Oil Paintings (III): Unknown

New painting from what seems to be a XIXth Century Military. Let me know if you identify the portraited gentleman and the author. I got a bad picture as reference from a Russian Art Book. Not sure if the author is russian. The figure reminds me of the English Army but not sure at all. What do you think?

I had a great time painting the reflected red colors in the left gauntlet and the gold ornaments of the costume.

Oil Paintings (II) - Albert Bierstadt

Here i present an exercise i did using one of the most known works of the hudson river school. It's Albert Bierstadt this time if i recall correctly.

Quite challenging for me. Here the difficulty relied on several parts. 

First all the tiny details and vegetation in the foreground. Ended up mixing several different colors and brush strokes to convey that feel of mixed thin grass leaves of different types and the ocres and less saturated colors of the stones and grains.

Then the feel of old bricks in the right facade that is being eaten by nature little by little and like specially the yellow highlights of the grass in it's top part. Im quite happy with the colors and the texture.

The sky was the first thing to do since i try to work from background to foreground, thus covering layers. The clouds, pastel-ish atmosphere of the original painting here was certainly difficult for me, specially if we take into account the hard times i had in a previous  exercise where i was painting huge sky sunrise where the primarily light was hitting on a backlit inmense set of clouds. Really happy how it turned out this time.

At last, the background mountains where we can see three major depth planes, each one more and more whitewashed. I had difficulties trying to get and match the middle toned colors of the set of mountains in the middle plane since there where an inbetween of the almost like sky colors of the mountains at the back and the more saturated ones closer to the viewer. I put several layers of mixed oils until i finally got the desired, something in between, atmosphere.

Github repository

INTRODUCTION

The idea of opening up my own github repository has been around my head for some years now. I ve been putting it off for a long time, the reason being i ve always had my personal backup of script code and utilities ive developped through the years at home but the fear of several hard disks crashing including my home NAS finally made up my mind and give github a shot.

It's purpose is primarily for personal use, im not too keen on spending time uploading the unit tests or even commenting unless it is fuzzy enough not to understand.

FIRST PROJECT: SERIALIZER

https://github.com/juan-cristobal-quesada/serializer

In python we have several built-in methods to serialize objects: json, pickle, .. etc. The JSON module serializes only basic types and some built-in datastructures whereas Pickle/cPickle attempts to serialize all custom class objects.

There are several further modules implemented in the python repository that intend to solve different issues with serialization. My current implementation relies on cPickle because of it speed but leverages the final serialization object by limiting the type of variables that are serializable. This comes specially handy if you intend to send the serialized object over a network. Fine tuning which objects get serialized and which dont allows more control over the size.

The serializer in this project allows for basic types serialization including basic lists and dicts datastructures which covers pretty much the core data of the objects we needed to send as well as a special class called Serializable intended for any custom class to inherit from in order to be serialized. In the process the path of the module is appended so that it can be correctly reconstructed at the endpoint.

The resulting object is then base 64 encoded so that it an be ascii compliant, for example allowing to be passed to another subprocess as an environment variable.


FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS

- extend the base serialization and add a readable format such as json notably for debug purposes.
- add a zip compression functionality
- add an encryption functionality so that the serialized object is protected when traveling through the network.
- add support for more built-in basic types such as OrderedDict and others.
- add unit testing cases to showcase the usage.