30 August 25
Sailor Fude
I’ve been working on the ancillary characters of the Mr. Ginger story. Slavic people tend to have round faces and large eyes. This is a gross oversimplification but I was looking for faces online that I could draw quickly to try and approximate this.
Because I’m going to be working at double size, I needed a thicker line than my Pilot Metropolitan could give me. My Sailor Fude pen has a bent nib which allows for four different line weights. Working on hot press watercolor paper is hard — the ink needed a bit of coaxing — but I like the effect. It’s sort of cartoony without my intending it to be so.
I will also be trying Bristol board but I’m thinking this might work well. Still unsure about whether to hand letter the text. (Or whether to hand letter it, digitize it, and set it that way…)
28 August 25
Flow
A prompt from SAWgust yesterday was to depict our Flow, our Process. This is my attempt to depict mine. It’s not very efficient.
I’m trying to get as much done as I can on Mister Ginger before Sunday night, and it’s slow. Paper is definitely faster, but if I do it digitally it’s a lot easier to edit. It doesn’t mean I don’t have bits of paper all over the house.
One thing is, my deadline is self-imposed. I have no idea what I’m doing with this thing other than giving a copy to Mister Ginger’s former owners. But I do have time to get this right, or as right as I can.
27 August 25
The Soul of an Egg
The Vuelta a España finally arrived in Spain today, with a team time trial that circumnavigated the small city of Figueres. Figueres is famous for being the home town of Salvador Dalí, and also the site of a museum dedicated to his works, designed by Dalí himself. The team time trial started at the museum itself, and we were treated to many helicopter camera views of the museum, which in good surrealist fashion has a set of giant eggs on the roof.
Egg sculptures make for fun landscape art. Here in Davis on the university campus, there is a series of egghead sculptures by the sculptor Robert Arneson. The photo here shows a pair of eggheads entitled “See No Evil/Hear No Evil”. These are situated between the administration building and the law school, and neither of them have ears.
Figueres and Davis are not the only places in the world with egg sculptures. In a bay by the village of Djúpivogur in Iceland, there is a set of 34 giant eggs on plinths paying homage to the nesting birds in the region.
24 August 25
Happy Birthday to Me
Yesterday was my birthday. I’ve been thinking about the lettering for my Mister Ginger comic and don’t have a satisfactory italic nib. This pen writes like butter and I think it was a great choice!
Numenius gave me a gift, a way to get us through some very troubled times. Keep your claws sharp….
20 August 25
Material
The good folks at SAWgust have been providing prompts daily to get us thinking about our process. I’ve sometimes answered prompts but I’ve ALWAYS thought about them; they’re very interesting. Today’s was #material: what materials do we use and why? I decided to draw it on one of my materials that isn’t pictured here (Procreate on my iPad). And it’s all from memory, since Winston was sprawled across the kitchen table where these materials all are.
Last night I had a call with Mr. Ginger’s owner, and hoo boy there is a lot more to this story. Good and bad. The good: Mister Ginger is still alive and well and living in Kharkiv (and he has a girlfriend); the bad: this has been traumatic for him, retelling this story for me. But A. did say that he thought Mr. Ginger helped him through some very hard times, which is great to hear because it’s the actual punchline — simply giving comfort to people in a war zone is heroic enough.
18 August 25
Matching the Medium to the Message
On Saturday I attended the SAWgust halfway point call. I had a question about how others organized their composition process if the final was going to be analog; mostly I work on paper then go digital. But for this Ukraine project it seems analog is a good way to go.
I’d done some sketches with a fountain pen but it has a fine nib and when reduced down it maybe too fine a line. I looked for and found my Sailor Fude pen, a fountain pen with a bent nib that can give you at least three different thicknesses. I think I can get this to work. I still have some fine-tuning to do but am pretty set on this course.
Someone said they just redrew and redrew panels until they were right. Someone else said when using watercolor they used a camera rather than a scanner. Another helpful suggestion was to write the names of the materials, paints, brushes and pens on the back of the work so if you revisit it a year later you have some hope of matching it.
Meanwhile it’s looking like I might do the whole section before the invasion in full color, moving to monochrome afterwards except for the guinea pig… The paper is Deleter A Comic Book Paper size B5, which is not as thick as Bristol board, takes a good wash, and is very pen-friendly.
17 August 25
Daily Sketch - Young Oak
For today’s weekend tree sketch I ventured out on bicycle to the local arboretum where to no surprise there are many trees. I sketched this young oak with De Atramentis Urban Gray ink and used Derwent Graphitint pan paints for the wash. I like the Derwent Graphitint pan set a lot. The principle of the Graphitints (both in pencil and pan paint form) is that they are watercolor pigments mixed with graphite particles which mutes the colors a lot. Using the pan set I find I can mix a lot of realistic greens, and muted sketches work well at times.
13 August 25
Painting In Kodachrome
I have recently become acquainted with the photography of Saul Leiter, and am awestruck by his work. It is the most painterly color photography I have run across, and it is not surprising that he was also a painter.
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923 and was descended from a line of rabbis, his father being a prominent Talmud scholar. Saul’s father wanted him to be a rabbi too, and Saul dutifully went to seminary in Cleveland for a bit, but then dropped out and moved to New York at the age of 23 to try to become a painter. Friends of his encouraged him to take up photography, and he developed a career as a fashion photographer, working mostly in black-and-white. His color work was a private hobby which started in the late 1940s and largely carried out in the neighborhood in New York where he settled in the 1950s and lived the rest of his life. But his color photography started to attract some attention in the 1990s, and in 2006 a book of his early work was published, entitled Saul Leiter Early Color. After that book was published many people got interested in his work, though Saul was quite humble and never comfortable with fame.
Saul died in 2013, and in 2014 friends of his set up the Saul Leiter Foundation to preserve his art and legacy. The photo at right was taken by him in 1958 on a walk in New York. Saul loved working with reflections and windows and raindrops: in a documentary about him completed in 2012 Saul remarked that “a window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.”
9 August 25
Photo Cataloging
I have started in on a project that will take me months to complete but this makes it a good activity for retirement. This project is cataloging all my photographs. I keep my archive of photos in a photo manager called digiKam, with most of the photos organized by year and then by month. I started this archive early in 2017 when I bought a little compact long zoom camera, the Panasonic ZS50, in advance of a trip to Iceland in fall of that year. In addition to organizing the photos by month and year, I also started tagging the photos with keywords and rating them in quality from one to five stars.
I fell off the program of tagging and rating the photos sometime in the middle of 2018, which leaves about a 7 year gap in this process. I have been working backwards to fill this in, and I have completed between July 2025 and May 2024. (I set July 2025 aside, and have just completed it. Because of my photo palette project in July, I ended up with 740 photos for the month, which made it a bear to get through.)
Is this effort going to be worth it? I think so. The rating process is an important exercise in figuring out one’s photographic style and aesthetic sensibilities, and tagging the photos helps a great deal with retrieval. The photo at right is a fun example of the latter. I wondered what I had cataloged under “Animals / pigs”, and came up with several photos of a pig enjoying the Whole Earth Festival in Davis in 2018.
4 August 25
Artists Support the Protests
On Saturday I attended the weekly Freeport, Maine protest against the current administration and its erosion of American democracy with my sister. We grew up in a fascist country and as the gentleman on the left is pointing out (his sign is not very visible), “Remember Germany 1933.” It was a pleasant way to spend a morning but we were all wondering what good it was actually doing… Lots of cars beeped in solidarity; some also shook their heads or worse. This is the point: we agree they have the right to disagree.
This protest coincided with the local arts & crafts fair, and one of the artists offered us all a notecard to thank us for showing up. I went over afterwards and talked with her: she is a farmer whose livelihood is being threatened by the administration’s cuts to the USDA… I loved her work and bought some more notecards. I gave the still life of just-pulled beets to my mother, who loves beets.
