14 May 26
Hollyhocks
Hollyhocks are in bloom throughout our neighborhood now, including some straggly plants in our backyard. This is a sketch of some hollyhocks growing in a little public garden across the street from our house. This is my second field sketch using my new Folio Palette kit. It’s nice to have lots of colors to choose from between the 26 colors in the filled pans and my expanded colorful set of Derwent drawing pencils.
13 May 26
Stamp Designing: Behind the Scenes
Following on the heels of the exciting announcement of the new Postcrossing stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service (I should be receiving my pre-order this Friday; see my previous entry on this topic), the folks at Postcrossing interviewed Antonio Alcalá, an art director at the USPS. It’s a wonderful interview and very heartening to know that he really understands the postcrossing project and even participated in it before time constraints drew him away.
Designing something as tiny as a postage stamp is one of the most difficult challenges I can imagine, and it’s no wonder that each set of stamps takes about three years from concept to counter. As Alcalá says, a stamp is part of a country’s brand. How many stamps do you issue in a series? (the more, the greater the cost and also time commitment.)
The USPS has been going through the wars in the past few years but it remains an excellent service. I am happy to add to its coffers in my own tiny way by my postcard habit. Below is the card I received yesterday from Ukraine; the sender not only wrote a lovely message (and selected birds for me, which a surprising number of people manage to do), but also responded to my acknowledgment in which I sent sympathy for what her poor country’s been going through. It is an awesome way to connect with people all over the world, a light touch in a heavy time.
12 May 26
Folio Palette Is Filled
The paints I ordered for my Art Toolkit Folio Palette arrived yesterday and I have filled the palette with the 26 colors I selected. I painted a swatch chart which is to the left of the palette in the photo. I am going to mount the swatch chart on cardstock and carry it around in my art supply pouch with this palette.
The other component to expanding my field kit is adding additional pencils that are in the new Derwent drawing pencil set to make up a field set of pencils. This is a project for tomorrow or the next day.
11 May 26
10 May 26
Whole Earth Day Three
I returned to the Whole Earth Festival today to do another sketch. This is of the main stage at the south end of the campus quadrangle. Performing on the stage when I was sketching was a singer named Dakota Dry.
9 May 26
A Really Good German Lesson
I have found the quality of instruction at Lingoda to be very high and worth what I pay for it, but this morning I had an outstanding private lesson. With Lingoda you have the choice to be in a group class (maximum five students) or a private one; I have a lot of class credits saved up so have transferred some of my group credits to private. I always learn a lot more. You also have the choice, when private, either to follow the class content you signed up for (in today’s case, Konjunktiv I Wiederholung, or review of Subjunctive I, which is almost always reported speech) or just to chat.
What made this class in particular so good was that the instructor zeroed in very quickly on where I’m struggling and gently corrected my errors, but also gave me tips on how to remember things. The introductory topic of the lesson was about an astrophysicist discovering a black hole, not something I’m in any way familiar with but which is inherently interesting, and it provided a jumping-off point for a much wider conversation with someone who is interesting, intelligent, and a bloody good teacher. It made me feel great.
(And I still make dumb mistakes.)
8 May 26
Whole Earth Day One
Today was the first day of the Whole Earth Festival, a hippie fest that has been happening at UC Davis almost every year since 1969. The festival runs three days over Mother’s Day weekend. I walked down there late this afternoon to scope the event and perhaps do a sketch. I ended up sketching the outside of this booth displaying wares from the Harmony Tie-Dyes Company.
7 May 26
Other Perspectives
I had a doctor’s appointment in Sacramento on Tuesday… for various reasons I elected not to drive a borrowed car across the Causeway, which is under massive construction, and took an Uber both directions. My first driver was Iraqi (I think, though am not sure, he was Kurdish); the second was from Venezuela. He was given political asylum three years ago; because of the Trump administration’s moratorium on green cards for refugees, he finds himself in an uneasy limbo. He was able to bring his wife and son over from Venezuela eventually through hard work; his wife has a degree in business administration but is selling fruit.
When I asked my driver whether it was better here than in Venezuela, he was very clear: at least here they can eat three times a day and his wife doesn’t have to use ripped up shirts as sanitary pads (he choked up as he was telling me this part — the shame he felt at having to put his wife through this ordeal was still very real for him).
These stories are not unique. What struck me was how buried they become in the anti-immigrant narrative. People are working so much harder than I ever have, and can barely make ends meet… It’s a reminder that those of us who are fortunate to have enough to live comfortably shouldn’t take any of that for granted, when a lot of it is just an accident of birth and/or geography.
6 May 26
The Pigment Bazaar
I ordered six 5 ml tubes of watercolor paint yesterday for my palette expansion project. While trying to figure out which paints to order, I ran across an extremely useful site, Artist Pigments.org. The developers of this site have created an art material and pigment database containing as of this writing catalog entries for 78,729 art materials with color swatches for 21,203 of them. The catalog has entries for many different types of art materials, including watercolors, gouache, acrylics, oils, colored pencils, pastels and others. Where pigment information has been supplied by the manufacturer it is included in the catalog entry. Most of the swatches in the catalog have also had their color measured accurately with a spectrophotometer.
As an example, I mentioned earlier that I was interested in purple magenta which I have as a Schmincke watercolor half-pan. The entry for that Schmincke paint is here, which tells us it is made out of the pigment PR122 (quinacridone magenta). The page for watercolors with this pigment lists many different paints from lots of manufacturers. After reviewing these, I ended up ordering the Winsor & Newton Opera Rose.
The catalog is interactive and lets you save your own collections of art materials. I used this feature to save a list of paints in my current Pocket Palette and prospective paints for the Folio Palette that I am assembling.
This catalog builds upon lots of earlier work, especially Bruce MacEvoy’s marvelous site handprint, but MacEvoy ceased building out the watercolor material on his site around 2014. It is still invaluable: just today an artist with an YouTube channel about color wheels (Color Nerd) posted a video saying how the only color wheel he actively uses is MacEvoy’s pigment-based chart. I have a printout of his chart somewhere in one of my art drawers. Prior to MacEvoy, color theorist Michael Wilcox wrote a book on the finest watercolor paints, but his book is from 1991 and is quite out-of-date.
4 May 26
Postcrossing Stamp on the Way from USPS!
As I’ve said on here before, I am a member of Postcrossing an organization that allows you to send and receive postcards all over the world.
The United States Postal Service has announced a dedicated Postcrossing stamp to be issued in late May, an interesting triangular shape (the current international stamps, for both letters and postcards, are circular). I’m thrilled about this, having watched the postal services of several countries issue Postcrossing stamps; I’m surprised this has shown up on the radar, to be honest, but super happy.
