Name That Typeface

I once designed, for a final project in design school, a board game called “Name That Typeface.” Game pieces were type slugs set as their face (so Garamond was set in Garamond, Electra in Electra); there were cards with questions referring to type specimens; I even got a local binder to foil stamp the “spine” of the board.

Type’s changed a lot in the years since I finished school, and I struggle now to name some of the more trendy ones, even if they’re used all over the place. But designing type is an exciting field and there’s some wonderful work going on. It must be a great time to take a typography class.

I haven’t signed up for one of those, but for an online calligraphy class (Roman Majuscules, fiendishly difficult and something I’ve never taken enough time to learn properly). I’ve never taken an online class (our teacher lives in Melbourne, so this should be interesting). It starts in November; I’ll let you know how it goes!

From Pixels To Digital Dust

We are becoming digital pack rats. I’ve been consistently keeping my sketchbook journal for three months now, and am trying to sketch something, anything at all, in it every day. I’ve gravitated much more towards sketching than digital photography, and one of the reasons is the vast amounts of digital clutter a digicam produces. It’s so easy to take 100 Mb of images in a single outing with a digicam, and since storage is so cheap then keep 90% of the images. It doesn’t take very many sessions to end up with thousands of images, and a cataloguing and digital preservation problem. Sketchbooks stay nice, small, and self-contained, have a longer potential lifespan, and are lots of fun to browse through.

(From The Shifted Librarian)

Patterns

The patterns above are how I learned to write. It was at a British primary school in Madrid in the early sixties—somebody must have heard of Alfred Fairbanks or something. We had to trace the patterns in pencil. Nobody made sure we did it right, like downstrokes instead of up or right strokes instead of left, or that we held the pencil lightly. Everyone’s handwriting turned out terribly, including mine (I’m an adult convert to Italic).

Across from me at the squat formica’d table was a girl who struggled more than everyone else. She had a huge head and her tongue was always in sight. I forget her name—I’ll call her Julia—but I can’t forget the way she smelled or the creative mess she made of her tracing paper.

Statistically, Julia is long dead, victim of an extra chromosome and a culture ill-equipped to deal with her. I hope she felt at least some connection with the little folks at her red formica table that ay as we all pushed graphite around more or less haphazardly. Some of us got a second chance…

Rendering Dimension

We all drew as children. The question Peter Steinhart asks in The Undressed Art: Why We draw is why we stop.

Many give up because they think they aren’t good enough, or it doesn’t make any sense when there are so many other things to do. But Steinhart thinks it’s what makes us uniquely human.

The camera, and now the computer, have played their part in destroying drawing as a discipline, yet they have nothing on abstract expressionism. Generations have lost the skill of drawing.

And yet: life drawing classes and studios are filled to capacity.

Reading this book makes me ache to get back into a dusty room with twenty other people, charcoal dust swilling around, looking at a human figure and puzzling how to get it down on paper. I think I’ll try the Davis open studio this fall. If I’m no good it doesn’t matter: there’s nothing else that can get me to see as hard as that.

This post is the 500th on Feathers of Hope, eighteen months and counting.

Another Sketching Jaunt

Today Numenius and I took a trip to a zoo we hadn’t visited before: the one in Folsom. This was a refreshing change from previous zoos we’d been to; the focus is entirely on providing a safe home for mostly California-native animals that would either not have made it in the wild or would have had to have been destroyed. There are several camp-marauding bears, injured raptors, foxes, wolves, wolf/dog hybrids, tigers rescued from an illegal breeder (who apparently had 60 large cats in an area maybe three of them could have lived in comfortably), bunnies and chickens rescued from overzealous Easter gift-bearing relatives, ferrets, and so on. Peacocks, including an interesting male albino, supervised all day. The reason we went, though, is so I could do some studies of mountain lions.

I wish I had access to an inexhaustible warehouse of high-quality photographs of wildlife I could use whenever I needed an image for a project at work. We have a couple of good shots here and there, but you don’t want to overuse these. Plus, I could never get a photo of what it is I want—a mother looking out, two cubs playing—in the order and so on. I’ll have to do it myself.

My illustration teacher used to tell us to be sure to get a variety of pictorial references before starting a project. Photos should be a last resort. Live was always best, she said; video’s pretty good (funky pause buttons make an animal almost seem to be in motion); taxidermy and skeletons have their uses. But live is certainly best (and most challenging). Although the Folsom Zoo currently has no mountain lion cubs, I was able to see things in these animals I’d never noticed before. Our kittens are structurally similar but there are important differences; the mountain lion, though small for a large cat, is massive and moves heavily (though a couple of pounces showed us how little chance you’d have to get away if one decided you were somehow superfluous).

Above is a group of sketches I reworked when we got home this afternoon, a combination of watercolor pencil and watercolor.

Iraq In Ink And Wash

Artist Steve Mumford from New York has made several trips to Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, capturing views of life there ranging from open-air markets to the battlefield in a wonderful series of drawings and paintings. In a world where the digital camera is commonplace, it’s remarkable to see someone out there in the field with sketchbook and brush. (Thanks to Danny Gregory.)

Waterbrushes

On our trip to the Sacramento Zoo last week, I tried out Pica’s Niji waterbrush. This is a synthetic brush that is attached to a squeezable handle that one fills with water. I was quite impressed with the utility of this tool, especially for field use in working with watercolor pencils and small watercolor pan kits. It provides a lot of control in how much water reaches the brush, and it is much easier ergonomically than filling a tiny cup with water and dipping a brush in it everytime one wants to add some brushwork to a watercolor pencil sketch.

Anyway, we ordered some more of these brushes in several different sizes from John Neal Books, and they arrived yesterday. Here is a sketch I did today showing Mt. Diablo at dusk, together with the 15mm waterbrush.

Watercolor Compendium

Today I found the site handprint: watercolors and watercolor painting, which is an amazingly comprehensive resource about watercolor materials and techniques. The section on paints and pigments, with hundreds of evaluations of different paints, is alone worth much study.

Distant Cousins

Numenius and I took a trip to the Sacramento Zoo today to do some sketching. If you don’t mind an audience (human), it’s a great place to sketch; the animals are used to having people around and sit still. Actually, they sit in a torpitude that only prolonged incarceration can bring.

This sketch is of a female orangutan that picked up a piece of fabric and draped it over her head not unlike the chadors I saw when I was in Iran. She looked right at me, a suffering buddha. I was almost too distraught to notice the children around us, yelling “monkey, over here!” or older children yelling “where’s the wrench”? I got fatigued quite quickly after this.

A creature that can gaze at us like this—it knows. It knows us. It knew me.

A Pancake Journal

If one is ever lacking for subjects to sketch, breakfast is always a possibility. The site Pancakes Across America has a set of galleries of pencil sketches of pancakes from many breakfast places across the country. For instance, here is a sketch of a three-stack of buttermilk pancakes eaten in Bardstown, Kentucky.

I’m not sure what subject would make a good culinary travel journal for me. Burritos, perhaps?