Sanderson Fans, You Can Get An Exclusive Stormlight Archive Pocket Companion On Bookstore Day‬ April

Badger and I were contemplating what color axehounds should be and then they said there should be sparkle axehounds and that reminded me of My Little Pony and then Badger drew this and it is EXCELLENT. 

my little axehound, my little axehound ~

My sister @neranishin and I have projects. She got me a piece of faux fur so we can figure out to make a Soonie pup and I found her fleece that I figure would make good skyeel wings. So there are going to be Cosmere plushies :D

mmm..  I distinctly don't need more projects right now, but I can tell you what would help get stuff that I have already drawn (and likely that other people have drawn) or am planning to draw anyway onto the wiki. 

 Make a "Welcome Fanartists!" page (or something like that)  that is easy to find from the main page. This page should first and foremost have simple detailed instructions for how to add art to the wiki.  These instructions should assume that the person has no idea how to edit the wiki at all.  If there is someone who is willing to add art that they are pointed to, you might include instructions for how to tell that person that your art is available to be added.  If there are any ground rules for what kind of art should/shouldn't be added, include it here.  

After that section, it might be useful to have a list of "things it would be nice to have art of" that fan artists can go look at when they feel like arting but aren't sure what they want their subject to be.  If you wanted to, you could have these grouped into a couple of different priority levels (perhaps: It's a disgrace that there is no art on this page, it would be helpful to have art on this page, this page has some art but could use more, this page could use art if it happens to be something you are excited about drawing).  If there is a way to have them in a table so they can be sorted by priority level, planet/book, or type of thing (maybe: people/plants/animals/things/other) that could be useful. That way if someone is thinking "mmm I want to draw a Mistborn character" or "I want to play with the plant life on Roshar" they can look to see what we could use.

Once you get that page functional, throw it to tumblr with a short list of pages that could use more art.

Cosmere artists! I seek your opinion!!

If there were some notice/notification on wiki pages which pointed out or asked for art to be given for a particular topic or section. EG the Shardplate page has no art, and would probably very much benefit from some, to help describe it. 

Would people be ok with requests like that, and would artists actually contribute more than they already do?

I just want to increase the contributions and make it a more informative source and make editing and helping out more attractive and easier? I don’t know what I’m doing tho really. Please help XD

Frillbloom!  As with shalebark, frillbloom is a family of plants rather than a specific type.  Here is how I imagine a few different varieties, in both open and closed form.

Rithmatics: Part 5 - Curvature, Ellipses and a Guess at the Blad Defense

Let's start by considering a snippit from one of the diagrams in The Rithmatist:

(Note: full diagram can be found at http://brandonsanderson.com/books/the-rithmatist/the-rithmatist/rithmatist-maps-and-illustrations/ )

Now we have a problem, namely, circles don't all have the same curvature. In fact (a slight simplification of) the idea of calculating curvature is to determine what radius circle would best approximate the curvature of the line at that point. A circle of radius r has constant curvature 1/r.

The basic idea here is reasonable though – apparently, lines of warding are stronger when they have a higher curvature. You can think of an ellipse as a circle that has been stretched along one axis. This means that if you start with a circle and then stretch it, we can talk about the resulting ellipse being stronger than the original circle where it curves more and weaker where it curves less. Here is what that diagram might look like if we add in the relevant reference circle:

Assuming this interpretation is correct, there are some important implications. The biggest is probably that the size of the circle used to form a defense matters. If you have two otherwise completely equivalent defenses and one of them is a scaled up version of the other, every point in the wall of the smaller defense will be stronger than the equivalent point in the wall of the larger.

Note: There are at least two potential underlying explanations for what is going on here. One option is that there is a certain strength inherent in a portion of a curve of a given curvature. This is the assumption that I am going to work from here. There is also the possibility that there is a fixed total strength for any closed curve of warding and that this strength distributes itself based on curvature. If we stick to circles and assume that strength and curvature are proportional, the two notions are equivalent. The second option is intriguing, but leads to rather messy calculations when we start looking at more interesting constructions. If I stick with this long enough we may eventually get there. I have no idea which option is correct or whether there is a third one I haven't considered.

One way to think about this (and this is almost certainly an oversimplification of things) is that it might take approximately the same amount of chalkling effort to destroy the entire dark blue segment as to destroy the entire dark green segment in the figure below:

 The important take away is that it should be easier to break a small hole in a large circle than it is to break an equally sized hole in a smaller circle. This means that when you are drawing your initial circle for your defense, you should be actively thinking about how large you really need it to be. It also means that even the weakest point on an ellipse could still be stronger than the wall of a much larger circle.

From an offensive standpoint, this means that the small circles and Mark's crosses added to your opponent's main circle are going to be much harder to affect than their main line of warding. They aren't just in the way – they are actually stronger.

We will talk about ellipses in more depth in future installments, but for now let's close with a guess at what the Blad Defense might look like. All we know about it is that it combines four ellipsoid segments in a non-traditional manner and that it is strong enough that some people think it should be banned from competitions.   

From Words of Radiance, Ch. 41.

I don't particularly identify with Melody, but I love her character and think it is super important that she exists (and a young adult novel is exactly the right place for her). Across his books, Sanderson has given us a whole collection of fantastic women who represent a wide range of personalities and strengths. Melody is our stereotypical high school girl. She loves unicorns and pegasus and flowers and drawing and is completely unapologetic about it. She dislikes math and is convinced that she is hopeless at it. She desperately wants to live up to expectations but hates the form they take and thinks they are impossible. She feels lost and alone. She is also amazing.

Spoilers for The Rithmatist under the break.  

She really does struggle with math. It doesn't come easily to her. At the same time though, we get to see that with the right teacher and the right motivation and working at the right pace, she can learn the math. It isn't something she needs to or should just give up at. Even by the end of the book, she still isn't great at math. She has improved, but it is a level of improvement that is reasonable given the amount of time she has been working. We see promise for her to improve more as she continues to work at it. It feels real.

Despite this (in some sense because of it) ends up playing a very important role. Everybody knows that rithmatics is all about the math and the precision of getting your lines and curves and binding points in exactly the right place. It is essentially a science. There are Lines of Making and you can sort of affect what they are good at by their shape, but controlling them is essentially an exercise in programing. You have to know ahead of time what you want them to do and you have to give the instructions carefully. Chalklings are notoriously difficult to work with.

Melody sees things differently. She struggles with the science of rithmatics, but excels at the art. Her chalklings are not the rough sketches thrown in almost as an after thought. Every one is a work of art. They are elegant and detailed and at least approximately anatomically correct. She believes in them. She whispers instructions and they do her bidding. For Melody, working with chalklings, the thing everyone knows is a lost cause, comes naturally. Her role is just as important as Joel's in their final battle, and the fact that she can do magic and he can't is only a very small part of why. Her wonderful unicorns were just as important as Joel's fancy defense circle and carefully placed shots.

Melody is the woman on the programming project who makes sure the user interface is intuitive and functional even if she doesn't do much of the actual programming. She is the mathematician or the physicist who struggles with the more involved computations, but can easily see the symmetries that turn a nasty problem into a much more straight forward one. She is the inventor who sees beautiful, functional things in the natural world and asks why we don't just do it that way. She is Important even as she is very much a stereotypical girl.

Melody is there for all of the high school girls who are convinced they can't do math (or other traditional subjects) and that their passions don't matter. She is there to show them that if they work at it, they can succeed at the areas they feel hopeless in and that their passions do matter. At the same time, she reminds the rest of us that the more unusual perspectives and talents are important. They can provide solutions that simply do not occur to more conventional people.

So... I was experimenting with the watercolor brushes in FreshPaint and playing around with ways to get different effects for skies...and then this happened... so here, have a happy playful skyeel flying through the sunbeams with its little fishy spren friends.

Pattern Skirt

I randomly got this image in my head of Shallan in a poodle skirt except with Pattern instead of a poodle...  So, here, have Shallan in a Vorinified 50's style poodle (Pattern) skirt outfit.  With boots. Because this is Shallan after all. I don't usually like the result of me trying to draw people, but I'm reasonably happy with how this came out.