Caption Contest Finalists

It was very hard to narrow down all the great captions you provided for this Dinotopia Deleted Scene Caption Contest. Instead of three finalists, I have kept six, all of whom will receive an Imaginative Realism poster.

1. Kid: Dag! What's in this stuff?!! Look what it did to my Corgi...

2. Just a little farther and I'll be one step closer to having those dino-feet for the back of my chair too!

3. If this painting wasn’t so bad, maybe this food would taste better!?

4. "Timmy! No! That's how you lost your left hand the last time!"

5. Gee Johnny. If one cake turned you into a dinosaur, maybe another will turn you back.

6. Dinosaur: Why can’t I have a knife and fork?

Boy: The iron age hasn’t arrived yet!

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Note: The poll is now closed, and #4 is the winner.
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Daroo, Mark, GooGoo, Ted, Advantageous, and David: please email me your mailing address so that I can send you the poster, and, depending on who wins, the extra grand prize poster.

Real or Photoshop?

There’s still time (until 9:00 p.m. Eastern time) to enter yesterday’s caption contest.

Meanwhile, blog reader Jason Peck sent me this image with the following question:

This is a pretty neat photo, but I really can't figure out exactly what I'm looking at. I know it’s an illusion, but I can’t figure out how it works. Something tells me its Photoshopped, but I could be wrong. What do you think?

Let me turn the question over to you first. At 6:00 p.m. Eastern time I’ll post the answer I came up with.
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Added at 6:00.
I can hardly add to the perceptive explanations in the comments, explaining that this is a real object. I agree, and here's what I said to Jason:

These three dimensional illusions do exist as real objects, and I believe this one is real. They're only viewable from one angle. In this case the horizontal piece coming across the middle is actually in front of the right hand vertical bar, but it is beveled in such a way as to look like it is tucked behind.

The giveaway is the cast shadow from that central horizontal bar. It travels diagonally down the figure and then across the floor grid and stops just to the left of the watch, proof that the horizontal leg is unattached.

Blog reader Jay Meinhardt actually created the figure in his CAD program. That's awesome. Thanks, Jay, and thanks everybody for your great explanations.

Caption Contest

This drawing from 1989 is an early experimental (and failed) attempt to work out the technique for Dinotopia.

But it needs a humorous caption. So I'm inviting you to contribute one in the comments below. Either the dinosaur or the kid could be talking.

The deadline is tomorrow, Thursday at 9:00 p.m., Eastern time. I'll pick three finalists, each of whom will receive as a gift a signed, two-sided poster for Imaginative Realism (the book itself will be published in early October).

On Friday you'll be able to vote on your favorite of the three caption finalists. The grand prize winner will receive an additional Dinotopia poster and a hand-drawn remarque.

Insect Vehicles, Part 2

Beetles in flight are as amazing as butterflies or dragonflies. They have to lift their rigid wing covers and position them forward of the flapping wings.

The sketches below are of some insect-based aliens for a science fiction universe with sentient flying robots. I looked through lots of photos of insects, trying to dream up different ways to use the body plan of a beetle or a fly as a starting point.

A vehicle would require many of the same functional elements as a natural creature, namely: optical sensors, landing gear, external armor, wings and wing covers, fuel intake tubes, and offensive and defensive weapons systems.

The design assumption we’ve had until recently is that the manufacturing process would lead to artificial beings with an industrial geometry of straight lines and circles.

But recent advances in computer-aided design and manufacturing, and even computer-aided evolution suggests that vehicles of this kind might begin to mimic the organic lines and surfaces of real insects, like the longhorn beetle Callipogon armillatus, which is a marvel of natural engineering.


An entymologist friend gave me this amazing 5-inch-long specimen, which I love to study when I’m trying to imagine new kinds of vehicles. To learn about exoskeleton engineering, I also gather up parts from crabs and lobsters that wash up on the beach.

Image of pine beetle in flight from the NSF, link.

Insect Vehicles, Part 1

A few weeks ago, we took a brief look at a vehicle based on a butterfly design (link), but I thought it would be fun to explore the topic of flying insect-based vehicles a little more.

Throughout the history of transportation design, engineers have looked to nature for design analogs: fish for ships, tortoises for armored vehicles, and birds for aircraft. From the time of Leonardo da Vinci onward, many of the concepts for ornithopters were based on birds. Today many of the new semi-autonomous spy drones come from the study of insects.

The dragonfly is an ancient natural design, and it’s a powerful and agile flier. The two sets of wings beat out of phase with each other, making for a smooth ride. Each wingbeat is controlled by a separate nerve impulse, unlike flies and bees, whose wingbeats depend on a pulsating vibration of the upper plates of the thorax.

Recent high speed photography has revealed the secret of how insects fly. They take advantage of minature vortexes in the air to get extra lift—you can feel this effect by moving your hands in “wingbeats” underwater. But in an air medium, insect designs only work at a small scale, for the physics changes as you scale everything up.

This ornithopter maquette is from Dinotopia: The World Beneath. It’s based on the extinct dragonfly Meganeura, with some steampunk elements. I built the maquette with a pine fuselage and cardboard wings, which were mounted over armature wire, much like I did with the Utopiales Lepidopter, so that I could pose them at any angle.
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Photo by Robert Seber: link. (Canon 30D, 300mm IS ISO 1600, 1/1600, f/8)
Building the Utopiales maquette, link.

Illo 2

Dan Zimmer is best known for the beautifully produced ILLUSTRATION magazine, which is about the history of American Illustration. He also publishes ILLO, a book-length spotlight on the contemporary illustration scene.



He has just released ILLO 2, which features interviews with Michael Cho, Nancy Stahl, and Zina Saunders. Somehow I got lucky and they included me, too.

It’s hard to convey how extensive the coverage is on each person without actually seeing the whole issue, so here's every page. Go to a newsstand and pick one up so that Mr. Zimmer can keep making future issues. There are a lot of other deserving illustrators that he still needs to cover.

ILLO main website, link.
Purchase ILLO 2 or subscribe directly from Dan Zimmer, link.

Smokestreams

When you’re drawing or painting a stream of smoke rising in still air, here are a couple of things to keep in mind.

The column of smoke begins as a fairly uninterrupted column of less dense gas. As it rises, the column begins to interact with the surrounding air by forming a curling vortex.

Each vortex usually spirals outward from the central line and breaks up as it gets higher. The most unexpected shapes happen higher up.

It helps to think of the smoke column as a three dimensional semi-transparent plastic bag, with some parts seen edge-on and therefore more opaque.
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Two of these images are by Irene Muller. They all come from the image collection “Dark Roasted Blend.”