saylornotes | The Blog of Chris Saylor

"Blue Whale"

May 31, 2018 art Chris Saylor

Sam has been especially fond of whales, so I decided to paint a picture for his room. In this piece, I’m starting to get the hang of blending colors. Particularly, going in after the colors are down with simply a wet brush in order to blend the layers together. The lower part I got a little too aggressive with and it affected the texture of the paper. I’ll have to have a lighter touch going forward, but overall, I’m happy with how it turned out. Continue reading

watercolor

"Storm Tree" (in a Canolla Field)

May 26, 2018 art Chris Saylor

This is mostly a study on shadowing the tree (as well as some coloring). The washes are not yet well blended, but that will come with time. I also didn’t have a flat brush at the time, so the washes were with a regular (14 size) brush. Chris Saylor "Storm Tree" (in a Canolla Field) Watercolor on paper 22.86cm x 30.48cm

watercolor

Parental Commissions

May 23, 2018 art Chris Saylor

These are my first couple of complete watercolor paintings. The flamingo was gifted to my Mom, and the lighthouse was gifted to my Dad. Both are untitled, and I am very much in the process of learning with these pieces.

watercolor

Why Use Generators in PHP

January 2, 2017 engineering

I’ve heard many co-workers, friends, and colleagues at meetups acknowledge the existence of generators in PHP, but not understand why they would use them or give them much thought when planning out implementations. In this article, I’m going to explain with concrete examples of when it is a good idea to use a generator. In case you don’t know what a generator is, you can check PHP’s documentation on the subject for a good synopsis. Continue reading

PHP

Elasticsearch Series: Let It Work for You

May 19, 2016 engineering

This is the second entry in a series on Elasticsearch and how we use it in our applications. See the previous entry on Rebuilding Indices with No Downtime. Elasticsearch has a vast number of ways to query the data in your index. How you query your data is very much dependent upon where it is being used, so in this post we’re going to talk about how we use it in our instructor search application. Continue reading

elasticsearch open source

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