a fragile parcel

a fragile parcel:

a humble bubble animation study:

. . . and, a touch of sweetness for your day:

(currently working on identifying source and copyright)

ANIMATION: a winged dinosaur

For fb group: Daily Sketch Workout

Doing this involved an exploration into animals that fly and using procreate to do an animation.

My first thought about flying dinosaurs is they had wings of skin.  So I found some videos of bats flying:

A little research showed me that dinosaur wings were more like bird wings.  I found bird videos to study:

The first one was a profile where I started to see the rotation of the wing tip, but I was unable to capture it.  So I tried another video of a bird in flight:

This was a three quarter view and it allowed me to see the way that birds 'grab' the air, almost like a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke. I was starting to see the movement of the various parts of the wing, but I was sure I was missing the subtleties.  So I looked for slow motion studies of birds. I found a wonderful resource, Birds in Flight by Wildlife World.  I also discovered that I could reduce the speed of the YouTube video by a factor of four.  This allowed me to glimpse the bird grabbing the air and 'slapping it with its wingtips. I would love to see how the feathers participate in this 'slap'.  I imagine them acting like cascading little paddles.

To make my flying dinosaur, I took some artistic license and assumed that those pterosaurs had feathers and just glued a pterosaur head on the goose.  I used Procreate to make the animation and discovered that I had to add the background to each drawing. The bad aspect of this is it's tedious. The good thing about it is that you have complete control of the frame. After putting the background with each frame, i realized that I had to tone down the background. To make this tedious exercise less onerous, I played  by varying the opacity.  This serendipitously ended up creating an actively misty background.

an insect musician

For the facebook group: Daily Sketching Workout, the May 13 topic: an insect musician

Using Affinity Designer to render the violin was worth a post of its own.

Daily Sketch Workout, delayed

Wednesday's topic was "an insect musician". Today is Saturday and, although I started the "DAILY" sketch on Wednesday, my ambitions took me on a melodious tangent.  Needless to say, my insect is not quite ready for his debut.

I did a rough doodle of my insect musician, deciding that the violin would be my insidious insect's instrument. When I began to draw a violin, its beautiful intricacies defeated my sketching talents. After some soul searching I decided to bite the bullet and create a violin vector drawing with my new Affinity Designer app.

Here is the result:

Along the way I discovered that I didn't know jack about a violin, so I did some googling and at least learned the names of the violin's parts and sections (with a couple of hints to help me remember them):

If you do amuse yourself with the quizzes, here are the parts of the violin labeled; and the parts of the bow labeled.

Now I have no excuse not to finish Wednesday's Daily Sketch Workout.

Charting COVID-19 in my families' counties, states, regions

 

7 graphs are included below:

1. New Covid-19 Cases for Family's Counties
2. New Covid-19 Cases for Family's Counties per 100,000 population
3. New Covid-19 Cases for 5 States
4. New Covid-19 Cases for 5 States per 100,000 population
5. New Covid-19 Deaths for 5 States 
6. New Covid-19 Cases by Census Regions
7. New Covid-19 Cases by Economic Analysis Regions
8. New Covid-19 Deaths by Economic Analysis Regions

1. Watching how we're doing with managing the coronavirus in three California counties, one county in Kansas, and two parishes in Louisiana.



2. This graph uses new cases per 100,000 population to help compare the six counties. It made the escalation due to the meatpacking clusters in Seward county Kansas starling obvious.




3. Looking at new cases for five states gives me a larger perspective. I added Tennessee and Georgia since we have friends who live there.




4. To better see how these states compare, I normalize the data using new cases per 100,000.




5. I also track deaths in each of the five states.




6. Going up another level, I look at the new cases by census regions. Here's my post that includes a listing of the states in the Census Regions. NOTE: Northeast data affected by Massachusetts making a -7,342 adjustment 9/3/2020




7. I also look at new cases by Economic Analysis Regions. Here's my post that includes a listing of the states in the Economic Analysis Regions. 

8. A look at deaths by Economic Analysis Regions brings up the question: Why are death rates in New England and the Mideast states nearly 3 times as much as other regions?  

Finally, I look at Coronavirus in the United States on the NYTimes website

Star Wars Day - May 4th

coded messages

waterproofed

a creature that only eats . . .

. . . couches