New Pens, or Numenius Bicolor

I picked up a couple of fountain pens on Saturday in Berkeley, as well as some brown ink cartidges. I tested them out on Saturday evening: Numenius was looking intently into the laptop screen.

He doesn’t really look like Jerry Garcia…

[Comments disabled because some cretinous spammer obviously really hates Jerry Garcia]

Mimsy

It’s wedding invitation season, a process that can make you go a little crazy. I’ve been addressing envelopes in Spencerian, a nineteenth-century American outgrowth of Copperplate.

Today at the Whole Earth Festival I heard, and heeded, the siren call of a beautiful hand-turned cherry pen holder. (Dale will laugh when he reads this, because he’s seen this look in my eyes before.)

Italic nib, good paper, contaminated with Spencerian crazyness: I give you

Below is the first stanza of a poem I wrote for my niece back when she was about three or four five or six and had just been to Florida (I illustrated it and made an accordion-fold book for her, and was pleased to find out this afternoon she not only still has it, but knew exactly where it was and was able to read me stanzas two and three).

Mimsy. There you have it.

In case you want the second and third stanzas, such as they are:

Said Poly to young Tesla:
“Now mark me well, and harken
My bath I cannot leave to play
On meadow, beach, or wold.”

Said Tesla, “Poly, I’ll come in!
And play till sun goes down.”
Said Poly, “Roll and swim with me—
My bath is never cold.”

Cosmological Graffiti

I’ve been puzzling over this graffiti which is by the bike path underneath the freeway near the UCD Arboretum for some time now. Browsing through my copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Astronomy this evening an answer came to me. The upside-down V must be a capital lambda and the statement would be a reference to the cosmological constant.

This parameter was introduced by Einstein as a modification of the theory of general relativity because of his belief at that time that the universe was static. Later, after Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein withdrew this modification and considered it to be his “biggest blunder”. Stepping forward into the late 1990s with the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, this parameter has now made its way back into contemporary cosmology, as something needs to counteract gravitation. What could be more theologically profound?

Hey, the physics building is only a half-kilometer away from from the graffiti.

Ink Under the Fingernails

I dropped and broke the water jug (it wasn’t empty), I left the binder in the wrong place, I lost my glasses, I’m behind on everything at home, at work, and in the garden.

Breathe, and get ink under the fingernails. I did. My, that feels better.

In other news and to get some perspective, one of my coworkers was rescued from the San Jacinto Mountains yesterday having hiked in the day before to retrieve a radio collar from one of our tagged lions. He twisted his knee (don’t know quite how badly he’s hurt yet, but he couldn’t walk). He was luckily a) with a colleague, b) carrying a GPS emergency beacon, which he activated at six the night before. They made a shelter (which didn’t cover his hurt leg, which he had to keep extended and which got rained on in the same rainstorm that delayed the Dodger/Giants game). (At this time of year it could still have turned into a blizzard…)

Signing Up for Saving the World

That will be $13 on Paypal, please.

Why not join in? You can surely fill a small 64-page book by August 1!

Printing In The Sun

I just got the book Printmaking in the Sun, by Dan Welden and Pauline Muir out from the library via interlibrary loan. It describes the process of using photopolymer plates for printmaking. Basically you create a transparency with your artwork, and then expose the plate under the transparency to the UV light in sunlight. Where the transparency is clear, the UV light hardens the plate material. The non-hardened areas are soluble in water, so you wash the plate to create the printing surface.

It’s an intriguing technique, and we may have to try it out. One can do both relief and intaglio printing through it, though the former is simpler, and could be done with not much more equipment than we have at home. It’s still pretty involved, though — I guess you just start small, and see where it takes you.

17th Worldwide Sketchcrawl

Get ready! Saturday, January 19th, is the next worldwide sketchcrawl. We had a fantastic time in November with a group of dedicated crawlers at the Sacramento Zoo. This time we’re going to keep it local in Davis because there’s a lot going on that weekend and to be honest I’m trying to reduce the number of trips we make by car.

If you can’t find a sketchcrawl near you, start one! Even if it’s only you, it’s a great way to spend an hour or four: gets you outside your head. It’s the time of year where that might be a good thing to do.

Silverpoint!

Before Christmas I was hankering for a silverpoint tool. Well, my cousin Gainor took pity on me and sent me a small silver rod and three sheets of prepared paper. The package arrived today. I sanded the point down and stuck the rod in a mechanical pencil holder.

Your blackest black is never really very black, only gray, so the whole effect is quite washed out. But this is the tool of the Renaissance: no graphite yet. It’s a trip to sit at my kitchen counter and draw my thumbnail and muse on 500 years ago…

Russian Caravan Tea

It’s been a long, lazy week. I had an hour to kill yesterday while waiting for the local monthly designers’ get-together at Mishka’s, which is a European-style cafe that roasts its own coffee and offers free wireless. It is inhabited permanently by veterinary and medical students as well as anyone wishing to spend hours and hours online. But yesterday there were also lots of people having real conversations.

It’s been chilly and has finally gotten wet, and few braved the tables outside. But the ones who did got sketched by me. There’s something about the glass barrier that gives me a bit more cover than just drawing someone inside the room.

I did eventually do some of those too, though. The thing about sketching faces: you notice just how beautiful people are, how different, how complex. It leaves me at the end of this year with, how can I put it, hope. I am filled with hope. Against an awful lot of odds, I realize…

Typography and Other Design Delights

In a do-or-die attempt to master positioning on web pages with cascading style sheets, and taking advantage of a relatively slow time at work, I’ve been availing myself of the courses available at Lynda.com, which were paid for by my employers earlier this year but which I’ve not had a chance to get to. There is a bewildering number of online courses on offer, and while I’ve been working steadily through CSS2 Essential Training, I couldn’t help but have a gander at InDesign CS2 Professional Typography, or Typographic Principles (or Audio or Podcasting or Alpha Channels or dot dot dot).

This all comes at a good time, because I found out today that Robert Brinkhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, an essential book that came out after I’d trained as a graphic designer, is being applied to web design by Richard Rutter. Hints on how to control spaces between words and kerning using style sheets are going to be a huge help to me.

(Language Hat referred me to Rex Sorgatz’s Fimoculous and his Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading, which provided the above link through Drawn; it’s a fantastic list. A couple of particularly quirky finds: Strange Maps, whose maps are fascinating but whose typography in the text is a bit lamentable (hope they look up the Rutter, above), and Quotation Marks, to which all comers are invited to submit photos of inappropriate use of quotation marks.