Amour Sacré

Painting a bit today before the Roton. Considering paintings an an expression of one emotion, I wanted to expand on some existing works to enlarge them. Sacre Coeur is a simple painting of a burning heart, an emotion of longing, so a portrait, the object of desire, seemed to be a good second painting for this. I found a photograph of Deborah from our visit to Little Moreton Hall, and used that as my image, blurry though it was.

The colours (clearly) unify it. These are simply Light Red, with a touch of white for lighter areas, then Cobalt Turquoise Green, and Raw Umber in some areas. The umber and cobalt turquoises go so well together, magical. Umber - yellow, Cobalt - blue/green, and red, so we have all hues bar violet.

Borchard Entry, Symphonic Structures in Paint

Spent almost all of yesterday photographing/scanning Meals of Warm Spring and entering it into the Ruth Borchard competition. The process was long and complex and took until 2pm. My photography is working well enough but the main problem is the uneven lighting. I'm wondering whether to make some diffused studio lights, just for this photography, but I have little space to store them.

Today I'm back to painting. The key element of a classical symphony of the era of Mozart/Haydn/Beethoven is that each movement is a distinct mood which doesn't vary wildly. Beethoven's 5th is a prime example; each movement is a singular mood, though all movements are unified by the aaab motif. I want to add more paintings to form group unities like this because a painting is usually a singular mood, and alone is too much like a single tune, not powerful enough for a serious artwork of a structure which holds its unity in size and time. One painting can never equate to a group.

So today I'm adding some paintings to last year's works to create a broader structure. Apart from anything else this allows a wider gamut of moods. One painting is too tied to one mood. Some can be large and complex, perhaps like symphonic music evolved into (Sibelius' 7th), or progressive music. Genesis' Supper's Ready is hardly one mood, but one could say its many movements squashed over the top and into each other. Well, these considerations will inform my painting and music.

Today, a drawing to accompany Sacre Coeur from last year, in this exact way. I may be able to paint it today.

Portents of Desire

A slower day, tired and recovering from the days of painting. I came up with a few painting ideas in the evening, but I have lots to work on already. I also typed up some changes to my painting procedures, and modified a few of my tools, including my lamp for painting, and plastic sliders for my painting sticks.

Of today's ideas, I started on this one. It has a touching quality and was originally called Culmination of Moonset, then Culmination of Many Moonsets, then, as I drew it out, Portents of Desire.

I keep thinking of Ireland, Jack Butler Yeats, and today, Jonathan Swift and Pope.

Meals Glazing

Final day of glazing Meals of Warm Spring. An exhausting day; awake most of the night with crushing stomach pain which persisted for much of the day. I was unable to eat until 1pm and focusing was difficult. Work started at 9:30, but continued as planned.

The idea is perfect, then each human entropic act chips away at that perfection. The aim is to preserve it, or enhance informational content, as life does, wrestling to push upwards to heaven while falling down to an inevitable chaos; thus art replicates, not mere imitates, life. All novels and symphonies ultimately document the author's struggle to complete the work. At the end of every painting I have the sinking feeling of only failures. The work is done, it cannot now be better. I see only the flaws and must careful analyse each one, and calculate how to best repair each one next time, identify each possible route to the best outcome.

I'm now exhausted. Tomorrow I'll finalise my games, document this artwork and work on a full procedural breakdown for painting, and work on the jobs which have been on hold since Saturday.

Meals Glazing Day 2

Second glazing day.

There are three types of glazing:
1. An opaque layer matching the underpainting hues and paints to smooth it. I rarely use this these days, but it has been useful in fixing up an otherwise rough underpainting. For this I tend to use an linseed medium cut with solvent. I avoid solvents in my media, apart from one or two drops of Spike Lavender in the medium. Even a damp brush can be too much solvent.
2. A transparent pigment layer which covers the whole area, matching tones (light/shade). This is rubbed very thinly over a whole area. Details (perhaps still visible from the underpainting) are then added over the top, wet in wet.
3. An ultra-fine 'wisp' layer of genereally transparent paints. Really tiny amounts of paint, the tips of the brush breathing past the painting, adding a magical smoothness to the layer beneath. For this the hues need to match exactly, ideally from transparent colours so different pigments from the underpainting. This is efficient and beautiful, but the layer is very physically delicate.

I painted the floor in type 2 yesterday, and the sky, and most of my work; but the main figure flesh was painted in the wisp type, and it felt remarkably satisfying to do it this way. My work has evolved to use that, a super-detailed underpainting and a super-delicate glaze. A float of the brush seemed to magically 'perfect' the underpainting.

I will probably finish tomorrow.

Meals Glazing, Computer Wakes

First day of glazing Meals of Warm Spring, a difficult day due to lack of sleep and the usual jet-lag and headaches caused by the idiotic 6-monthly ritual of resetting the clocks, a ritual which makes me more ill for longer each time it happens. Painting started badly but I gradually warmed to it.

I became annoyed at the lack of reference images for some parts, but then reasoned that I'm not aiming to paint reality, but what my mind sees. This is a reversal of traditional doctrine - 'draw what you see, not what you think is there' is the mantra to drawing students, but I realised that, for me, the opposite might be better, that photo references may contaminate the reality of my mind, my feelings, my idea. This concept is worth pursuing.

The sleeping computer woke annoyingly as I worked. I banged the easel on the ceiling when I set it up. This bump woke the PC from sleeping. The room heater clicked on due to the thermostat. This woke the PC from sleeping. I dropped my maul stick on the floor with a bump. This woke the PC from sleeping. I ejected a CD from my hi-fi. This woke the PC from sleeping. None of these things were near the computer and should not have any effect on the keyboard, which is the only device permitted to wake the computer. I've now disabled even that. Why a knock halfway across the room should wake the PC is beyond me.

More Martian Roving, Rotoning, Patreon

Another day spent working on Roton and Martian Rover Patrol. Perhaps less frustrating, as I now expected this job to take longer, and I also improved the gameplay and stability of both games.

Martian Rover Patrol plays rather well. The next step now would be to improve the graphics, add more levels or an algorithmic level generator, more enemies (many sorts are possible, we could have inclines or ramps, pits with fire or enemies inside, new aliens, other rovers or even allies), more plot and player interaction (it would be nice to know the name of each planet, or receive an award or more messages at the end of levels)... the list can continue infinitely, but my goal here was to make this old game available, not make a new one.

That said, in the end, I did made a few tweaks to the gameplay. The aliens fire more often and at more interesting angles. The timer is faster too, giving more resolution to the score (though one still can't see the target time until the end of the round).

Overall, I'm happy with both games but ready to move on. I'm awaiting final testing from Andrew. 90% of all of the changes for both games were about system stability and compatibility.

I also set up a Patreon account yesterday and need to consider what to offer patrons. I'm ready now to work on my portrait. I have five days to glaze it before the Ruth Borchard deadline; really, far fewer, as I'd like some drying time before I photograph it.

Debugging

A frustrating yesterday, back to working on Roton and Martian Rover Patrol as new bugs are exposed and hunted. I wanted to avoid wasting too much of my time of these ancient games but, as with Radioactive, I must try to make them work their best, so will try again, bit by bit over the days and weeks. I msut stop tomorrow to start work on the glazing of Meals of Warm Spring.

Roton and Martian Rover Patrol Completion, Jack Butler Yeats

My main job of today was to complete the Martian Rover Patrol manual and prepare everything for uploading. These final tweaks drive me crazy. Like an albertross landing, the last parts seem to take a logarithmic age to set down. It's now 20:24 and I've just made the last programming tweaks, to fix (well address) the problem of Alt-Tab with both games. Fortunately, Radioactive (also a DirectX7 game) had the rudiments of code for this, so now both games have Alt-Tab support for the first time.

One choice was to work out payments, prices. I've decided to make both games $2 with a $2 option for the 16-bit 44100hz wave of the music. This is next to nothing. I had considered 'free' with donations, or perhaps a higher price, but I can but hope for a few sales at this price. There are so many games now and so many are free. Windows itself is, to some extent, on the decline as an operating system because a lot of people use phones, tablets or other devices to do the basic online ordering or web-form filling that modern life demands. Few people use chunky PC computers like myself, and those people, like myself, are computing professionals or old-school 40 or 50-somethings that have grown up using computers. Consoles are dominant for games, though Steam is a dominant (though expensive for developers) force in Windows gaming. For some games, the PC still remains a premiere gaming platform due to it sheer flexibility of controls (keyboards!), specialist game types that consoles haven't really made use of (consoles are still generally child/toy orientated), and the massive quantity of games.

Peter came for his lesson as planned and we talked about many things.

I finished watching a documentary about Jack Butler Yeats which was astonishingly hammily narrated by Pierce Brosnan. I found most of his art to be ugly and crude, but one or two had touching, almost ghostly qualties. In general, however, I found the titles to be better than the paintings.

Martian Rover Patrol

Well, last night I was wondering whether to update Martian Rover Patrol, so I tried the game as it was on Win 11 and it worked correctly. I enjoyed playing it and I remembered what a fun game it was, so I decided with some glee to update it.

The updates are invisible to a player, but fairly major in the background. As with Roton, I upgraded the engine from DirectX5 to DirectX7. DirectX7, now that we're on DirectX12, might seem just as ancient, but actually by version 7 it had pretty much reached the top of DirectDraw (2D), as well as sound and input capabilities. From then on, each upgrade was mostly about 3D hardware, and so it remains today, so updating a 2D game to DirectX7 is perhaps all that's needed even in 2023.

Doing so revealed a few improvements and changes to make to Roton too. Last night I thought that I should improve that game, and for the first time have changed the gameplay metric. All of these games, up until Gunstorm and even the Flatspace trainer, have waves of enemies that appear faster and faster - but there are periods of waiting when there are no foes. I thought I'd fix that by making a new enemy appear instantly when one is destroyed. This tiny change really improves the game. There are no more boring waits for action, there is always something to shoot. The jewels in the bonus rounds (a unique feature of Roton PC) are much harder to get now.

Updating Martian Rover Patrol from a 16-bit display to 32-bit caused a few issues. The bouncing wheels actually track the luminosity of the ground object to hug it, but did so in a really bad way, just checked the 16-bit pixel against a fixed value 0x4000, which is usually a dull red, but can really be anything - the pixel format of any screen can vary. Even where red is located can vary. So I had to do some work on proper luminosity checks, and lots of other technical things. As with the new Roton, the game will also now run on a screen that's bigger that 640x480, and it uses the original CD audio; the 2022 remaster of the original Yamaha SY-85 sequence.

On that note, I noticed that the 1999 Roton theme was mixed very differently to my recent recording. The samples were about 4 times the volume on the old CD-audio compared to the 2022 re-recording, but that ancient CD one was/is hissy and not very good quality generally. I lamented the loss of this, but realised that I still have the MED sequence, which contains the samples. So one last upgrade was to render a sample-only track in MED Soundstudio and mix it, at the correct time, over the 2022 SY-85 recording to get the volume balance right. It still sounds rather different to the 1999 version, which has a lot more mid range for some reason, but the new one will do.

One last job was to make a new logo and icon for Martian Rover Patrol:

I had no game art bigger than 160 pixels!

Peter was due for his piano lesson but missed it without warning for the first time ever, but he called later and will come tomorrow.

My last job is to create the Martian Rover Patrol pdf manual.

Roton PC Complete

Sigh, how frustrating some days are, but the newly updated Roton is now complete. I dashed through the morning, adding the new main loop and fixing up high score tests and other minor things. At 10:30, I set up a new television for mum after she spectacularly smashed the old one (I say old, it was less than 6 months old).

At 11 I got back to Roton, and created a new icon, and slightly tweaked the title graphics, from...

to...

The new icon was a bit of a pain, as I had nothing near 256 pixels wide (that was probably a huge size in 1999). Then, some playing and trying to address a weird bug where the wrong text kept appearing. I think it was due to the high scores, as resetting them fixed it, but I'm still unsure what caused it. Then lots of final updates; updating the itch channel, and creating a fancy pdf manual, which itself took over an hour.

I just had to make it look its best, I had to make a print quality manual, had to remaster the audio and update the graphics, but I feel that it's as much as waste of my time today as it was then. As a game, Roton is not very good. It starts very slowly, is actually rather boring for the first five or ten minutes, but becomes exciting (if repetitive) at around level 20. There are few noteworthy parts apart from the variety of enemies, and the occasional space invader. I could do so much better now; so it goes the familiar trope of my life! Toying with old and poor things in a a semi-frustrated state, when I know that I can make new things that are a thousand times better - yet those will remain forever unseen by the world. I don't make games anymore, so the whole experience of these remasters is a cycle of frustration and angst.

Still, my goal here isn't to make a good game, but to make available an old one which, without me, would be vanished forever. I thought, while playing, how Roton Amiga, from 1992 is about my anxiety and frustration of those days. I clearly remember working on it while a part-time office employee at Mediaware, a computer parts company. The villains in the game include floppy discs and lightbulbs, and other odd things, and the only aim is to face more and more of them until you can't cope and are consumed by them; buried, swamped, drowned to an ultimate and futile death. The unstoppable attacks from my father taught me that fighting was futile in this way.

A last few tweaks to this ancient game have taken hours, but hopefully it's all done now. My plan was to also update Martian Rover Patrol for similar reasons. Will I find that experience as frustrating and pointless? Yes. I could simply put it in my will that the source code can be released for someone else to fix! That's the lazy option. Really, I should, if I had the time, the resources, the care, be making new and genuinely imaginative games, but then, why, when I feel more at home painting, a medium which is easy to master and evident for all to see?

At these times I feel like a van Gogh of games, with the crucial difference that my games were rubbish... yet, no game is perfect and it's good that I can be critical and objective - critique proves that one has improved. Perhaps the greatest benefit of my programming years was the accretion of mental ability, of patience and problem solving skills, and the organisational skills that are necessary to learn to program, to make game art, to make the music. I would be a different person without the games. A normal person. I'm anything but that now.

Roton!

A rubbish sleepless night of stomach pain.

I dream of going to Wales, a lakeside holiday area, with others pon some sort of coach trip. At leaving time, I dash for the bus, but find I'm the only one of my party, then discover it's the wrong bus! I'm taken to a city, and get off the first stop. I enter a hotel and ask what I should do, will there be any more buses? I ask if I should take a taxi and they agree, then they and I wear strange headsets to talk to the taxi company and to each other. I wonder why I'm not phoning the others, calling Deb to let her know where I am. I left the hotel and walked down the very busy street, the road full of cars. It reminds me of Stockport, near the gallery. I see a huge limousine and wonder if I should just hire that, knowing, somehow, that I have £1,000 to spend, so why not?

Then I awoke. I think the dream is about art. I think my unconscious wants me to paint, the only times when I feel contented.

I got up late, and decided to work on Roton, one of my oldest PC games. I want to resurrect these old games, to at least make them available, even if they aren't artistically satisfying or forwarding my future... yet, this game is, in retrospect, one of my most surrealistic. A spaceship battles giant apples, atoms, umbrellas and all sorts of odd things.

The source hasn't been touched since 2001, not even on my prior PC! So it was a challenge to get it compiled. Visual Studio has a habit of setting everything up in a certain way, for 64-bit Windows, the latest kit with unicode text, and all C++ checks in place, which means old programs like this throw up hundreds of errors, most of which need compiler switches to fix. Roton was my second ever PC game, and my first full-screen DirectX game because my first game (Thermonuclear Domination) was more of a programming test that ran in a Window. It was first complete at the end of 1999 (I was working on Arcangel at the time). The commercial verison, bundled with Trax (my first 3D game) and Martian Rover Patrol, ran on CD-ROM only, streaming the music in little chunks, which is totally unnecessary today.

The code is ancient. By 4pm I was struggling with getting it working, but by 6pm it was running, and now has been upgraded from DirectX5 to DirectX7, with full wav music (actually, a new master, recorded from the SY-85 just before I sold it last year), and optional resolutions (it will play in a box in the top-left corner if 640x480 isn't possible).

Taking a day or two to resurrect Roton is fine. If I didn't do it, it would probably never see the light of day again. I'll finish it tomorrow, perhaps update the graphics a bit, then put it on itch, and get to work on Martian Rover Patrol. It would be nice, one day, to remake Arcangel and release it on Steam, but I need money for this.

MIDI Music Again, Frame Blobs, Van Gogh

A full day. Two art things were done. First, the final edits of the time-lapse video. The music constantly annoyed me. I started by creating a MIDI recording on the MODX, then imported this into the pattern editor, which is a simple multi-track sequencer. I then added layers, but the whole thing was very loose, annoyingly so. Exporting this, the arpeggio, oddly exported the individual notes of the arpeggiator, rather than the keys held. That made external editing difficult.

So today, after more work on it all, I deleted it and re-made it all, but used Sekaiju to record the parts externally, and heavily quantised everything. The music is simpler too. Very simple; generally A-min with F-Maj, C-Maj, and G-Maj; my most basic chords, as featured in my earliest ever music from my 17th year... the late 1980s. Improvising to such chords is easy, but I was happier with this tune, partly because I'd learned something new. I changed the lead instrument from an electronic wail to a wailing violin, an unusual opposite which helped it.

I also worked on an old frame, painting it with a mix of chalk and sand to texture it, but the result was astonishingly ugly. My filtered sand has gone missing, so I had to use garden sand which was wet and full of huge lumps. My plan is to wait for this to dry, then sand it all, then paint again. Well, again, I may learn something, and this £10 frame can't be used without a lot of work.

Oh! The first thing I did was prepare copy number 300 of 21st Century Surrealism. I noticed that I'd sold 299 on Amazon (I've probably sold a few here too, so it's only a nominal 300 rather than a technically accurate 300th copy). So, I signed and mocked up a special copy for auction on eBay.

I expect I'll spend the week working on Roton and Martian Rover Patrol; two ancient games which have never worked since Windows XP, and never except for with a CD-ROM for the music.

What I want to do is paint. I've watched a documentary about van Gogh, the artist who, in an indirect way, was my inspiration to become an artist because, years ago, a TV documentary about him had a competition attached (Window on the World) which I decided to enter. I noted the similarities between his work and Rembrandt's. Van Gogh was more like Rembrandt than any impressionist. People are blinded by the colours of van Gogh's late work and forget that half of his work is dark, browny, moody. I like ashen greys and subtle colours. Bright colours give me eye-ache. I'm overwhelmed by them and find them loud to the point of screaming; shouty, rude and boorish, gaudy, cheap, infantile; the antithesis of delicacy, subtlety, intelligence. Bright colours are a cheap trick.

Time-lapse

Have spent pretty much all day working on the time-lapse film I recorded while painting. The video editing was relatively easy, although the film is longer and more complex than previous time-lapse films, and required some customised pixelization.

The time consuming part was the music. In art there's often a compromise between doing one's best and doing for enjoyment, experimentation, or perhaps most commonly not doing one's best due to lack of time or resources. Just about every artist I can think of; Rembrandt, Dali, Leonardo da Vinci, van Gogh; they all at some point painted or drew things which were quick, loose, amazingly rubbishy looking compared to their normal work.

And today I felt like doing this with music; doing something quick, live and different, so I thought I'd sequence something live using the MODX; three tracks of tune which bounce along using the arpeggiator. Sometimes these experiments can produce good things. I rather like my Telly Savalas painting, made in this style, for example, but with music I always feel I can be and should be doing better, adding more polish, better timing changes etc.

After hours of playing with this, I'm unsure if I like it, but even the good elements will die if I don't use it.

Final Underpainting Change, Lamps, Jobs

So tired yesterday evening after four days of solid painting. My legs felt, as I walked with Deb, as though I were floating, and my eyes and brain concurred. We watched the last of the Muppet Shows, with Roger Moore, the end of a 5-year epic televisual journey. I slept deeply and awoke, still somewhat aching, at 8am ready for work.

I'm suddenly overwhelmed with jobs. The Steam Sale started yesterday, I must promote that, and I have an IndieSFX sale starting today, and the launch of the new Flatspace Golden Age Music pack at 6pm. This all needs promoting and working on in the next first hours.

And I need to dismantle and reconstruct my anglepoise lamp. I was out walking (floating) last night because I needed parts for it, but today I discovered that my existing bulb holder has a hollow plastic screw on the back which will be perfect for the lamp.

I sought a holder without a switch (the holder won't fit in the lamp with one, its metal tunnel is narrow) but the new switchless holder is too short and I can't use lower part in that because the screw thread in the base is a slightly different size (sigh!) so I'll keep the switch 'on' and saw off its prong.

First, today however, I had to make a slight change to the painting, a slight darkening of the leftmost eye. Yesterday, when the painting was wet and fresh it looked amazing and perfect, and today, in the cold light of a day, it looks blotchy, lumpy and crude! I must glaze some of it.

It's amazing how the tiniest strokes, the tiniest amount of micro-paint will transform a surface. Oil paints are truly magical, in contrast to the plastic ugliness of acrylics and the base and moronic idiocy of 'digital art'. Perhaps one day, a multi-spectrum display that uses more shades of light than ONE red ONE green ONE blue will exist, creating something which, in light terms (though not, even then, depth) match an oil painting. But not today. Today, digital displays are uniformly destructive to pictorial reality.

David commented that the painting is one of the best things I've done, which I felt a little stung by. I could paint at least this well for the last 10 years, but yet, perhaps, I simply haven't. Haven't the time, haven't the money, haven't the incentive. I could always paint well enough, but I know that I can paint better. My life is spent in a mad rush. I've never had the luxury of rest; a day doing 'nothing' is full of panic at the things I should be doing. Rest is time, life breath, stolen from work, from art, and industry, the hope of a stable income or stable future.

Now I must get to work. Tired I am, but frenetic the day must be. On we charge!

Day 4

I slept badly for the first time in this painting session. The days are long and exhausting, but I'm painting faster and better than ever. To think that I'd underpainted this in 4 days, when, for example, The Art Of Painting, a painting of comparative complexity took 18 8-hour days in 2008.

Day 3, Art and Seeing

A tiring third day of painting. Started by making a lamp, as my old one has broken.

The claw will grip onto my window handle, and the board works as a crude reflector (ignore the yellowness of this bulb, I painted with a daylight bulb!). I feel starry-eyed and exhausted, but I'm painting well. I watched part of My Rembrandt, a documentary. One expert was confounded by the potential that Rembrandt had to paint a portrait in one day, but this is quite possible. The quick drying lead white perhaps makes this necessary. He painted, on screen, so very slowly compared to myself.

For me, these days are whipped, like a galley slave. Click, click, speaks the camera on time-lapse. Click. Every 15 seconds I am whipped. Click, beats the drum of the bare-chested coxswain. Click! This camera seems to speed me up, reminding me of the passing of time, but also an eye, observing, making me anxious. Click! There it goes, pushing me on. Click! I kept thinking of the Scott Walker song 'Next'. Click! Paint, it says. Click! Time is short. Life is... Click! Short. I'm concerned about the source images from my computer screen appearing oin the film, these may have licencing issues in a video, so I'll try to mask them.

Unfortunately, the deadline means that this is likely to be a one-layer painting. It will look good enough, but not as good as it could or as good as I can make it. I know I can do better, and I feel this way after making every artwork, painting, piece of music. It remains true. Each artwork is a little better than before, but I know I can do better.

Over the past few days I've thought that Leonardo was unusual in that most of his compositions were collages, not a scene from life from which he copied, but imagined in the way I imagine, then sourcing and creating 'components', one by one. Perhaps all artists historically had some live and some collage parts; did Caravaggio assemble all of his 4 models and make them hold their pose for a week or more? Perhaps, for him, this was important due to the shadows cast by all of his models, but I expect that one or two models could take a day or two off. Most artists had a real place and put the models there, then painted that, but the Virgin of the Rocks never stood in a remote cave next to an angel! Leonardo painted each item separately, hence his interest in light reflections from each component to making the scene appear real. I needed to do this today, for my strange sky, and imagined sea reflections.

Anyone can paint what they see before them, but only a true artist can paint what their mind's eye sees. Art must come from the mind because a painting should be a pictorial representation of an emotion, idea, or mental concept communicated to another mind. Art is not a pictorial representation of a real scene. This is why a photograph is always bad art.

Meals of Warm Spring Day 2

Started by fixing the rogue eye. From:

To:

It's better placed but it's darker due to the difference in today's light vs. yesterday, and the difference in today's paint mixes vs. yesterday. It may, actually, me more accurate all round. Painting into wet 'guide' paint natually creates a muddy result, which is why I prefer a drawn outline, putting exactly the right colour in the right place first time on a dry (toned) background. This is impossible with a painted guide on the canvas as used by 'impressionists'.

My lamp has cracked and collapsed. I need to buy and new fitting and fix it. I've also had to order an engraved plaque for mum, and mix up a couple of salads. The days are long and tiring.

Underpainting Day 1

First day of painting. It is dark and cold, and dark, and dark. I've had to use lights for most of the day, and the brittle plastic of the screw fitting in my lamp has cracked!

Painting went well enough, but the likeness is not adequate, so despite a good looking eye I have erased it in preparation for a new one tomorrow.

I decided to use Micheal Harding's fast drying white, which did a good job in drying time, but is linseed based (that man has an obsession with linseed oil, I mean, even in whites!) so I anticipate a poor prognosis for the ultimate fate of the work. I can't change white now, at least for the new eye, or else time will reveal the difference. I really feel like throwing away all Micheal Harding whites, but no! The old stock safflower white is excellent and, for this rare deadline, I need a fast drying white. Why do art competitions have deadlines at the end of winter? Idiocy.

The whole day was recorded as a series of time-lapse photographs which will continue tomorrow.

Painting Plans, Crêpes

Preprations for painting. I've set up my camera for time-lapse, something I've not done with this DSLR; it requires a time-lapse interferometer, and mains power, and ideally manual camera settings. I'm erring on the side of long exposure time but a big F-stop and low ISO. Any motion blur may acutally help the animation, and the still tripod and easel should come out fine.

I'll record a snap every 15 seconds, so an 8-hour day would fit into 72 seconds at 30 frames-per-second.

I've also prepared study images.

I had crêpes for lunch in a new crêpe pan, a luxury item I've dreamed of for some time. I now want to make some with oats rather than just wheat flour.

Radioactive v1.15, Colour Studies

An annoyingly sleepless night. I went to bed at 21:30 but woke from 03:30 to about 07:00, then slept until nearly 10, the worst sort of night!

I started with Radioactive programming, studying Andrew's feedback from his latest version. There were two problems. Firstly, far too many screenmodes were being polled. The Enumerator routine was, for some reason, continuing to process after a CANCEL request, so I did things differently and only stored data when screenmodes were under the maximum. Secondly, the actual setting up of the 3D device was wrong. This is because this ancient game was written in DirectX5 or 6, and the older code wasn't updated correctly. My code said:

if (lpD3->CreateDevice(IID_D3DDevice, lpDDSbackbuffer, &lpD3Ddevice)==D3D_OK)


But the IID_D3DDevice define was an error, it should have been either IID_IDirect3DTnLHalDevice, IID_IDirect3DHALDevice, or IID_IDirect3DRGBDevice. This is obvious from the documentation BUT the documentation isn't online anywhere. Due to my meticulous filing, I remembered that I have the original DirectX7 documentation as a chm file, and discovered this error when checking the Enumeration routines. Anyway, this was quickly fixed and I was confident enough to update the game before Andrew could test it. I was right, and v1.15 is now error free, perhaps for the first time.

After that, work on colour studies for Meals of Warm Spring. This is difficult because almost any colour will suffice regarding 'reality', the pictorial reality of the mind, yet colour is crucial for conveying the mood via a sense of place as well as the inherent feeling of chromanance.

I started with a classical approach; colouring the flesh warm and the background cool, blues or greens. The result was rather pretty, warm, springlike, and something like the colours in my painting Romeo and Juliet.

Too happy though, too twee, too wrong! I painted an alternative with a red, foreboding sky and it looked instantly more powerful. I was hesitant to do this first for fear of overwhelming the whole image with reds and oranges; but there are always points of contrast. The lines in the sky (teeth, stictches, ribbons...) the light ones are light green (not evident from the insult of the digital imagery you can see, only in real life are the colours of any oil painting fully visible).

The area behind the crucifixion is heavenly. This is Jesus, Caravaggio's Jesus. The moon, originally yellow is now a light blue, brilliantly icy against the turbulent sky. The left will feature more green. There is vastly more drama in the second image, yet the only difference is hue. This is why colour studies are important.

You'll note the flesh is the same. I simply painted the new parts on a new piece of cardboard.

Sketchy, loose, and rough this may be but it still took a few hours. I'm ready to begin the painting, though I still feel somewhat sniffly, congested and sapped of energy. I'm not ready to start tomorrow, but will probably do so on Monday. I'm unsure whether to use Michael Harding's quick drying white. That might give me chance at a second layer before the deadline at the end of the month, but it probably yellows faster than the other white, and Michael Harding's paints yellow more than most anyway. When his colours are exhausted I'll be using Blockx and Winsor and Newton exclusively.

Radioactive v1.14, Sound Weapon Dream, Tracing

A frantic and stressful evening, passing versions of Radioactive on for testing. The results were ultimately useful, but it was all very last-minute.

I lay awake thinking about the CONFIGFILE changes. As well as reading and writing variables in the form "variable=value" it can write text to a file, simple lines, but what if the previous line didn't have a linefeed? Normally it adds one, then then line, but sometimes the class is used to add lists of variables like "Data=125, 167, 266" etc. so there's a separate function for appending text. In the night I thought that the ideal is a function which can either start text on a new line, or not, or add a linefeed, or not. Such things are the spinning thoughts at 4am. I hardly slept, as is usual when working until 9pm, but it's usual at any night. I've not slept for a whole night all year.

So, I programmed this function in the morning, and discovered the cause of yesterday's odd crashes which were down to a failure to initialise, trying to free memory via a junk pointer. All is well and the class is brilliant, though it wasn't, it turned out, anything to do with the Radioactive errors.

So, then to Radioactive, which was launched at 11:30am with a few changes. Based on Andrew's feedback, it seemed to be setting up screens successfully, but, right at the last minute, rejecting them, which points to the final check of all, for texture formats. Textures aren't used in Radioactive, and they were very problematical on Windows 8 with Flatspace, so long ago I replaced them all with DDS textures anyway. In this case, I simply removed the code. Perhaps it works, but, even if not there is a demo for people to try.

Then I thought that I really should shut the display down in case of failure, so, in a panic, created a new build which did this at 12:25, before, ten minutes later, realising that everything shuts down anyway, and doing it twice might make things worse. More panics, and switching back to the former build. All a last minute panic, when the program updates were complete 14 days ago.

This has probably been the most stressful and troublesome launch since the first Flatspace, but it's now done.

I dreamt of a new weapon, a new experimental sound generator which was set up in a deserted railway station. It was huge, with a grey, square face about 5M wide and high, a little like a performance stage. A man in a white coat and goggles sat on top in a command chair, and others were there as part of the 'crew'. It fired off a weak sound into the distance. After a minute or so, there was a distant explosion visible on the horizon. Then the power was turned up and the weapon fired again. The explosion in the distance was small at first but grew to be vast, a huge red/orange mushroom cloud, growing in size in proportion to our alarm as the conflagration approached us. I ran in fear indoors into a warm, well-lit room with tiles and huge windows like a swimming baths, like Rhyl's old Sun Centre. The device was fired again, but at me this time, as a weather controlling device. A thunderstorm hit the building, vast torrents of rain teeming down the windows. I cowered under some stairs, awaiting the terrifying bangs of thunder.

After the Radioactive set up, I got back to my painting, and traced the underdrawing to the canvas. I've lost a day's work due to programming, but programming is generally some sort of progress in terms of tools.

CONFIGFILE

I've spent all day programming. There is an annoying crash bug in Radioactive that affects Andrew's PC. It's probably a tiny memory infringement somewhere, but I am at a loss where. My idea today is that the text file class I use, CONFIGFILE, is at fault because that code is very old and complex and full of possible ins and outs and possibilities. I use it in every program, from Flatspace to Prometheus, so one would imagine it is stable... but it occasionally flags up (so called) errors in the Code Analysis.

// Create new text file as a buffer (text+possibleendofprevlinezero+value+finalendoflinezero)
    newtext=new (std::nothrow) char[textsize+strlen(value)+2];
    if (newtext)
    {
        if (textsize>0)
        {
// Copy file into newtext and append zero if none at the end
            for (i=0; i<textsize; newtext[i]=text[i++]);
            if (newtext[i-1])
                newtext[i++]=0;
        }
        else
        {
            newtext[0]=0;
            i=1;
        }
// Copy entry to newtext
        for (j=0; j<strlen(value); newtext[i++]=value[j++]);
        newtext[i]=0;
        i++;
    }


The bold line there is flagged with a possible buffer overrun when I'm sure it can't! The variable 'i', at that point must be textsize+1+strlen(value) at most. After that line, i should = textsize+2+strlen(value), which, true beyond the maximum, but I don't use 'i' after that; it's there for neatness, to show that the value should be incremented. Yet, the compiler flags it as a memory infrinement.

Occasionally today I've had bizarre happenings, instant crashes for simple loads and saves that should be fine and had worked earlier in the day. They resolved themselves without any major changes. The whole situation started from a neat and ordered re-ordering of my code, going through each routine in turn, checking, neatening, and, just when it was all working, everything started to go wrong for no reason!

Sigh. Well, computers teach us all patience. I hve no time for painting today and am eagerly waiting for Andrew's report.

Painting Freneticism

Finished the under-drawing yesterday, but had more to think about. Unity of the idea is important, but on a large scale it's hard to maintain. It's a similar problem with unity in a large piece of music; how I find it easier to unify a 4-track EP than a 12-track album. A few large scale artworks can have this problem... particularly fantastical or surrealistic ones as these can be too large, too complex or full to conceive in an instant. Here's a sketch part way though, the hand roughly outlined, refined in position later.

My ultimate theme is a (futile) quest for perfection, the same idea as Dürer's Melencolia I, and to help the hapless observer along, there are lots of Melencolia bits. Today, I made a few tiny changes to the drawing I had the idea of adding a ladder, and I made a lighting model for this:

Then a model for the whole scene:

The figure on the left is from Supper at Emmaus, but will be lit from the right, not left. Then, tracing and canvas preparation.

I'm working faster than normal and feel exhausted. Today, I had a bite of world-famous Market Drayton gingerbread and that revived me in an instant. This gave me an unpleasant echo of Beethoven in his last days; a sip of wine magically revived him, but it was a transient lift in his terminal decline. I hope my decline is transient! It's been a frantic 2023 so far, which is how I like things.

Drawing Meals

A delightful evening watching Ukraine National Opera performing Carmen. My eyes were opened to the structure of many short narrative songs to tell the story, an ultimate realisation that an opera is what I think of as 'a concept album'; albeit one with acting, costumes, sets. Inspirational.

A full day drawing out Meals of Warm Spring. Quickly done, one of my fastest days of drawing, mainly because I have little time to spare, so worked constantly. I'm also composing the picture as I draw; the idea sketch was not very detailed. This mustn't take long.

Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Painting

A full and busy day, I have to paint a picture for the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait prize and came up with an idea this morning, and another this afternoon. I've spent all day preparing for this/these. Expanding the ideas sketch to size, preparing a paper for the underdrawing and starting to source images for the compositions.

The one I'll focus on is called Meals of Warm Spring, which is about perfection, legacy, and a reflection of my mood at this time, like all self portraits should; though it's a complex composition with many elements, not a lone figure. I'm reminded that many (if not all!) of my paintings could be considered self portraits in a psychological realm, to some extent. There are overt influences from historical paintings. The title itself is a pun on Supper at Emmaus, the double meaning helps the mood and meaning. It's a large work, 48x61cm, and I have just 3 weeks to complete it.

Tonight I'm going to the opera to see Carmen, a late birthday gift from Deborah, and Peter has a lesson on Wednesday; and I have many duties regarding the music promotion and game sales, but this painting will be my main focus. I'm still in the composition stage, but must complete that, the tracing to canvas, and a colour study this week.

Five Years To Live

A tired and slow day. It's been such a busy few weeks, this is the first empty day, but I know I have little time to transition from music and programming to painting, my first painting in months, only three weeks to paint a masterful portrait. I wrote a few songs today, the lyrics. Here is one:

Five Years To Live

He had five years to live
and didn't know it.
Five years to live.
Five years to die.

He had five years to love,
to walk alone and cry,
to blaze a trail
and scream goodbye.

He had five years to live;
he thought forever.
The clock was a-rolling
like a die,

and the 'bones were a-humming
in his ballroom, but he didn't hear
the fuse give him
five years left alive.

And the rain kept on coming
but didn't feel wet
he wasn't there, any more
in those glitter-lit streets
yet the posters of leaves
in their fragments showed his name
though the red ink now wept
into pink.

He had five years to build
up a heaven
but didn't see the staircase
ahead;
but we're all on that infinite
stair, somewhere
leaving a mark
on a tread.

Pre-sale Launch Day, Argus v1.19

A busy couple of days. Launched The Golden Age pre-sale on Bandcamp, and released the Welcome to My Gallery video on YouTube, by coincidence at almost exactly the same time as Sparks launched a new music video.

I spent most of the day, and today so far, updating Argus, my animation/video software. I'm almost certain to release this for sale, but I'm unsure of the best way to do this or how much to charge. It requires an odd mix of specialist knowledge, while being very easy to use. It will also visually look different on each computer, unusual for animation software, as it uses 3D hardware to generate the images.

It crashed when clearing out an old costume (that is, 3D data) so had to fix that. It was caused by not clearing out the old geometry data for the 3D display. I've added lots of other features including optional video refresh rate for the live display, when setting the screen mode. Custom frames per second to display hz options for each of the major F.P.S. rates: 24, 25, 30, 29.97 (technically 30/1.001), 30, 59.94 (technically 60/1.001), and 60. For 30 F.P.S., a rate of 25hz seems to work best. For 25 F.P.S. its 33.54 and for 24 it's 33.67. I've no idea why. I don't know if its system specific (though Ludwig, which is at least 4 times slower, also worked at 25hz for 30 F.P.S.) or generally true.

I've also added the feature to add/spawn actors live during video playback, allowing a unique degree of creative input for a so-called animator. You can already live 'move' objects with the mouse, now you can hit a key and one will appear. It's the visual version of hitting play-and-record on a tape recorder and creating visual objects.

A full list of screenmodes is detected on startup and saved out, menu items now show the keyboard equivalents, and lots of other little things, including a fix to the way that texture coordinates are calculated. Texture coordinates range 0 to 1, but this can cause overlap on the left edge with the right edge (all textures are seamless tiles). Texture coordinates should ideally range from the centre of the first pixel to the centre of the last pixel, so a 256x256 texture should start at 1/512 = 0.001953... rather than zero. I've added the feature to calculate all of this for any specified texture size.

My head is spinning in coding mode. I must now pause and reflect. My main job over the month is to paint something for the Ruth Borchard self portrait prize.

Welcome Lyric Video

A full day of work making a Lyric video for Welcome to My Gallery. I had thought of simply using the Spotify Canvas, slightly changing the loop for different song sections, but that seemed too easy, and it didn't seem that hard to make a new animation with Argus. Bless Argus! I must sell this at some point. I managed to make the whole film in a few hours today, all thanks to its lovely wonderfulness.

The program did, however, crash for the first time. This is extremely rare, but fortunately it seems reproducible, and happens when deleting/purging unused items, so should be relatively easy to track down. One thing that may hamper adoption for users is that all images must use .dds format images, and the 3D format is even stranger, as only I can use it (and it uses my ancient Visual Basic 6 converter, which makes it even harder for anyone to access). Still, it's rare than you ever need a custom 3D object.

I also fixed the problem with the FFMpeg conversion to libx264 codec formats, which needed to specify the pixel format (-pix_fmt yuv420p). Videos then (and with H.265) play correctly in Windows Media Player. I must test this on the projector too. Perhaps without this it's converting to BGRA format, which is the AviSynth RGB32 format.

I'm exhausted, and must think about how to launch this video; the final details. There are always a few tiny scrappy details. I'm obsessing most now about the exact wording on the lone credits page... Direction & Animation, or Images & Animation, or even just Direction?

Radioactive Branding, Canvas Animations

A full day. started by finalising the Radioactive update, and designing some new, much better and simpler artwork for the game branding and shop front.

This looks much more like the actual game than the other art, which was over complex. Then, charged into finalising the Spotify Canvas animations for the new album. The last two were The Laughing Cavalier and Tycho Brahe.

The cavalier is tricky for a few reasons. I can't use the famous painting due to copyright problems. I always, in my head, had the image of a happy cartoon horse bouncing along a brightly lit countryside, but I can't easily use that either, and it wouldn't fit with the other art of the album. I needed a horse image and remembered Muybridge's horse photographs, so converted some of his frames into an animation, and made the it run across the chessboard used throughout the artwork.

I made it bounce up and down, in an approximate rhythm to the music, but alas, I can't make it match the music which is at an odd 110 beats per minute. This won't easily fit in any number of 30 frames-per-second for perfect looping (and the music is, in any case, not exactly regular).

The head of Tycho was photographed and made to wobble around in a rather ghostly manner:

The animations vary. The Cotan one is one of my favourites. The Pearl Girl blinks as though alive, and the girl reading a letter uses ancient silent film imagery as I'm unsure of clearance for the Vermeer image.

Also, for the first time, I've made a few full-screen (wide) videos which may useful for lyric videos or other YouTube use. I'd often thought of using them, but wonder how... they aren't really good enough for a 'full' video. Is this still better than nothing?