Brush Lettering Workshop

I attended a short workshop today — more of a demonstration, really — on how to do brush lettering with different brush tools. I’ve tried it in the past with limited success but I think Mike Gold’s tip — work slowly between strokes — really hit home. I couldn’t resist drawing the Anna’s hummingbird outside and was beside myself when Mike said “Always draw a bird.” (I don’t need telling twice.)

Not sure how to use this so my holiday cards might get some fancy lettering this year…

Cats with Fude Pen

Now that the temperature has turned cool the cats are snuggling up more together and this afternoon they were uncomfortably trying to occupy the same cat bed. Esme is on top of Winston in the sketch here at left.

I have sketched the cats here with my Sailor Fude pen which I just resurrected today. This is a bent-nib fountain pen that is designed for Japanese calligraphy and is easily manipulated to give very thin to quite thick lines. I have loaded the ink cartridge with De Atramentis Urban Gray ink which is waterproof, though I don’t use any wash in this sketch.

Second Street Sketchcrawl

Today we went to the sketchcrawl that took place in downtown Davis in the morning. We all met at Second Street and G Street but I immediately sauntered east one block to a spot closer to the train station. This sketch here is of a smaller building nearby that serves as the Amtrak bus depot. I did one other sketch today; I looked the opposite direction from where I was sitting for the first sketch and focused on the colorful entrance to the Mexican restaurant there, Tres Hermanas. This sketch was to experiment with a small set of Neocolor II aquarelle wax pastel crayons.

After the sketchcrawl ended, Pica and I had lunch at Tres Hermanas with a friend of ours. We both had vegetarian quesadillas.

Loading Dock

Today’s weekend urban sketch is of the loading dock in the back of the Davis Food Co-op. I did the ink sketch first, using De Atramentis Urban Gray ink in a TWSBI Eco fountain pen together with a Pentel pocket brush pen with gray ink for the bold parts of the sketch. For the wash I used Derwent Inktense pan colors, except for the blue in the sky which was done with a Museum Aquarelle cobalt blue watercolor pencil. I’m experimenting with the Inktense pan paints to provide bursts of color on the fairly thin paper of the sketchbook (a 7”×7” Stillman and Birn Alpha softcover sketchbook.)

Field Notes

About a month before my trip to Maine, I submitted a proposal to do a 6-page comic to be included in an anthology called Field Notes. I actually submitted two ideas: one about the scars on my body, the second, much less edgy, about Anna’s hummingbirds. The second was accepted, I turned in my first draft, was given a couple of suggestions which were easy to accommodate, and then I went to Maine, where a one-week stay turned into three weeks that included grieving, visits to lawyers, clearing out an apartment, and no Anna’s hummingbirds in sight.

I have said before that I am the queen of first drafts, and the gap between this idea and its deadline next week has made it really hard to get back to the project. I’ve been forcing myself to take my ipad to a coffee shop to work on it because at home there are too many distractions.

The panel at right is one of the pages. I originally had hoped to do this on paper. I’ve turned to Procreate in the interests of time and my sanity. I have some refining to do of all the pages. My one question is whether to leave the watercolor paper texture in the submission or not. Still pondering.

Slippers

Today’s daily sketch is of my slippers, essential for chilly fall mornings and during Sunday house cleanings.

Alone Again

One of the central tenets of The Artist’s Way is that you take yourself on a weekly “artist’s date,” which is basically spending two hours, alone, doing something you like to do. The idea, as I understand it, is to make time for fun and not be beholden to the wishes of others.

I took myself off to Mishka’s, a coffee shop some blocks from our house (there are certainly lots of closer coffee shops, at least five, not counting Starbucks which seems to have closed down), but this one makes excellent coffee, has a great European vibe, and has a lot of outdoor seating. I got my cappuccino and worked on a project for an hour or so and then went across the street to the Avid Reader, our local independent bookstore which changed hands a few years ago and is now one of the gems of Davis.

Intensely social, I have not often sought my own company, but it turns out I like it. Maybe this is a function of age or that we all got used to isolation during COVID or something else, but I am finding myself planning other ways to spend fun time alone. I have to go to Berkeley next week; this is an excellent opportunity to spend a couple of extra hours doing something fun: it’s about building a restorative practice.

Perceptual Crisis - The Board Game

I am not a board game designer and the thoughts below do not constitute an intent to design such a game, but I am wondering what a board game about the current political situation in the United States might be like — let’s name the game for now Perpetual Crisis.

There are lots of board game antecedents to draw upon, even in the fairly limited space of United States political history. One example is This Guilty Land, designed by Amabel Holland, which is about the political struggle over slavery in the antebellum United States. One player’s role is “Justice”, and the other player’s role is “Oppression”. Another game of note is Votes For Women, which is about the campaign for women’s suffrage starting in 1848 and running until 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. A much more tightly defined game is 1960: The Making of the President, about the presidential election of 1960 (Kennedy vs. Nixon).

Also of interest are COIN games (short for COunter-INsurgency), which are a series of simulation games covering asymmetrical conflicts such as insurgencies and often featuring up to four factions. (An example of a COIN game is Cuba Libre, about the 1956-1959 Cuban revolution, with four factions being the Batista government dictatorship, the syndicate aka the mob, the student protestors aka the Directorio, and the Fidel Castro-led guerillas.) A lot of the mechanics I’m imagining for Perpetual Crisis comes from COIN games.

I think Perpetual Crisis would be a two-player game though. One side would be those striving for a liberal multicultural democracy, the other side would be the white supremacist neo-feudalists. (I recognize that feudalism is a concept very much in disfavor with actual medievalists these days, but neo-feudalism does seem to capture both the rural power base of far-right farmland owners as well as the technofeudalism of the Silicon Valley types.) The sketch map shown at right for the board is very much inspired by COIN games. This would be an area control game with the areas being a combination of culture regions of the United States as well as major cities. (Here I am drawing from the 11 culture regions put forth by Colin Woodard in his book American Nations; the regions on the sketch map are the Left Coast, El Norte, and the Far West). Having major cities as separate areas to control in addition to the culture regions helps capture the rural-urban political split.

The horizontal five-box tracks on the sketch map hold a token to track the sentiment of each region or city. This ranges from +2 (strong democratic sentiment) to -2 (strong neo-feudalism). As players take actions in the game, the sentiment tokens will shift left and right on the tracks. I could also keep the COIN mechanism of players pulling cards from an event/action deck during each turn. Shuffled into the deck would also be cards representing special election turns, with the outcome of the election causing changes in the abilities of either side. The result of the election would depend in part on summing up the sentiment of the populations of both the culture regions and the major cities. (The numbers 6 and 4 on the sketch map indicate the population of Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively).

COIN games feature a quite asymmetric palette of actions to take depending upon the faction, and that works well in this framework. For instance Vote Suppression or Political Violence would be a couple of the actions the neo-feudalists could take, whereas the democracy side might have Rally or Get Out The Vote as two possible actions.

So what is happening right now in game terms? The neo-feudalists are carrying out Terror actions in Chicago and in Portland. I don’t think those actions are degrading democratic sentiment in either of those cities, but it may be strengthening neo-feudalist sentiment in other culture regions. The actions are also reducing capacity on a resource track, due to the negative economic impacts of deportations and suppressing immigration. Meanwhile, No Kings 2.0 could be represented by the play of a Nationwide Rally event card. This might increase democratic sentiment by a point in several regions or cities.

That is just a start in imagining this game. There is probably a place in the game for several resource tracks that work at a nationwide scale e.g. one tracking propaganda levels, another economic health, and another being quality of governance. So in each turn players could take actions that affect the nationwide resource tracks or those that impact specific regions or cities on the board.

A Good Drying Day

We’ve gotten a fair amount of rain the past several days (1.30”), but today was a good drying day for laundry. Here’s my pajama top and a t-shirt, sketched with Inktense pan colors.

The Artist's Way

Since my mother died I’ve been journalling a lot, early morning, three pages, morning pages style. There is a lot to process and writing the same old stuff over and over is a) helpful, b) kind to my friends, c) a palette cleanse for the day.

I tried doing the Artist’s Way back when I was living in Cambridge, Mass, and again in Santa Barbara, and got stuck (like so many people) in the middle. I liked the morning pages and I even liked the artist date, though I rarely did it, but it seemed like a Reaganite version of self-actualization with some new age gobbledegook thrown in for good measure. But I can journal, so I’ve been doing that since I got home, first thing in the morning like a good little artist. Rewriting what happened with my mother and the time I spent in Maine has at least spared my friends the endless repetition of it all…

But then a couple of videos about the Artist’s Way popped up on my YouTube feed and I decided to watch one of them. Like me, they balked at the God references; like me, they were half-assed about the artist dates. But they said they got a lot of value out of it anyway, and this has made me wonder whether stopping wasn’t a form of self-sabotage.

So I’m not sure I’m recommitting but I’ve read through chapter 1 and this time had a whole load of critics and many, many more champions to name. (I even wrote some cringy affirmations.)

My issue isn’t that I don’t think I’m an artist, though I genuinely don’t have aspirations to have my art hang in galleries. I like to make things and give them to others. My issue is that I value all of this so little that I don’t make time for it. This is what I’m going to be focusing on over the next however many weeks it takes. Stay tuned…