8 March 05
Cheese, Gromit?
After this horrible past year in movies, there’s finally a film to look forward to. The new Wallace & Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, is coming out October 14!
(From LibrarianInBlack).
7 March 05
Peregrines Nesting
Peregrine falcons hold some kind of mystique… whether it’s because they came so close to extinction during widespread use of DDT, or because they can tuck into a dive reaching almost 200 miles an hour, or because they’re just plain beautiful, these are amazing birds to see.
There’s a pair now nesting at the PG&E Building in San Francisco. This webcam is updated every five seconds.
update, Tuesday, March 8, 2005: there are now three eggs, and the female “Gracie” is predicted to start incubating full-time, but at 2:34 pm PST she’s absent…
6 March 05
Art Student
As Pica has mentioned, we’ve been doing the exercises in the workbook for The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Yesterday, she was working on the exercise where you draw a flower through an acetate viewing plane. But Charlie reminded us that he too is a connoisseur of the art of botanical illustration.
5 March 05
Counting Crows, Again
My work buddies have been continuing to catch crows as part of a West Nile virus study. The backpacks with the radio transmitters seem to have held up remarkably well in most cases. There is a large roost site in Davis which most of the crows fly into at dusk, and their beep-beep-beeps alert the folks following along on radios to their presence. (This is, incidentally, a VERY bad place to park your car.)
Last week I spotted a crow with an antenna (well, I spotted the silver tag around its ankle) just outside my window at work. I’ve seen it every day since. This crow, #652, seems to be paired up. It’s almost always with another crow now. (By the way, Coup de Vent, it doesn’t seem at ALL bothered by the weight of the transmitter or the straps or even the antenna, though it had certainly lost the tape off the end…)
We heard 652 this evening at the roost site along with 14 others. We missed four, but we hope the volunteer will find them tomorrow night. All this rain we’ve been having is yielding a bumper crop of mosquitoes, and it won’t be long before the virus hits this region like a sledgehammer.
4 March 05
Kitties Reposing
It is well that cats sleep as often as they do for how else would we be able to get practice drawing them. Here are a couple of sketches of Charlie and Diego sleeping. 
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.