Prober and bobbuck II

Recently, I asked readers which colour scheme they preferred regarding the reworked Prober and Bobbuck (P&B) painting, giving them three choices. The one I chose in the end was the ‘African dawn scheme’, with strong yellow and orange as the main colours. If you see such colours in photographs from Africa, you can be almost certain that the photograph was taken at dusk or dawn against the light. There is always dust in the air in a dry climate, and if you look against the sun, that dust provides the yellow-orange glow. The P&B image tries to catch that feeling, and this is also why the sun is low and we are looking into the light.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Anyway, I kept part of the prober’s colours bluish, if only to provide some contrast to the otherwise overly monochromic painting. I read a few recent papers about camouflage patterns to see whether there were new developments (here is a recent textual review without figures as examples). The major theme of that review was that many mechanisms can be combined. The P&B painting shows several mechanisms: background blending, countershading, disruptive colouration and probably a bit of motion dazzle.

Background blending is just what the words suggest, meaning an animal has colours and patterns that make it inconspicuous against the background. Countershading is simply having the underside of the body colour lighter than the top. As the belly of an animal will be shaded by the body, shade makes the light belly colour seem darker, and if all goes well, the result is that the belly is just as dark as the top of the animal. This helps with background blending and makes the animal lose its three-dimensional appearance. Disruptive colouration  means an animal has patches of colour that make the overall shape of the animal more difficult to discern. This works best when the colours of the various patches also appear in the background. Many of these effects work best when an animal is motionless, but apparently some also work when an animal is in motion. In fact, ‘motion dazzle’ describes the effect that the motion of patterned objects is more difficult to judge than that of bland, unpatterned objects.  (tis is not the same as motion camouflage).  

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

 

Back to Furaha and to the P&B painting. The prober and the bobbuck both show multiple camouflage features. Countershading should be obvious in both. Without thinking much about it, I made the belies of both animal an even light colour, whereas I could simply have continued the patterns on the rest of the animal but in lighter colours. Apparently, this occurs in Earth biology a lot too (from where I had unconsciously picked it up). The bobbuck’s horizontal stripes mimick the low hills and patches of low vegetation in the plains where it lives and may also help provide motion dazzle. The stripes are broken, both to break up the outlines of the legs and to increase the resemblance with natural features. The prober has a combination of stripes and spots that again help to break up its outlines. You may note that the stripes are largely at right angles to the animal’s contours. By the way, when stalking and in its initial attack run, the prober holds its ‘raptorial appendages’ (its graspers) back and down, closer to the centre of gravity. Its bright undersides are then not visible from the front. Probers only bring the graspers forwards to the attack position when the hunt is on, when camouflage is no longer an issue.    

Does it all work? You may have noticed that I changed the header of the blog to reflect the updated P&B. Somewhat to my surprise, the shape of the animals is not immediately obvious on such a small picture. That may be because of their fairly unearthly shapes, motion blurring and camouflage. I like it myself, but perhaps I overdid it.          

Was there anything else? Let’s see… Oh yes, both animals of course show features of the Great Hexapod Revolution (here and here), with their kinked distal and proximal necks. You may also note that the functions of the vertical (upper and lower ) jaws are separate from those of the horizontal (left and right) jaws. You will not find advanced hexapods in whom all four legs come together to catch prey; doing so poses overly complex demands on how teeth should work together, so the lateral jaws evolved into food gathering aids. If you look closely, you can see that the prober’s oesophagus runs alongside the proximal and distal necks, and not underneath the joints. You may have to wait for The Book to see that level of detail though.

Speaking of The Book, there is progress. Amazon’s self-publishing scheme makes it difficult to predict colours and shades on the printed page. The only way to get a useful result seems to be to change the colours beforehand, in expectation of then the printers will do with them. Or to them. As this takes trial and error using proofs, I am now at the fourth round of adapting colours, saturation, and brightness, among other things. On screen the results now look garish and cheap, but the proofs are slowly approaching how I wish them to look.       

Reworking 'Prober and Bobbuck'

The image on the header of this blog still shows an old oil painting depicting a bobbuck being chased by a centauroid carnivore, a prober. Back in 2012 I already mentioned that I was working on a new digital version, one finished at the time. I never replaced the image in the header, thinking that I ought to save all new paintings for The Book. I take that restriction less seriously know and am working on a new 'Prober and Bobbuck' version to account for all the anatomical conversions of the Great Hexapod Revolution. That new one will therefore make the previous one obsolete, even though it was never published. that is a sad fate for any painting, so here it is, at last.

 

Click to enlarge; copyight Gert van Dijk

The original oil painting as well as the now defunct digital one, above, were meant to evoke the atmosphere of a scene from an African wildlife documentary. You will just have to image the voice of the inestimable David Attenborough, providing a running commentary.

But how how far should I take the 'Africa scene' association? Please help me decide.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is version One. The painting is at an early stage, without any details, and there is also no leg blurring yet (I will first paint the animals and then cautiously apply blurring effects). The light will come from the top left with the sun low in the sky so there will be brightly lit bands while most of the visible parts of the animals show the shade side; those bright bands have already been indicated. The animals are further apart than in the original, not because that improves the lay-out, but to cater for the fold between pages (the 'gutter') when the image is printed as a book). 

The colour of the plain indicates dry grass, at least to an Earth observer. Almost automatically, we assume that the scene represents a hot and dry environment. But for all we know, orange colour indicates freshly sprouted plants in this particular Furahan biotope... 

I played with camouflage patterns taking inspiration from various Earth animals, so there are stripes tending to run at right angles to outlines and large blotches that make contour recognition more difficult (implying that the animals for whom these patterns are meant have visual circuitry relying on colour, contrast and contour extraction much like our visual system). There is also countershading, in which the underside of animals is lighter than their top, so any added shade on the underside will be counteracted. The animal's colour schemes match the surroundings. Nice, but very Earth-like. Too Earth-like?

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

In this second version the colours of the animals do not match the surroundings well, which can be explained, if need be, in a variety of ways: perhaps the animals have strayed into a biotope where their camouflage does not work; perhaps the plants have changed with the seasons but the animals have not; or perhaps the animals cannot see this colour, or cannot discriminate between yellow-ochre and greenish blue. The animals are less Earth-like with these colours.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This third version has blue-green vegetation, which is not strange on Furaha. After all, large plants on Furaha consist of three groups with differently coloured photosynthetic pigments. The result is that the animals and plants match one another, albeit in a way not found on Earth (not at present anyway; dinosaurs may have sported colours that mammals cannot produce). An interesting aspect is how strong our preconceptions about what colours mean are. Will people interpret the lighting with a low-set sun, or will they assume a nighttime scene because of the bluish colours? I could turn the brightly lit bands yellow in an attempt to counter that (unless that evokes moonlight!).   

I must decide before I start finishing the painting; which one do you prefer? One, Two or Three? If possible, can you say why?

Four years on (and back again!)

Four year ago, almost to the day, I started this blog about Furahan Biology and Allied Matters. Over time, the 'allied matters' took precedence over Furahan biology, but the readers did not seem to mind too much. Last February I decided to take a break from blogging for a while. I had found that writing an entry every two weeks was beginning to feel a bit like a load. I think the sabbatical worked, but even I will only know when I start blogging on a regular basis again. I have several interesting subjects in mind, such as animal legs in the recent 'John Carter of Mars' movie or about the colour of plants.

So, what happened to the Furaha project in the last year? Well, I produced several double page spreads. Two dealt with Fishes IV and Fishes V, with five new digital paintings. One spread dealt with a new animal, the 'dandy', a tree dweller with a colourful asymmetric giant claw. I produced three spreads without life forms: two showed the outer and inner planetary systems of Jua (that is the star Nu Phoenicis), and one shows a large atlas-like map. No doubt you would like to see these paintings, but that is not going to happen. After all, all these pages are meant for a 20 to 26 page 'proof of concept' booklet that I can show to publishers, as I wrote last year. The pages look like the sample I showed earlier, right here. My sentiments are that if I cannot sell the idea to a publisher with a worked-out and carefully edited sample like this, I cannot sell it at all. We'll see.

Of course, some pages show older, non-digital work. These do not remain untouched, however. I will show a few images of a work in progress: the prober and bobbuck page. I have no problems with showing it, as you are already familiar with the painting: it is the one at the top of this blog. That image was taken from a photograph; it is remarkably difficult to take decent photographs of paintings: even with digital cameras and tripods the colours are often incorrect, they are not sharp, or not sharp everywhere, etc. To solve that I had all my paintings scanned last year. As some of them are 50x70 cm that required finding a professional scanning service, but it was worth it. I know have digital versions of about 175 dots per cm (120 dots per cm equal 300 dots per inch).

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is an example: this is the head of the prober, taken from the high-resolution scan. Enlarge it to see it at full resolution. The width of this section corresponds to about 65 mm on the real painting, so if you think my painting is rather coarse, take that into consideration. I could of course simply use the scan as such, but I prefer to take advantage of the possibilities that digital painting affords. One reason to do so is that I never considered the biological backgrounds of these creatures when I painted them as thoroughly as I discuss biomechanics in my blog these days. To a large extent the themes developed as I went along, meaning there are some oddities here and there (Well, lots of them, really. For instance, felt that the bobbuck's torso was too short, and that the middle pair of legs would benefit from an idea I developed later: they are further apart than the front and middle pairs. Having painted quite a few Fishes recently, all of which have four eyes, I started wondering why terrestrial hexapods would have lost their lower pair of eyes. Instead, I decide to migrate this pair sideways, giving terrestrial hexapods four eyes. This creates opportunities for visual specialisation as well. I also felt that the eye design need not always involve eyes on stalks, so in may cases the stalks could go.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

So here is a first step towards the revised painting 'Prober and Bobbuck Mk II'. I selected the animals gave them their own layer, and filled in the background layer roughly. As you see, the bobbuck has already been dissected, and its parts have been rearranged. The eye stalks have gone and the prober has been given a tentative set of new eyes.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This is the next stage; the bobbuck's body has been filled in tentatively. Since then I have been thinking about the relative positions of the two animals, but the original one turned out to be best. I will probably alter some more details and smooth some of the brush strokes, but I will have to be careful not to overdo it. Brush strokes have their own charm, and I should be careful not to ruin that by taking the digital element too far. I wonder whether I should revise the prober's beak to include teeth, following a discussion on the bulletin board of the Furaha site of the last few days.

Animals like the prober use their clubs for the heavy work of dismembering a carcass. They have internal teeth and jaws to grind lumps of food, and use their mouths merely to get food inside them. That's why their mouths are like beaks. Still, teeth-analogues are part of their ancestral make-up, and perhaps some tearing and cutting implements would be handy. And so it proceeds...