|
|
| The Campaign Logo, double size |
|---|
Combination Justice/Liberty, including Justice's Scales, Blindfold, and Liberty's oxidised-copper colour, (excluding the Torch of Liberty/Freedom/Illumination, however).
Justice's Sword of Power is taken from her, and impaled through her back from behind.
I found a portal for "Images of the Goddess of Justice", and many of the inspirations came from there, though the traditional British statue on top of the Old Bailey (formally The Central Criminal Courts) in the City of London is not well represented online. The CPS's website displays a derivative form.
I used this sculpture by Peter Ehrlich as partial inspiration for the
impalement. He named it "Poetic Justice", I interpret it here
differently.
I found it on an anti-fraud site run by Barry Zalma, a fraud investigator. |
The downloaded basis, with a buff flash, is from an online source, though I have not yet been able to trace the original author. It looks like it could have been adapted from a line drawing in a Greek History book. Much of it certainly has been scanned in at some point.
Most of the images I found I used as inspiration, rather than as direct
graphic input.
This logo was originally required to be a figure of Justice, being
stabbed from behind by a figure of the police.
And that isn't too easy to draw.
|
| The first, rather feeble, attempt at a logo |
|---|
A rough start was made in prison, freehand in Ms Paint, and that turned out only to be good enough to fill the hole. A schematic figure, and the verdigris colour, a kind of blindfold, a kind of posture, but generally no long term use.
Ideas were trawled through at a college-funded access point in Fareham on
the internet, and a Greek-style outline was printed out and used as a
basis.
|
| The downloaded basis and used basis, the basis amended in Ms Paint, the Photoshop version, and the current version. |
|---|
Much paper-based traditional artwork was done refining the vague, lo-res,
outline to high-quality penned lines, partly using pencil and tracing
paper, the sword was moved, the mouth opened and the scales knocked askew.
The top part of the dress was made a little less bikini-like, and
following helpful comments at an internet café in North Southsea,
Portsmouth, (Hampshire, England,) the blindfold which on the download
looked like camera-film, was changed to a Native-American triangular
style. "Blinded by the media" is not an interpretation we want
here, thanksverymuch. The original colour of the trapezoid background
flash was buff-yellow, this was changed to the current verdigris
(sunlit/floodlit copper patina featuring on the Statue of Liberty).
The area of neck exposed by modifying the top part of the dress had to
have the indentation-shadows of the collar bone and top of the sternum added,
for it to make visual sense.
The reworked artwork was retraced at Fareham Library study carousals (little boxes they shut you in when you need some quiet space) and rescanned back at the Portsmouth/Southsea internet café. It was combined with the previous data in Adobe Photoshop, intending to save time rescanning but ending up taking more as I worked out from scratch how to do that in Photoshop (I know what I need to do and the technical and process and mathematical concepts behind it, I just don't use Photoshop as often as other people). Fortunately I used to scratch a living testing and repairing other people's software, so I broke it through in the end. But a hell of a mental strain.
Then I saved the (very large) original, reduced a copy of it into
a suitable GIF, and printed out some cards with pre-prepared HTML code.
Then I had the rush back to the prison before they started missing me.
The reduction-method and colour of the background flash turned out to be way out, but the main start was made.
Parallel to all this, still at the prison, I started a 3D version, Ray-Traced in POV. I had used POV before, but I was separated from my main data archives. I had to find and download POV from an internet access point, get it working in the prison computer, and write from memory the testbed scripting sourcecode. All this whilst complying (well, mainly) with prison regulations and putting up with/arguing back at the bundle-of-jeering-arseholes brigade of workshy criminals (a minority) who were furious I was stressing them out by working in their lazing-around-infront-of-the-TV time, in the badly-misnamed quiet room.
In (failed) revenge they spread the rumour that I was wiping other
people's work off the shared machine whilst wiping the data off themselves.
As a counterstrike to that rumour a new inmate tried to wipe the
harddisk, but since I had made contingencies against this and also
since they didn't know enough to do any real damage, they only succeeded
in wiping everybody's work except mine.
I managed to restore the games on the shared machine (as if there were
any other machines), thus gaining some cred back from the original
jeer'ers, so it all worked out survivorly in the end.
All that mucking around aside, I hit mathematical problems with the implementation of a particular algorithm for positioning figure's skeletons\frames in POV, and had to bow out of any final 3D result for the time being.
I do include here some bits of 3D scene, to give an idea of what was going on.
When I got back home, I optimised the reduction of the large scan, in !ChangeFSI, !InterGIF and !Paint, and found Photoshop's bicubic resampling method of reduction seriously lacking along with it's dithering, when compared against !InterGIF.
|
| 
|
| Photoshop version (x2) | Analysis (x4) |
|---|
Note how lousy the colour matching is, and zoomed in, the multiple banding in the dithering at the edges of the background flash.
This is highlighted in the enlarged version, which has the main colour
replaced with a buff shade, to make the banding around the lines easier to
see.
|
| 
|
| The current version (x2) | Analysis of (x4) |
|---|
Look how much more contrast there is, and how the green (looked good onscreen but far too dark printed) is replaced with a sunlit-verdigris shade, reminiscent of the oxidised copper skin of the Statue of Liberty. This shade looks good on all media (LCD & CRT monitors and printouts) and took ages to calculate.
You can see there is now no banding around edges, in the enlarged version,
and dithering is properly observed.
Later on, much colour-matching for good looks onscreen and on paper.
These took quiet a while, but the results are very striking, in my
humble opinion.
The latest version of LadyJx was uploaded mid-February
2002AD.
So that'll do for the time being. Other sizes of reduction have been made from the large scan, the scan itself has been converted to Acorn (four-colour) Sprite format, bits too dark have been lightened (with regular dithering on a copy of the large scan), and minor flaky errors have been removed.
The 3D alternative will be worked on when I have time, superior scripting
facilities in !Zap and debugging
realisations of the current limitations of the POV script language should
make this a cinch.
However the 3D thing will now never replace the now-stable,
prestigious-looking, 2D Logo. It will become a supplement, in whatever
capacity is required or spring's up in the future expansion of the Campaign.
It can be animated reasonably easily (parry and thrust), and fire, flags,
and flashing "blue" can be added to the symbolism.
"That's not very nice!"He said.
This is a symbolic representation, not a literal one.
If you went around balancing a set of scales in one hand and waving a
sword with the other, you'd be down the funny farm before you could say
"it's in the public interest".
So it is important not to confuse the two.
You can see symbolic representations on all classical public statues, as often as pigeon droppings, verdigris stains, and drunkards balancing on them for their friends to photograph.
Graphic images often being nicked or going walkies thanks to Google®'s Image Library, mean it is a good idea to add explantory text (eg copyright information) inside their files. This is also a good promotional measure. This was done with the Campaign Logo GIF, particulary prompted after it turned up in a search through Google®'s Image Library for "copyright free images", which it is not.
(Previously dated SATd9/2/2002AD.) Text added
within the file (the Campaign URL):
Did put:
ht tp://Freedoms.4t.com/freelogo.htm
Was to be:
The Freedom Campaign logo:
ht tp://Freedoms.4t.com/freelogo.htm
Now:
(Not wanting to give the impression that the Logo is free, and wanting to keep the filesize at a minimum.)ht tp://Freedoms.4t.com
Next: To update this in line with the new domain:
http://freedom.is
Note: The "Watermark" is not the type that affects the
display of the image in any way.
The standard size of logo is infact 18.8 times smaller than the scanned master (Known to me as Final75). The master rasterfield (bitmap) was scanned from two pieces of paper artwork and joined together in Photoshop. Several fully anti-aliased and error-diffused (nothing to do with errors; Floyd-Steinberg dithered) reductions are used. A vector version may be prepared in future, once the copy of Iota Image Outliner (the Acorn equivalent of Adobe Streamliner, only much more powerful of course) I have ordered arrives.
These reductions have been used so far:
| 1: 1 | Final75, from the scanned master. Not used directly. |
| 1: 4 | Quarter-size, for printing A4/A5 size Poster version of Card. |
| 10:188 | LadyJx, "normal size". Used on the website and Contact Cards.
The Cards are published on the internet, and have to use the lowest common denominator. |
| 10:94 | HalfLady, double normal size, also used on this site, on this page infact, as an illustrated zoom. |
| 20:94 | quadruple normal size, for on-screen detail-zooms,
in Logo explanation. (which turned out to be too big, and too near the 1:4
size.)
Though it has found a use in vector-based printing of a Poster, reduced to that physical size, but, in a vector-based environment, losing none of the resolution. |
As well as being used on this site, various incarnations of the Campaign
Logo are employed on Contact Cards, Leaflets, various sizes of Poster,
and letterheads in headed notepaper, including a monochrome version for
Faxing. It also crops up on other websites in Buttons and Webring
navbars.
In future a series of [serious] cartoons will be produced, and these may
feature a monochrome version of the logo, with the flash reduced to a
discontinuous outline, for mass-photocopying.
|
TinyLady, the 50 pixel-high logo used on the webring. First version (oTinylady) quickly reduced from LadyJx mid-May 2002AD. TinyLady properly reduced, from Final75, two days later.
Note the colour distortion and grainy double-dithering in the rushed first attempt (LadyJx is itself dithered), and how much clarity\quality is gained by doing things the long way round. |
A smaller version was required for the Logo in the Small Crusaders
Webring.
Originally, there was a maximum height restriction to be complied with,
and this was kept because it looked good and loaded fast.
What the Webring is and does is explained at length
on a dedicated section of this site.
For speed, and for technical reasons that are not as easy as they should
be to escape from, the Webring Logo is hosted separately, by an Image[-only]
Hosting company. (The Webring itself is hosted by a specialist Hoster that
only runs Webrings.)
The 3D method uses Ray Tracing, which is the highest quality of graphics, tracing each path of every ray of light reaching a virtual camera backwards to it's source, and any surfaces along the way. The camera, lights sources, and objects, and the attributes of these, are stored in a mathematical model represented by a scripting language. The software I use is called POV (Persistence of Vision). It is an Open-Source project in the Public Domain (ie, it's free,) and compiled version are available for both Acorns and PCs (which are the two platforms I use most frequently). Ray Tracing in effect uses infinite polygons, and effects including perfectly smooth curved surfaces, gas plasma, reflections and transparency are all easily achievable, all the hard work being done by the rendering engine. The trade-off is speed, Ray Tracing takes time, particularly for complex images, and, for the complexity I use, is not usually a real-time option.
|
| An illustration of the struggle to draw Arms |
|---|
|
| Scales of Justice |
|---|
|
| Torch of Liberty |
|---|
I show here some components (of statues), including body parts and
symbolic items for them to hold.
These models were positioned against a framework of my design, for my
guidance. There are difficulties positioning 3D items from a single 2D
viewpoint. You can see this by trying to trim your hair in the mirror, with
one eye closed.
The framework is axis (axises? axia?) of x, y, and z, and the origin, set
upon an infinite groundplane of white translucent material, so bits sinking
beneath it can also be glimpsed.
Two light sources are used together with ambient lighting, for helpful
shadows and proper illumination. It isn't easy working with less than this.
This is an explanation of what the flashy graphical subsitemap is all about.
The diagram illustrates the older structure of the Summaries, the forums
structure, and the relationship between them.
Straight radiating forks connect the parts of Summaries.
Curved separated lines access the forum topics.
You can see the effects more clearly
with this zoom into the central sphere (post-processed fading with Paintshop
Pro).
Clearly reflected in the surface of the big sphere are the smaller ones, including, if you look closely, the 'hemiring' of outer spheres.
Several effects are varied to differential between the inactive and active parts of the diagram: Saturation, Brightness, Refraction, and Surface Finish.
Glass has an IOR of 1.5 and Diamond 2.4 . The diagram's IOR switches between 1.55 and 1.75 . For more on IORs, Cf. "Fire and Ice", below.
A small, tight highlight is associated with hard, shiny objects (regardless of the actual reflectiveness), and larger highlights with faded edges making the material seem like a rubber balloon. I wanted a faded highlight, so I modified the colour of the highlight from white to taking on the colour of its surrounding material, usually only used with metallic finishes, and bumped up the reflectiveness and IOR. These accompanying tweaks conteracted the rubbery-feel.
Interestingly, even on perfect spheres, a high IOR has a lensing effect,
which is why diamonds appear to be aglow with a diffracted "fire"
of surrounding light.
Back to expanded-contents page.
