning to get around to but haven’t yet).

4. I’ve unlinked my feeds from Buzz. I’m still trying to decide if I should unlink my blog from Facebook, though. Not sure…

5. Today included paring down my Vim statusline and then adding a wordcount to it (which updates when you save). Oh, and I added line numbers to the terminal version. See my .vimrc for the details.

6. To keep this post from being all geekspeak: Tonight we went to my brothers’ church basketball game — three of them on a team and they creamed their opponents. It was awesome. At first I kept thinking, “This is just civilized war,” and I still think that’s true of most sports to some extent, but yeah, it’s just a game. I have to remind myself of that. ;)

7. I know I said I was going to finish my novel Tanglewood, but I’ve decided to put it on hold for now and write some short stories. Also, I’ve got a blog post coming up soon on why I’m spending so much time doing genealogy and art and coding when I said not too long ago on here that I was going to focus solely on writing and design. :)

I’ve noticed a lot of cool photo manipulations online lately and got the itch to try my hand at one. Here’s the result, which I’m calling “Komodo King”:

As usual, it started out with a sketch:

I then went on Flickr and found some images (hurray for Creative Commons) that fit what I was looking for. First, the background wall (via cameliatwu:

And then the fighter (via fatniu):

Originally I was planning to use a frog or a chameleon, but I ended up going with a Komodo dragon instead (via jason_coleman):

I opened Photoshop, pasted the images in, and then moved, resized, and rotated them until I got a basic composition I liked (and I added a floor and did some basic lighting on the background wall and color correction on the dragon):

Next, adding a floor, basic lighting, shadows, color correction, and some rotation to get the dragon at the right angle:

Darker shadows (through burning and curves), more texture on the background wall, painting in some reflections on the dragon’s eye, and trying to figure out what to do with the fighter:

Cleanup on the dragon’s edges, shadow fixes, and a new dusty kind of lighting on the dragon (which I really liked):

At this stage I finally got something I liked with the fighter. Also did more cleanup on the dragon (including burning the shadows to make them more wrinkly):

The last stage was mostly just revising the fighter’s magic/weapon, painting the light reflections on the dragon, and doing some slight cleanup on the background wall (getting rid of the seams):

And there you have it. It’s meant to be sort of video game-esque (ala Street Fighter). And no, it’s not perfect (far from it), but I’m relatively pleased with the result. Taking random photos and weaving them together into a coherent piece is so dang fun.

You know, I seem to be doing a lot of art lately (and I’ve got another illustration in the works that’s coming along nicely), and wow, I’m loving it.

I’m resurrecting the Mormon Digitization Project, which I blogged about nine months ago and then abandoned while I went and got married. (I feel justified. ;))

Project page: Mormon Digitization Project

Brief recap: the goal is to find pre-1923 Mormon books (out of copyright), scan them, OCR them, clean up the OCRed text, and release the plain text files on Project Gutenberg (along with ePub editions, possibly PDFs, and possibly Lulu editions as well).

I’m starting with John A. Widtsoe’s book Joseph Smith As Scientist and will go from there. If you have any suggestions/requests, leave them in the comments (or email them to me). If I get enough people helping out, we’ll be able to tackle a few books at a time.

Process-wise, I’m thinking about trying Bite-Size Edits for at least part of the cleanup. There’s also a remote possibility I’ll use PGDP, but I really, really don’t like their interface. Right now I’m planning to track things using email and a Google Spreadsheet. (If I had more time I’d write a web app to manage it all for me, but Beyond is getting the bulk of my coding time.)

Yes, this will be kind of similar to the Mormon Documentation Project, but they don’t seem to be doing the types of books we’ll be doing. (I did use their text for the Standard Works web app and for this D&C reader’s edition I’m still working on, though. Good stuff.)

Want to help out? Email me (ben dot crowder at gmail) and I’ll add you to the list.