Galling

While travelling to Boston in May I left a pencil case at an airport gate. Nothing in it was really irreplaceable, and I quickly bought a few pens, pencils, and Caran d’Ache watercolor crayons to replace my Derwent Signatures on an interim basis.

I still haven’t picked up new Derwents but plan to tomorrow on a trip to Berkeley. And as a wetting agent, instead of water, I’m going to try to find ox gall, a medium made from the bile in bovine gall bladders, normally used in marbling and lithography, which supposedly makes a much smoother blend than water.

I’ll let you know how this all goes.

A Cartographic Font

Since I am both a map geek and a font geek, I am glad to learn about Cisalpin, which is a font recently designed by Swiss typographer Felix Arnold specifically for use in cartography. It is a linear sans serif face that is intended to be extremely legible at small sizes and also runs slightly narrow to avoid long line lengths.

Rainy Evening

Just the time to settle in with a sudoku or two.

I’ve actually been working on some calligraphy this evening for the first time in a while. I got a commission to do some wedding vows for a couple whose table place holders I did over the summer. I haven’t seen the text yet but have been working on loosening up, which is going to need to happen a lot before I even start on this. There are a couple of challenges: the vows are of quite different lengths, and how do I render them without making the longer one seem more important?

The cats have responded to the change in weather in opposite ways. Charlie’s hunkering, Diego’s running around. Maybe I should take some calligraphic cues from this.

Impromptu SketchCrawl, Davis Style

We seem unable to coincide with any official SketchCrawl outings. For instance, next weekend there’s one to Alcatraz, which sounds like a wonderful idea, but I’ll be in Maine. So today we decided to do our own.

The car was due for its 10,000-mile maintenance, so we left it at the Honda dealership and walked across to Mocha Joe’s, one of the better cafes in town even though like Common Grounds it’s in a mall [cue scary music]. On the walk there, on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, a headline blared out: the Provost of the University of California had abruptly resigned yesterday for promoting friends and relatives.

Normally these kinds of things are par for the course, except this Provost used to be the Dean of Graduate Studies here at UC Davis, where I used to work. It was before my time but a strong and brilliant personality like this leaves its mark long after any kind of physical departure. (Given that Greenwood had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington to work for Clinton and set her sights on a Chancellorship when she returned, which she in fact nailed at Santa Cruz in short order, this mark has to be interpreted at best as “mixed.”)

She’ll be returning, the Chronicle assures us, to her “first love teaching.” Probably here, in Davis. This is a universal euphemism in academia. It means “he or she got canned.” Only Greenwood didn’t; she resigned first. If only Rove could be so honorable…

Our sketching took us to the Yolo Bypass where the sharp-tailed sandpiper was seen earlier this week. There was no sharp-tailed that we could see, and after sketching resting dowitchers and dunlin we were about to move on when two American bitterns flew in and landed within a few feet of us.

There is no benediction like that of a bittern. University politics, governmental politics, the whole hoo-ha over Covell Village—all of it melts away; to be in the company of this spirit-presence is like nothing I can describe. I tried, miserably, with a sketch, two, three, but mostly it’s just reverential whispering and holding your breath.

The birds finally moved on and so did we, sketching frolicking at the dog park, the salsa bar at El Mariachi where we had lunch, then patrons at the Yolo County Library (where I finally read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit; a philosophical treatise that has me puzzled in certain respects—I think his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark to a post-operative friend is off-base, but on the whole it was very provocative, especially the examination of how bullshit is different in so many ways to lying).

Sketching your way around your environment: it’s a way to see things. Fresh. Cutting through the bullshit.

Arrival of the ATCs

The first week of the month has become a week of waiting eagerly for the mail. Ever since I started participating in the Cyberscribes swap of Artist Trading Cards, I can’t wait to see what other people have done with the theme—this month’s was Equinox of where you are.

Though these are calligraphers, there are lots of other talents there too. The format is so small it’s manageable for a small edition.

This month’s theme is black and white. I’m pondering the skeleton.

Meanwhile, Beth of Cassandra Pages had a nasty Tuesday night; head on over and wish her well…

Adobe CS2

Mostly a new version of software is much like the old with a bit of razzmatazz thrown in so you’ll buy it.

There’s plenty of razzmatazz in CS2, most notably the incredible vanishing point in Photoshop, but how many buildings am I realistically going to change the siding on, unless I suddenly start DeChirichoising my newsletters?

Some of the new features, though, will save me a ton of work. The object style in InDesign, the live trace feature in Illustrator, and the new Bridge browser across the platforms. Installed today. I’m looking forward to having a bit of a design session indulgence over the weekend.

A Day at Adobe

I found out yesterday there was an Adobe conference in San Francisco today, so I joined some folks from the main UC Davis design office on a train jaunt down. Lots of interesting new features in CS2 but it was mostly a ploy to get us to buy it. If I’d had this earlier in the summer my big project would have taken a lot less time, at least if I knew how to use the features in question.

I did another doodle at one rare slightly boring bit. I’m too tired to scan it this evening but I’ll put it up tomorrow.

Orange Substrate

Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud, who taught for a long time here at UC Davis and whose paintings of cakes grace student dorm walls all these years later in print form, is probably responsible for the current wave of Central Valley landscape artists insisting on an orange edge to everything.

Part of this is in the landscape, of course: this is land-of-orange, orange dirt, orange dust, orange buckwheat drying to rust, orange sunsets that turn to deep purple with the dust in the air after the sun goes down.

It’s like a signature, this line. It says I’ve looked at Thiebaud’s landscapes. I’ve seen the orange. And now I’m going to teach you to see it too.

Whether this orange line is enough to constitute a school is not for me to say, but as I sit here looking at the kitchen window (it’s dark out) and see the marigolds, dried and hanging, from our wedding two years ago, I’m willing to see orange in things around here. I even bought some orange block printing ink over the weekend to experiment with some monoprints. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Doodling Away

A recent thread on the Cyberscribes list explored how some people found it difficult to doodle, or to know what to doodle. Clearly, I’m not one of them, at least during Audubon Board meetings…

For some real fun, take a look at what Danny Gregory’s mother’s been doing…

Postscript, 9-16-05: the link to “mother” above no longer works. See Hazel Kazan’s site to view her leafages.

Envelope and Letter Folding

For those who haven’t completely abandoned letter writing, this is an intriguing site.