3 March 05
Foreshortenings
Working through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has got me to a point where I need to study foreshortening. I can look at Old Masters like Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo but the most contemporary exaggerated foreshortening I can think of is Frodo reaching up to grab the Ring, an image so iconic that it now gets referred to in other films.
So I put on the DVD this evening and paused at this spot. It’s one of the most difficult things to draw: the human hand, foreshortened. It’s a conjuring trick to get your hand to draw what your eye sees but what your brain is telling you can’t possibly be. I think I’ll be using the DVD player a lot for this exercise; it’s easier than getting a tame model to pose for 20 minutes at a stretch, over and over…
I might post one if I manage to get one that’s not horrible…
2 March 05
GeoURL Returns
If you scroll down and look on the bottom of the left-hand column of the main page here, you will notice a GeoURL tag. This links to a site where there is a database of the geographical locations of websites.
For a long time the GeoURL database has not functioned, it being neglected as the original developer, Joshua Schachter, moved on to greater things (he is the creator of del.icio.us). The database has found a new maintainer, and as of last week, it is online again!
For those of you who want to add their own website to this database, the instructions are here. Basically, you add a meta tag giving your site’s latitude and longitude to your web page, and then ping the GeoURL site with your site’s URL.
1 March 05
Things Japanese
Three things to report today:
1) I’m going to be leading a delegation of Japanese oiled wildlife experts around the Yolo Bypass tomorrow. I’m hoping for a good selection of ducks and a few early shorebirds. Yes, folks, I’m getting PAID to do this, to go birding.
2) My brother’s jewelry was recently featured in the Capital City Weekly of Juneau in addition to Juneau This Week. His style has been described as a western intrepretation of Japanese wabi-sabi; finding beauty in the imperfect—simple, irregular, earthy. (To me his stuff always looks Anglo-Saxon or Viking, and draws also on his eye for shrapnel, honed while he played as a kid on Spanish Civil-War battlegrounds with his pal Barry, but what do I know.) Check out his work if you happen to find yourself in Juneau at the Juneau Artists Gallery: his name’s Rowan Law.
3) I drew a flowering quince for Susurra yesterday and the combination of birds (three white-crowned sparrows, an orange-crowned warbler, and an Anna’s hummingbird were all in this shrub while I sat on the pavement drawing), flowers, arriving spring, and seeing old friends walk by put me in a contemplative haibun-type mood. More to come, perhaps. (Along with a sillier one about all the eggs that must have fallen off the back of someone’s pickup by the creek here—the crows have been having a field day.)
28 February 05
On Gallotannate Inks
From Evan Lindquist, an artist and printmaker at Arkansas State University, comes this set of pages about making gallotannate or iron gall inks. The best of these inks begin with a solution derived from oak galls which is then mixed with an iron salt. The resulting solution will then darken over time on the paper as it oxidizes.
Lindquist provides many old recipes for these inks, which are now out of favor. There is even a standard for govenment writing ink, suitable for use in post offices, issued by the National Bureau of Standards, U.S. Department of Commerce, in 1936.
27 February 05
Before Baseball Starts Again
I’ve missed most of the movies that were nominated for tonight’s academy awards. We don’t have a TV. I got a sudden hankering to watch them, though, and persuaded the Spirit Sisters to let me come over with a pot of soup and watched the taped-on-Tivo version so we could skip the commercials.
Oscars are general silliness and sometimes that works. After the somewhat traumatic experience of taking Charlie in for his rabies shot this morning, it fit the bill for me. Numenius stayed home and did his Spanish homework; his prediction that Russell Crow wouldn’t win anything this year proved to be astonishingly correct.
26 February 05
Diamond In February
We went to our first baseball game of the year this morning. This was the UC Davis team playing the University of Portland; the college season begins in early February. We spent much of the time sketching the players. The UCD Aggies ended up losing in 15 innings; we got hungry and left after the 10th to eat some Chinese food. Today’s match was a doubleheader, and the Aggies won decisively 11-2 in the second game. But we were long gone by that time.
It was foggy in the morning, and when we first arrived at the field it was partly sunny and I thought I’d end up being hot after sitting through the whole game. Big cumulus clouds came in though, and the hot-and-sour soup at the restaurant definitely hit the spot.
25 February 05
Spring
Numenius has installed a weather applet (Meteo) on our laptop which means I’m keeping tabs on the weather here, in Maine, in Boston, and in Juneau, where friends and family live. I definitely feel guilty wondering which blossoms to draw when I see everyone else is getting snow today.
Guilty or not, the blossoms here are on their inexorable march; the almond ones have blown away, giving place to the much smaller white plum blossoms. The pale pink nectarine and darker pink peach blossoms are next. We lost a cherry tree four years ago to rot and and the peach might be heading that way (helped along by an overzealous northern flicker), but they’re beautiful while they last.
24 February 05
Daffodil Sunshine
Our landlady keeps a fine garden, and she kindly planted daffodils in back of our house, viewable from our bedroom. They’ve been coming into full bloom right now, warmed by several days of sunshine.
23 February 05
Pica’s Recent Peregrinations
22 February 05
Our Secret Kansas
Yesterday’s pendulous thunderclouds did produce a couple of tornados, it turns out. One of these touched down in the North Sacramento area shortly before two in the afternoon, causing light damage to an apartment complex. Here is a slideshow of some photographs of this tornado.
At the time, we were far away, comfortably ensconsed in the art store in Palo Alto. By the time we got home it was dry, but there were impressive thunderclouds to the west of us, including the storm we had just passed through. At left is a view of the Vaca Mountains from our house at about 5:15 in the afternoon; later on we’d see lightning flashes from those clouds.
(The title of this post is lifted from a chapter of Mike Davis’ book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster: it turns out tornados hit the Los Angeles area much more often than people realize.)