3 May 05
Web Design Linkfest
Vitaly Friedman maintains an excellent and growing list of essential bookmarks for web designers and web developers.
27 April 05
Ban Comic Sans
A campaign to rid the world of that design perfidy spawned by Microsoft, complete with stickers, flyers, and t-shirts.
24 April 05
Sundancing
Numenius and I took another class today, this one five minutes from home rather than two hours. Robert Regis Dvorak led a full-day workshop on travel sketching. Rather than have us wander around Davis, sketchbooks in hand, he encouraged us to try a full range of techniques in the classroom—pen, watercolor, dry brush—in a specially-made drawing pad. The subject was mostly Greece.
This pad contains 80 lb Sundance text paper. It works well with all the above media and takes a calligraphic line very well despite the texture. I’m thinking of getting larger sheets and binding my own sketchbooks so they open flat (it’s a bit of a gripe of mine when they don’t).
Here’s my first attempt at dry brush (the wash is laid in afterwards).
15 April 05
Brush Pens
One of the things our teacher had us do in our workshop last weekend was to experiment with a brush pen. The first exercise in our journal was to make brush depictions of ponderosa pine needles. Later when we got outside, she had us using them to sketch the midribs of leaflets and leaves.
I’ve decided to learn my way around brush pens better and have since bought two of the six-pen sets of Faber-Castell Pitt brush pens, the landscape color set and the shades of gray set. Here is a little tryptich I did this evening — that’s Charlie in the window on the right.
14 April 05
Tango
Natalie of Blaugustine has recently started selling her art online through Photobox. I bought this GORGEOUS print and it arrived a few days ago from the UK. I don’t have my tango gear any more but here’s a photo of a photo of a print of a painting of Boca by the goddess of color, halfway around the world.
9 April 05
Artist’s Journal Class
We went to the San Francisco Center for the Book today to take a class with Andie Thrams on creating artist’s journals. In our afternoon session we learned about gridding up a journal page. The handy trick we were taught is to make a grid template by poking holes on the grid intersections on a stout piece of paper, allowing one to quickly layout the journal page.
Tomorrow our class goes to the field — we’ll be spending all day sketching, painting, and writing in Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park.
1 April 05
Friday Troll Blogging
Here is a little painting of one of the two trolls our friend Jennifer sent us from Sweden several years back. I did this last night using watercolor over a water-soluble 4B sketching pencil drawing, a combination which seems to turn out better than I thought it should. So I’ll be trying more experiments with this choice of media.
29 March 05
More on Pens
We took over a new pen for Karen on Sunday for her birthday, a purple Sunrise Stypen-Up with purple ink. (The retractable fountain pen.) I was happy to see her using it in our kickoff meeting today for the Campus Community Book Project for next year (Kite Runner).
And then Numenius tells me about another pen fetishist out there (Scribbling Woman, nice Zapfino masthead). Safety in numbers. Good. I’m already having anxiety about what pens to take to our Artist’s Journal workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book weekend after next…
Thanks to all who left notes of congratulation on our second blogday.
24 March 05
Bloom
This is an entry for the Illustration Friday topic on Bloom.
A couple of weeks ago when we went to our friends’ picnic in the foothills of the Vaca Mountains west of here, there were many brodiaeas out on the grassy slopes. Here is a sketch I did of a couple of plants near the top of the hill.
21 March 05
From Romans to the Dark Ages
My Roman Majuscule class is over; the next one in the series is Uncial starting in April.
The story of Western writing is the history of empires that came and went, of striving for perfection and going beyond it to precious and eventual decay.
I don’t know what future paleographers will make of the American empire through its writing (or lack of it). At any rate, I’ve been playing with 4th-century letterforms, some of which have made their way into the new Feathers of Hope masthead. I think we should change this more often than every two years. Walnut ink remains plentiful in the fridge.