Green Man in SPAAAAACE
From the New Cathedral in Salamanca, Spain. The New Cathedral was built between the 16th and 18th Centuries. The Old Cathedral is late 12th C. So, old.
The astronaut was added, along with some other figures, in a renovation in the 1990s. I was going to slam the artist for the clumsiness of the carving but, after an images search, this appears to be its unfinished state. It gets better. And then, at one point, looks damaged and old. I dunno what that’s about.
I like his “demon eating an icecream cone” better. They call it a faun, but it has prehensile clawed back legs, so nuh-uh.
All of which puts me in mind of Darth Vader at the National Cathedral in Washington.
I am getting steadily better, thanks. Went in to work for a few minutes today and managed not to bump into anyone (but sent out lots of emails from the work account so everyone knew I’d been in.
They don’t call me ‘weasel’ for my excess facial hair).
Looking forward to a weekend of glorious loafing. Hope you are too!
September 23, 2016 — 9:01 pm
Comments: 5
Lookit the pretties
Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800) was a Japanese painter and Zen Buddhist lay brother who painted many subjects in nature, but famously birds. Mostly famously CHIKKENS! Particularly roosters.
He’s well worth checking out — his paintings are more naturalistic and less stylized than many of his contemporaries, but nevertheless beautifully detailed and formalized. I’ve spent a happy hour banging around Google Images search.
This year is the 300th anniversary of his birth, so there’s lots of his stuff to look at online, though sadly much of the accompanying text is Japanese.
But this? This is not an Itō Jakuchū cockerel. This is a cookie in the exact shape of an Itō Jakuchū cockerel. And a pretty good copy it is, too.
Thanks to Bob Mulroy for sending me this fun link.
June 7, 2016 — 7:20 pm
Comments: 13
Have a good ‘un
Naw, it’s not really Weasel Day. I posted that old graphic because I FINISHED ALL MY WORK and I feel like a fairytale princess because I get to have a three-day week just like people.
And so, my imaginary internet friends, what are you doing for Memorial Day?
May 27, 2016 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 18
Oooo…grungy!
There was a link to this at Ace’s the other day, and I was impressed enough to look up how it was made. Three plus years ago, a group of six students from De Montfort University, Leicester took old illustrations from the British Library and painstakingly reproduced what 17th Century London would have looked like before the Great Fire (if you hit the link, you have to fast-forward a minute to get to the animation. The beginning is a montage of illustrations).
It won a contest jointly sponsored by the British Library and game developer Crytek. They used the CRYENGINE, the engine that built the Crysis games. Fun games, but they made my GPU fan squeal like a little girl.
You know, if you enter a contest jointly sponsored by the British Library and Crytek, it’s hard to see how you could not come up with this exact idea (this or Stonehenge), but they’ve done a beautiful job, so all hail.
I love this use of 3D technology. Crawling all over 12th Century Jerusalem and Damascus was the only reason to play Assassin’s Creed (though I grew weary of the gameplay by the third installment).
Oh, and Daniel Vávra’s precise historical reproduction of 15th Century Bohemia, Kingdom Come: Redemption is still in the works, though it looks like the deadline has slipped by a year.
And, yes, he’s still taking shit because there aren’t any black people in it.
May 26, 2016 — 9:25 pm
Comments: 3
Is he strong? Listen, bud…
Welp, I ate the last of my birthday cake tonight. Yes, those are the cake toppers. I know they’re supposedly edible, but they’re just too darned un-food-like to pass my lips. Real food is not halftoned.
Big fan of Spiderman. I mean the 1967 cartoon, naturally. (You laugh, but I bet the theme song is going through your head right this moment).
The cake is, of course, an oblique reference to the Spiderman Incident. Honestly, pay to have your picture taken with a Romanian acrobat dressed as Spiderman one time, and you’ll never hear the end of it.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
May 13, 2016 — 8:45 pm
Comments: 16
Oh. Okay.
Harriet Tubman was a brilliant choice for the 20 dollar bill. There’s absolutely nothing negative anyone can say about it BECAUSE SLAVERY. I’m a big, big fan of the patriarchy, so this is kind of a blow for me.
Oh, well. Let’s hope they can find a softer portrait to work from. All the pictures I’ve seen, she looks like YOU SPEND THIS TWENTY AND I’LL KICK YOUR ASS!
I will say something about that: we don’t have the quality of engravers we used to have. Back when so many more documents were engraved, we had a big gene pool of craftsmen to choose from. Now, not. If you look at the modern big-head version of our currency compared to the old portraits, the quality is just not there.
And don’t get me started on coins…
April 20, 2016 — 9:27 pm
Comments: 13
Oh, sweet fancy Moses!
Did you follow the link Wolfus Aurelius dropped in the last comment thread? Kate Clark: Taxidermist of your Nightmares. She combines taxidermy animals with clay models of the faces of her friends to give you a walloping serious case of the jimm-jamms.
Oh, well. She’s in collections all over the world, while I squat on the internet pretending to be a weasel. How fine a nartist am I?
As I have brought work home, I shall leave you to stare into the abyss (one that is definitely staring back this time).
April 13, 2016 — 8:16 pm
Comments: 13
Godzilla is a friend to whisky
Did you know the Far East is a huge growth market for whisky? Friend of mine’s son is a liquor retailer in Singapore. Or Hong Kong. I forget which.
Anyhoo, I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about this ice cube. These ice cubes. The article calls them 3D printed, but that’s a little misleading. They’re carved using a CNC router.
Though I suppose the practical difference between a computer-controlled additive process and a computer-controlled subtractive process is neither here nor there.
These were created for an ad campaign, so I don’t suppose they’re really available to buy, though the technology is not totally impractical. There are a lot of CNC machines out there.
And the article mentions coupling CNC with Autodesk’s 123D Catch. I’ve mentioned this program in passing. It’s a free phone app that makes 3D models from your snapshots. It actually does a scary good job.
You have to take as many pictures as you can from as many angles as you can. They recommend a minimum of twenty. I think I did twelve or thirteen of a simple object and it worked fine. The stitching together process takes a long time — for my simple object, about an hour. But the end result is good enough to boggle someone who has invested a lot to learn how to squeeze out 3D models.
That would be me. I’m talking about me.
April 7, 2016 — 9:03 pm
Comments: 12
How historians troll…
This is a nice architectural detail I ran across. It’s from the roof of the Abbey Church of Saint Foy in Conques, France. It might mean God is always listening, or it might just be a bit of fun. Them Medieval types did a surprising amount of the latter.
Speaking of which, do you know how historians troll their underlings? They do things like call out, “Weasel, will you do an images search of ‘sheela na gig’ for me, please?” *quiet snickering heard in the background*
Go on. Hit the button. You know you want to.
April 4, 2016 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 10
Thundercats, HO!
This is de Löwenmensch, the Lion Man. He’s about a foot tall, carved out of a single mammoth tusk (which explains his pose, to some extent). The head is a cave lion, a creature from before the last Ice Age. Actually, Löwenmensch translates more to “lion person” — there’s some dispute whether the figure is male or female.
He was found in a cave in Germany in 1939 and, owing to some little distractions in the country at the time, forgotten for thirty years. More bits (including the head) were found in the same cave in the Nineties and a thorough restoration was undertaken in 2012/13.
Dude is forty thousand years old, the oldest undisputed representational sculpture found to date. If he looks stylistically familiar, he was made (probably) by the same people who did some of the better cave paintings found in France. The known territory of his makers — the Aurignacian culture — extends right through Europe into Asia.
More pics. He’s in a museum in Ulm and his official page is here (Google translate does a surprisingly good job with these pages).
Yeah, that’s right. I’m doing neolithic pinups now.
March 31, 2016 — 9:12 pm
Comments: 16