26 February 08
Signing Up for Saving the World
That will be $13 on Paypal, please.
Why not join in? You can surely fill a small 64-page book by August 1!
18 January 08
Printing In The Sun
I just got the book Printmaking in the Sun, by Dan Welden and Pauline Muir out from the library via interlibrary loan. It describes the process of using photopolymer plates for printmaking. Basically you create a transparency with your artwork, and then expose the plate under the transparency to the UV light in sunlight. Where the transparency is clear, the UV light hardens the plate material. The non-hardened areas are soluble in water, so you wash the plate to create the printing surface.
It’s an intriguing technique, and we may have to try it out. One can do both relief and intaglio printing through it, though the former is simpler, and could be done with not much more equipment than we have at home. It’s still pretty involved, though — I guess you just start small, and see where it takes you.
10 January 08
17th Worldwide Sketchcrawl
Get ready! Saturday, January 19th, is the next worldwide sketchcrawl. We had a fantastic time in November with a group of dedicated crawlers at the Sacramento Zoo. This time we’re going to keep it local in Davis because there’s a lot going on that weekend and to be honest I’m trying to reduce the number of trips we make by car.
If you can’t find a sketchcrawl near you, start one! Even if it’s only you, it’s a great way to spend an hour or four: gets you outside your head. It’s the time of year where that might be a good thing to do.
8 January 08
Silverpoint!
Before Christmas I was hankering for a silverpoint tool. Well, my cousin Gainor took pity on me and sent me a small silver rod and three sheets of prepared paper. The package arrived today. I sanded the point down and stuck the rod in a mechanical pencil holder.
Your blackest black is never really very black, only gray, so the whole effect is quite washed out. But this is the tool of the Renaissance: no graphite yet. It’s a trip to sit at my kitchen counter and draw my thumbnail and muse on 500 years ago…
29 December 07
Russian Caravan Tea
It’s been a long, lazy week. I had an hour to kill yesterday while waiting for the local monthly designers’ get-together at Mishka’s, which is a European-style cafe that roasts its own coffee and offers free wireless. It is inhabited permanently by veterinary and medical students as well as anyone wishing to spend hours and hours online. But yesterday there were also lots of people having real conversations.
It’s been chilly and has finally gotten wet, and few braved the tables outside. But the ones who did got sketched by me. There’s something about the glass barrier that gives me a bit more cover than just drawing someone inside the room.
I did eventually do some of those too, though. The thing about sketching faces: you notice just how beautiful people are, how different, how complex. It leaves me at the end of this year with, how can I put it, hope. I am filled with hope. Against an awful lot of odds, I realize…
20 December 07
Typography and Other Design Delights
In a do-or-die attempt to master positioning on web pages with cascading style sheets, and taking advantage of a relatively slow time at work, I’ve been availing myself of the courses available at Lynda.com, which were paid for by my employers earlier this year but which I’ve not had a chance to get to. There is a bewildering number of online courses on offer, and while I’ve been working steadily through CSS2 Essential Training, I couldn’t help but have a gander at InDesign CS2 Professional Typography, or Typographic Principles (or Audio or Podcasting or Alpha Channels or dot dot dot).
This all comes at a good time, because I found out today that Robert Brinkhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, an essential book that came out after I’d trained as a graphic designer, is being applied to web design by Richard Rutter. Hints on how to control spaces between words and kerning using style sheets are going to be a huge help to me.
(Language Hat referred me to Rex Sorgatz’s Fimoculous and his Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading, which provided the above link through Drawn; it’s a fantastic list. A couple of particularly quirky finds: Strange Maps, whose maps are fascinating but whose typography in the text is a bit lamentable (hope they look up the Rutter, above), and Quotation Marks, to which all comers are invited to submit photos of inappropriate use of quotation marks.
11 December 07
A Peek Into Studio B
Our bird illustration workshop Sunday was at the Davis Art Center. Next door to our classroom was the weaving studio, Studio B. It was unoccupied, so I poked my nose in. Hundreds of weaving bobbins were on the shelves in the studio, the yarns arranged in color order forming a very pretty sight.
Once again I’ve gotten fascinated by color and its mysteries. But my peek into that room reminds me why I am much more interested in drawing and watercolor painting than color photography — it seems such a hard problem to photographically capture the color in that room and make a successful print of it. Why not just work directly and apply pigment on brush to paper?
4 December 07
Bug Art
This artist clearly would have the upper tarsus in a submission to the current edition of qarrtsiluni.
1 December 07
Subtle Yet Precise
Silverpoint: you draw on a prepared ground with a stylus that is made of silver. The metal leaves traces on the ground which then darken (tarnish) yet never become really black.
Numenius and I went for a walk today in the hills, given that we’ll be doing Thompson Canyon for the Christmas Count in two weeks and I haven’t been hiking too many hills what with oil spills and whatnot. We saw a hermit thrush in a buckeye, which was now all bare apart from a few beautiful pendulant fruits. (We brought some home to draw and paint: think horse chestnut/conker, with all that velvet warmth, but twice the size.)
Oh, said I, that would be a good Bateman subject. Nah, said Numenius, too monochrome, it’s more up Keith Hansen’s alley.
Nah, said I, that’s too dark, black. This was subtle gray. Warm grays on silver grays. A moment…
Silverpoint. I gotta get me one of those. Good thing I have a brother who’s a jeweler. (We chanced upon the Open Studios on Point Reyes last week and saw the work of Gary Smith who had some very large silverpoints, stretching the medium to places I didn’t know it could be stretched, but that’s why you go to these things…)
29 November 07
Persimmon
This persimmon came from our neighbor across the street Mary. I sketched it with Inktense pencils.