New house portrait commission

I just finished this a few days ago.  I'll spare you the self-critism and just say I'm happy with it.
 

 

 

Why is it that if I nod off two or three times during a meeting, I lose track of time and find it nearly impossible to tell whether I've been in the meeting for twenty minutes or an hour; yet if I wake up in the middle of the night, I can usually guess what time it is and be off by less than fifteen minutes?

 

Car painting 100% finished

 I just realized I never put up a photo here of the car at 100% completion.  This picture came out a little too pale and blue, but it's close. I wonder if you can spot the differences between this and how it looked at 99.9% finished?

 

Category change: flower to weed

Last night I had to declare war on these cute little flowers in my garden.  I don't know where they came from; they might have been part of some "remainder" garden center plants that someone gave me a few years ago, but I don't think so.  They only grow to about 12 inches, and end with nickel-sized, lavender-tinted white flowers with yellow centers. They are pretty and sort of subtle.

 

However, the stems also bear needle-like thorns. I tolerated this when it was only growing in one small patch of the garden, because I didn't really have to do anything with it.  Now, though, there are seedlings popping up in the yard nearby, and the seedlings have thorns, too.  They would be quite painful to step on barefoot.

 

With grim resolve, I put on leather gloves, grabbed a spray bottle of Roundup, and attacked the plants.  I pulled up the ones I could find in the yard (there were fifteen or twenty), and sprayed carefully around the sweet corn, asters, bee balm, and mint to destroy what I could find in the garden.  Something tells me the fight's not over yet, though.

 

 

Well, it's been a week, so I guess I better post something before my commercial sponsors desert me.

 

Art:

 

   I am working on two pen & ink drawings.  One is a walnut ink commissioned drawing of a house, and the other is a black-and-white drawing of Farmington.  With the Farmington drawing, I'm working out the best way to capture the bricks.  Bricks always seem tricky.  Drawing each brick seems wayyyy to detailed, but how else do you make brick look like brick?  There are ways…  However, in this case, the question is needless.  I'm working rather large, and I want it to be very detailed, so yeah, I'm drawing each brick.  We'll see how that goes.

 

Garden:

 

  The corn is more than two feet tall and growing fast.  I also planted a little more in the spaces between the peas and the spinach and the onions, figuring that those vegetables were about to expire, and the corn will   grown in and take over the spots.  The corn has sprouted, the peas are bolting and wilting, and the spinach is about worn out, so the plan seems to be working so far.

 

  Helga gave us some bee balm, and I love it.  It is large and bright, and it's the prettiest thing in our garden right now.  I also ate some of the flowers, and they're interesting.  They taste a lot like oregano with a   little bit of a spicy kick to them.

 

Coins:

 

 Missing them.

 

Metal detecing:

 

  Missing it.

 

Books:

 

I   just finished a "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" novella called "The Snow Women."  This was the first time I've ever read anything by Fritz Lieber, at least that I can recall.  It was a decent story, and I might read some more of the stories sometime.

 

  A few nights ago we were at a book store, and I commented to Kim that there are so many books that I'd like to read that picking up one and reading it seems like a terrible waste.  How can I choose what to read next? Why bother?  It's like being hungry and only getting a French fry.

 

Movies:

 

  Haven't seen anything.

 

 

More paintings that didn't work out

 

 

Article about why so many coin designs are lousy

http://numismaticnews.net/article/Poor_quality_coin_designs_lamented/

 

 

I'm looking at you, Florida and Indiana state quarters.
 

 

Triptych painting - are its days numbered?

Here is one of the "corner paintings" that I don't know what to do with. It's on canvas, so I could take it apart and re-use the stretcher bars. However, I'm in no hurry, because I almost like this one.

I painted this in 2002 (I think); it's the view from the Falls of the Ohio State Park Interpretive Center's observation deck, looking towards the Falls, on a rainy, misty day when the river was high. It is, to date, one of the largest single painting projects I've ever undertaken. In fact, it might be the biggest.

It never really developed in a way in which I was really satisfied, but I like many of the elements. I like the colors, I like the idea, I like how the bridge looks. I was very conscious from the start that it was a very minimal composition, flat and very straight-forward. The simplicity was on thing that I found interesting and challenging about it: how could it be turned into an interesting painting?

Unfortunately, I don't think I pushed it quite far enough. It needs more engaging textures and a more carefully planned use of color to really succeed, I think. That's one of those things that I think I'm better at now than I was a few years ago.

I like the scale, and I like the subject, although I'm still not convinced that the composition could ever have completely worked, even if the above problems had been taken care of.

painting demolition

Kim and I have decided to clean out the corner of our living room that includes my not-quite-good-enough paintings. The old paintings in the corner must go.  I'll be looking for ways to break them down for scrap or otherwise salvage parts for other uses.

 

I know there are people who get a little worked up about me destroying the sub-par paintings, so I won't hurry through the process.  I'll photograph them, and anyone who is interested can make me an offer.

 

These are all works that I couldn't previously bring myself to get rid of, but didn't really have a place on any wall in my house, and weren't presentable as far as something to give or sell to others.  Some are works from college, and really aren't too bad; some are things that never really developed the way I wanted; and some are merely unfinished, and may still be completed by me in the near future.

 

I'll put pictures of them on my blog soon.

 

 

Illustration

I've had to take an online bloodborne pathogen course for work. This is a page from it that caught my attention.  I'm not so sure about that last sentence: Really, no one has ever gotten a disease from performing CPR?  That just strikes me as unlikely.  I can understand no confirmed cases of HIV or hepatitis B transmission, but c'mon.

 

Also, that is one funky cool illustration.  The sexy protruding yellow lips, the single breast, the funnel-shaped right arm, the hands of two different sizes...that's a woman I want to know.  I actually do like the drawing.  It's pretty wiggy, yet still perfectly and immediately conveys the artist's intent.

 

 

 

 

Ant vs. Pistil

I was out by our mailbox a few days ago, and I noticed that ants really enjoy the primose. Then I noticed this one guy who had his head down in the hole, and the part of the flower that sticks out of the hole -- the pistil, I learned -- was rocking and rotating. I watched for a minute, and realized that the ant was probably trying to chew through it so that he could get at the nectar behind it. I looked around at the other flowers and saw that more than half of them had their pistils detached and sitting on the petals next to the holes. This was evidence that what this ant was doing was routine work for his tribe.

I ran and grabbed the camera, and managed to film his moment of triumph.

Car painting in its nearly (99.8%) complete form

 

 

North Korea and the Axe Murder Incident

You know, I don't often use bad language on this blog, but I just have to make this comment: Craaaaaaazy shit.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe_murder_incident

 

I don't recall hearing about his before. Just thought I'd throw it up here, Korea being in the news so much and all.
 

 

The Car Painting (update)

 

It is nearly done!  I stopped last night around 12:45 (this was my third night in a row of staying up past 1:00 a.m., and I'm starting to feel it).  There is one small area that needs a tiny bit of detail work. After it spends the day drying, I should be able to polish that off in about ten minutes.

 

However, I made the mistake of bringing it in to work with me today.  That means I'll be spending the day looking at it, finding more things to do.  I already spotted one thing I could correct.  It's not something super obvious, I think, but it's hard to tell.  After spending so much time staring at it, it becomes very difficult to tell what works and what doesn't, which mistakes are glaring to a casual observer and which are merely wickedly haunting my second-guessing right hemisphere.

 

I think it looks really good, though.  I'm pleased with it.  I even signed and dated it last night.

 

Figuring out how much time I've spent on it is very hard.  I kept thinking, "I'm probably getting close to fifty hours," but I started thinking that twenty hours ago, at least.  Fifty hours would be a very conservative estimate.  I don't think I hit a hundred.  Seventy hours worth of work is probably about right but really I just don't know.

 

Photos will follow in a few days.

 

I should also add that rubbing a cut garlic clove onto the surface of a painting does, in fact, seem to curtail the beading problem I was having.  Now the painting smells like garlic.  I'm sure it will fade before too long; but in the meantime, Lynette, if you're reading this, and you're not a garlic person, then…sorry.

Bad Astronomy

Bad Astronomer Phil Plaitt wrote an interesting post explaining why the Moon tends to look notably bigger when it is on the horizon:

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/13/why-does-the-moon-look-so-huge-on-the-horizon/

 

He includes this photographic illustration of a Ponzo illusion.  I think this is really amazing.  Look at the two vertical red lines in the photo.  How much longer does the one on the right look than the one on the left?

 

 

 

(Note: I'm sending this post in via email, and when I do that, I don't know where the photo is going to end up in the post.  Sorry if it's placed confusingly.)

 

Another item from the Bad Astronomy blog:  This is a really cool photo from a guy to takes lots of really cool photos.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/18/iss-shuttle-transit-the-sun/

 

 

Painting and stuff

For a blogger that is supposed to be at least partially blogging about art, I sure haven't put up many photos in a long time.  I've been painting pretty consistently on the car, though, and I'm close to being finished with it.  I painted for another hour-and-a-half last night.  I need to let the whole painting sit for a few days so that it's dry to the touch, then I can put what might be the lat layer of glazing on it.

 

This has been an educational process; I have done relatively little work in oil glazes before, and I've never before done a single painting that depended so heavily on glazing.  Thank goodness for the Internet; I've relied on articles and discussions to help me work out the bugs in the process.  Once again, Wetcanvas.com was a reliable, entertaining resource.

 

One problem that I have had is with some of my thin layers of glazed paint beading up on the preceding layer.  I learned that rubbing the lower dried layer with a cut onion or garlic will prevent this from occurring.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

 

I am also working on another walnut ink house drawing commission.
 

 

You smell delicious!

I think I'll invent a line of fragrances called Grill Scents.  They'd probably work equally well for men or women.  The flagship fragrance would be Tangy Barbecued Chicken, but Jamaican Jerk and Sizzling Steak would be on the shelves with it.  For those who adore subtlety and love anticipation as much as they love payoff, I'll include Freshly Fired Briquette.

 

 

Considering the others

 

Kim and I have failed to locate our Sony digital camera.  It has been missing for more than a week.  We've lost cameras before, but never in such a seemingly confined amount of space and time.  We had it in my parents' van on Wednesday night, and that's the last time we saw it.  After we got out of the van, we got in our vehicles, and drove home.  When Kim looked for the camera the next day, she couldn't find it.

  

There just aren't many places it can be.  We looked everywhere we could think of, and in most cases we looked there three to five times.  I still think there is a good chance it will turn back up.  Maybe it fell behind something at a weird angle, or…that's about all that's left I can think of.

 

We decided we still need a camera while we wait for ourselves to find the missing one.  So Kim bought a little Canon camera.  It's tiny and very pink ("I'm sorry," said Kim, "it's the only color they had left.")

 

I read the small owner's booklet a couple of nights ago, and came across this sentence: "CAUTION:  Do not point the camera at very bright objects (the sun, etc.) Doing so may damage the sensors."

 

I'm intrigued by the "etc."  "et cetera" is Latin for "and the others," and the general modern meaning is that there are others things of the same sort that, for the sake of brevity, aren't listed.

 

So, in other words, it is inadvisable to point the camera at the Sun or other things of that sort.  That made my mind race. What are those other things?

 

First I thought of lit candles.  They are hot, and they are bright.  However, I've never seen a candle as bright as the Sun.  It seems unlikely that anyone would market a $160 camera that would break if it were used to photograph a child blowing out birthday candles.

 

What else is like the Sun?  The Moon?  It's not nearly as bright; it hardly ranks as a celestial birthday candle.  Did you know that the Earth's moon has one of the lowest albedos (abilities to reflect light) in the solar system?  If you lined up all the planets and moons and shined light on them, our moon would be way down at the bottom of the scale.  It's a very dark object, and just looks bright to us because it is so big and close.

 

So, I don't think that the Moon is one of the things meant by "etc."

 

Obviously, stars would have to fall into the category of things similar to the Sun.  Upon careful consideration, though, this doesn't seem to work very well in the context of the owner's manual.  Humans as a rule are only allowed to photograph stars from a great distance.  They are fainter in appearance than the Moon.  I feel that it could not possibly have been the intention of the technical writer of the owner's manual that you should not point your camera at the night sky and snap a photo.

 

This "etc." could serve to warn off lawsuits from NASA several hundred or several thousand years from now.  If scientists prepared an interstellar probe and decided that the philosophy of "faster, smaller, cheaper" meant that a small Canon digital hand-held would be the best choice for imaging technology, then it could spell trouble.  The probe would spend centuries crossing the gulf between us and Proxima Centauri (not a particularly bright star, by the way), point itself at the star, and fry itself.  Another NASA fiasco to frustrate the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of the same engineers who forgot to convert their English measurements to metric on that Mars probe that crashed a few years ago.

 

All this strikes me as unlikely to have been in the mind of the writer of the owner's manual.

 

Another theoretical way to get close to a star is to be abducted by aliens and brought back to their home solar system.  People are always trying to get good photos of UFOs, after all, and a well-documented close encounter of the third kind would be worth a good amount of fame and money.  I don't think this kind of event really ever occurs, but maybe the technical writer is a believer, and he doesn't want someone burning out their camera's optics before snapping some great shots of the Grays, spacecraft interiors, and alien cloning operations.

 

After these considerations, it struck me: The most likely item to fall under "etc." is a nuclear blast.  That has the brightness of the Sun; it can and does occur here on Earth; there are probably lots of people who would try to photograph one if it occurred near enough to see and they had their cameras in their hands.  The warning would be wise to heed for those people who want their cameras to be intact to record the effects of post-Armageddon firestorms, nuclear winter, and rampant hair loss.

 

After thinking of this, it occurred to me that similar energies can be released on a smaller scale and in more tightly controlled conditions during particle physics experiments.  The newly started Large Hadron Collider in Europe might do this.  Grad students, make sure you read your tiny hot pink camera's manual before hooking it up to your research project.

 

That's all I can think of.  Therefore, the camera's manual could read, "Do not point this camera at the Sun, at alien suns around which you may orbit, or at nuclear explosions.  Do not attempt to use this camera to record data for high-energy particle physics experiments."

 

This would certainly make the manual more interesting to most people (not to me; I fill in all those boring blanks myself, obviously.)  There is, however, value in just leaving it as "etc."

 

lunch time detecting

I metal detected very briefly at lunch today—about 20 minutes.  This time I stopped at a park on the way back from getting my allergy shots.  I found a quarter, two dimes, two nickels, and four or five pennies.

 

 

lunchtime detecting

 

 

I detected for a little while at lunch again today.  I was headed for a spot I'd found that had produced a few little interesting things before, but it was being mowed by groundskeepers, so I headed to a quiet spot, way out of the way.

 

I hoped it might be an interesting place, because it is just across the fence from that old military academy.  I looked along that fence line for a while, expecting to find nothing, and finding exactly that in spades.  I found a Coke can, an old tiny bit of iron fence, and a metal disk that isn't a coin (I'll wash it off, but it looks featureless and aluminum).

 

Despite the lack of anything remotely resembling treasure, I had fun, as it was a beautiful day to be out.  I was under some sort of trees that bore fragrant white flowers, and the ground was full of violets, and it was neither too not nor too cold.