From the Archives (VI): the woolly-haired shuffler

It is time to delve in the crypts of the Furahan Archives once more. There are body plans there that have never seen the light of day, and remnants of species long forgotten. Scribbled notes in a mixture of languages show that names of continents, animals or even the entire planet evolved as did the animals. The more prosaic version boils down to an unsorted stack of paper of all possible sizes and types.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This post will deal with how the woolly-haired shuffler (Gigatheron inexorabilis) came into being. The two small doodles on the left show running animals with big heads that seem to have overlapping layers of skin or armour on their body. Their overall shapes suggest a warthog or a ram, and perhaps that is where the inspiration came from. The one on the right was done with felt-tipped pen, and mostly shows a head with interesting horns or teeth as well as a nice neck shield. There certainly is nothing resembling the overlapping dermal plates that came to characterise the shuffler.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This one is rather similar, and the fact that it is a colour sketch means that I had starting thinking about elevating the idea to a full painting. The head has not changed much, but does not work well: the eyes are above the horns in the middle. Those horns have already developed the split tips that I still like, making the horns look as if they developed from entwined separate cores. The colours suggest dawn on a very cold plain, with some direct light coming in horizontally from the left. That colour scheme would probably have worked quite well, as it would have allowed the bits of snow that are scraped aside by the animal as well as the mountain in the background to be highlighted in pure white.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Some developmental sketches must be missing, as the head of the next one has already evolved to its final shape: the eyes have moved down and the lower teeth now form a perfect shovel. The shield and the face below the horns together form a triangle, while the shovel and parts of the contour of the horns form an oval framing the face. You often see such ovals, circles and spirals around major parts of the composition in art books. I have never consciously used such design elements while drawing, and am always a bit amazed that they are in fact there. Drawing involves rummaging around with many shapes until they sort of 'click in place', so i guess that the 'clicking in place' involves an unconscious search for lines and shapes.

What this drawing reveals is that I am not a painter at heart: I do not think in blobs of colour or light and dark, but in lines. This drawing was done on transparent paper, something I used to transfer a drawing onto the prepared board, ready for painting. I traced the final design with pencil on transparent paper, and then laid that, reversed, on the board. By tracing the lines once more with a soft pencil the tracing was transferred. Here, I cannot have been happy with the animal's body, which is clearly still being developed: the overlapping skirts are there, but they do not reach down very far, and the body is rather small.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is another colour sketch. This became the final design. The head is exactly the same, but the body has grown, making the animal much more impressive. There isn't much of a background: just a peak mimicking the shape of the shuffler's shoulders. The bits of colour show that I was thinking of using bits of unexpected colour here and there, something I had seen in the works of Frank Frazetta and that I wished to experiment with.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

And here is the final painting again. The shuffler's story probably does not end here though. When I will have the time in a month or two to pick up the project again, I will continue the digital make over of old paintings. The eyes may change, and so will the fur, I think. Some of you may remember that I mentioned a film in which Furaha would feature. That project is still alive, although progressing slowly, and the final version should feature a shuffler...

Away until back...

After almost four years of writing posts for this blog it is time for a sabbatical. There are certainly enough subjects left to write about. For instance, there is the issue whether established echolocation can prevent eye evolution taking off (I think not), as well as more on eyes, issues on flight, on camouflage, etc. I find writing posts and interacting with those who react (thank you all!) most enjoyable. It is just there are things I need to take care of, and the blogging batteries need recharging. I do not know when I will resume writing, but a nice time to do so would be sometime around the blog's fourth birthday (that's in April, in case you wonder). That is not a definite promise though.

This does not mean that the Furaha project is in any danger. After 30 years I am not going to drop it now. Far from it, in fact: I intend to devote part of the time I have spent blogging on painting. There's lots of things to do.

As proof that the project is very much alive, I can tell you that Furaha will appear in a film that you can actually see in a cinema. The film is being produced by an independent company and is being shot right now. I cannot say too much about it, but it is not a documentary; it will be about people, right here on Earth, and the Furaha project plays a very interesting role.

The producer recently asked me to make -with two days notice, but such things always seem to work that way- a 3D model of my woolly-haired shuffler, an animal that they had seen in my newspaper interview (here and here). and so I loaded Sculptris, a program I wrote about earlier, and started making one. Sculptris is completely free and a joy to work with. The resulting model is certainly not perfect, but for someone like me with limited experience with digital 3D sculpting programs it did not turn out too bad, I think. Particularly if you consider that this was done in about four hours of time...

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here are some screen shots of Sculptris with the model in various colours. It was a bit difficult to get the lateral jaws in there, as Sculptris does not formally accept holes. What i did was to push two extrusions together and then I flattened them where they toch one another. Formally, there are no holes in the model...

Once I had that, it wasn't difficult to export the model to the 'obj' format, import it into Vue Infinite and make a 'turn table animation'. That is what you see above. Not too bad, is it?

With the 'obj' model at hand, I decided to have a better look at a website I had visited before. The site, by the firm 'Shapeways', provides a service through which you upload a 3D computer model, and they then check it, print it in 3D and ship it to you. The instructions on how to check the model and upload it were fairly straightforward, so all was left was to choose a material. You can choose various materials with different qualities, such as the ability to hold detail. I chose a material that promised to allow details and settled for a small size, as you pay for the volume of the material used.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The model arrived within in two weeks and looked good. Part of the left maxilla had broken off, not too surprising if you consider how thin it was. The website has lots of information on how to prevent making your models too thin. What I had not foreseen is that the material was transparent, so much of the detail did not show up. I painted it to solve that, and photographed the result. Interesting, isn't it? I was impressed with the details, but would like a larger size next time. You pay for the volume of material that goes into the model, so I will have to learn how to hollow out the model; if I manage that, I should be able to order a much bigger one for the same price.

So, it's off towards the sunset for me, for a while. I intend to keep on replying to questions here and on the Furaha bulletin board in the meantime, so I'm not away altogether.

Furaha in the Science Section of NRC Handelsblad

Well, when I came back from travelling abroad I found that 'NRC Handelsblad' had indeed devoted ample room to the Furaha project. 'NRC', as it is known, is a Dutch quality national newspaper. The weekend edition has a 12 page science supplement, and this weekend's supplement had three pages on Furaha: the cover and the spread in the middle.

I am afraid I cannot direct you to the relevant pages on the internet to have a look for yourselves, as these are open only to paying customers. Those with subscriptions can download a good quality pdf file. I have a subscription and have the download, but will not publish it here. After all, the newspaper is supposed to make money. Then again, at some point in the future I may yet do so after conferring with the newspaper people. For similar reasons the images below will give you an idea what the article looks like but not in enough detail to read it. Most of you would be unable to read it anyway, it being in Dutch, my native language. It is a very nice article, written by Lucas Brouwers, who also writes a blog -in English- on evolutionary biology.

Here is the cover. I took it from the digital edition, meaning the contrast is much better than in the printed edition, and the colours are also closer to those of the original. 'Wetenschap' means 'science'. (The two words may not overlap entirely. The English version of Wikipedia has a nice entry of the meaning of the word science: "Over the course of the 19th century, the word "science" became increasingly associated with the disciplined study of the natural world including physics, chemistry, geology and biology. This sometimes left the study of human thought and society in a linguistic limbo". In Dutch 'wetenschap' seems to used in the latter broad sense more often than in the narrow one).

Click to enlarge; copyright NRC / Gert van Dijk

Anyway, this is the 'woolly-haired shuffler', that can also be found on the Furaha site; it also featured in the Furaha blog when I first posted it on the main site. The name is a correct translation from the Dutch 'wolharige schoffelaar'. In both languages the adjective 'woolly-haired' was of course taken from the name of the 'woolly-haired mammoth', a name I have always considered as odd as it is funny. I do not think there are other animals, extant or extinct, whose name expresses a quality of their pelt. I have never heard of the 'silken-haired panther' or the 'greasy-pelted otter'; perhaps in poor prose, but not in an animal's name. The text of the paper uses 'wolharige schoffelaar' as intended, but the headline, after translation, reads 'Hairy shufflers and radial flyers'. Newspaper headlines are often written by other people than those who write the body of a text, for reasons unknown to me. Perhaps there was not enough room for the full name, but now the name states that the animal is particularly hairy and it is not...

Click to enlarge; copyright NRC / Gert van Dijk

And this is the inner spread. Regular readers will recognise most images. Two have not been published on the site though, eroding my store of fresh images a bit more. Mind you, the text does not go into what they are or why they look the way they do, so some mystery remains.

You might wonder why a science section of a serious newspaper devoted three pages to a speculative biology project, and that was what I asked the journalist before the interview. He answered that neither he nor his colleagues had any trouble with a mixture of solid science with creative and less factual matters. I am glad of that. Science is too often treated by scientists and others as if it is so serious that you should speak only about it with a straight face and in hushed tones. Well, without creativity science would not only simply not work but would be nothing more than drudgery. I hold similar views about the speculative side of matters, where I prefer to see a mixture as well: fantasy is not the same as idiocy. The best of science fiction is characterised by a 'sense of wonder' as well as a 'what if?' attitude. You cannot do science without them.