From the Trenches

If typefaces were colors, Perpetua would sing quinacridone magenta, then shift up an italic octave to California sunrises. I am swimming in Perpetua these days, which is slightly decadent, slightly not quite anybody’s mandated style, slightly involves flying under the radar of the various style dictators. I have no business having this much fun on a project that is so big, so consuming, so apparently stressful. I’m not stressed. Milagro.

Sabon would be blue, dark blue, but not quite Prussian. Garamond would also be blue but lighter. Cochin would surely be cochineal, ludicrous, outlandish, especially with that italic “n,” dancing on a page like a medieval tumbler.

Berkeley, my bread-and-butter, would bear the golden crust of homemade loaves.

Helvetica, of course, black. And Futura. And Gill Sans. Hmm. Something about those sans-serifs, lining up behind the Trajan column again. Perhaps they are only slate gray, perhaps tinged with light green, like smooth serpentine slopes with a red splash of Clarkia.

Arial is not a typeface. It’s a bastardized corporate THING. It is gray-brown, not organic soil, not the beautiful shiny chestnut of a buckeye or loquat seed, not the textured beauty of walnut desks, not the gold on an eagle’s coverts, but sludge.

Unplanned Museum Outing

As soon as I stepped off the plane yesterday, I saw an ad outside the gate for an art exhibit entitled Illuminating the Word: the Saint John’s Bible at the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts. As Pica puts it, the creation of the St. John’s bible is the calligraphic event of the last half-millenium, so I figured if I could possibly try to make the exhibit in my crammed schedule, I would.

It turns out the museum is open in the evening tonight, and there is a ticket slot available for a 6 PM visit, so off I go! The logistical complication is that there is a conference social event this evening at historic Ft. Snelling going from 5:30 to 10 PM, so rather than take the bus running from the conference hotel to the fort, I’m going to make my way there after my museum outing using bus and light rail.
All the running around will be worth it—I don’t think this is an exhibit to be missed since I’m in town.

Heavenly Thistle

Artichokes for dinner. Yum.

Shipment O’Goodies

It’s a fine day when the box of ordered art supplies arrives.

Web Design Linkfest

Vitaly Friedman maintains an excellent and growing list of essential bookmarks for web designers and web developers.

Ban Comic Sans

A campaign to rid the world of that design perfidy spawned by Microsoft, complete with stickers, flyers, and t-shirts.

Sundancing

Numenius and I took another class today, this one five minutes from home rather than two hours. Robert Regis Dvorak led a full-day workshop on travel sketching. Rather than have us wander around Davis, sketchbooks in hand, he encouraged us to try a full range of techniques in the classroom—pen, watercolor, dry brush—in a specially-made drawing pad. The subject was mostly Greece.

This pad contains 80 lb Sundance text paper. It works well with all the above media and takes a calligraphic line very well despite the texture. I’m thinking of getting larger sheets and binding my own sketchbooks so they open flat (it’s a bit of a gripe of mine when they don’t).

Here’s my first attempt at dry brush (the wash is laid in afterwards).

Brush Pens

One of the things our teacher had us do in our workshop last weekend was to experiment with a brush pen. The first exercise in our journal was to make brush depictions of ponderosa pine needles. Later when we got outside, she had us using them to sketch the midribs of leaflets and leaves.

I’ve decided to learn my way around brush pens better and have since bought two of the six-pen sets of Faber-Castell Pitt brush pens, the landscape color set and the shades of gray set. Here is a little tryptich I did this evening — that’s Charlie in the window on the right.

Tango

Natalie of Blaugustine has recently started selling her art online through Photobox. I bought this GORGEOUS print and it arrived a few days ago from the UK. I don’t have my tango gear any more but here’s a photo of a photo of a print of a painting of Boca by the goddess of color, halfway around the world.

Artist’s Journal Class

We went to the San Francisco Center for the Book today to take a class with Andie Thrams on creating artist’s journals. In our afternoon session we learned about gridding up a journal page. The handy trick we were taught is to make a grid template by poking holes on the grid intersections on a stout piece of paper, allowing one to quickly layout the journal page.

Tomorrow our class goes to the field — we’ll be spending all day sketching, painting, and writing in Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park.