23 December 07
Seven Weeks After the Oil Spill
Shining, the bay. Out to the horizon.
(This is my contribution to Illustration Friday’s theme, Horizon.)
21 December 07
Wild Dude, Wild Dog
Jonathan Papelbon’s dog ate the World Series ball. The Boston Red Sox closer, who became famous during this year’s post-season for dancing jigs to a tune of the Dropkick Murphys, lost the ball given to him by catcher Jason Varitek after the final out of the 2007 World Series when his bulldog Boss jumped up on the counter and started using it as a rawhide chew toy. “He tore that thing to pieces,” Papelbon said. One New England dog trainer is wondering why the ball was on the counter where the dog could reach it. “Bad dog owner. Bad, bad, bad…” she says.
20 December 07
Typography and Other Design Delights
In a do-or-die attempt to master positioning on web pages with cascading style sheets, and taking advantage of a relatively slow time at work, I’ve been availing myself of the courses available at Lynda.com, which were paid for by my employers earlier this year but which I’ve not had a chance to get to. There is a bewildering number of online courses on offer, and while I’ve been working steadily through CSS2 Essential Training, I couldn’t help but have a gander at InDesign CS2 Professional Typography, or Typographic Principles (or Audio or Podcasting or Alpha Channels or dot dot dot).
This all comes at a good time, because I found out today that Robert Brinkhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, an essential book that came out after I’d trained as a graphic designer, is being applied to web design by Richard Rutter. Hints on how to control spaces between words and kerning using style sheets are going to be a huge help to me.
(Language Hat referred me to Rex Sorgatz’s Fimoculous and his Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading, which provided the above link through Drawn; it’s a fantastic list. A couple of particularly quirky finds: Strange Maps, whose maps are fascinating but whose typography in the text is a bit lamentable (hope they look up the Rutter, above), and Quotation Marks, to which all comers are invited to submit photos of inappropriate use of quotation marks.
19 December 07
But When Should Be The Holiday?
UC Davis researchers have calculated that the solar system is 4.568 billion years old, give or take about a million years or so. They established this figure in a study of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, comparing ratios of chromium-53 to manganese. They do not report the day of the week it all began.
17 December 07
Christmas Bird Count
Too too tired to post this last night… Yesterday Numenius and I hiked Thompson Canyon, northeast of Lake Berryessa, to the ridge and back, spending most of the day in oak woodland and about an hour and a half in chaparral, where we failed to find our target bird, sage sparrow (though it was blowing cold and hard up at the ridge by the time we got there).
My feet are not good hikers and I decided to sit out the side trip up to the spring, armed with a handy-talkie and my tangerines and a sketchbook. I had a close encounter with a pair of wrentits that kept emerging from a brush pile, swishing their long tails this way and that. I’ll post sketches later on Bird by Bird.
It was a beautiful place to hike. Too bad we had the company of some dirt bikers and guys with chain saws cutting up wood (makes hearing bushtits somewhat challenging) but were rewarded at the end by a beautiful varied thrush, one of only two seen the entire day.
We were both weary but had thought to bring along some of the Xocolatl that Linda sent; definitely the best way to revive flagging energies!
13 December 07
Black Cat Ale
You thought you were coming home with a case of your favorite microbrew…
12 December 07
Little Things
For the “Little Things” theme in Illustration Friday. This creature emerges from decomposing piles.
11 December 07
A Peek Into Studio B
Our bird illustration workshop Sunday was at the Davis Art Center. Next door to our classroom was the weaving studio, Studio B. It was unoccupied, so I poked my nose in. Hundreds of weaving bobbins were on the shelves in the studio, the yarns arranged in color order forming a very pretty sight.
Once again I’ve gotten fascinated by color and its mysteries. But my peek into that room reminds me why I am much more interested in drawing and watercolor painting than color photography — it seems such a hard problem to photographically capture the color in that room and make a successful print of it. Why not just work directly and apply pigment on brush to paper?
9 December 07
Scale
“You should draw birds at different sizes,” said Jack.
It made me realize that I draw birds the size I see them. And it doesn’t have to be that way. (For an account of our fantastic bird illustration workshop today, see my account on Bird by Bird.)
9 December 07
Hoping For A Goshawk
This afternoon we went a little hike up the ridge east of Cold Canyon. In part this was to allow us to look up Thompson Canyon on the opposite side of Putah Creek, where we will be doing our Christmas Bird Count a week from tomorrow. It is evident it will be quite a hike next week. Our target birds include sage sparrow and pileated woodpecker. On the way back we stopped at the co-op, ran into Laura D. who said that one year a while back when she did Thompson Canyon they saw a goshawk. Maybe we’ll have similar luck.