15 August 10
A Week Behind The Typecase
I just spent the past five days taking the letterpress intensive course at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my new-found printing skills, but it was a lot of fun. We worked with the four Vandercook presses the center has, and produced personal stationery, a broadside of a quote our choice, and at the end of the week we reprinted the text from our broadsides to make up the parts for a pamphlet-bound book. At left is my broadside — two quotes on cats — printed in a rather beat-up 18 point Caslon font. Composing type a pretty intense process, but metal type is beautiful to work with. It’s quite neat to see one’s text laid out in shiny gray metal in the bed of the press, reading backwards of course!
28 June 10
Back from Pennsylvania
Spending a week just outside Gettysburg, studying 9th-century European lettering: bliss. Bliss was the long table with papers and ink and writing easels. Bliss was the conversation with other letterform devotees, sharing table and morning coffee (well, tea in my case) outside in the warm humid dawn. Bliss was rising on the solstice before the sun and greeting it accompanied by a gold flute echoing back the mourning dove’s soft song. Bliss was the delight of learning how to grind stick ink.
I sketched at Little Round Top and from Cemetery Ridge, looking down on the field with fences faced by Pickett’s division, marching double time up into Union canister. Ghosts.
6 June 10
Drawing Day At The Zoo
Today is the worldwide Drawing Day 2010: we participated by going sketching at the Sacramento Zoo. Pica drew mostly birds; I drew a mix of birds and ungulates. At left is a sketch I made of an Amazon parrot, at right are a couple of giraffes. 
I need to submit my giraffe drawings to the one million giraffes project — the creator of this project has as of today collected 839,661 drawings of giraffes and has only 208 days left to reach his goal of one million giraffe drawings!
15 May 10
Up Early, Even For Me
Today is the Davis Double Century. It’s too early here even for kingbirds. I must leave the house in an hour, having drunk enough tea to keep me going on a 200-mile course with many zigzags back and forth between rest stops (I’m driving, providing radio support, not cycling, but still). It looks like it won’t be too hot, meaning fewer heat exhaustion cases, but there’s always something, and it’s best to be prepared. Hope I am.
Today is also the 27th Worldwide Sketchcrawl. Can’t believe there have been that many. I won’t have much chance to sketch today but will try at a couple of the rest stops: cyclists are good drawing subjects, plenty of muscle definition to be had. And they all line up in exactly the same way for water and Gatorade and peanut butter sandwiches and bananas and potatoes and soup and coffee and muffins, staggering around on cleats, wondering how the hell they’re going to get up Resurrection and wondering whether this was really such a good idea. They’re a cheerful bunch, though, and this is such a well supported ride that it’s a good one for the “maybe I can make its.” Unfortunately for the support people, sometimes those ones maybe can’t, and need shuttling around. And their bikes… but then I get to meet really interesting folks and chat on the way to the next rest stop.
I’d like to put in a word here for an artist I admire greatly and whose work I’ve followed for some time now. Debby Kaspari of Drawing the Motmot lost her house and her studio on Monday in a tornado. She, her husband Mike, and cat Gizmo are all fine, but they have lost all their possessions. (I just saw in an update that after sifting through the rubble they were able to find Debby’s banjo and Mike’s guitar intact; I burst into tears when I saw this.)
There’s an art supply whip-round going on through Facebook through friends. If you have paper or paints or pencils or anything you think she could use, please check it out. There’s a paypal link too.
Right. Off to don the Second Ugliest Tshirt In The World and check in with Net Control. KI6IMU, Sag 10, reporting for duty…
4 May 10
Pondering on a Podcast
I spoke with my friend Dave Bonta on the phone yesterday. He was recording. Click here
for the results…
23 November 09
25th Sketchcrawl
![Peeps, watercolor]()http://www.magpienest.org/images/1138.jpg "Peeps, watercolor")
In honor of the fifth anniversary of the Worldwide Sketchcrawl movement, we headed out on Saturday morning at 9:30 to the California Raptor Center where they were holding an Open House, moved on to Mishka’s Cafe, on to lunch at Cafe Bernardo, out to the Yolo Bypass for a blackbird study, ending up at the Davis Library and a warm house where I drew Charlie. We had hoped to run into Pete Scully of Urban Sketchers fame but missed him.
More sketches can be found here. Unfortunately Numenius seems to have caught a cold from one of the kids we were sitting next to in the Raptor Center classroom during the presentation….
Bird sketches can be seen on Bird by Bird.
17 August 09
Don't Send Me Your Heirloom Bibles
This would make a good phrase for a bookbinder’s t-shirt, my instructor informed us at at a course I took on everyday book repair today at the San Francisco Center for The Book. The operative word for what we were learning to do was repair, not restoration, hence no heirlooms. For practice I arrived with several not-so-valuable books and sketchbook journals which we proceeded to operate on using wheat paste and PVA glue, Japanese tissue paper, and book cloth. (There was a time when I was doing a lot of notetaking on these hardbound artists’ journals commonly found in the art department of campus bookstores. What I’ve learned over the years is that although the textblock paper is quite good, the case binding falls apart quite readily with moderate use, hence the need for repairs.) I rebacked two of these journals, and reglued the cover of an ancient copy of the National Geographic bird guide. It was a successful day, and I’m now not afraid of diving into repair projects on ordinary, well-used books that are simply starting to fall apart. But first I need some Japanese tissue!
22 June 09
One Million Giraffes
Ola Helland had a bet with his friend Jørgen that he’d be able to receive one million giraffes by 2011. Hand-drawn giraffes. Why not send him one? Click here.
9 June 09
Christmas Lights In June
I’m well into my list of projects inspired by the Maker Faire. First up was building a TV-B-Gone. This is a device that can get you excommunicated from sports bars mighty quick: it acts as a universal remote off button to turn off TVs in public places that are harassing you. (We don’t have a TV to test it out on, so I don’t know if it works yet).
Second, I am starting to play with the Arduino physical computing platform. This evening I had fun blinking different colors of LEDs on and off, as can be seen at right.
6 June 09
World Drawing Day!
It’s World Drawing Day, where we’re going to try to get one million drawings online… I’ll be posting here my efforts from throughout the day.
I’ve also posted a couple of bird sketches on Bird by Bird.