kaberett | Entries tagged with playing catch with art

pixel art (from needlework tapestry) of a room, with a person facing out the window

References (I am absolutely expecting all of these to bitrot, probably in fairly short order, but oh well):

an eBay listing clearly showing the colour codes (which I wound up more-or-less ignoring) as well as the whole pattern (which I didn't)
an Etsy listing with lots of partial, but clear, photos
a Pinterest pin

Software: minor fucking around in GIMP; majority of both attempts in Pixelorama.

The one bad thing I have to say about Pixelorama (... other than the fact that it crashed repeatedly, but hey, its autosaving and recovery were rock-solid) is that I couldn't find any way to banish the once-a-minute "File autosaved..." notifications that popped up in the bottom left corner and then kept rising as they faded out (and similar: effects of ctrl+z, actual saving, ...).

"Huh," said A, "I'm surprised at that, it's the sort of thing I expect to see in old computer games."

"... it is dedicated software for pixel art," I replied.

Good point well made, came the approximate response.

Possibly I will even tip the project.

... and leads with an explanation of "opponency" that I did not quite manage to follow, for reasons that have more to do with typesetting of the ebook than anything else, but which problem I addressed by Visiting Wikipedia.

The wikipedia page on opponent process begins

The opponent process is a color theory...

... and indeed when my eyebrows raised and my eyes flicked over to the table of contents, I was unsurprised to see a section titled "Criticism".

All of which led inexorably on to impossible colors and, delightfully, the line of purples.

Yong has not thus far (I am a little under halfway through the chapter) even gestured vaguely in the direction of the immediately-obvious-to-me-from-the-opening-sentence-on-wikipedia Controversy about opponency, which means that I (i) have no idea and (ii) am poorly equipped to judge how this particular Controversy compares with The Controversy About Mantle Plumes wherein the small number of people who think thermal convective upwellings Aren't What's Going On for a long time were also the only people who cared about the wikipedia page on mantle plumes, which has at some point in the last decade been extensively edited to reflect actual current scientific consensus. Which in turn means that I am unsure how large a grain of salt to take with everything else Yong says!

Meanwhile,

Our [human] lenses typically block out UV, but people who have lost their lenses to surgeries or accidents can perceive UV as whitish blue. This happened to the painter Claude Monet, who lost his left lens at the age of 82. He began seeing the UV light that reflects off water lilies, and started painting them as whitish blue instead of white.

So. Admin: the LRP. I tripped and fell and now I'm kinda sorta corunning lost property.

Our Least Favourite Things To Store are weaponry, because weaponry is generally (i) large, and (ii) not given to stacking well. On the upside, it being large (and expensive) means that mostly it doesn't get lost!

... and then. then. there are the people who acquire weaponry the entire point of which is to fling it away from one's person with gay abandon, preferably in the woods, where it will get lost in the undergrowth.

Throwing daggers are kind of okay? Throwing daggers are small and I am absolutely getting to recognise the usual suspects. Oh, so-and-so was out on a skirmish this afternoon, were they.

But then. there are the arrows.

LRP-safe arrows have a large foam head, in order that they donk only gently against their targets. Commonly one makes some kind of identifying mark on the head, on the basis that lost arrows get deposited into containment bins like great bouquets with their heads upwards. This is not without its risks, though, in that one of the ways arrows commonly break is to have their foam head delaminate, so many people also make marks of some kind on the fletching or the shaft.

My favourite people are the ones who just write their damn PID in multiple places on their arrows, so that regardless of which combination of parts we are handed we are able to send up the Oi, Come Get Your Shit signal.

However. Many people who arch. Do so in multiple systems. And, not actually unreasonably (I concede grudgingly), are reluctant to mark their property with a unique identifier that means them for Admin purposes but might very well mean someone completely different in other systems.

So they draw A Sigil. (Or, in one case we are all very fond of, they carve a beautiful detailed potato stamp.)

This in turn means that it would be, as one of my bosses pointed out about a year ago, Extremely Helpful to have a catalogue of which sigils match to which unique identifiers, again for the purposes of Giving People Back Their Shit.

Attempt the first relied on grainy photos of sigils on textured foam against a busy background printed in black and white.

A few weeks ago I realised that it might actually be better to, uh, record the symbol for use in catalogue, and spent some time thoughtlessly reverting to my default of "trace shit in inkscape, optionally with a stylus on A's tablet", which stalled on "but I don't have digital copies of all the photos".

Today it finally dawned on me that! in fact! almost all of these symbols (potato-stamp maple leaves and foxes aside) are deliberately designed to be amenable to churning out at speed using a permanent marker onto foam, and that even my rudimentary art skills were! in fact! probably! just about up to.......... copying them onto my phone screen using my finger. without needing to trace onto a separate layer at all.

SO THAT IS WHAT I HAVE SPENT MY AFTERNOON DOING, followed by spending my evening compiling the images into a DOCUMENT, and now? a catalogue? exists??? so I just have to gently badger the boss whose idea this was in the first place for any other photos she might have lost down the back of the sofa, and then we can PRINT IT OUT and HAVE A REFERENCE when we are IN A FIELD next week.

And, hey. I made some questionable art. I am pretty proud of myself.

Jenny Beavan Cores 2016: reminiscent of silver birch trunks;

Made up of seven different clays, some local, the 15 Cores appear as if they have been lifted from the ‘earth’ of Eden. The clays – varying in colour and texture – have been blended as a nod toward the local geology; pebbles, crustaceans, flora and fauna have been impressed into the clay to suggest evolution and transition. Water, which was essential to this process, is implied through the blue glazes and the predominance of white clays suggest ‘white gold’, the local name for china clay, while the gold and copper also hint at Cornwall’s other treasures.

Also present, in a very different setting, on a roundabout on our way back home.

Via

body_impolitic_feed, specifically the post Ziz[i]pho Poswa's Amazing Art: Poswa's page at Southern Guild, who represent her.

Via Spirals in Time (Helen Scales): Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, due to their glass sea creatures [ Wikipedia | Atlas Obscura ] and thence onward to their Glass Flowers [ Wikipedia | Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries | Harvard Museum of Natural History ].

Both Spirals in Time and Atlas Obscura make the claim (although I am only quoting the latter here, the former wrote something very similar) "A father-and-son team created a menagerie of incredible glass models using mysterious methods." Please imagine, then, my delight at finding, in the Wikipedia entry for the Glass Flowers:

It is often said that the Blaschkas employed secret techniques now lost; in fact their techniques were common at the time, but their skill, enthusiasm, and meticulous study and observation of their subjects in life were extraordinary, which Leopold ascribed to familial tradition, in a letter to Mary Lee Ware: "Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms ... The only way to become a glass modeler of skill, I have often said to people, is to get a good great-grandfather who loved glass."

Similarly delightful, again via the same Wikipedia article:

Botanist Donald Schnell has called the models "enchanting", and relates his surprise at finding that the models faithfully depict an unpublished detail of a bee's behavior while pollinating a particular plant—a detail which he had privately hypothesized.

Found poking around Kickstarter: The Primordial Dreams tarot, created using an AI art generator and inspired by Neolithic artworks & cave paintings. I am really enjoying the encapsulation of the span of human creativity!

Today's progress: ink.

a sketch of two strawberry leaves, two strawberries, and a flower, now inked

I had to take a medium-length break before inking the final strawberry bracts, because my hindbrain was Very Convinced that there was a Tiger; further decisions about whether I'm going to leave it black-and-white (with some more inked detail?) or colour it in are being left for tomorrow.

I am noodling away gently at the similarities between the iterative process of "pencil blobs -- pencil slightly more defined shapes -- refine shapes further -- consider ink" and that of writing. I am proud of myself for Doing A Thing that I apparently found really quite scary; I am proud also that I can look at it and see Things I Like and Things I've Learned, rather than Everything That's Wrong. Gosh but it's nice to have got here.

Today I appear to have Decided, while mostly dozing grumpily, that I'm enjoying eating strawberries a lot and I actually want to try... drawing some... in my journal... as decoration...?

I've had "do some colouring" on my todo-list for self-care purposes for the last two days and have done only tiny quantities of it (because it makes me happy and is skill acquisition and...) but I have also now achieved a very faint pencil sketch -- which needs inking over and colouring in -- and I am really pleased with how identifiable My First Freehand Sketch In Years (That Isn't Rocks) is. So.

( Read more... )

Today I have mostly been self-soothing by playing around with A's collection of fountain pens, various, from back when it was his hobby of the day, and also by window-shopping. I think I am dithering toward replacing the Pilot Penmanship FP60 I broke the other day by kneeling on it (in such a way that ink did not go all over either the sofa or my trousers, through a combination of both luck and judgement), and also toward getting something with an italic nib for the sake of Fancy Writing.

The Pilot Penmanship is acquirable for £12, which is the basis on which A got me one as a present in the first place without me doing a Concern about What If I Don't Like It (or indeed What If I Break It, as I promptly did), and I think I am still sufficiently interested in Experimenting with it as a primary writing tool that having another go at it isn't wildly unreasonable.

The italic nib I want almost entirely for the purposes of decorative writing in my ongoing journal, and otherwise Messing Around. I have very nearly convinced myself that "I'll enjoy it" is a good enough reason to get (1) it, and (2) a variety of blue sparkly inks.

If this is one of your hobbies also, I would very much enjoy reading your Thoughts And Opinions on the general topic.

I was linked, some time ago, to the Galen Leather writing box, a portable briefcase-slash-desk Thing made out of wood.

I have also been idly contemplating (i) the fact that I have been keeping hand-written notebooks of one kind or another pretty much continuously (albeit with variations in intensity of use) for... over half my life; (ii) while A continues to work from home, I am mostly working from the sofa, with the result that a good half of our very large sofa is covered with highlighters and seeds and printouts of papers and my notebooks various, and I have to go fishing for my pens and pencils down the back of the sofa cushions several times a day; (iii) my absolutely pointless and deeply impractical (at least in the current house) craving for a bureau (in the writing-desk sense); and (iv) my nebulous desire to get... Something... that is solid and tangible and useful and an indulgence as a reward for Finishing The Thesis.

So this afternoon I went hunting and found the term "writing slope" and disappeared in a pile of Etsy tabs and, you know, I'm still not convinced this is actually a thing I want to do but it was very pleasant to spend an afternoon staring at rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Not unrelatedly, I also abruptly decided that the Himmelsscheibe von Nebra [wikipedia (en) | Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte] would be amazing as a notebook cover, and in particular could slot almost seamlessly into the Archer&Olive line (I am thinking, particularly, of the bee)...

... which tangented merrily off into:

(1) German copyright law (see the wikipedia page section Legal Issues for copyright and trademark litigation over an artefact that is three to four thousand years old), the upshot of which is "probably I'm not getting it on a fancy notebook until at least 2027", and

(2) when Archer&Olive say "We’re Female Owned, 100% Vegan, and all of our products come with environmentally responsible packing", they mean "A portion of sales from [the Pride collection] will be donated to the Black Trans Travel Fund"! So that's lovely.

a person sitting on a gray sofa, with loose waist-length rainbow hair

Please forgive the generally unflattering photo and the terrible posture and so on and so forth, but: I've been meaning to post about this for at least a year now and consistently failing to do so, so, here at last is a picture of what A currently has done to his hair. (Just the long side. The other side's an undercut, and there's a bit of an undercut on this side too.)

From top to bottom, the dyes are:
Directions Vermillion Red (we experimented with Postbox Red but it's just consistently hot pink on him, which is great when he wants bi pride hair but less good for this job)
Directions Tangerine (which will turn less red and more identifiably orange over the next week or two)
Crazy Color Canary Yellow
Directions Apple Green
Directions Turquoise
Directions Midnight Blue
Directions Neon Blue (which goes pretty purple-y on A's hair)
Directions Plum

My birthday present from my baby brother arrived today, and I promptly ended up--

-- okay, well, first of all I ended up trying to hunt down visual evidence of anyone having successfully used the bottle opener for anything, and actually found two baffling Americans attempting to provide reviews: exhibit A claims "scissors have a unique role in our lives - they offer more control and more precision than you could ever hope to get out of a knife when you need to cut something", and then goes on to explain that he only uses them in the workshop, on leather and carpet and suchlike; exhibit B tests them on a cucumber.

Anyway, then I moved on to this utterly charming short about Why They're So Expensive (if you would like an elderly Northern master putter-togetherer -- ! -- explaining craftsmanship to you, I can highly recommend it; it's very soothing) and, eventually, the short film about them that went viral.

There is [content notes: death by suicide and other illness] a lot of sad backstory from the last few years, but now, today, they're okay. They've got an increasing number of apprentices (who almost certainly made my set). And -- all of a sudden I find that I am very fondly inclined indeed.

Yoshimoto's Cube, a series of three Excellent Foldy Fiddle Toys featured at MoMA available to view on YouTube.

There's also, and these I do not pretend to understand, a wide variety of origami guides, which I think are mostly for Cube #1?

This came up because I was, during a chat with

simont, fidgeting with one of my toys -- which, as previously mentioned, I first encountered in the gift shop at the Tate Modern. Simon brought out some of his foldy fiddly paper bits with no idea what they were called, we shook the internet, and ta-da! Modern art fell out.

(I am put in mind also of Calder's mobiles -- yes, like nursery mobiles, and I don't think it's just because I went to the Calder exhibition at the Tate Modern a few years back.)

I have had... a lot... of really stressful and grim paperwork to do over the past few days, so I've been bribing myself with Do A Bit, Then Colour In An Leaf.

Ergo.

Walter Hood Fitch's Impatiens flaccida linework, coloured with watercolour pencils

Observations from this round:

I am amused by how obvious the paper buckling is, in the scan
I'm really enjoying the main stem, and some of what I've done with the red-yellow-green gradations
hmm, I appear to have managed greater colour saturation in a couple of places this time
I'm really amused by the differences in texture I'm getting out of the two sets of pencils I'm using
I am still laughing at myself over how alarmed and surprised I was to find my water dish... mostly empty... as I was finishing this up... almost as if... I had been using... water...
still enjoying this hobby

botanical illustration colouring book, showing example and part-coloured page

A friend recently had a birthday party of the "sit in a garden and Use Up Some Of My Art Supplies" variety, and I spent a nontrivial chunk of time frozen up in terror at the idea of Doing Visual Art In Front Of Other People, because I would be Bad at it and they would Judge Me.

Eventually I screwed up my courage to the sticking point, comandeered a small greetings card set up to be coloured in & the watercolour pencils & a mug of water & a paintbrush, and started going.

And... really enjoyed it? I was terrified, but also I... enjoyed it? I enjoyed it.

I like botanical illustration. I like watercolours. I've been too intimidated to actually pick sketching back up since I stopped doing field sketches for work. (Apparently drawing landscapes for the purposes of geology doesn't ping my Art Inferiority Complex, who even knows, even as I spend a lot of time and effort and energy and care over Picking The Right Colours.)

I was talking about this with C, when I went down to Kew with her to look at Chihuly's art & colours & light just brazenly Out There All Over The Place, as we were browsing the shop; I grumbled about the lack of Proper Botanical Illustration colouring books.

A few days later she texted asking for my full postal address; a few days after that, as I've mentioned, a copy The Kew Gardens Flowering Plants Colouring Book showed up for me. It was second-hand and very cheap, because it had already been partly coloured in, which -- as I've also mentioned -- was pretty much perfect, because it meant I wouldn't freeze up in a panic about Ruining It.

sebastienne and

me_and both got me watercolour pencils; I recalled that a local charity shop had a bunch of decent paint brushes at half price; and I have been ever-so-slowly starting to work my way through the book. I started out with beginning to fill in bits the previous owner had partially coloured; there's some works-in-progress ongoing, there. I'm also, in a more concerted fashion, starting to work my way through the untouched pages, one by one, in order, thereby circumventing the decision paralysis of getting caught between "I want to do the plants I'm most enthusiastic about first because I'm most enthusiastic about them" and "I want to do the plants I'm most enthusiastic about last so I'll have learned as much as possible by the time I get to them".

Botanical illustration of bitterroot, printed in black and white then coloured in using watercolour pencils

Of course, immediately after scanning this I spotted the bud I'd managed to skip over, but There We Go.

I have learned a lot over the course of gradually filling this out, including: what specialist watercolour paper is made out of, and why; the different preparations of watercolour paper, and resulting effects; why people like sable paint brushes, and how they're made, and why they're not currently (readily) available in the USA; and a bunch of theory of How Pigments Even.

I'm trying to work out how to balance competing factors of "colour intensity" versus "structural integrity of wood-based paper" (with a side of "how do I get the darker shades the example images are printed with?" to which I think the answer might be "own a bunch of darker pigments"). I'm messing about with techniques (laying down dry, then painting over; picking up pigment from the pencil on a damp paintbrush and then painting with that; drawing onto wet paper...). I'm comparing the properties of the two sets of pencils. I think I learned a lot between the right-hand flower and the left-hand flower.

I'm really enjoying myself.

Watching. A Midsummer Night's Dream (dir. Nicholas Hytner), as a National Theatre Live screening.

With my cousins, on Thursday: the first episode of Good Omens, the first four episodes of Over The Wall, and a lot of music videos various.

Cooking. Flapjack! I had a craving.

Bread experiments continue, with a focus on the trade-offs between flavour and structural integrity.

Boiled up a batch of stock & actually got it into the freezer.

And, for cousins & also All Souls': Kardemummebullar, which turn out to work rather better (in my opinion) with granulated than with caster sugar; smitten kitchen's pear bread, with some experimental tweaks (and bonus nutmeg and cardamom); Seelkuchen, which I'm getting the hang of doing with the jam in the middle; madeleines; scones, which are still not quite doing the thing I am hoping for; shakshuka; experimental caramel popcorn.

Creating. I've been doing a lot of quietly messing around with my watercolour pencils and my botanical colouring book and the... Winsor & Newton Series 7 brushes... I picked up at a charity shop...

So far I have been experimenting mainly with laying down & blending colour dry, then adding water, but I've also been doing a little drawing onto wet paper. On the cards for further experimentation is washes created by laying down a thick layer of colour on some sacrificial paper, picking it up with a wet brush, and then applying it as desired.

A source of minor anxiety is that the colouring book I'm working with has "here's the original with all its colours, here's a black-and-white for you to fill in"... with the original on a rather darker background, such that I'm really not managing to reproduce the saturation. I am spending quite a lot of time gently-but-firmly telling myself that it is Okay, I do not in fact have to Copy It Perfectly, I get to just mess around and see how things go.

Growing. Okay, so: the current batch of Thai basil hasn't died yet (!). AND I made it to the ALLOTMENT (with lots of encouragement from A) where I WRANGLED THE COMPOST BIN A BUNCH (partially filled in a bed!) and took some tentative steps toward constructing the next raised bed structure and confirmed that the water butt is very much Still Leaking, alas.

Playing. UNTITLED GOOSE GAME, COOPERATIVELY, IN A DUVET NEST. I have been running (and honking); Adam has been picking things up and putting them back down (and honking); it's great. WE ARE A HORRIBLE GOOSE. (We got the bell! We watched the credits! we got MORE TODO LISTS.)

Poking. Hatched: a Gible! Two Ferroseed! (Last week: a perfect Swablu.) Raided: some Darkrai.

Pretty much the only thing I've dared do with my watercolour pencils & watercolour pad so far is make myself up swatches, in an approximate colour gradient: scribble out a small block of colour, light to dark, then paint over half of it, so as to get a sense of what all the available range is. Each swatch is fairly small, and labelled underneath in tiiiiiiny writing (because I dug out my 0.05mm mapping pen as Appropriate to the task).

This has since spent most of its time sat on the coffee table while I try to work up the courage to do Something Else, and has been making me happy not least because, well, colour gradients are a thing I like.

I have been surprised and gratified, however, at how many other people have passed comment on It Being Pretty, on their way through our living room.

Watercolour pencils, because I really enjoyed messing around with them at a friend's the other weekend and I have the Succulent Dragons colouring book and actually I enjoy colouring in even if I'm still scared to actually sketch things of my own to colour and I'm... allowed to do things I enjoy badly. (Also I dithered over What Exactly To Buy to A & now I am apparently getting a present, so that's a warm squishy feeling.)
Two kinda fancy paintbrushes acquired from a charity shop, at half price.
I have utterly failed to locate (in town or online) any Suitable Large Planters for MY NEW FIG TREE, but I have enjoyed looking and will probably get A to take me to a gardening centre.
Lots of thinking about shears. Need to check my neighbour's Box Of Tricks because if they have some I probably oughtn't to buy them, but Investigation nonetheless, leading to a clearer idea of what I want. (The difficulty is that so far as possible I'd prefer to avoid plastics, but pure wood-and-metal-and-enamel-I-guess tools aren't super easy to find.)
I think I might have identified the plumbing bits I need to make the water butt slightly more robust.
Apparently the bit of furniture I want (that I saw in a charity shop and that had vanished by the time I checked it was okay with A, grump grump) is a valet stand or butler stand. Now at least I can keep poking the internet for more.
There is a semi-plausible definitely-ridiculously-located sun lounger on the eBays that I might attempt to go for, in that the single biggest improvement to my quality of life at the allotment would be "somewhere to lie down that is guaranteed to contain neither thistles nor ants".
I am tentatively fairly sure that I can in fact afford to Just Buy a fruit cage, rather than scrounging around for bits and pieces to DIY it, which abruptly frees up a lot of cognitive function, hurrah.
I have been doing a pretty good job of accepting support over the past few days, which gives me a framework to keep thinking about vulnerability and connection in.
Over the course of the evening I have made both vegetable stock and bread, which is extremely satisfying even if the bread is Kind Of A Shape. Settled and grounded and yes.

Right yes okay goodnight.

Tektite and rough diamond shiny: The Roads We Choose

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

finished (subject to deciding I want to finesse colours some more)

[books] today's chapter of An Immense World is on colour vision

terrible art project of the day

favourite sculpture of the day

my week (so far) in sculpture

[art] ... oh that's fun

[art] further small adventures

[art] (small bravery)

hobby of the day

today's rabbit-holes were mostly stationery-related

[art?] adventures in animal fibres

procrastinatory rabbit hole of the day: Ernest Wright, Sheffield

modern art of the day: yoshimoto's cubes

[art] Impatiens flaccida redux

[art] Impatiens flaccida

[frivolity] messing around with colour

vital functions

small amusement: art edition

today in idle poking around

oh no oh help

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April 2025

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