Another experimental new project: scripture posters. Definitely leaning more on the graphic design side of things here. The other day I happened to see This Is How We Do It (a children’s book by Matt Lamothe) lying around, and seeing the cover suddenly gave me an itch to make something similar but with words from the scriptures. I’m sure others have already made designs like this, but I haven’t (till now), so here you go.
I’m experimenting with a slightly new style here, masking the notes (after adding noise to the outlines with SVG filters and then eroding/dilating with Imagemagick) and painting inside the mask in Procreate. (And then texturing it in Affinity Photo as usual.)
New artwork: Behold My Beloved Son. Basically a Christ Visits the Nephites but with a different title, one actually from the scriptures.
I painted this in Procreate, and goodness, it messed up my back a bit. (Which is unfortunate because I really like the woodcut-style look on the white triangle. I may still do occasional pieces this way, when there’s not a billion little circles like I have here.) It’s frustrating when my spondylolisthesis keeps me from making art the way I want to. At some point I’ll probably try to figure out a way to do this style with code. (Speaking of which, I generated the circles here with a little bit of JavaScript. It was fun doing a piece that’s a little more three-dimensional.)
The MuseScore 4.0 announcement video. When I used MuseScore recently for the hymn prints, I didn’t realize it was a new version and had completely forgotten what the old one was like. 4.0 is so much better. Wow.
Tantacrul with an in-depth video on how they made MuseScore 4. This was great, loved it. I wish there were videos like this more often for open source projects. (Maybe there are and I just haven’t seen them.) The new instruments and playback quality are incredible and have me itching to get back into composing, now that I can export audio that will actually sound good.
Oktophonie on engraving changes in MuseScore 4.0. A lot of this is covered by the video, but I still really enjoyed reading through it. Mmm. (Very impressed by the engraving quality in 4.0, too.)
SMuFL, the Standard Music Font Layout. Bookmarking this here in case I ever end up getting into type design for real and want to design my own music notation font.
BlenderBIM, a BIM plugin for Blender. I have no need for this but I wish I did! (Alternate timeline.)
The Visual Dome, AI art from a semi-consistent secondary world. Freaky but fascinating.
Andy Matuschak on cultivating depth and stillness in research. This resonated — both the part about feeling the need to release work frequently and the part about social media making it hard to think slow thoughts and read books. (Some of that might be more my takeaway than things he actually says, by the way.)
Zach Leatherman on the JavaScript community. I hadn’t seen that only 3% of sites use React and a staggering 77% still use jQuery. Wow. While I do use React at work, I too have felt the disconnect (as is probably clear from some of these link posts) and have often feel at odds with the direction of contemporary frontend engineering. More JavaScript isn’t the answer, at least for me. (Which I say in spite of really liking JS. It’s my favorite language to write code in at the moment.)
