18 January 26
West Campus Outing
We went on a little outing this afternoon to the Putah Creek Riparian Reserve in UC Davis’s West Campus. Pica settled in and sketched a very difficult tree, and I focused on drawing the row of olive trees running north alongside Hopkins Road. I sketched these with my Derwent Graphitint pencils, except for the little bit of blue in the sky.
17 January 26
Fear of Getting it Wrong
I had the second workshop of my year-long Comix Coven today. We had half an hour to work with watercolor and ink on a two-page spread about where we are in our process with our projects.
I am working on a piece about my mother and her choices about end-of-life. I’m terrified I don’t have the chops to draw her, either as she appeared or as she was to me. I’m trying to jump in and have a go nonetheless.
Something that is so personal is challenging, but I think I have this fear with all projects. The way out of them is through, instead of putting them on the shelf and finding ways to justify abandoning them. But this one, even if only five people ever read it, is really worth doing, so I’m going to go ahead and keep working on it.
16 January 26
Attention And The Everyday Carry Camera
Attention was a significant theme of yesterday’s conversation between Teju Cole and John Gossage. It is evident that photography for Teju is a refuge from the despair of the world, and photography becomes a practice of attending to the beauty he finds. To paraphrase him, attention taken to the highest level is indistinguishable from prayer.
The conversation did make me ponder what am I trying to achieve when I take pictures. I wouldn’t think of posting my photos on Instagram, nor am I trying to sell prints of them. But I do carry a small camera wherever I go. (In today’s parlance, this is called an “everyday carry camera”). When I see something that strikes my eye on my habitual walks, I’ll take a photo or two. Sometimes these photos work, often they don’t. It’s still a practice of attention.
(The photo at left was taken up the street returning from my morning walk a couple days ago).
15 January 26
Seeing an Old Friend
We attended a conversation this evening between Teju Cole and John Gossage on photography. Here are my notes.
14 January 26
Francis At The Feeder
As Pica has noted, we enjoy watching hummingbirds. We have set up two hummingbird feeders in our yard, one on the east and the other on the south side of the house which we refill the feeders with syrup twice a week. Anna’s hummingbirds are the most common species and are present year-round; we’ve named the individual males of this species Francis. These hummingbirds are highly territorial and will chase each other off from the feeder frequently. Here is a photo I took today with my long telephoto lens of a male Anna’s on the feeder outside the kitchen window.
13 January 26
Zhuzhing Up Your Handwriting
It’s World Sketchnote Week (it used to be a single day) and I attended a couple of sessions yesterday. One was by a Graphic Recording colleague, Heather Martinez, whose fame as a lettering artist is well known in our field and who has taught me in particular a great deal about different lettering styles, effective for writing at speed and at scale.
Her session yesterday was more about spicing up your sketchnoting lettering, which is a much smaller canvas. But what struck me was that she seemed to think that joining all the letters — American cursive — is faster than other methods.
I remember reading Tom Gourdie’s Improve Your Handwriting long ago — I think I was still in college — and it is long out of print, though digitized versions are available through the Internet Archive among other places. One thing I’ve always remembered is his assertion that any handwriting that loses legibility at speed is useless. (Gourdie was a master of Italic handwriting as evidenced in the image. It has gone the way of the dodo in the UK as well as most other places; this book was published in 1978, when there was still some hope of improving national handwriting among British schoolchildren.) But to do this some ligatures must be lost — it’s not faster to join up the letters when to do so makes an awkward and lengthy detour.
I found the image at right where he is excoriating the Palmer method as illegible — though few people under 80 use it anymore, and indeed few American (or British!) adults under the age of 50 do anything at all that could be called “cursive.” Sigh. Handwriting is a useful skill in order to retain information, much more effective than typing. Get off my lawn.
12 January 26
One Tree And A House
In the morning before heading to the memorial protest on Saturday, I sketched this house on A Street. As is my practice in winter, I colored it in with the watercolor crayons when I got home. Pica suggested I get an aubergine crayon; here I try it out in the shadows of the tree and the vegetation. I like the richness the color adds.
11 January 26
Busy Day Tomorrow
Our patterns of sleep seem to be shifting a bit now that Numenius is retired and we are sleeping much later into the morning than we used to. I can’t tomorrow, though, because I have a number of timed engagements, all of which are pleasurable but which mean I need to be up, dressed, and with my wits about me by 8 am. (I used to rise often before 5, so yes, this is a big change.)
The final of these engagements at 4 pm is a discussion about this recently published tome through the Sequential Artists Workshop. We are going to discuss a list of Rookie Mistakes contained in the book’s introduction, which include not thinking through the visual story, writing way too much, underestimating how long it takes to draw a comic, taking sloppy notes, and refusing to edit or cut anything. I’m afraid this last one is a big constraint for me — why draw it if it’s going to go? — but I hope to have enough of a thumbnail draft of one project to be able to share it next Saturday.
10 January 26
Memorial In Central Park
We went to the memorial held in the afternoon in Central Park here in Davis for Renee Good who was murdered earlier this week by ICE in Minneapolis. There was a good turnout of several hundred people, some of them wandering over from the tail end of the Farmers Market, and the memorial was marred only by a disruption by our town’s Moms for Liberty loon (Lady, I’d like to hear what the pastor is saying, thank you, I thought).
On YouTube later I watched a bit of a conversation between historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman about this moment. A fragment from this:
(HCR) “And you know, I quite frankly never wanted to live through historic times. I just got to lay that out there.” (JF) “And I wanted to sit in archives and read dead people’s mail. Like that was our job.”
9 January 26
Escoda Ultimo
An Escoda travel brush arrived today. It’s the synthetic fiber Ultimo #12, a large round brush that can hold a crazy amount of water but also holds a very sharp point.
I am not averse to using waterbrushes like the Pentel Aquash, but I’m looking for a little more control. This brush seems to be able to handle all kinds of things I might throw at it. More anon.