Day 42: Wintermoon

 

Wintermoon (1996 or 1997) Digital collage using altered Paintshop Pro "tubes" (clipart brushes).

Intended as a desktop background. Done for fun, and I ended up being really happy with it, except for the black rim around the moon, which is from a "moon phases" tube I made without thinking what I'd really like to use it for. Not all night skies are black.

Plans to re-do in the future. Maybe.

Days 40 and 41: Portrait and Nimbus

 

Portrait (1989) Pencil on paper.

If you were a young woman during the mid-1980's, you may well guess who this young man is. If not, well, the hair is pretty typical of pop musicians of the time. It's one of my best pencil portraits. Still.




Nimbus (2007) Work in progress - current state is a digital painting, incorporating some source photographic elements. Worked in Adobe Photoshop over a scan of the pen and ink study.

An angel, or a djinn, or some other winged, supernatural being.

For the hell of it.

IllustrationFriday: Day 39: Milo?

 

Milo? (2007) Digital. Family snapshot, cropped, re-edged and digitally edited in Photoshop, with added text.

The Illustration Friday theme this week is "Remember." This piece, which I have been working on variations of for a couple of years, is the perfect thing. There were two previous versions (in 2002, I think), but this time I started from the original snapshot and reworked towards the real feel I wanted, which was something evocative of the golden cast of good childhood memories.

There really was a puppy named Milo, but I don't know if this was him. He (and his other dog family members) beloged to my aunt and uncle, who were forever fixing up this enormous old house of theirs. We lived nearby and my uncle was pretty close to his sisters (my mom and aunts), and he was really a great influence to have in my life, since my mom was a single parent at the time. The snapshot was taken in early or mid 1975, I would have been about 4, before I went into kindergarten in the fall. Most of the dogs, my aunt, my cousins and the house, were still around into my teens. My uncle wasn't - he died on my sister's birthday the year after this was taken.

I don't know if he took this picture or if my aunt took it. I don't really care which dog it was. It's a little bit of a lost time, and that's why I keep it.

Day 38: colorplay

Untitled (colorplay) (1997) dilute gouache on bristol.

Another quickie, just for fun with color. Kind of looks to mee like a parrot in motion.

Day 37: Snow Fairy

 

Sonw Fairy (2002?) Gouache over pencil on marker paper (don't do this). Some retouching to fix paper rippling that didn't scan well.

I had to do some serious retouching of this quickie, because I chose to use dilute gouache on marker paper, and, of course, the paper rippled badly.

It's another anime/manga influenced piece, and I did it super-fast to fill a frame when decorating a new apartment a few years back.

Day 36?

Day 36 was called on account of thunderstorms and my taking too damn long to finish the piece I wanted to post. That one will be up in a week or two. My muse bit me on the ear, and I have to do Much More Work on that one.

Many appo-logies for the incon-weeeniences.

Herbert: A Pet In A Jar

Mad-kitchen-science, or biology is delicious.

We keep a yeast colony in a large lidless glass jar in our kitchen. His name is Herbert, because it seems like a good name for a pet in a jar. "He" is covered with a red-and-white napkin tied, bandanna-style, over the mouth of the jar. I take some out and feed him about once a week, more often in hot weather if he's not refrigerated.

The flavor is really good, a lot like a good San Francisco sourdough, and it seems to have a lot to do with how I feed him.

Here's my method for making your own sourdough, with a good west-of-the-rockies flavor.

Making Herbert

Preparation and utensils:
Get a large glass jar, a 1.5 litre or 2 quart size, in tempered glass (so sterilizing it isn't a cause for high blood pressure), and a clean square of close-weave cloth, large enough to tie around the mouth of the jar easily. Wash, rinse thoroughly, then boil the cloth and allow to dry (in the drier on HOT is good). Sterilize the jar with boiling water, by pouring boiling water into it after filling with warm, then hot tap water, or by immersing in a canning kettle (if you have one). Also sterilize any utensils you will use - measuring cups and spoons, plastic chopstick(or spoon or whisk), and wash your hands well.

Science note! Use only glass, plastic or wood utensils for wet ingredients, as metal utensils can affect the pH of the yeast mixture in some way. Stainless isn't as bad as, say, iron or copper, but stainless isn't really stainless - it's resistant, and if its coating of oxidation-resistant molecules is damaged (by scratching, for example), iron oxides can get into your mixture and affect the yeast.

Wood safety: I you use a wood spoon, get anew one. Always scald the wood before use, if you choose to use one, and keep it ONLY for use with your sourdough. I have not found that using wood is really better than plastic in this regard, so It's much more of a hassle than it's worth.

Once everything is ready, you can start.

Prepare a boosted sourdough starter in the jar:
Take equal parts (about a cup, by volume, but you can use a little more or less, or even double it) of the following:

• water - boil and then cool to lukewarm
  
• milk - scald (heat just until small bubbles form, do not boil) and cool until lukewarm
  
• flour - Unbleached all-purpose white flour, or white bread flour

Place these in the jar together, and mix until creamy with only few lumps. Next add:

• 1 packet OR 1 scant tablespoon of instant yeast

Stir the yeast in gently, cover with the cloth, tying it tightly. Set your starter aside for several hours or a couple of days. How long depends on the ambient temperature and humidity in your kitchen. 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, with 35% to 40% humidity is just about right. Cooler, it takes longer, and drier, it can also take a little longer. Yeast likes warmth and moisture, just like we do.

Watch the activity level - after your pet yeast colony has foamed up and subsided (may take a few hours or up to a day), you need to add some more food to keep it going during the initial colony formation period. Add one of the following at a time, stir, cover and wait for the foam/collapse cycle to complete (each time will take a little longer until the colony is well established).

• A rough handful of potato flakes OR a small boiled, peeled and mashed potato
  
• A rough handful of rice baby cereal OR 1/2 cup pureed cooked rice OR 3 TBSP of rice flour
  
• 1 Tbsp sugar (any kind - whatever you use in everyday cooking)
• A rough handful of flour

Each time you feed your incipient colony during this first week or so, add a different food. You can follow the list in sequence if you like. This develops the complex flavor of a good sourdough. If it seems a little thick, add a little water until it's about the consistency of sour cream.

Science note! The reason we add several different starch types (and a sugar) to our developing colony is because the starches are metabolized to produce slightly different flavors by our yeasts. The starches taste slightly different to us, but the yeasts make those differences more apparent. Rice, potato and other starches are used to create different flavor complexes by bakers for this reason.

After your sourdough has developed a good flavor, you can keep it semi-dormant in the fridge. You can check the flavor by smelling the colony - it ought to smell like a good sourdough loaf, with a good sharp tang and a few deeper notes created by the mixture of starches used to make it.

Go on, give it a name. I'm all for naming your yeast colony.

Maintaining Herbert

Feed once a week if you will be keeping it dormant, using a mixture of 2tbsp flour, 1 tsp sugar, 2tbsp water alternated with an equivalent amount of rice or potato starch and water.

To use, take it out of the fridge and set it on the counter overnight, and feed it if looks a little low. To activate your yeast, or keep it fed if you are using it regularly, feed it a combination of equal parts flour, potato starch, and rice starch (add a little sugar if you need it to start a little faster), mixed with water, milk (not too often), or whey (I use whey I set aside after making cheese at home). Use for baking, making pancakes, lots of stuff. Sometimes, when I don't want to wait for a sourdough loaf, I'll add a cup to a regular recipe just for the flavors.

Every once in a while, when the jar gets a bit crusty around the top ( I do this every 2 months), transfer the sourdough to a clean temporary container ( I use a large mixing bowl/measuring cup), cover with a clean cloth, then clean and sterilize the jar and the cloth cover. We refer to this as "Herbert's Bath Day" around here.

If your colony gets too big and you aren't interested in baking that day, make pancakes.

Recipes for using your starter:

• How to Make Authentic San Francisco Sourdough French Bread
• Sourdough Breads at Allrecipes.com
  
• S. John Ross's Sourdough page

Sourdough science:

• Sourdough at Howstuffworks
• Sourdough at WikiPedia

Next Installments: Pancakes! and a couple of modernized genuine-antique bread recipes for using your colony.

Day 35: Nikon Eyes

The Girl With the Nikon Eyes (1997?, 2007) Original: pen and ink with later coloring using gouaches on bristol board. Digital version: Scanned, filtered for increased focal impact. Not retouched otherwise.

This may actually be an older work - I didn't date it, it may be as old as 1991 or 1992, in pen and ink form. I know I colored it around 1996 or 7. In any case, I was reading quite a bit of cyberpunk of some stripe or other at the time, and was particularly taken with the idea of camera-implants in place of eyes. I was also fond of anime. Still am.

The original image was okay, but not focused on the subject enough, and I was never able to really make it work, even when I gave in and colored it. The coloring helped, but not enough. The digital editing finally did the trick, though it took several iterations and layering of focalized blur and lighting effects to make it pop the way it's always been supposed to.

Days 33 and 34: tablet sketches

So, I spent the weekend digging around in boxes at Mom's and finally located my stylus. It was cunningly hidden in the bookshelf box for my copy of Adobe Illustrator. I'm so happy to have it back, but it's been so long I may have to relearn using it. A stylus is a thing between mousedrawing and using a pencil on paper, a bit of both and a little disconcerting to get used to. These are what I came up with today that was worth saving:

 

Wry Girl (2007) wacom tablet and Adobe Illustrator, stock brushes.
She's really very Lynda Barry. I didn't figure that out until I was done, but there she is. Maybe I was channeling or something... This is my first sketch with my tablet since getting it unpacked after a year.



Hope (2007) Adobe Illustrator, stock brushes, sketch from photograph with my good old Wacom ArtZII.

This is a quickie, illustration version of the IF subject theme for last week. My photographic version, really the first part of the process, is day 31. I thought I'd go ahead and finish what I started, even if the week is over, so here's what was in my head to begin with.

day 32: Irreconcilable Differences

 

Irreconcilable Differences (2007) Digital, mouse drawn in Adobe Illustrator.

My entry for Illustration Friday this week. The theme is Polar, and I got this strong feeling of "polar opposites" in human relationships and this is the quick result. Two people, so different in personality and views that they cannot even face each other. They are shown with simple lines, and backs turned, color and line expressing their essential difference.

Day 31: Gifts of Fortune

 

Gifts of Fortune (2007) Digital photograph, no manipulation. No flash, black and white.

This was meant to be my Illustration Friday entry for last week, but it took me all week to get just the right image. I wanted to do it using traditional photography techniques, or as close as I might be able to come with a digital camera. The theme last week was Fortune, and my feeling about it was to do with the power of family being a profound demonstration of fortune in my life. My second child took four tries, and I consider him a gift - even though both children are treasures, it was much more difficult to achieve that gift the second time, and I had given up trying when we finally got him.

He's my good fortune.

Also, you will note that this is a day late. I took about 4 dozen images last night and only got it posted today. My apologies, today's will be up shortly.

Interview from Nayuh

Okay, i wanted to blog about something besides the baby sweater I'm making out of sock yarn (It looks like a washcloth at this stage and I've been working on it for 2 weeks), so I volunteered to be interviewed by Nayuh of Hello There! Here goes!

1. What three things would you take with you to a deserted island?

Probably knitting (this means all of it, plus the stash), books and an MP3 player full of music with a bottomless battery. That's teh totally dream-perfect-vacation list.

Practically? A knife, a spool of good strong twine, layerable clothes that I could potentially use for other stuff (like a net shirt ... for washing stuff in the ocean). As long as there was other stuff already there (like fruit, water, trees, animals), I'd work things out.

2. What one thing would you make illegal if you had that power?

Stupidity. I mean the willful kind that people/companies use as an excuse to injure others.

Also selfishness. And meanness. Most of the other stuff is already illegal.

3. What one thing would you never buy in a dollar store, no matter how much of a bargain it was?

Food. Dollar store food just creeps me out. It's always the stuff that nobody would buy at a regular store because it's too nasty. If I'm going to spend a buck on food, I'll go buy a bag of rice - at least then I know what's going into my body.


4. What is your dream job?

Easy! Getting paid to do creative work. All my most beloved jobs (except one) have been creative work - graphic design, costume design, set design, window dressing, house restoration. I once took a life-size dummy to work on the bus, for a window display at the bookshop I worked in, and even the scary/crazy people moved away from me!

5. What is your least favorite household chore?

I hate folding/putting away laundry. Hate it. I also hate it when I can't find my underpants, though, so I have to put my clothes away.

Want to play? Here’s the scoop:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Day 30: Birth Announcement

 

Birth Announcement (2003) Gouache and inks on bristol board over pencil. 11x14.

Celtic knotwork and calligraphy panel, meant to mark the brith of my first child.

day 29: Wings

 

Wings (1999) Pen and ink

Design for articulated angel wings, anchored and supported by a set of 18th century stays.

I designed and built a set of wings for a freind for Halloween 1999, and this one of the design drawings.

Day 27 and 28: Red and Blame

 

Red (1999) Digital revision of Blue.

A pretty simple color-change revision, but fairly interesting on its own.



Blame (1999) Final digital version of Blue.

Some filtering, cutting through to a layer underneath that contained Red, and text, which was copied from a core dump message.

Day 26: Recipes for Disaster

 

Recipes For Disaster cover (2000) "cover" art for webzine, digital, collage.

Cover art for splash page of a goth-themed cooking webzine I maintained from 2000 to 2002.

Composed of scans of some funeral-themed dessert plates and the elements from the chapter heading plate I posted earlier. The web project actually grew out of the print project, and they ended around the same time.

Day 25: Penny

 

Penny (2007) Digital, Adobe Illustrator.

First - the inspiration is a ferret we live with (it's impossible to own something that habitually escapes). They are very calligraphic creatures, they almost seem to have been designed with brushes in mind. Odd, as their hair would certainly make a good artist's brush.

In any case, as I have spent a good bit of my time doing both pen and brush calligraphy, I have wanted to try and capture that essential mustelid line, which is so liquid, moreso even than Steinlen's cats. This would be my first attempt, consider it a figure study. It's all done with vector lines in Illustrator, mouse guided, as the stylus is still in parts unknown (I ought to just order a replacement).

If I ever get my sumi-e brushes unpacked, I'll try a real brushwork portrait of her. I'd be ashamed if I did not. Pixel pushing is a skill that still feels like cheating to me, no matter how hard it is and no matter that my hand still guides the tools. Maybe it's the "undo" feature that makes it feel that way.

Day 24: James, Sleeping

 

James, Sleeping (2007) Sketch, 7x11. Pencil on drawing paper, finger smudged/erased shadows and highlights.

This is a simple sketch of my sleeping infant. I can't tell you how weird it is to draw someone who is sleeping in your lap without disturbing them. I think I did well, for a quick, rough sketch.

I'm going to be doing more life-drawing exercises, and some of them will be good enough to post here.

Illustration Friday: Spring

 

Spring (2007) Digital painting, incorporating collage elements from original reference photographs. Photoshop 5, mouse, and digital camera.

I'm leaping into Illustration Friday wholeheartedly, if a little late this week. The theme is green - and I think I captured what I think of when I think of green.

The seedling is a basil seedling in my kitchen garden. I was going for a feeling of deep, bourgeoning greenness and life, as we usually have here in late April or May. I'm thinking I might have got it, though the skies are all early April.

I did all the masking/drawing/painting with my mouse, as my tablet stylus is AWOL (I love moving). I only used a few filters - fresco, high pass, and gaussian blur. All else is done with the basic photo retouching tools, and a couple of brushes. The tree is real, but doesn't look anything like that, the leaves are parsley, made into brushes, and the statice on the ground is the pink-frosted top of my redbud tree, or at least it started that way. The clouds were photographed today -4 photos-, and layered and cloned and smudged around until they were right.

Day 23: August Hunt

 

August Hunt (2004) Pencils, ink and gouache on bristol board.

Final composition of this piece, most of the comments are the same for the structure. However, the colorwork presented its own problems and challenges.

I had to match the two different blues in the arc of sky, and the gilding of the figures had to be done after the underpainting, so I referenced the pencil composition and the original work (which I was intentionally imitating) at every brushstroke. I had some difficulty with the lake and the stream, and I'm still not completely pleased with them. The rest of the landscape was fairly straightforward to color, as I've done many landscapes in gouache and watercolor, some of which I even like.

While the horses may seem clumsy, when compared to the original manuscript illustration, they are stylistically identical, and seemed, in the original, to have been created from templates. A typical technique involved pouncing powdered pigment through a pinpricked template to create a stylistically standard underdrawing. This enabled the master to concentrate on the fine colorwork, and his apprentices to do the bulk of the layout work without constant supervision, and without affecting the continuity of the piece.

I did not use pouncing to transfer the pencils to the final board, I used pressure transfer and overdrawing of the penciled design, as I did not wish to destroy the pencilled sheet.

The horses were colored from photographs of real horses belonging to the owner of the piece and her closest friend. The dogs are drawn from life - one is a breed standard pug, and the other is a pug mix, with a long snout. The owner does, indeed, possess brilliant red har.

Making stuff and making myself do stuff

Well, I was carping about low traffic on one of my blogs (the art blog) over on Knittyboard, and I got some positive feedback and advice that had not occurred to me before, and I realized that I post things about crft elsewhere without updating here. SO I'm updating here. I'll try to keep to an "every Wednesday or more often" schedule.

Now to the making stuff part - actually unmaking stuff. I have these two sweaters that I got from the "unsellable to due to defects" box at our church rummage, and I've been frogging them. I have several balls of lovely laceweight soft tan yarn (hmm, a lace shawl for me?) and several balls of a rich, warm coffee brown almost sock weight.

Last night I skeined up two balls of the tan laceweight, and washed it in HOTHOT water (the damage was moth holes), and it's relaxed into a lovely smooth yarn with a little bit of spring in it. Once it dries, I'm balling it up to get started on that shawl for me.

No idea what I'll make with the coffee-color yarn, but the wee bit I test washed already has a nice soft hand.

What got me started on finally frogging and recycling the sweaters (I've had them for over a year now) was sucking it up and rescuing the formerly lovely skein of cobweb weight chocolate brown romney handspun singles (mine, too, which makes what follows so much worse) that my dog ate. I untangled it, wound it into three small balls (she CHEWED the skein, how could she? Well, she's a DOG, and I should have locked my stash in a safe), and took another small skein of cobweb weight singles (this was a lovely purple, which I'd dyed myself ages ago), balled it up, and plied them up together into a nice sock weight 3-ply.

Not enough for a sock, of course, because they were sample skeins I'd done, but enough for an earband or something like that. Maybe I can pair it with the coffee-colored recycled yarn for something bigger...

We're Still Here

...but it's raining today.

I wanted to do yardwork today, I had ambitious plans to set out my seedlings. I have beds planned out in my head, but the ground is soggy and it's still a little bit chilly.

They ought to be fine a few more days inside.

Day 22: Herod and Salome

 

Herod and Salome (2003) 8x10 pen and ink Illustration, some digital cleanup. Intended for print.

This is one of a set of several pen and ink illustrations made from photographs of 12th century stone carvings, which were done for a small-press publication on the clothing of the era. I used about 10 different photographs of the particular piece as the source documentation, and I'm not even sure I consider it art - this feels more like a technical illustration of an extant artefact than my own art.

Day 21 (late): Starfield

 

Starfield (1997) Digital painting, seamless tiling design.

An early version of this was made for my site, then later I tweaked and improved it to this, for a site design suite I put together for my sister. It's one of two I made that I'm still quite happy with. Both are essentially textile designs that were generated for web use.

PSA: Days off

I took Saturday and Sunday off for the holiday. Unintentionally. I thought I would have time, but I didn't.

Today's art will be up later.

Terrors in the Night, or Clown House Repairs

...actually, bad/strange/funny dreams with more house relevance, rather than real disasters. Which would you choose? I thought so.

My dream began with us sitting on the front porch, talking (a transcript is not available as the soundtrack has bee lost), followed by an enormous "runch" sort of noise and the building shuddering, with the center third of the house, and only that portion, listing to one side. After much comical sliding around, all of us rush downstairs, to the cellar.

There is an enormous soft spot in the foundation, as if the blocks had deflated. We immediately produce pole jacks from nowhere (I seem to recall them unfolding neatly from our pockets - that'd be nice, wouldn't it?) and jack the house back into its normal position. We're all wearing brightly colored overalls at this point.

Then we produce cans of "inflatable paste" which is then used to repair the wall. I think it's manufactured by the same imaginary company that makes Prognostikote. I don't recall there actually being air pumps, but there probably were. There were balloons, but I'm not sure what they were for. There were the long skinny kind, used for making animals. And a lot of slapstick.

Eventually we finished the repair and went back upstairs.

Do you think my house is trying to tell me something? We haven't had much time to work on it, beyond the Day Of Muck, for several weeks.

Incidentally, I'm not afraid of clowns.

Day 18: Untitled

 

Untitled (2002) Digital photograph, some retouching.

Here's another clear winter day photograph. It's very much a non-religious Chrsitmas card sort of image, but it works. That was a good photography day.

Day 17: Doubletake

 

Doubletake (1987) Study for serigraph. 9x12. Gouache and pencil on paper.

I may still have one of the serigraphs around here. This was the study for a series of 50 three-color, poster-sized serigraphs I did as my final project in my favorite design course in college, and my prof got the progressive set. The stencil film was hand cut, and I had to resize and manually do color seperations (black, red, silver) from my study. I did it the old-fashioned way, using a grid and a photocopy of the 9x12 design. I wish I still had the butcher paper I drew the seperations on, for cutting the films, but I cut through them to cut the films more accurately.

I'd love to do it again - and I mean the whole old-fashioned, hand-cut stencils, messy, dirty, unrefined silkscreening technique. I did another run of a different size with photo-sensitive stencil medium and I don't like it as much, it feels like cheating. If I'm going to do that, I might as well just print the things out on a printer, or send it off to a printing service. Serigraphy, for me,is about the process and getting my hands dirty.

It's now the oldest one here. It's twenty years old.

Note: yes, this one is late. I spent all of yesterday making tortillas and prepping dinner. I think I'm happiest when I'm getting my hands dirty. I'll do today's in a few minutes.

Day 16: Infant Figure Study

 

Figure Study of My Son (2003) Pencil on paper.

Pretty straightforward - my contstantly moving infant son had passed out on the floor, I picked up a pencil and my sketchpad and whipped out a sketch. It came out well enough to make me happy, and I really ought to do that for the second baby, Real Soon Now.

One of my most prized things in my family's collection of photos and keepsakes is a polychrome crayon (as in crayola-64-colors) sketch of me done by my mom's friend Nadia when I was about 6. Photos only tell what you looked like, but portraits and sketches tell how others saw you. Which is more valuable?

Day 15: Erishkegal

 

Erishkegal (2000) Digital painting, incorporating collaged photographic elements and text.

I was reading a lot of paleohistory and books about Sumerian religous texts. I felt, all along, that Erishkegal (the goddess of the underworld and gaurdian of the dead) kind of got the short end of the stick during the world's creation. She certainly isn't happy in the Songs of Innana, she obviously feels cheated, and is envious of the real life that the love/fertility goddess gets to have.

I wanted to make a portrait of her as the bride of the underworld. This is it.

day 14: Girl

Girl (1996) (three stages) Pen over pencil underdrawing, dark areas filled with black marker, with red marker to add color, then the image was photocopied and strategically erased.

I saw a similar pose in a magazine and wanted to try drawing it. The final image turned out wiht an entirely differenct fell (not surprisingly) than the inspiration image. I played with techniques, since the drawing itself is not technically challenging, and I wanted to do more with it. I inked the sketch, filling large areas with magic marker, then I photocopied the inked image and made it as dark as I could, deciding to use the surplus toner as a sort of scratchboard, except that I used a pink eraser instead of a stylus.

It came out pretty well, for a piece of "office supply art."

Textual interlude: Toy design

Hey, where's day 13? There is no day 13. Look! My April fool joke was a lack of posting.

I'm thinking making a few plush Gregors. Okay, stuffed Gregors, as I suspect a plush cockroach wouldn't really work. Maybe an edition of 5. Or so. With accessories... Anyone interested? They'd auction for a starting price of about 30 dollars.

I'm also considering some more dolls. Still percolating, though.

More Later.