23 July 25
Two Days at The Marine Mammal Center
I have just spent two days in the fog on the Marin Headlands, doing graphic recording for a workshop on vessel strikes on whales. Climate change and other causes are forcing whales to change their movement patterns and when they get hit by a ship — or even a pleasure craft, like a sailboat — they get injured and often killed. There is an estimate that of every dead whale that is recorded, either floating or washed up on shore, there are probably ten that are never seen. This is particularly bad in the case of gray whales which have been coming into San Francisco Bay more and more to feed, a body of water that is full of risks for them.
This was a group of scientists, tech folks and policy folks assessing the ways to find out more about where the whales are, what the boat traffic is doing (this is very well recorded for large vessels, less so for small fishing or pleasure craft), and what can be done to reduce or mitigate the risks. It’s a bit depressing especially in the current funding crisis but being around people who are so passionate about what they do, who keep trying to find ways to save the planet in the face of unbelievable odds, was inspiring.
22 July 25
A Photographic Diary
I recently watched a YouTube video by Emily Lowrey (her channel is “Micro Four Nerds”) entitled “how to document your life with your camera (and WHY!)”. I like this concept and am trying it out. One’s day-to-day life produces plenty of photographic material — look for it and have a camera with you. But the photos should be about what you do in your own life rather than other subjects, however visually interesting they may be. In this vein, I went grocery shopping this morning, and here is my record of that event.
21 July 25
When Things Go Awry...
… sometimes it’s just easier to rip the knitting back down to the lifeline, which I eventually did, but not before attempting complex string surgery…
20 July 25
Blues Are Hard
I have gotten through my project of selecting 7 different picture profiles for my compact Sony camera. As related previously, I went down this rabbithole because the skies in the reference photos of the trees I’d sketch were tinged cyan (see the example at right). I am better off now after finding some good profiles, but Blues Are Still Hard.
To begin with historically, blue pigments have been very hard to come by. Taking one example, until it was synthesized by the chemist Christian Gmelin in 1828, ultramarine was only obtainable by laboriously preparing the mineral lapis lazuli sourced mainly from Afghanistan. (I should read science writer Kai Kupferschmidt’s book from 2021, Blue: In Search of Nature’s Rarest Color).
Next, in summertime here the skies are blue with nary a cloud to be seen for months at a time. Photographically this becomes a challenge because if I’m exposing on a street-level subject, the skies will tend to be overexposed and blown-out. This is not what the eye sees, since the eye-brain has a much higher dynamic range than any camera. In other words, our visual system is quite capable of taking in a bright blue sky together with details in shadows underneath shrubbery at the same time, but cameras cannot handle this.
I sketch using either watercolors or watercolor pencils as my color medium. Here is a different problem. Consider a scene where one is looking through sunlit leaves up into a bright blue sky. The leaves may end up having a lighter value than the blue sky because they are transmitting direct light. This is really hard to paint in watercolor – one can’t do a uniform blue wash for the sky without laboriously masking out the leaves, and then painting the leaves a very light yellow green. Photographing such a scene isn’t much easier because of aforementioned dynamic range problems.
At least I’ve worked out that the best pigment for painting Northern California skies is cobalt blue. This doesn’t necessarily hold for other places in the world.
19 July 25
A Complex Lace Knitting Project
I know I’m supposed to be spinning: it’s the Tour de France/Fleece, after all. But I’ve been sitting on my hands for a long time, itching to get back into a complicated lace project. I have some beautiful laceweight silk I’ve had for longer than I can remember where I bought it, and since the Diamas shawl calls for exactly this kind of yarn, I stopped fighting the urge.
All knitting is basically looping successive rows of string together. When you mirror the stitches on the back you get the familiar smooth front and bubbly back most people are familiar with. You can cross these stitches (cables) or you can insert pairs of yarnovers with decreases to make openwork lace. This particular pattern also features nupps, an Estonian-style bobble in which seven knit stitches are inserted into a single stitch in the row below and then gathered together at the top, making for a textured highlight.
I have some travel coming up and a good lace project to get my teeth stuck into will be great. But I’ll insert a second lifeline when I get to the end of the current chart (there are three), in case I mess up. I finally broke down and paid for a subscription to KnitCompanion because this is a complex enough pattern that I can use the extra help keeping my place. Ripping back to where you made a dumb mistake is never fun….
18 July 25
Daily Sketch - Figs
Sketched with watercolor pencils and De Atramentis urban gray ink. None of the figs on this tree are ripe yet – maybe another two or three weeks?
17 July 25
Drawing a Postcard
It’s actually very difficult to find postcards of Davis to send to people around the world through Postcrossing. Often people request “pictures of your town” and there really aren’t any photos for sale here of things like the Davis train station or the Arboretum when the redbud is out. But recently someone I was assigned to send a postcard to wanted a bird, an OWL, and preferably a drawing of one.
I like drawing birds of prey and especially owls. I like giving the suggestion of the softness of their feathers. I hope I did this bird some justice… we have a pair locally; I heard one the other night.
16 July 25
El Foraster
I have started doing a self-paced online introductory Catalan course through the folks at Easy Catalan. In the unit on personal pronouns they recommended looking at the Catalan television series El Foraster (The Outsider) because the presenter, Quim Masferrer, often uses the formal version of the second person singular pronoun, vós, when interviewing older people. Taking their hint, I’ve discovered this to be a quite engaging and enjoyable television show, even though I don’t know very much of the language.
The premise of El Foraster is that the host Quim travels around to the tiniest villages of Catalunya, spends 48 hours interviewing some of the inhabitants, and then afterwards shares his interviews in a monologue given to a group of the villagers. The show is edited so that it intercuts the interviews with video of the monologue to the group, the camera often zooming in on the reaction of the interviewee sitting in the group. Quim is warm-hearted and quite funny; he often concludes his monologue with saying to the villagers “… sou molt bona gent.” (you are very good people).
It’s a pleasure to see the countryside of Catalunya that is highlighted in the series. And it’s a good language learning experience. I watch it with subtitles in Catalan turned on, which helps considerably with comprehension and picking up on pronunciation. Because Quim is always meeting new people, the dialogue patterns will repeat, which is good for learning.
15 July 25
Bureaucracy
I’ve reached the age where there are a lot of bureaucratic rites of passage: Medicare, Social Security, Numenius’s retirement (which has bureaucratic consequences for me as well as for him), and, today, mailing off my request to start collecting my British pension. This was a 16-page form in which I was asked to provide addresses of places I’d lived in the UK (in the mid–late 1980s, good luck with that); dates of trips to the UK including holidays (again, good luck with that); to provide originals of documents proving I’d worked in the UK (well, I had one, but it didn’t give my address or employer); you get the idea. Assembling notarized copies of birth, marriage, and divorce certificates and my forms, I trotted off to get them sent to an office in Wolverhampton. Unfortunately this also entailed some bureaucracy, because tracking wasn’t available from certain services, Fedex would cost over $100 to send, and several false steps (not all of them mine, to be fair) later in the rising heat, I parted with my documents at the US Post Office to the tune of $81.
I say all this not to ask for sympathy but to point out that as people get older we are more easily overwhelmed by these kinds of things. It makes me appreciate my 92-year-old mother’s struggles more and to have a bit more compassion. I came home and wound off all the Tour de Fleece spinning I’d done so far onto storage bobbins, it being a rest day (finally!) in the Tour de France.
14 July 25
Weekend Tree Sketching - Palm
This sketch is from yesterday’s outing to Central Park in Davis. I took my Schmincke pan set of watercolors and appreciated having the cobalt blue handy.