Eva Luef’s team recorded two western lowland gorilla groups in the Republic of Congo and found two different mealtime sounds. One was a steady, low tone. The other was a series of short, mismatched notes, kind of like they’re making up little food songs, Luef said.

Seeds and aquatic plants brought on the most singing, she reported. Termites brought about none.

Most of what animals say has been occurring just beyond our awareness. Researchers at the Univ, of León attached tiny audio recording devices to 52 carrion crows in Spain and collected over 100,000 adult calls. Before that, people used directional mics capturing from a distance, but that only caught the loud end of their vocalizations.

When scientists put microphones on the birds, they found that crows do most of their communication quietly, inside the family, at close range. Here is a quiet call and a loud one. It would be as if aliens were watching humans, and only recording our shouts at the stadium and not our dinner table conversations.

If you ever hear a raven or a crow making these low sounds, and you imitate them back, they really notice!

Belugas got the nickname “sea canaries” because whalers heard the weird noises they made through the hull. In 1984 a diver surfaced at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego and asked his buddies, “OK, Who told me to ‘GET OUT‘?” Nobody did. It was a beluga named NOC, varying the pressure in his nasal passages to produce humanlike sounds. He kept doing it for about 4 years, then stopped.

Karl Berg swapped eggs between green-rumped parrotlet’s nests in Venezuela. The chicks grew up using the signature calls that their foster parents used with them. It turns out that in parrot families, Mom and Dad dole out the names.

Elephants (and presumably mammoths) go even further. Michael Pardo’s team ran 469 recorded rumbles through a machine-learning model and found they could predict whom a call was addressed to from the sound alone.

When they played the sounds back, an elephant named Donatella heard a rumble meant for her. She approached the speaker. When she heard one meant for her cousin Rothko, she called once and stayed where she was.

A dolphin speaks out a name by imitating the sounds of the individual they’re referring to. But an elephant’s name for another elephant does not imitate the other one at all. It’s totally arbitrary.

Elephants also talk on to each other simultaneously. They seem to expect it, and they’re not thrown off by it. At the Mushara watering hole in Namibia, when a senior male rumbles, the others answer one by one, their voices overlapping him. In one study of family groups, 96 percent of rumbles overlapped the one before.

Unlike turtles, which leave a minute of silence between each statement and a conversation. I've noticed the same with frogs.

This all arrives now because we can finally search recordings at a scale that no human ear could manage. And here’s an even stranger finding. If you train one model on English and another on a remote language, with no translations between the two, you can match the two systems without a dictionary.

Aza Raskin, cofounder of the Earth Species Project, believes animal communication follows the same rules.

I believe we’re living through a Copernican moment. We humans may not be so unique or special after all. Other creatures can name things and hold conversations.

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'Jimothy' is a wild raccoon with a congenital short spine syndrome.

This cute little guy gets around just fine in his Seattle neighborhood, making him both endearing and inspiring. His story went viral last month.

Here’s a little video that shows how I draw him, using a water-soluble felt pen and a soft pencil.

Here’s a video of Jimothy's amusing antics.

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Lighting designers and photographers are aware of how hard or soft the light is. What do they mean?

Hard light has sharp shadows

Hard light (sunlight)

The quality of “hardness” or “softness” of light results from how large the source appears to be from the point of view of the subject.

If you hold your thumb up at arm’s length and can hide the source behind it, the light would be considered hard. The sun is an enormous object obviously, but its disc appears small, so it behaves like a hard source.

But because of the size of the sun, the edges of even those cast shadows get a litte softer as they get farther from the object casting them.

One more thing to notice about that photo of hard light: Texture shows up in the half light, that region where the light turns from light to shade. Look closely at the photo of the ostrich egg, and the air pores are most visible near the division between light and shadow.

Soft light has soft shadows

Soft light (overcast light)

A soft source comes from a broad source, such as an overcast sky, a north window, a diffuser panel. Under hard light the division between lit and shadowed planes is abrupt, the cast shadow has a crisp edge, and hollows drop. A hard light brings out surface texture and casts a hard-edged shadow.

Under soft light the shadows don’t have clear boundaries. The darkest tones are the ponts of contact. Surfaces grow lighter as they turn up toward the broad source overhead.

Soft light hides wrinkles and simplifies form, which is why it has often been the preferred light for portraits.

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If you needed to animate your logo for a video, the standby method was to spend lots of money on high-tech digital motion graphics that will look fake and dated in five years.

Or you could make it yourself practically for free out of cardboard, wire, and mud. (Direct link to video).

My wife Jeanette helped me with filming. You get all kinds of cool variations for free. love practical, in-camera effects, especially when you bring smoke and gravity into the equation. It’s a fun way to ground logo animations.

This analog technique is also a good way for artists using CGI to quickly and cheaply generate reference of real effects little nuances of things like wind vortices in smoke, cast shadows, etc, which would be hard to imagine in purely digital simulations.

What I plan to do with this re-usable frame is to shoot it in a few different environments, such as in front of a roaring bonfire or in the middle of a fern garden.

Here are some of the CG animated logos for inspiration (link to video).

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Here’s what the screen graphics looked like for a game called River Raid, where you fly a jet up a river and shoot at helicopters and ships.

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(Below, Norman Rockwell, Artist Facing Blank Canvas, 1938.

Obstacles and Remedies

1. Imposter syndrome

You’re grateful for the opportunity, but don’t feel qualified or adequately trained.

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Show-card writing, which I introduced a couple days ago, was done mainly with the pen and brush.

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Menhennit Course in Show Card Writing, 1927

These were called “show cards” and they were big business for commercial artists.

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The paper was hard to find (PDF below), but it’s unclassified. It’s called “A Seismograph for Lunar Experiments,” published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in November 1962. It came out of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, …

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I love making these short videos. You can pack so much story and character into a minute.

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In the winter of 1879, a 23-year-old John Singer Sargent stood in the Prado, copying Las Meninas (below). The master’s canvas was nearly ten feet tall and had been hanging in that room for over two hundred years, dimmed by varnish and lampblack. Sargent struggled to understand how an artist who was deceased since 1660 could bring painted figures to life.

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Plein-air study painted in oil on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, looking west.

Blog reader Rockhopper asked why tones get lighter in the distance as a result of atmospheric perspective:

“How do you define value as the image recedes? I know it gets lighter and I know it goes bluer. Is there a rule in place to define distance with the value? So for exam…

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To wrap this post, I'll share some interesting insights about how our thinking doesn't just happen in our brain, but our hands really do a…

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Let’s start with the finished drawing by Xubucheng. Blog reader ZS has generously translated the Chinese notes in the book, which I’ll show in bold after each step, followed by my own observations about what he seems to be doing.

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Bernard Garbutt grew up in southern California, where he worked as a staff artist for the L. A. Times, producing sketches …

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“Why do you work so small? Why do you make those complete little paintings in a book? Why not paint them larger, on panels that you can exhibit and sell?”

Well, let’s see. I don’t always paint in sketchbooks. Sometimes I use small panels for plein-air studies, like the recipe-card-size study of rhododendrons …

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In the late 1960s, Bob Peak kept a Ferrari 275 GTB4 in his Greenwich, Connecticut driveway. His financial success issued from his paintbrush. His neighbor Bernie Fuchs up the road in Westport, was, by most accounts, the highest-paid illustrator in America. A single national ad campaign earned Fuchs the equivalent today of $90,000 to $100,000, which he b…

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Henri Regnault was the most talked-about young painter in France when his Salomé lit up the 1870 Salon.

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