Olive Trees

I rode my bike over to campus today in order to sit and draw the line of olive trees along Russell Boulevard. I’ve been illustrating the borders of my journal and wanted to try series of trees across the top of a spread.

While I was drawing, I looked up and saw two raptors, a turkey vulture next to a much larger soaring bird with a white head and tail: a bald eagle! This is a very unusual bird to see in Davis — in the lower part of the county at all, in fact — and I called Numenius to see if he could catch a glimpse of it from the house (yes, we keep a yard list). He couldn’t, but I made sure to report this eagle on e-bird.

Dinner Shallot

The smaller portion of this shallot made it into our dinner this evening, which was stir-fried green beans and mushrooms over rice. Sketched with Derwent Graphitint pencils.

My New Favorite Thing is this Crosshatching

The next assigned text for the Comix Coven is My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris. Drawn on composition paper while she was recovering from West Nile Virus (a process that took seven years), the story enters the life of a young girl in 1960s Chicago, a girl who is fascinated by monsters. It has the feel of a noir detective story, a love poem to monster comics and film from that era, but what made me gasp when I first opened the book was the masterful hatching. I’m not sure what tool Ferris used (and in fact it looks like there are several different techniques in the book) but it looks like a crowquill — this must have taken thousands of hours to draw.

Also, and this is important to me — it looks as though ALL the lettering is hand-drawn. Hats. Off.

Fear of Getting it Wrong

I had the second workshop of my year-long Comix Coven today. We had half an hour to work with watercolor and ink on a two-page spread about where we are in our process with our projects.

I am working on a piece about my mother and her choices about end-of-life. I’m terrified I don’t have the chops to draw her, either as she appeared or as she was to me. I’m trying to jump in and have a go nonetheless.

Something that is so personal is challenging, but I think I have this fear with all projects. The way out of them is through, instead of putting them on the shelf and finding ways to justify abandoning them. But this one, even if only five people ever read it, is really worth doing, so I’m going to go ahead and keep working on it.

Attention And The Everyday Carry Camera

Attention was a significant theme of yesterday’s conversation between Teju Cole and John Gossage. It is evident that photography for Teju is a refuge from the despair of the world, and photography becomes a practice of attending to the beauty he finds. To paraphrase him, attention taken to the highest level is indistinguishable from prayer.

The conversation did make me ponder what am I trying to achieve when I take pictures. I wouldn’t think of posting my photos on Instagram, nor am I trying to sell prints of them. But I do carry a small camera wherever I go. (In today’s parlance, this is called an “everyday carry camera”). When I see something that strikes my eye on my habitual walks, I’ll take a photo or two. Sometimes these photos work, often they don’t. It’s still a practice of attention.

(The photo at left was taken up the street returning from my morning walk a couple days ago).

Seeing an Old Friend

We attended a conversation this evening between Teju Cole and John Gossage on photography. Here are my notes.

Zhuzhing Up Your Handwriting

It’s World Sketchnote Week (it used to be a single day) and I attended a couple of sessions yesterday. One was by a Graphic Recording colleague, Heather Martinez, whose fame as a lettering artist is well known in our field and who has taught me in particular a great deal about different lettering styles, effective for writing at speed and at scale.

Her session yesterday was more about spicing up your sketchnoting lettering, which is a much smaller canvas. But what struck me was that she seemed to think that joining all the letters — American cursive — is faster than other methods.

I remember reading Tom Gourdie’s Improve Your Handwriting long ago — I think I was still in college — and it is long out of print, though digitized versions are available through the Internet Archive among other places. One thing I’ve always remembered is his assertion that any handwriting that loses legibility at speed is useless. (Gourdie was a master of Italic handwriting as evidenced in the image. It has gone the way of the dodo in the UK as well as most other places; this book was published in 1978, when there was still some hope of improving national handwriting among British schoolchildren.) But to do this some ligatures must be lost — it’s not faster to join up the letters when to do so makes an awkward and lengthy detour.

I found the image at right where he is excoriating the Palmer method as illegible — though few people under 80 use it anymore, and indeed few American (or British!) adults under the age of 50 do anything at all that could be called “cursive.” Sigh. Handwriting is a useful skill in order to retain information, much more effective than typing. Get off my lawn.

One Tree And A House

In the morning before heading to the memorial protest on Saturday, I sketched this house on A Street. As is my practice in winter, I colored it in with the watercolor crayons when I got home. Pica suggested I get an aubergine crayon; here I try it out in the shadows of the tree and the vegetation. I like the richness the color adds.

Escoda Ultimo

An Escoda travel brush arrived today. It’s the synthetic fiber Ultimo #12, a large round brush that can hold a crazy amount of water but also holds a very sharp point.

I am not averse to using waterbrushes like the Pentel Aquash, but I’m looking for a little more control. This brush seems to be able to handle all kinds of things I might throw at it. More anon.

Drawing Trees

I have, among other things, set as an intention this year to get better at drawing trees. My plan is to draw a tree a day. I feel like I’ve chosen a bad medium — pen is less versatile than pencil, for trees — but I’m going to keep going.

This tree was drawn a couple of days ago in the early morning fog. Here, the pen wasn’t a hindrance. I’ll be posting more as I go.

And I’m writing about drawing because the events in the world are almost too much to bear.