25 September 25
Collective Revisiting
Looking through hundreds of old photos with three generations of family members is an interesting experience. Perspectives change, what’s important changes, so many details are now lost to history…But we had a great time this afternoon sorting through some of my mother’s photos. There are more to go, but for now we are savoring the time we have with her, mining her memory and adding ours.
The photos above are the prints I’m keeping so far. I already have a lot of photos of our camping trips and of my parents in Bodega Bay and Spain. In this age where digital photos are at the end of your thumb and a smartphone, the magic of seeing old prints was a joy. More anon.
21 September 25
Back From Boston
I came back this afternoon from my short Boston outing on the train. Yesterday I took a ferry trip with a friend from the North Shore to the North End, Boston’s original neighborhood whose ethnic identity has changed from settler to wealthy Bostonian to red light district to Irish to Italian, though I doubt that many or even half of the people who live there now are of Italian descent: it’s turned into boojie wealthy, though unwise to own a car if you live here.
This morning my friend Linda and I went birding on Plum Island, where we saw a lot of migrating songbirds (including some warblers I haven’t seen for a while). Batteries? recharged!
20 September 25
New Daily Sketchbook
I started my new daily sketchbook today. For my weekend sketching outings using this sketchbook I’m going to be doing general urban sketching. Today’s sketch was of a house on G Street not far from the food coop.
My new sketchbook is a 7”×7” softcover Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook. My previous square sketchbooks were 5 1/2” × 5 1/2”, so there’s a bit more area to cover in each sketch. In today’s sketch I used my gray Pentel brush pen for accents; maybe I’ll be doing more of that in this sketchbook.
19 September 25
A Trip to Boston
I lived in Boston for eight years before I moved to California. I’ve been back to the east coast many times over the past 30 years but rarely to Boston proper. Today I went south on the train and took myself to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the Museum of Fine Arts where I found a lot of old friends and at the latter saw the astonishing Rachel Rausch exhibit. Recharged the batteries for sure, maybe at the cost of sore feet.
17 September 25
Dried Plants
I’m visiting Maine with minimal art supplies… and that’s great.
15 September 25
River Lighthouse
A lot of the people I send postcards to request postcards of lighthouses, and it’s easy to see why: essential features of 19th century coastal navigation, they are now quaint relics in an era of GPS and accurate weather forecasting. But today we chanced upon a singularly rare lightouse: a river lighthouse near Bath, Maine, tiny compared to coastal ones but evidently helping ships across a sandbar.
14 September 25
Pendulous Oak
I am nearly to the end of my current daily sketchbook and will be moving on from sketching only trees on weekends. So I’ve finally sketched this handsome oak in our neighborhood — I think it is a cork oak. I’ve sketched it with Derwent drawing pencils, a fountain pen filled with De Atramentis urban gray ink, and watercolor wash, the greens being Daniel Smith green apatite genuine.
4 September 25
Videolets
I have been continuing my project of cataloging all my photos, and have launched into the subproject of organizing the video snippets I have. Video baffles me a good bit, coming from a background in still photography. There are many situations where a bit of video captures a subject or a scene much better than a still photograph — think of imaging a river at full flood — but such snippets even if edited together don’t make for a full-fledged video. Or to put it another way, if YouTube videos are the dominant force in video production these days, they are rhetorically a very different medium from still photography even if the stills are augmented with a bit of video.
Maybe the way forward is to embrace video snippets as their own art form — let’s call them videolets. These could work well in a blogging context, for one thing.
In this light, here is a videolet of Winston making a big leap. At night he likes to sleep on top of the bookcase in my office. But he usually takes a shortcut to get down from the bookcase!
1 September 25
From Guinea Pigs to Hummingbirds
Yesterday was the last day of August. I had promised myself to complete a (rough!) first draft of my Mister Ginger comic by the end of the day, and I more or less did.
I now have a new task, one whose deadline is September 24th. I’ve been invited to submit a 6-page comic for another SAW anthology entitled Field Notes. I’m going to take some of the hummingbird drawings I did and arrange them thematically on six pages. This book is going to be even smaller than the last one, so my plan is to have one large panel per page.
At left is some of the doodling I’ve been doing for the title page. I am toying with versals. Since I’m going to be working at least at 200% I was playing with larger paper, which is definitely a challenge.
Below are the postcards I painted last Birdtober from which I am drawing the material for this comic. Nice to have most of the research for this project done and dusted.
31 August 25
Metro Systems That Ought To Exist
Metro systems are one of the great urban inventions but unfortunately there seems to be a minimum urban size before they get built. That doesn’t mean they can’t be designed in imagination. A YouTuber by the name of Helio Roque has started a project entitled “planeando metros que no existen” and has designed three of these so far, the cities being Badajoz, Salamanca, and Benidorm. Here he presents the creation of his map for Salamanca.