drawing

A one-minute clip of Alexander Overwijk drawing a near-perfect freehand circle, one metre across, in under a second on a chalkboard. He is a repeat winner of the World Freehand Circle Drawing Championship.

3Blue1Brown introduces Fourier series, from the heat equation to drawing arbitrary shapes with rotating circles. It builds a visual intuition for decomposing functions into sine waves.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

A short Globe and Mail animated explainer on why renting can leave you as well off as buying a home. It walks through a rent-versus-buy comparison using Toronto numbers and the opportunity cost of a down payment. The video notes it dates from 2015 and the housing market has changed since.

A BBC documentary on Francis Bacon, the loud, hard-drinking British painter, drawing on people who knew him. It explores the haunted man behind the Roaring Boy persona.

Bob Nystrom shows his process for hand-drawing the diagrams in his book Crafting Interpreters, from pencil sketches to tracing and inking. It is a time-lapse of the whole illustration workflow.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

The first episode of Stewart Brand's 1997 BBC series based on his book How Buildings Learn, covering how buildings change after they are built. Brand presents and the series has music by Brian Eno.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

The first part of a long series documenting Dave Bull's Tokyo woodblock workshop as it produces a reproduction of Hokusai's The Great Wave. It follows the carving, proofing and printing of the reward print for Kickstarter backers.

An animated short film of Tanya Davis's spoken-word poem 'How To Be Alone', illustrated by Andrea Dorfman. It gently argues that being alone can be embraced and enjoyed.

The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

The School of Life sets out principles for making attractive cities, arguing that the art has been lost in the modern world.

A timelapse compilation of the night sky above the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, using ESO photographers' footage set to music. It shows the stars wheeling overhead and the observatory at work.

Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tours a Kodak factory to show how photographic film is manufactured. This is part one of a three-part series covering the large-scale coating and production process.

A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

An episode of the comedic You Suck at Photoshop series in which Donnie Hoyle teaches distort, warp and layer effects while vandalizing a Vanagon in the image. It won Webby awards as a how-to and comedy series.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

Jacob Geller's video essay examines how architecture in schools and in video games, such as cover shooters, is shaped by violence. It touches on brutalism, campus policing and protests.

A short film following Moroccan artisans from Fez as they build a traditional 15th-century-style Moroccan court inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows zellij tilework and other traditional techniques.

Kirsten Dirksen visits architect Gary Chang's 32 square meter Hong Kong apartment, which he has redesigned over decades. Sliding walls and transformable furniture turn it into 24 different room configurations.

Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculpture chains twelve 1:50 worm gear reductions so the final gear, embedded in concrete, would take over two trillion years to turn once.

Kirsten Dirksen visits the Providence Arcade, the oldest US indoor mall, which was converted into 225-square-foot micro-lofts classified as a rooming house.

A behind-the-scenes tour of the ILFORD factory in Mobberley, England, showing how black and white film, paper and chemicals are made. It walks through emulsion making, coating, finishing, QC and distribution.

Trevor Paglen's 30C3 talk on photographing and documenting the secret state, including CIA flights, spy satellites and military sites, to reveal the geography of covert programs.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

A short demo of interactive AI live painting in Krita using the Stable Diffusion plugin, where canvas changes update the generated image immediately. It uses an LCM sampler for speed and needs a high-end GPU for the interactive feel.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

Footage shot with a Nikon P1000 superzoom camera showing extreme optical zoom on distant targets from Ben Lomond in Scotland.

Theo Jansen shows many of his Strandbeests, wind-powered walking kinetic sculptures, set to Khachaturian's Spartacus. It presents his work since 1990 on creating new forms of life on beaches.

A Wendover Productions video on how the art market works, arguing that prices are driven by wealth, storage and tax mechanics rather than artistic value.

A short look at CoeLux, an artificial skylight that recreates the scattering process that makes the sky look blue, producing a convincing illusion of distant sun and depth.

A Vox explainer on how many of the British Museum's treasures were taken during British imperial rule, focusing on the Benin Bronzes and requests for their return.

Applied Science shows how telecentric and hypercentric optics differ from normal lenses, producing no or negative perspective. The video builds a telecentric system from a Fresnel lens and demonstrates a lens that can see around objects.

A two-minute animated minute meme by Nina Paley, photographed at the Metropolitan Museum, showing how all creative work builds on what came before. It is set to music from the Sita Sings the Blues soundtrack.

A tour of Christian Schallert's 24 square meter apartment in Barcelona, designed so that it looks like an empty cube until he builds the furniture he needs. Kirsten Dirksen shows how the space is transformed for cooking, sleeping and dressing.