Bartlett Pear (detail)
I took some serious liberties with the color on this one (Bartlett pears are bright yellow), but I really like how it turned out. I did a bit of a collage-y foundation, with torn bits of pages from an old patent book, glued down with acrylic matte medium. Then, I cut out (tore, actually) a pear shape from another piece of the same paper and glued it on top. It has a slightly 3D effect that’s nice.
I leave little (and sometimes not so little) piles of junk on my coffee table, with the intent of sketching or taking photos of it. The most recent pile of junk is a bunch of humongous, rusty nuts and bolts and washers (frankly, I’m not sure what the square things are). I found them in the bottom of a closet in an old house I lived in.
The list of really stupid things a person might do surely includes shaking a nearly full bottle of black gesso without first making sure the flip top is securely closed. And bonus points if you do so while walking across the carpet.
Luckily, I still had just enough Spot Shot left to clean up the mess. And, more importantly, I was able to find it before the gesso had dried.
Things like this make me laugh at the fact that I had just a $140 damage deposit for me, but had to pay a whopping $300 for the dog. I’m the one who’s apt to wreck the place, not the dog!
Pan was asleep on my drafting table, surrounded by journals and sketchbooks. I’d pulled them out, because I didn’t do a good job of including information for older images at Flickr. When recreating my Coppermine database, I had to go back to the original source for things like media and dimensions. So, there are stacks of books everywhere. I haven’t pulled out the canvasses yet, but I expect that’ll be even messier. I also expect that Pandora will insert herself right in the middle of everything, because that’s what she does.
I woke up this morning with a sore throat and somebody’s wool blanket stuffed in my head. I am not amused. And worse, now that I’ve been up and out with the dog, I can’t get back to sleep. So I’m cruising Flickr, looking at other folks’ photos.
Michigan City Lighthouse, Michigan City, Indiana
Michigan City Lighthouse seen from a sand dune on Washington Park Beach, Michigan City, Indiana
Credit: Tom Gill, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license
This was “our” beach, when my family lived in Michigan City. We lived on California Avenue, which was just a few blocks from Washington Park and the Washington Park beach. We could walk to the park via the beach, then cross the road and go to the Washington Park Zoo. The dune grass is sharp, and will cut you if you aren’t careful. We used to run around and play in the grass, and I remember getting long, razor cuts from it.
Sometimes we’d go to the lighthouse and walk the pier. There were usually old guys lined up on the pier, fishing. While the grown-ups were walking, us kids would scramble around. I remember climbing up on the center section, then down the far side. There was a narrow walkway there, and when the tide was out, it was easy to climb on the rocks. I was a chicken, though, so I only stepped on rocks that were right next to the walkway, and only those that were near the shore.
Frozen Shore by Meghan Linehan published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license
I remember going to the beach one winter and seeing, beyond the hurricane fencing, huge frozen waves. I was probably 6 or 7 years old, and I couldn’t figure out how water could freeze so quickly that it kept its wave form. Years later, I remembered those waves, and by then the solution was obvious. It really puzzled me at the time, though.
The photo doesn’t give a good idea of scale. These waves are enormous. And the ones I recall had wonderful, bizarre formations.
I was able to get replacement code for the Linkpendium via the Wayback Machine. Yay! They archived it in March 2007, so it’s not the most current version, but who cares? Besides, it needed some serious weeding, anyway.
I’ve also pretty much finished re-loading all of my images into Coppermine[1]. There are about 600 (out of 2000+) that are still unsorted and unidentified, but I should have that finished in the next couple of days. If I don’t go cross-eyed, first. And if my hands don’t fall off.
Today I did all the digital photographs, and boy, was that ever a surreal experience. They spanned the last 4-5 years, and because they were sorted in file name order, they were chronological. Do you remember those filmstrips from grade school–the ones with the accompanying tape that beeped when you were supposed to forward to the next frame? It was kind of like watching a filmstrip of my life, only without the cheesy narration.
In other news, I had hoped to have a drawing for today, and I did start one, but it got kind of complicated, and there’s no way I’m going to get it finished before bedtime.
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1. Speaking of which, there will be much bozocity relating to the clicking of images in order to biggify them. Instead of the links being broken, they will now take you to pages with completely unrelated images and metadata. For example, if there is a photo of Harriet, and you click on it to view the large version, it may take you to a lovely sunset, or a mangled Barbie doll, or a pile of old tires. How fun!
This, um, “feature” will persist until I manually update the code in each and every blessed blog post that has an image that points to my Coppermine gallery. If I emerge from this process with my sanity intact, it will be a miracle.
This only is a problem with older images. Any images I post from here on out will–God willing–be fine.
Pandora Rolling Around on the Studio Floor
Pan is not only the Queen of High Perches, but Empress of the Low Lying Lands, as well. Her motto: It’s all mine.
(Edit: And this is a good example of why it’s worth messing around with re-loading all those old images. The above picture is 23KB, but the same photo uploaded to Flickr is 113KB. That’s a significant difference, and with a blog that’s heavy on imagery, it’s a big deal.)
I found a sack of huge, rusty nuts, bolts, and washers at the bottom of a closet in one of the houses I used to live in. I’ve been dragging them around, with the intention of using them in an art project.
This is a test run of the new database. I’ve still got some aesthetic tweaks to make, but the basic structure is in place, and everything seems to be working.
I somehow managed to upgrade Coppermine, but it still didn’t work. After some blind tinkering (and I mean, really blind, as I haven’t the first clue what the hell I’m doing), I got it working. Of course, all the database tables are mangled, so now I have to decide if it’s worth messing with trying to re-upload all 2000+ files. It means more work for me, but the benefit is that the image files I display here will be about 1/10 to 1/20 of the size of the ones from Flickr. If you aren’t on broadband, this is a big, big deal. Even with broadband, it means slow loading times and being at the mercy of the whims of Flickr.
Of course, I could also get everything re-loaded only to have it crash on me again.
Red Pear (detail)
I meant to do an extra one tomorrow, but I went ahead and did it this evening, instead.
red paper boat 