16 April 04
Dabbling in Illustrator
I’ve never really taken the time to learn Adobe Illustrator properly. It’s a very powerful piece of software but I’ve always managed to get things done other ways.
Yesterday, however, I was asked to do a schematic diagram of an orca with markings showing where to measure in case one washed up on the beach. Doing this in Illustrator was surprisingly easy and very satisfying. I’ve attempted a rose in the same way this evening; I’m sure you have to do this for a while to realize what your “style” is but I’m certainly up for playing a bit more!
4 April 04
Archeology of a Car
Inspired by Jenny and Tvindy, I made an inventory not of things that were in my fridge (nothing really interesting in there except a whole drawer full of walnut ink), but of things that were in my car. Here is a partial list from March 27, 2004. The photo at left is the little flutter book I’m in the process of making of the same subject.
A bottle of generic Ibuprofen that doesn’t expire until 2005. (This seems miraculous.)
An envelope, empty, from the Registrar of Voters in Fairfield, dated November 2003.
A press clipping on Sicilian puppeteers and Osama Bin Laden (Charlemagne’s betrayed again).
Half a ream of orange cardstock.
Denise’s green marble. It’s lain in the tray where it was since she sold me the car back in 1995.
A black umbrella I found on a train from Berkeley to Davis.
A broken #2 pencil.
A plastic bottle with SPF 40 sunblock from 1998.
A tube of Boots Lipsalve from England, long melted into oblivion.
A light that’s supposed to come on when you open the door; it just dangles from the roof instead.
A glass Venetian egg given to me by Rachel as I set out on my western quest.
The draft program for a peace ritual Karen and I held outside Mrak Hall on March 17, 2004.
Two jumper cables. They lie on the bed of the hatchback, which is where they’ve been for eight years.
A first aid kit I haven’t opened since I bought it in 1996.
Some Yolo Audubon raffle tickets from 2001.
An empty green Delorme Atlas bag.
Two inscribed art books, on Burne-Jones and George Watts, given by my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother for “her birthday, September 6, 1906.”
The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, faded to pale pink in exposed patches.
A few dessicated pads: alcohol and Wash ‘n’ Dry.
A green Irish stone to put in my pocket, given to me by Gail.
An art book in German, ca. 1899. Condition poor.
Marian’s copy of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. I still haven’t read it.
A blue blanket with yellow stripes, the “donkey blanket.” Slept on in Spain, France, and Michigan.
A black flowered Spanish fan bought at the Corte Ingls on the Castellana. This is our only air conditioning.
A pasta spoon, white plastic with prongs.
Five assorted Spanish earthenware dishes.
A Japanese travel blessing, the string now broken, given to me by Cora, best massage therapist in Cambridge.
Exam questions for my 1981 Birmingham B.A. Combined Honours [sic] finals (French and Spanish).
My Latin linguistics exam taken in Montpellier in 1980 (in French). (I got 18/20.)
A day parking permit for UC Davis from early August 2003. Price: $6.
A receipt, type faded into illegibility.
A box of Rose Pastilles we bought in Santa Barbara in 1999.
A calligraphed “Poets Against the War” pin.
A Davis Bike Club T-shirt for the July 4th, 2001, Criterium volunteers.
A gallon ziploc bag containing traces of Skippy peanut butter.
A French orange Rhodia notebook where we write down our gas mileage.
A purple coolmax shirt from REI.
A bag of plastic styrofoam peanuts that needs to go to PDQ for re-using.
Owner’s Manual, 1986 GL Subaru 3-door.
A Giants cap with Jeff Kent’s name on it, won by Numenius in a baseball trivia contest.
A few strips of balsa-wood veneer, used as nibs in a March 2004 calligraphy workshop in San Francisco.
A pair of pink dreamcatcher earrings, given to me by Chris the day Medea Benjamin came to Davis.
A receipt from Arco, Russell Boulevard, dated March 20, 2004. Gas cost $2.19/gallon on that day.
A Bic pen that doesn’t work, and another one that does.
A brown paper bag with only one functioning handle and another one with none.
AAA maps: Davis, Woodland, Northern California. Bike map: Yolo/Solano counties.
A yellow plastic funnel and an orange plastic trowel, neither of which has ever been used.
Empty plastic bottles: Odwalla Soy Chocolate, Aquafina 16.7 oz, two nalgene water bottles.
A UC Davis L permit, good only for Lot 11, and a disabled parking permit. Both expired.
A wire coat hanger from the Santa Barbara Cleaners. I think I went there twice.
A strip of Velcro that held a trash bag, now lost, given by Auntie Kit in Cohasset for our westward trek.
A whole series of Yolo Audubon Burrowing Owl newsletters from the mid-1990s.
Two unopened bottles of brake fluid. They’ve sat through two or three stifling car-summers.
A pair of sandals I last wore while gardening at Barbara’s in April 2003.
A pair of psychedelic sunglasses I bought in Santa Barbara for the boat trip with the island scrub-jay and the red-footed booby.
Framed photos: my sister and me in 1962 (Tiburon), us with our brother in 1973 (Madrid). The frames are disintegrating.
A pair of blue shorts and a brown ponytail holder, both belonging to Numenius.
An orange plastic rain poncho, $1.99. Never been opened.
Some Windex in a blue squeezable plastic cologne bottle.
A blue cotton sheet for a twin bed.
A length of pink tulle, part of my going away present from my former job, and last worn at Code Pink.
An Aramis umbrella I found at a bus stop in Harvard Square.
Assorted socks and parts of trousers that are now officially rags. (Actually, now officially trash.)
14 March 04
The Grain Of Letters
One of the exciting things in our workshop this weekend was playing with the textural quality of letterforms. Nibs made out of sheets of balsa wood make very interesting and organic marks on paper. And as we discovered, the most unusual things can make for writing implements. In the last series of exercises we did, we experimented with a square of Stim-u-dent toothpicks! They made marks like a music ruling pen, only more so. The textural quality of letters for the most part gets lost using digital type, which is of course most of the letters we encounter these days.
The alphabet at right is one where I was struck by the very reed-like quality of the letterforms of the E and the F, and tried to build upon that for the rest of the letters.
13 March 04
Twenty Alphabets and a Cousin
Numenius and I have spent the day at the San Francisco Center for the Book, studying with Maine calligrapher Nancy Leavitt. The entire day was focusing on variations of Rudolph Koch’s Neuland typeface, a blocky, geometric alphabet we rendered in pieces of balsa veneer. It was such a treat to get covered in ink and eke texture out of these very tactile materials.
I also met my sixth cousin Stephen. He joined us after class and we went to Farley’s on Potrero Hill to exchange genealogy findings. Our common ancestor moved from Duchess County in New York following the Revolutionary War to Canada…
6 March 04
A Bridge Of Clay
Today we went to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento where we saw the stoneware sculpture The Bridge by the Taiwanese artist Ah Leon. This is an amazing twenty-meter long sculpture of a wooden bridge that has fallen into disrepair. Every bit of the bridge—the wooden planks, even the nails—is made out of fired ceramics, five tons of clay in all. The details are extremely realistic, down to the finest grain of the wood, and if you didn’t know it was made out of clay, you would be easily fooled. The installation of the bridge took three days.
Also in the exhibit were a number of smaller ceramic works, including teapots with a tiny vent in the handle to allow fine control of the pouring, and simulated platters of newly made tofu in a wooden tofu press.
3 March 04
Photoshopped Out
I’m back from my urban foray. Photoshop is hugely complex (like we didn’t know this already) and I’m worried that if I don’t put into practice all these things I just learned, they’ll fade away.
At left is a photo of San Francisco from Judy’s house in Berkeley where I was staying (thanks Judy). This is the house Numenius grew up in, so it was sort of fun to poke about the nooks and crannies of this Arts & Crafts vertical dwelling.
New in Photoshop CS, though we don’t have the ability to do it with our cameras, is Raw editing; lens blur and average filters have uses that aren’t altogether obvious, and the file browser is much slicker. I won’t be upgrading just yet—there are other priorities.
It’s amazing to be around 2,500 people who are as excited about all this as I am; there were obvious cliques of Designers versus Photographers, but everyone got along. Watching our teachers duke it out in the afternoon today during Photoshop Wars was quite entertaining.
28 February 04
Photoshop-ho
Photoshop World starts on Monday in San Francisco. It’s a huge three-day serious teaching forum/conference where there is usually more than one session you want to attend concurrently, so they prepare an 800-page “booklet” for you to lug around that gives you all the information about all the other sessions you couldn’t get to.
I’m going to attend, even though I just started a new job. I consider myself an intermediate Photoshop user; I can tweak images enough for publication. By Wednesday evening I hope to be an Advanced Photoshop User, able to do this tweaking far more effectively and above all EFFICIENTLY.
My former job had me doing four or five publications a year (writing and/or editing and design, prepress). Now I’m going to be doing four or five a quarter, and there are lots of images coming my way, images I’m going to have to get a handle on pretty quickly.
I’ll be taking the train down through the Suisun marsh; it will be interesting to see what it looks like with all this water we’ve had in the past week. And yes, I’ll have a digital camera with me…
17 February 04
The Drafting Pencil Museum
Fountain pens are not the only writing instruments to have their ardent devotees. Leadholder.com is an online museum on the history of drafting pencils, and includes many images and catalogue entries.
The thin lead mechanical pencil is only reluctantly included in this site. As the author says:
I’ve been ranting since long before this site began about the evils of thin lead pencils and the corruptive power they have over impressionable youth. Although these impure drawing implements are now represented in the collection, thin lead mechanical pencils and their use are in no way endorsed by leadholder.com.
29 January 04
More About Pens
Pendemonium has come through as a source for the retractable fountain pen I wrote about in Pen Fetish, the Stypen. Based in Iowa, they also have an exhaustive line of inks, cartridges, the luscious Clairefontaine notebooks and stationery, and for you collectors out there they also have plenty of antique inkwells, pens, and blotters. Sam has been very responsive. I placed an order last week; should arrive soon. A caveat on their website reads “Many parts of the US are experiencing extremely cold temperatures. Ink and freezing temps do not mix very well. Rest assured that we are watching the weather where you are and we will make every effort to insulate your ink. If we think there is a chance of the ink freezing and the bottles shattering, we will let you know that we are holding your shipment and waiting for the sun to shine. This happens every year just about this time and we’re happy to say that we’ve never lost a bottle of ink to the cold!”
I bought a notebook for my class on religion and violence at the campus bookstore here and it’s inadequate: when I take notes the ink shows through the page. Grr. I’m also on the lookout for the ideal field notebook, so I make up my own grail quests as I go. This is a way to make myself crazy, but I blame it on January like Maria does in Alembic.
Ecotone wiki topic for February 1: Food and Place.
23 January 04
Rosy-Fingered Dawn
Homer’s repeated rosy-fingered dawns break lots of rules outlined in a list of ten mistakes often made by writers (via Hoarded Ordinaries and Burningbird), but I think Homer had different rules, and aren’t we glad he did?
I woke this morning to a thick tule fog which turned pink as the sun, somewhere out there in the east, rose. I tried to draw the tree outside our kitchen window with my walnut ink. I have altered the hue on the drawing to approximate the hue I saw: it was completely monochrome, just different levels of saturation.