Animated Photos, Engaging Artificial Intelligence, and the Field Project

One of the things I am blogging about today are some photos that have already been posted on the blog.  The Photos are slightly different now.  When I posted them, they were still photographs.  I received a notification on Google Plus that a photo had been posted to my account.  The picture showed an animation of the moon phases section of my Shaman Staff Walking Stick changing from waxing crescent to the full moon.  The first time a picture was animated I was somewhat puzzled because I had asked for no such thing.  Since that first animated photo, I have received some others.  The next one had added snow falling to a picture of leafless trees I had posted.  Then it added twinkling lights to the Christmas tree in the two photos of the gnome ornaments blog post.  (You have to look closely to see them twinkle.)

When I first saw the moon phase animation,I was wondering how someone had accessed my account.  Then I clicked on an icon and read about the info about Google Awesome Photos.  It turns out, that it was not a someone, it was a something.  It was a computer program. It is an intelligent program. And herein lies an opportunity to try to engage Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Read on. 

The Google photo enhancement program has a feature that can stitch together photos to make panoramas and animate sequences of photos.  Yes, many photo enhancement programs can do this.  But, this is different in that no one is clicking on instructions telling the program to make a photo brighter, increase the contrast, or that this photo is related to that photo.  A computer is doing it on its own.  And I will have to say that all in all my photos look better after the computer enhancement.  So my question is, just how smart is this program?

 If you are an older science fiction reader (as I am), you might remember the book, The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein.  In that book, a computer becomes sentient.  It starts a conversation with a computer repair person.  Back then, AI was all just speculation about the future.  Now we have computers that may come to very close to that point.  I am just starting to read a futurists book that predicts that we may have AI computers having a significant impact on the global economy as early as 2029, only fifteen years from now.  (I've just started reading it.  If it turns out to be informative I'll post the title and author.  Not all futurist books accurately predict what is happening.  Example:  Where is my hover car?  It was supposed to be in my garage by now.) Anyway, I don't expect this computer to talk to me with real speech at this point, but I am going to try to engage the computer to see if it can extrapolate what I want it to do from the pictures I post.  So, this adds a new dimension to a project I had planned for the coming year: the field project.

As regular readers know, I posted a photo last week of the field near my home.  I live about a hundred feet from this farm land.  I initially had thought to document the changes of this field from winter through the
growing season, autumn, and back to winter as a photography project.  I walk nearly every day, and it is always refreshing to see how the field changes from day to day.  I had planned to take a picture of the field weekly, but also to take the photo at approximately the same time of day, so that I could also show position of the sun at that time and how it changed over the year.  Now I am adding another layer to this project: engaging AI.  Can this computer program understand that I want it to make an animation of these photographs to show the sequence of the entire year of the field changing.  This is of course doable if you program it to do that, but will it understand by my posting a pictures weekly?  Will it recognize the sequence over that period of time?  Or does it only analyze the data from a single blog post at once?  Or possibly will it only do a few frames of animation and quit?  It will be a pretty boring animation if it only uses the first few photos.

So what can I extrapolate from what I've seen from this program so far?   The program was able to recognize a sequence of photos as a change occurring in a single object (a moon)  in the Shaman Staff posts.  It was also able to correctly predict that the lights were twinkling on the Christmas tree.  The snow on the barren trees was a close prediction.  It posted the photo with the Hatch Tag:Winter.  However, in my blog post, I had stated that this was a picture taken in late autumn.  So this program was not "reading" what I wrote about it.  The program analyzed what it "saw", and determined that this was a winter scene.  So, we can understand that the program is smart enough to make assumptions from the data.  My digital camera is an older model.  At the time of purchase, commercial publicly available GPS was just another futurist idea.  Newer cameras have geotags embedded in the data which identifies the location.  I would be willing to bet that this computer is smart enough to be able to identify the location even though it does not have geotags from my camera because it could match that picture if other pictures of that scene had been taken and posted from a newer camera.  (You should be able to turn off the geotags on your camera.  Probably a good idea if you are posting a bunch of personal pictures online. The computer is not the only one seeing that data.)  I'm not saying that this is happening to your photos, but that it has the potential to happen.  (Think of the defense applications of recognizing location in photos.)

So this is the second in my photo series of this field.  It was taken about 8:20 am.  I had not really planned on taking the photo so early in the morning when I started the series, but rain was coming in and it was getting ready to pore down.  I ran up to the field and snapped some shots and ran back home before the rain started.  Today, for the second photo, it was raining when we woke up.  I asked my husband, (without any real hope of success) to come out and hold the umbrella for me while I snapped the pictures.  It was forty-four degrees Fahrenheit with rain and wind, so I really was not surprised that he quipped, "I feel no need to suffer for your art."  So I hoofed it up to the field in the rain to snap some photos for today's blog.  It is not a big change from last week at this point.  One of these days, I'll get a picture with the sun out.  And this is where it ends for today.

Next blog post:  Further Projects for 2014.

Folk Art, a Field in Winter, and Other Things

Decorations on folk art.

A note to regular readers:  there will be no blog post on December 25th.  The next blog post will be on December 29th.

Painted figurine.

Like many people, I have been busy preparing for the Christmas holiday.  I usually try to spread out the shopping so that I am not caught up in the Christmas crunch of shoppers.  However, this year I was so busy working on the Shaman Staff project, trying to finish it before cold weather set in,  that I did not get any shopping or holiday preparations done.  Now I am playing catch up, and that means little to no studio time.  Because of that, and because I have been really sick as a dog with the cold that is going around, I'm blogging about past projects. Much of today's blog is about why a sense of humor is an important factor to cultivate while developing artistic skills.

So, what do you do when you have a houseful of folk art and it's time to decorate for the holidays?  I used to drag all of the usual decorative items into some back room of the house to make room for the Christmas tree and all my Christmas collectibles.  That became tiresome, so now I just try to incorporate the Christmas decorations into the existing decor.  Sometimes you have to have a sense of humor about it.  And that is why there is a Grinch riding on folk art a pig in my living room.  Sometimes you have to learn to live with folk art.

First day of winter

Christmas crafts were the starting point for my doll making skills.  A few decades ago, Victorian style Father Christmas dolls were all the rage.  At that point in life, we were a young family with four children.  Money was tight.  A three hundred dollar Father Christmas doll was not something we were planning to purchase.  As my Christmas present, my husband had purchased some resin Santa figurines and a paint set.  They were fun to paint and I had many enjoyable hours painting them.  But, they weren't the same as the velvet robed Father Christmas figures, so I purchased some books on doll making and tried my hand at it.  My first dolls were less than successful.  I had trouble with the soft sculpture on the faces.  My Mrs. Claus doll looked like someone had just goosed her.  Over time, my skills improved somewhat (The faces were still a little off: low foreheads and long noses.) and I decided to try to make a Father Christmas figure as a gift.  By this time, I had grown tired of making things in the traditional red, and green colors of Christmas figures, so I decided to try something different.  Instead of red velvet, (and also because I already had some) I decided to use blue velvet to make the robe.  Other than that, it was more or less a traditional Father Christmas doll:  bearded figure, crown of holly, carrying a pack of gifts, etc.)  I also gave him a crook staff that you see with some old world Santa depictions.  I still was not totally happy with the face, (getting the face right took a couple more years of practice) but overall, I was pleased with the work.  I had a visitor at the house and I proudly showed off my completed doll.  After a long minute of silence, the lady said, "So who is it?  Moses?"  From that I learned that not everyone is willing to think outside the box on iconic holidays.  That did not prevent me from making the casual Santa that I blogged about last blog post.  I try to learn from every situation, but when it comes to being creative, I feel that I need to do what I find interesting.  If others like it, that makes me happy, but I need to be true to my creative self rather that worry about if others like it or not.

This next part has little to do with a sense of humor, other than I can frame it as trolling a computer program.  I had blogged earlier about how the Google photo enhancement program had turned some of the still pictures of my walking stick into an animation.  They have now also changed two other pictures I put on the blog into animations as well.  I finally figured out how to get the pictures posted to the blog, so they will be the subject of my next blog post.  (Once I quit trying to overthink how to do it, the solution presented itself immediately).  I could turn the feature off, but honestly the enhancement program makes my photos look better than they really are, so I keep it turned on.  Anyway, I figured since you can't beat them, you might as well join them.  One of the features of Google Awesome Photos is that once it recognizes several photos as the same place, the program can stitch it into a panoramic landscape or turn it into an animation.  So I decided that this year I would take a picture of the field that is just down from my house about once a week.  Hopefully, over time, I will get back an animation that will show the field changing through winter, spring, summer, and autumn.  I say hopefully, because at this point they just show up as a surprise.  I did not request them. 

There will be no post on December 25th, due to the holiday.  My next blog post will be on December 29th.

Casual Santa Doll

Here is another project I made a number of years ago.  This Santa doll was made back in 1996.  I had only been making dolls for a couple of years at that point.  This doll needs a doll stand to stand up, but it is also button jointed so that it can sit and move its arms.  The hair is wool roving.  I feel that this doll has a lot of personality. 

I had made some of these dolls as gifts, and some to sell at a holiday craft sale.  I only sold one at the craft sale.  Everyone thought they were cute, but did not want to pay ten dollars for one.  That is the problem with trying to sell crafts.  Few people have appreciation for the number of hours it took to make the project.  If I had charged minimum wage for the time it took to make the doll, it would have cost considerably more.  Dolls are not a quick project by any means.

Anyway, it was my attempt at a type of doll for a homespun Christmas.  I was trying for Christmas decor that was not all hard plastic and glitter.  Some people like that  ,simple homemade holiday things, but it seems that they might be a minority these days.   

Gnome Ornaments

It's the middle of December, and I am scurrying around trying to get ready for Christmas.  I've been busy shopping, wrapping, and mailing packages and cards.  That hasn't left me much time to get into the studio.  Since I don't have a project underway, I thought I'd show you a previous project: gnomes ornaments.

Many years ago, I was really into doll making.  I checked out a book from the library on making gnomes.  I wish I could remember the exact title, but I can't.  A couple of years ago I tried to look it up, but the book is no longer in the catalog.  I haven't been able to find the same book on Amazon either, so I guess it has gone out of print.  (Or possibly
the cover has been changed so that it is not recognizable as the same book.) Anyway, there were patterns in the book for making gnomes of different sizes.  I decided that I would use the smallest pattern and make ornaments for the Christmas tree.  They have been hanging on the tree every year since.  One year I wired some of them into the wreath for the front door.

There is not a lot of work involved in making the gnomes in this size.  I made these out of felt, which has held up well, and did not have edges that would fray.  The pants are just tubes stuffed with polyester fiberfill.  The shirt was cut on the fold at the neckline, and the side seams were sewn together, sewn to the pants and stuffed.  The hands are small rectangles of flesh color felt.  The boots are two shaped pieces for each boot that are sewn together, stuffed and sewn to the bottom of the tubes.  The head is a circle of muslin gathered around the edge, pulled tight to form a spherical shape and stuffed.  I did some soft sculpting on the face with thread before adding the hat.  Acrylic paint was used to add details to the eyes and mouth.  The hat is a triangle shaped into a cone and stuffed.

The gnomes were fun to make.  The felt has held up year after year.  Besides ornaments, they would also look great tied on presents as decorations.   

Painted Floor Cloth-Part 2

Completed floor cloth.

The floor cloth looks a bit better after I did some more painting on it.  For the most part, I added shadows under the leaves.  That helped a lot.  Before the shadows were added they just seemed flat.  Now they have more dimension to them and gives them more an appearance of floating on the water.  The shadows help the rest of the painting recede into the background, giving it more depth.  I also added highlights in spots.  I still have a lot to learn about adding highlights and shadows.  Sometimes they were too bright and other times they looked like I did not do enough. 

I also lightened the reflection of the branch on the water.  I also cast a shadow from the branch over the leaves that were in the reflection.  I'm not totally sure that it gets the idea across of a shadow, but it does add some more coloration to the leaves, which looks nice.

Once again, the blog platform will not allow me to place the pictures where I wanted to place them.  I was trying to do a side by side, but it isn't going to happen.  In fact, until I added this paragraph, it would not let me add a caption to the second picture       

Before shadows and glazes.

unless the picture was sitting in the space taken up by
paragraph.  Some days I just have to post them and let go of
how I want the blog to look.

I used an acrylic extender to make a very thin wash of burnt umber.  This was painted across the entire painting to tone down the brightness of the under painting.  I think it looks better now that the colors are slightly muted.  The thin glaze of brown added a bit of depth to the picture as well.  It adds a slight haze, which makes it look more like you are actually looking down through water.

Once the paint was thoroughly dry, I coated the painting with a satin varnish.  

The bottom picture is a picture taken before I did the additional painting.  I'm not sure how well the subtle differences will show up on a computer monitor, so I don't know if you will be able to see a lot of difference between the before and after shots.


Anyway, I'm calling this picture finished.  I feel I could do more on it, but I have found in the past that I have not learned when to quit.  In some of my earlier paintings I ended up putting in too much and the picture ended up with too much detail.  Sometimes, less is more.

I feel I learned a lot from this painting.  For one thing, I had never painted on canvas before.  As I have very little painting experience, I had been reluctant to purchase expensive canvas to use for practice.  I was surprised at how much more paint it took to cover the canvas.  I was also surprised at how much extra push you needed to get the paint to cover the canvas.  It is very different from painting on paper or smooth boxes.  I liked it though.  I plan to try more paintings on canvas in the future.

Next blog post will be about some other quick project to finish
out the year.  I'm not sure what it will be at this point.  I don't want to get too involved in anything because the holidays are coming and we have lots of things going on.  Also, after doing a couple of long projects I just need to piddle around and play to keep from feeling burned out.  


 

Floor Cloth Painting- Part 1

Floor cloth-not finished yet.

I've made a little progress on painting the floor cloth.  It is not finished yet.  This is just the basic painting.  I still have a long way to go on it.  I have a number of layers of paint to go.  Once I add shadows under the leaves and lighten the reflection of the branch, things should look a little better.  At the moment, the colors are a little bright, but they will be toned down with the next layers of paint.  This floor cloth will be called Reflections on a Trout Pond.  I am painting it from memories of looking out in the stream behind  the cabin.

Speaking of the cabin, we were up there recently.  We wanted to make one more trip up this year.  We did not stay as long as we had planned.  A winter storm was coming, and the wind chill was going to be five degrees with high winds.  I did get a few more autumn pictures though.  I've posted a couple below.

Refinishing the cider press.

Even though we probably won't be back up to the cabin until spring, work still goes on.  We brought the cider press home for refinishing and repairs.  It is old, and in need of an overhaul.  Next year it will be ready for apple season. 

An ice storm is just starting here at home today.  We have already had a couple of brown outs, so I had better get this post finished.  I hope we don't lose electricity.  Our neighborhood has many large trees.  When we get ice, you just don't know what is going to happen.

As you can see, the blog platform is giving
me some grief over where I place the pictures again.

A Quick Project to Finish Out the Year

The year is drawing to an end.  I have completed my two art goals for this year, to make a folk art carousel and to do another walking stick.   With only a few weeks left in the year, I am taking on a fairly quick project.  After two really intensive projects, I need something quick and fun.  I am painting a small folk art floor cloth.  As with many of my projects, there is a story behind this one also.

I really had not intended to paint a floor cloth.  I had considered it once, but since I had no need real for a floor covering, I just put it on my mental list of things I might do a some time in the future.  Then a small floor cloth showed up.  This all started because my husband wanted to make a log carrier.  We actually already have a very nice log carrier.  We use it at home to bring in wood when we want to have a fire in the fireplace and at the cabin to bring in wood for the wood stove.  The problem being that we have to bring it back and forth with us.  Just one more thing in a long list of items that we are hauling back and forth.  So, my husband asks me to keep an eye out for a canvas cloth or some canvas tote bags when I make a trip to the thrift store.  (Cotton duck canvas was selling for about $11.00 a yard at the fabric store.)  And, sure enough, on my next trip to the thrift store I find this small canvas floor cloth, new in the package, in the bin of craft items.  It was priced at only a dollar, and it was just the right size for making a log carrier.  Furthermore, as a bonus it was already hemmed.

I was really excited to be able to bring home this prize.   It was just the size we needed, and you could not beat the price.  All that had to be done was to sew on some webbing for the handles, and voila!, a log carrier.  So I proudly show my find to my husband who says, "Oh, I changed my mind.  I don't want to make one after all."  So now, I have a floor cloth.  It has been sitting in my studio annoying me for a while.  My quick project to round out the year is to paint this floor cloth.  If nothing else, it will check off one more item of artistic things I have on my bucket list.

My plan for this cloth is somewhat ambitious.  I have had an inspiration picture in my file for some time of autumn leaves floating on a river. It is just an inspiration picture.  I wanted my picture to be more personal.  I decided I would paint a picture of a trout pool that is behind the cabin.  Leaves float in the pool, and bunch up against the rocks, so it is similar to the inspiration picture in that aspect.  But I wanted to add something more.  When I stand at the edge of the trout pool and look down through the reflections, I can see trout hiding near the rocks. So the trout and underwater rocks will be in the picture also.  I'm hoping to have it look as if you are actually standing at the edge of the pool and you are peering down through to see the trout.  From that angle in real life you would also see the reflection of branches, sky, and sun light across the top of the pool.  I'm going to try to paint this picture from memory, so that it will be impressionistic rather than trying to do something photo real.  I think I will call it   Reflections on the Trout Pool.  This will be a double entendre as it will be reflections as in reflections on the pool and reflections as in my thinking about the trout pool.  Sort of a personal inside joke, so to speak.

It is an ambitious painting project.  As regular readers know, I have spent a little time this year trying to improve my painting skills.  I expect this will never be as good a painting as I would like it to be.  However, for a dollar, it is worth taking the risk.  I have started on the under painting, but I don't have anything ready for a photo yet.

I have also considered painting the cloth and then making it into a decorated log carrier.  However, that presents a few challenges.  If you put the webbing straps on the unpainted side it means that the logs will be abrading the paint.  If you put them on the painted side, they will be obscuring the painting.  So I guess it will just be what it was supposed to be all along, a small floor cloth.  It will be one of my own additions to the folk art that decorates the cabin.

Shaman Staff Walking Stick- Part 20- Final Section Completed and Project Completed-Photos

A note to readers:  This is the same post as yesterday.  It has been republished because I forgot to add the labels that the search engines use to locate the post.  A new blog post will appear on Wednesday.

I have been working on the final section of the Shaman Staff Walking Stick.  This section, at the bottom of the stick deals with a weaving pattern.  When I was doing research into traditional designs for this project, I noticed one pattern that kept showing up through many cultures.  Because of the ubiquitous nature of this particular pattern, it showed that many cultures considered that this was something important.  Therefore, the pattern seemed like a good choice to put on the stick. This pattern is currently known as the basket weave pattern.  

Bottom of the staff.

The basket weave pattern was also a good choice to place it at the end of the stick because it had numerous rows, which would still be seen as the stick wears over time.  It is decorative as well as keeping with the theme of transmitting information that is important to retain.  So, if the bottom of the stick wears down through use, the information is not lost.  The basket weave has so much importance for human civilization.  It created the baskets that carried food and seeds.  It is the warp and weft threads of the loom that allowed us to create clothing.  Some cultures used woven palm fronds to create walls and ceilings and mats to sit upon.  So yes, this pattern has a place in the theme of this art piece.

Upper portion of the staff.

Lower part of the staff.

The basket weave pattern has been with us in the form of diamonds or squares in contrasting colors for thousands of years.  It is seen in early traditional cultures, medieval cathedrals, Renaissance palaces, and in textiles throughout history, even on our clothing and game boards.  While I was working on this piece, I took some time to think about why this particular pattern is so prevalent.  Why do humans have such an attachment to this specific pattern?  Does it say something to us that we understand on some unconscious level?  I think so.  Think about the basket weave pattern for a minute: over and under, over and under.  Think of it in contrasting colors:  light overlaps the dark, dark overlaps the light.  This is the pattern of our lives.  Day overlaps the night which overlaps the day, which overlaps the night.  When we look at a contrasting pattern, we don't see this, but somehow our minds recognize the pattern as something familiar.

Free association also yielded some insights.  Art can take your thoughts to places where you might not otherwise go.  Although they are not totally relevant to the mechanics of creating this art piece, I thought that they were worth sharing. The diamond pattern of light against dark reminded me of stars shining at night.  How bright those stars must have been before electric lights came to dim the night sky.  The bright diamonds against the dark field also reminded me of a flash of light.  A flash of light is used as a signal.  A signal flashing, a flashlight being turned on and off in the dark.  Flash lights have a switch to turn on and off.  These days many electronic devices have a symbol on the power switch to indicate that this is the switch that turns the device on and off.  That symbol is an incomplete circle with a straight line running down from it.  The circular part indicates the off position, the straight line indicates that the energy is running through it.  On and off, a signal, a signal is a message.  What is the message?  Try this:  hold your hand stiff with the fingers pointing straight up.  Then release the muscular tension so that your hand curls down so that the fingers are circular and the index finger is next to the thumb.  In essence, you are making the current symbols for on and off.  Repeat this a few times. What are you doing?  You are waving a type of wave that is most often used to say goodbye.  One of the themes of this walking stick was that important information would be retained even when the people passed on.  The important information they want someone to have is on the stick: how to make things, what is safe to eat; and finally, the people are saying goodbye.  They have gone on, and this is the final message to the bearer of the walking stick.  Maybe that was important.  In early cultures, death by violence or accident was high as the group hunted or one tribe fought against another.  Many times they did not have time to say goodbye.  So perhaps that could have some importance.  Or conversely, the message could be mean that the past still has relevance in our lives and is signalling hello.  On the quantum level, all possibilities are present. I didn't really expect all that, but that is what comes of free association.

I am posting here a segment of one of the first blogs on this walking stick about the creative process used to come up with an idea for what to put on this walking stick:  it is basically a story that starts with a creation myth and goes on into shamanic concepts of past/present/future happening all at once and the manifestation of form.  It is a reminder to the shaman that he or she is the vessel that contains all who came before and all who will come afterwards.  The poem on this stick begins with the creation of the universe and ends with the manifestation of the bearer of the walking stick as the current form that will take those from the past into the future, that at this moment the past, present, and future are joined.  There is a pictorial story about the many forms that life took here.  The walking stick also contains the story of what could have been important to a very early band of hunter/gatherers as they moved about the land and the things that they created that advanced civilization.   So there you have it:  art and poetry on a stick.  The poem is below.


We began as the dust of ancient stars
Crossed time and space
We took form in this place
Living always with a hope for a better tomorrow
And now we are manifest in you
Here past present and future are one

Anyway, the piece is complete.  I signed my name on it the last day of November.  It took three months to complete the project.  As I wood burned my name onto the walking stick, the tip of the wood burning nib broke.  It lasted to the end of the project and not a second longer.  Somehow, it seems the way it should be for this project.  As always, it is hard to get a picture of the entire walking stick at once, so I am posting a couple of pictures that give some long views of the staff, even if it is not all in one shot.

Check back next Wednesday for a different project.