He Who is Not In the Photograph

If there were a picture that gave description about that for which I cared, this would be it.

That's my brother, on the left, my dad looking down and my wife crouched in front of Grandpa Lyman's grave. Here is a representation of my grandfather in a more robust time:

We have an old photo of Grandpa lying around. This is a drawing of that photograph that I gave my dad for Christmas back in 2001. In the picture Grandpa is doing that which he was always doing, and that which he did best: work. He passed away in June of 2000 while I was away serving an LDS mission in Illinois. This was the last letter I received from him. I was serving in a small town called Byron at the time:

3-29-2000

Dear Lee, 

I am  always happy to receive your letters and feel of your spirit.

We are doing fine and are not ready to plow as we still have 1 1/2 feet of snow. We had a few warm days and the snow started to melt, but has cooled off a little.

The price of milk is still low, but the price of gas is still going up.

We went to Idaho Falls last Friday to see Melanie fly in. She surely looked good. Had a lot of wreaths around her neck. I believe she put one on each that was there. [I think he meant to say Leighs.]

She reported her mission Sunday and the church was filled with people. She did very good. She has certainly grown spiritually since being on her mission.

Last Sunday we rented a couple of snow machines and everyone had a real time riding them.

I got word Monday of my very dear friend Dwayne Linford Died. Grandma and I are going to the funeral. They asked me to dedicate the grave. It is being held in Lehi, Utah. The funeral is Thursday, so we are leaving this afternoon and going to Tremonton tonight to stay then on to Lehi tomorrow. We are taking Aunt Vicki with us from Salt Lake.

No: Jet isn't ruined. As soon as spring comes, we'll get her ridden.[Jet was a horse that I tried to ride just after it was broken. The mouth bit was loose and for a few eternal seconds I had a bucking rodeo  out in the hayfield.]

Learning patience is a hard job, but it is very important. We are always being tried, so don't give up. Can you imagine how many times our Heavenly Father has been tried by each of us?

Well, keep up the good work, and know that you are in our prayers daily.

We love you and are always happy to hear of your great efforts to do this great work.

Love,

Grandpa & Grandma

Crook

I have studied a lot of things and known a lot of smart people. But nobody I have known in this life was as wise and as smart as my grandfather. He was a humble farmer, born in the homesteading era in Star Valley at the turn of the 20th Century. For all of my vain intellectual pursuits in my life, no conversations have been as meaningful, purposeful, and insightful as the conversations I had with Grandpa Lyman lying down in the grass under the cottonwood trees next to the Simpson Hill. The sun was spotting through the tops of the trees as they do on a breezy day, and the faint sound of the combine could be heard from atop the hill, where my uncle was harvesting grain.

I have a lot of memories that last summer working on the farm before going on a mission. They are all special to me. I was not ready for him to pass away. He was a father figure to me. I miss him dearly. When I returned from my mission, and was off for the summer from college, I would take a motorcycle up to the Freedom Cemetery late at night and talk to him. That simple grave stone was an important marker left behind of his life. I know it was just his body under the earth, but the monument represents more than that. It is a symbolic intermediating object between my remaining on this earth and him returning to God. I felt that there was so much more that he could teach me about life, and when I returned home nothing in life was the same. This headstone came to mean a lot to me...the weight of the granite, not just a good object to engrave information to resist erosion, but the granite itself became a sort of anchor to help me deal with a world changing too quickly.

Rest in peace, Lyman. And what I mean by that is don't work too hard on the other side!
Happy Memorial Day!

The Girl in the Puddle

The following Link can be found at: trib.com:

"LANDER — Three-year-old Addison Romans was walking with her mother, Tara, just before she was fatally hit by a car this week, according to a law enforcement official.
Lander Police Chief Fred Cox said the two were walking out of the Lander community swimming pool when the toddler darted in front of a moving vehicle. The pool is adjacent to Starrett Junior High.
Cox said his department has pieced together the events leading up to Addison Romans’ death from witness reports and by reconstructing the scene with the help of the Wyoming Highway Patrol.
Paramedics worked to save the toddler, but she died at about 9:30 a.m. Thursday in the emergency room of the Lander hospital — not long after the accident.
Fremont County Coroner Ed McAuslan said Addison Romans died of trauma to her head and chest."

I cannot imagine what the parents are going through. Grief is an emotion taken for granted by those of us who have not yet lost. I have a three year old the same age as this girl, Addison. I remember feeling sick the day I heard the news of this accident.

One of my clients is Bott Monument Service. I really enjoy working with them because the go to great lengths to make sure the monument made for the death of a loved one is made with the utmost quality. Drew is one of the nicest people you could ever talk to. Well Drew contacted me to do some custom imagery for the headstone. It is a family headstone, erected and based mostly around their little girl Addison, but it is very large. It is actually in production right now, and as far as I understand, Drew has contracted with a stainless steel company in Chicago to have stainless ballons "floating" above the granite, with installed lighting for night time. I have seen designs of it, and I am excited to see how it turns out. One thing that Drew enjoys is thinking outside of the box when it comes to monuments. It has been a family business for over 135 years, so I imagine that you learn a few tricks of the trade in that time, as well as some desire to expand the possibilities of what a monument may constitute. At any rate, Drew's eye for design allows him to take risks that most people would not succeed at--and he does it well.

For the back of the monument, the family wanted an image of their daughter playing in a mud puddle, just after a rainstorm. I spoke with Tara, her mother, and she told me how Addison was always outside, with no concern for how dirty she might be getting, and fully enjoying the best that nature has to offer any child.

I understood the families desire to have a graphic made just right, so it was not easy. I knew this going in, but it did not make it easier. I have done portraiture for over 15 years. I love portraiture--but as any artist understands, there will always be new and unique challenges to face with any new project you receive, and this was no exception. I went through a lot of trial and error, photographing models and using images of the Roman's daughter that they had. I sweat A LOT. There were even times that I was not sure whether I was going to pull it off. I will not bore you of all the steps it took to get me to the final point, but when I got there...I was relieved, and excited:

This was a combination of photoshop, tablet drawing, and vector processing. It is a three-toned graphic, meaning that the mid-values will be steel-shot, and the dark values will be sandblasted. It is a large vector file, 22" by 20". I am very pleased with the result. Some things are very rewarding if you have to work hard to overcome the challenges.

I wish the Romans the best as they adopt to the fierce changes in their lives. Children are so precious, and no parent wishes to outlive their offspring. I do not believe she is simply gone, however. I believe Tara and Tony will see their girl again.

Optical Value and Impied Form in Two-toned Vector Graphics

I grew up on a farm where...lets just say if something was broken...you made do with what you had to make it work. It was amazing how many things one object could be used for if you were creative. A discarded wheel hub became a salt-lick holder. A used barrel of motor oil became a rain-shield for the combustion engines on the moveable irrigation lines. Last but not least, many broken aluminum sprinkler pipe became prime material for potato canons (although I don't recall ever firing potatoes).

I miss those days. I was just a kid. Life was so much simpler. One thing that I have taken with me, however, is that desire to creative problem solve.

Now that I design graphics, I am interested in addressing different sets of problems using the same creativity. One of the problems that we face in the west is sprinkler systems and water scale build up. This poses a problem for steeled stones with a laser etching on them. Laser etching is relatively new, so nobody really knows how long a photograph will remain on a stone, but at least for arid climates we are pretty sure of the damage that can be done. This is sort of a bummer because I have seen some incredible monuments with images being primarily laser etched. Just check out this link: http://www.paramountgranite.com/images/articles/jett_etch_grayscale.jpg  Laser etching does have the advantage of providing infinite gradations of value, which allows for photographic quality on granite.

I am in the development stages of developing graphics that, from a small distance, would have the illusion of value, not just two tones. The principle is the same as laser etching; optical mixing, only on a much larger scale. This technique is no secret to printers, especially woodblock and intaglio engravings.
Contoured lines have been used for centuries to imply value. For some reason I haven't really seen this on gravestones. I don't think its because its impossible, I just think that perhaps few people have really thought about the illusion of optical mixing on granite.

Well I did some tests:

 This is an image of a glass ball, with caustics(refracted light). This image has 5 shades of value, which were then turned into lines of respective varying diameter. The wider the diameter the darker the value appears from a distance.

I am very happy with the results. Though I have not had it sandblasted, I think that it would work very well. One of my primary concerns was for the plot-cutter. How can you put value into an image without having the cutter spending 10+ hours cutting the stencil. This would wear out your equiptment to fast, and would make pulling dots out a headache. With a contour pattern however, value is created with a relatively simple node path.

The question then comes to mind of what are the limitations of this technique. A line can only be so thin for a sandblaster to engrave deeply enough for it to matter. There is also the consideration of how close lines can be to each other before they get blown out of position and compromise the drawing. The last thing to consider is what is the threshold for the human eye when it comes to viewing an optically mixed image.

The ball and caustics are geometrical. But how would this technique measure up against something more organic, like, say a portrait of Abraham Lincoln?:

What do you think? I don't think the image is unsuccessful per se, but I think it is a tougher challenge to sell the human eye on something that has been geometrically stratified when the subject matter itself is organic. It really comes down to thresholds of value. An image like this might work: It is Linciln and at this point of his presidency, he looked pretty bad from all the stress of civil war casualty. But what about a little girl?

A computer cannot perceive planes, and therefore it cannot make contour lines that are appropriate for the respective plane they are contained in. This requires the discernment of a human. So I went back to square one and looked at...well not so much optical mixing, but implied form. Here is what I came up with:

Here there is some volume implied by contour lines in their respective plane Take Christ's hair for example, the lines, while following a natural path for hair to flow, creates the illusion of depth. This was done with a drawing tablet.


The image didn't quite feel complete. It would make a nice ink drawing to hang on your wall, but probably not a graphic to etch on stone. So then I tried to find a middle ground between hand drawing and the computer generated contour lines. I also took into consideration spacing for a gravestone...a format that would make it work in more of a radial pattern:

The original which I based this image from was a painting of Christ with a Child by Heinrich Hoffman. Hoffman was a 19th century realist most famous for his paintings depicting the life of Christ. I love his work...and knowing that his work is well known, thought that basing an image off of his work would make for a comforting graphic for someone who has lost a young child and would be comforted by the thought of the child happily in the presence of Christ. I am not sure if it works for me, however...The representation of Christ looks like the actor Liam Neeson.



This vector will likely be available in the free vector section of qualityheadstonegraphics.com.