Do you remember how photo negatives looked like?
The inverted versions of the most common colors looked so unreal. Hues of orange, violet, or cyan that you never saw in the real world.
Happy smiling human people looked like turquoise zombies with an evil grin.
When creating this geometric drawing, I haven’t been thinking about old photos initially. I wanted to complete a series of four artworks, called Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship.
Each drawing on 21cmx21cm (8inx8in) watercolor paper features an ellipsoid and a sphere and their intersection curve. The scene is shown from four different viewpoints: Three times straight-on, with the line of sight in the direction of the x-, y-, z-axis respectively, plus the axonometric “3D” view from a more random direction. The latter is constructed from the former, using the techniques of traditional descriptive geometry.
Image 1, 2, and 3 made me pick up nice colors. I saw colorful insects or cute versions of spacecrafts. I called them:
I wanted to end the series of four on a positive note. I should have created a butterfly ellipsoid, perhaps.
But, alas, something within me wanted to see The Evil. Number Four should look disconcerting and irritating.
Maybe it was because I had to redraw number 4 – I had made an error in the early stages of the construction. This drawing was cursed. Probably it was the shape of the ellipsoid? Was it a wasp rather than a bee?
Instead of demonizing an innocent insect, I simply call it:
Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship 4 – Evil.
Only having completed it, I recognize the evil orange and evil violet of the photo negative zombies.
Traditional geometrical construction (orthographic projection) an ellipsoid intersecting a sphere as used in Louis Poinsot’s theory of the gyroscope. Watercolor pencils on watercolor paper.
You can view as an abstract image that happens to have been created “manually, but with an algorithm” – following the rules of geometry with pencil and compass.
You can call it mathematical art as this is about an ellipsoid and a sphere. Or you can recognize the physics of the gyroscope it is based on.
I think I have said everything that can be said about those ellipsoids and spheres – multiple times.
Today, I will let the subconsciousness of the internet speak. I am searching for Evil Ellipsoids and Spheres in a private browser window on DuckDuckGo, and I take one brief, unedited phrase from each of the documents or pages listed as search results. The rule: I need to process the search results in the order they appear, picking a line immediately, not knowing yet what the next line will be.
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Evil Ellipsoids and Spheres
equidistant and equiangular
no one managed to do it
an inversion of the tree of life
About those arches I heard a theory
the harmony between opposites
They each look a bit different
you might have heard some whispers
alluring, transfixing, and hypnotizing
exert dominion over earthly realms
Literal or Spiritual?
size is a key part of the data
using super-ellipsoids and multi-spheres
reaching the free surface
decreasing the minimum fluidization
our shape bulges from a diamond to a circle
in a rotating drum
the small volume element can be chosen
non-spherical particles have been proposed
Why is this
formalisms are used for inclusions
Verify you are human
Suppose we have a box
migrate to the end walls
from truncated spheres
don’t think nature uses π
but little is known regarding the influence
Approach sketching like sculpting
move parallel to their long axis
We can enhance your experience
with different aspect ratios
before I begin,
explore more complex surfaces
exploited to fix the origin
it became the standard term
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I have turned this series into print-on-demand coffee mugs, each featuring two different images. Evil is paired with UFO, for example!
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