Tag: newsD

Sketch of the Week: Sunset, Skyline, Power Lines (Oct 18, 2024)

This week’s sketch is watercolors and India ink, of a house up the street after the sun has dipped below the treeline, but is still above the horizon:

A watercolor painting depicting a silhouette of a house and power lines against a vibrant sunset sky. The sky features shades of red, orange, and yellow, with trees partly framing the scene.

Back when I was a teen I was taught two ways to use India ink: dip pen and bamboo calligraphy brush. You can do a lot with either, but Jesus are they fiddly. Also, the old bottle of India ink I have is not waterproof, which is great for certain effects, but often maddening overall (esp. against watercolor).

So this was done with Faber-Castell Pitt pens, which are amaaaaazing. Yeah, a dip pen can give you a much finer line, and an ink brush can do really interesting dry-brush and textural things that you can’t coax out of a Pitt pen. But in terms of bang-for-buck (esp. when the “buck” translates to hair-pulling frustration), the Pitt pen is hard to beat:

The India ink is dark and flat and deep, water soluble/flowable when first applied, but then dries absolutely waterproof. They have a ton of different nibs. For this sketch I used a 0.3 fine liner and a soft-brush (the later nicely emulates doing wet-brush work with a Japanese calligraphy brush, giving you all the expressiveness and none of the sorrow). The color of the sky was me experimenting with wet-on-wet watercolor.

Sketch of the Week: Flowers or Lil Arbus Boy? (October 11–13, 2024)

You get a two-fer this week:

A pair of pencil sketches on a single piece of paper. Top sketch is of some red daisies in a pot on a small table. In front of the flowers are two low, rectangular plastic baskets. The lower sketch is a skinny little by in a rigid, grotesque posture holding a toy grenade. It is clearly based on the Diane Arbus black-and-white photograph "Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962"

My son voted for the upper sketch, noting “holy heck I love the shadows on the flowers.” The model for this was a little table near the entrance of the Unitarian church where my congregation held Kol Nidrei service on Oct 11. I’m on our Safety Committee, and so had a shift watching the front door. Thankfully, it was an extremely boring shift, hence the sketch.

The lower sketch is based on Diane Arbus’s “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962.” The sketch maybe looks pretty odd if you aren’t familiar with the reference. (Otto noted, “He’s adorable but I confess the angle of the head is kinda confusing me.” Then, after seeing the original, added “Pfff okay he just looks like that” and “Is that a grenade!?”)

Here’s my photo of a reproduction of Arbus’s original photo (which, stated like that, begins to sorta feel like I’m making a cheap Duchamp joke):

A picture of a reproduction of Diane Arbus's photography "Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962"

Holy Moses! That snake fooled me, too!

I cannot get over how persuasive the movement is of this snake’s “faux-spider” tail lump-and-floofs is. Structurally, it looks practically nothing like a spider; it’s like a skin tag put on a feather boa. But the way the snake moves it is an amaaaaaaaazing piece of puppetry. I could watch this video all day.

If you want more danger noodles, here’s the excellent Ze Frank explaining how kangaroo rats put snakes in their place:

Sketch of the Week: Rabbi at the Bimah (October 3, 2024)

Just a quick, loose sketch I did of our rabbi at the bimah while she was leading Rosh Hashanah services. (Our particular rabbi trained as a cantor before being ordained, and happens to play harp; harp isn’t a standard part of Jewish services.)

My son voted this sketch of the week because “I really like the curves on the harp. All the geometry in that one is very beautiful.” (I spent most of last week working on faces, which I’m terrible at; weak as it is, this is the best sketch of the lot 🤷‍♀️)

Sketch of the Week: Heading to the Faire (Sept 24, 2024)

My son voted for this sketch to share this week. He liked several, but “the fairies one is just too adorable”:

A pencil sketch of a woman and a girl standing together, both depicted with butterfly wings. The girl has a flower crown and the woman wears a wide-brimmed hat. A note next to them says "Heading to the Faire."

The reference is this photo of my wife and daughter dressed up to go to out local Renaissance Festival a couple weeks ago:

A woman and a girl standing in front of greenery, both wearing floral-patterned dresses. The girl has butterfly wings and a flower crown, while the woman is wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

Apparently this hat made my wife look like “Sadie Adler” from Red Dead Redemption II, which I guess bodes poorly for me 🤷‍♀️

Sketch of the Week: Barn Swallows (Sept 18, 2024)

My son nominated this sketch, noting: “That one in the back looks like it has strong opinions.” I can’t quite recall where I saw these little guys, just that it was in a Michigan State Park this past summer, as part of a canoe trip that went moderately off the rails (massive duckweed, inclement weather, thousands of dead fish blocking the river, etc.) This park was maybe our third choice, in terms of places we were supposed to be that night.

A pencil sketch of two annoyed lil barn swallows in their mud-and-straw nest

For the record, I was almost positive he was either gonna chose the Jubilant Sorceress or Captain Tenacity:

Pencil sketches of two comic book-style characters. On the left is a the "Jubilant Sorceress" with a long robe and a horned headdress. On the right is a character labeled "Captain Tenacity" wearing a cape, goggles, and a belt with an emblem.

Mostly I like how the two images interact (they were in adjacent slots on the spread). The reference for the sorceress is my wife in a Halloween costume she got for cheap at a thrift shop a few years back, while the captain is me about 20 years ago. Serendipitously, the ratio between their sizes is roughly our real-life size difference.

Sketch of the Week: Young Dali (Sept 9, 2024)

My best sketch from Week #37-2024 is this one of a young Salvador Dali:

Pencil sketch of a young Salvador Dali with slicked-back hair, a pencil mustache, and patented Dali Crazy-Eyes (tm)

My reference for the sketch was this picture of Dali and Man Ray I stumbled across on the Library of Congress website:

A picture of Salvador Dali and Man Ray, both giving Crazy Eyes. This picture was probably taken at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse exhibition in Paris by Carl Van Vechten on June 16, 1934.

Until I saw this photograph, it never dawned on me that Man Ray might be Jewish (which he was), nor that he was American-born (I thought he was French, because he was most famous for the work he did while living in France), nor that he thought of himself as a painter (I knew him for his photography). 🤦‍♀️

For the record, the Young Dali sketch narrowly beat out this space captain from Friday, September 13. She is taking no shit, folks:

A pencil sketch of a space captain aiming her blaster off screen to the right. Leave her ship!

Gerrymandering Solved Just Like Mom Used to Make!

Remember when you were a kid and would fight over who got the bigger slice of cake, and so your mom made one of you cut and the other choose, in order to ensure fairness and decrease the amount of kvetching and whining she’d have to deal with, so she could just get on with her life?

Well, turns out you can fix gerrymandering exactly the same way (more or less): Schneier on Security: A Self-Enforcing Protocol to Solve Gerrymandering

This protocol is self-enforcing (i.e., it requires no outside arbiter or commission or oversight board or judges), mathematically verified, and fair—all of which taken together basically guarantees we’ll never ever ever use it, because (waves hands) will-of-the-people-constitutionalism-orginalist-intent-textualist-consistent-with-traditions-blah-blah-bullshit.🤬🇺🇸🔥

“the only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill”—Jerry Seinfeld

I do not endorse Seinfeld or Seinfeld (no deeply held conviction or ideological bone to pick there; he just never particularly worked for me, as a comedian or writer), but I do wholeheartedly endorse both the above sentiment, and reading the entire op-ed it came from (here’s a gift link 🎁🔗 ):

“Opinion: The life secret Jerry Seinfeld learned from Esquire“[*]

The takeways summarized in the op-ed are good and worth your time, and the core message is a fundamental truth:

Dedicating yourself to the mastery of a craft—against all odds and despite all distractions and obstacles—is the only path along which there is relief.

Along these same lines—delving into and reflecting on what it means to dedicate yourself to craft—I likewise wholeheartedly endorse this documentary (noting that, over the last decade I’ve revised my opinion on it in at least one important detail: although I still love the documentary, I no longer even mildly like any of these comics).

[*] I also don’t endorse Esquire—again, it never really worked for me is all. I do endorse the Washington Post, though. I read a lot of news reporting from a lot of sources, and there’s is consistently the most even-handed and makes the most honest attempt at being honest and accurate, in my humble.