Borrowing the title from Sergio Leone’s film, I’m going to share my impressions on 3 brushes I have in my studio. On the bottom of the picture below we have Winsor & Newton 13mm/ 1/2″  Artist’s Water Colour Sable ‘ One Stroke.

In the middle we have a very cheap Chinese brush that I bought 6 for $0.99 with shipping included (!) to Brazil. I can barely reads the gold lettering on red handle but where I can read it says “820 / Cheng Zhen. The third is a Keramik 6 – 916 brush sold by Keramik in Brazil, that I suspect it comes from China as well.

So, the Good is obviously the Winsor & Newton’s brush that while is not expensive, is made of selected Kolinsky sable hair. The handle is well balanced and ferrule is well constructed.

The Bad, is the second brush. While the Hair is fairly decent synthetic fibers, the handle leaves much to be desired. Ferrule is poorly constructed and the handle is very light weight. It is clear when you hold it that no attention given to the balance of the brush.

The Ugly is this Keramik brush. The hair fibers appears to be made from the poorest bristle available on Earth, it is extremely hard and pointed to various directions. The ferrule is as poor as the Chinese in the middle and on top of that, no balance to the handle as well. I have this brush in my studio to remind me to not buy any brush from this brand ever again.

I’m constantly amazed by how things evolves in computer graphics.

I got myself thinking these days about the evolution in the Computer graphics area in the past decade.
In the old days the CG artist…

a)Modeling: We did not have real time sculpting software like Zbrush, Modo etc and the work had to be done mostly pulling and pushing vertexes. When Zbrush came out it was something exotic, promising. Now days it is pretty much the standard and virtually every studio is using Zbrush or other mesh sculpting tool. There was no retopology tools too, as far as I remember.

 
b)UV Unwrap: The process of UV Unwrap was a real pain… until the automatic unwrap tools came into play. Pelt mapping and automatic unwrapping tools made this task easy as 1 2 3.

 
c)Character rigging: While we still have a lot to evolve on this, I see a couple options of automatic rigging popping up that I’ve found very interesting like Mixamo, Blenrig, autorig scripts etc. Below an image taken from mixamo presentation.

 
d)Rendering: Even simple renderings took a lot of time. Now days we can pull some decent imagery with powerful computers with a fraction of time we had in the past. Consider this image below from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.  It would take possibly hours to render an image like this.. today it is real time.
There are more of course, but these are the topics that affected me most during these years. It is exciting to think the future will bring even more tools and progress.

“Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that. ”

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

“The hidden knowledge of the true colors was revealed by multispectrally scanning the painting in thirteen channels – from Ultra Violet to Infra Red.  Then the spectral response curve of the varnish in each pixel was isolated and subtracted from the digital file to virtually reveal the surface of the painting when it had freshly exited Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop.”

Left: Actual painting. Right: Virtually restored painting.

There is a lot of good information about the process, including other paintings scan on Lumiere website:

True Colors of the Mona Lisa Revealed

Mona Lisa: Inside the painting

Around Mona Lisa scan

Lumiere Technology’s home

There are many copies of Leonardo’s famous painting but the articles spreading around regarding this Mona Lisa copy is really interesting; Conservators at Prado museum found out to this one was painted at same time as the original on the Louvre so much likely to be painted at Leonardo’s studio by one of his pupils.

The Mona Lisa copy had black paint over the background, added in 18th century as reported and was carefully removed by restorer, revealing interesting details not so well preserved in the Louvre painting.

Left: Louvre’s Mona Lisa. Center: Prado’s Mona Lisa copy with black background. Right: Prado’s Mona Lisa copy with restored background.

For more information (highly recommended), see article at

FT
Guardian(UK)
The Art Newspaper
Anorak (UK)

A couple doodles I did in Alchemy below:

You can check it here.

“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all”.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)