Red Pear (detail)
I did a second pear today, to make up for getting side-tracked earlier in the week. I’m still one pear behind, so I’ll probably do two tomorrow, too.
Month: November 2007
d’Anjou Pear
d’Anjou Pear (detail)
This is another one done with Neocolors II over an acrylic medium ground. Only this time, I blotted the acrylic with a piece of waxed paper, to create a mottled texture. A single layer of watersoluble crayons were blended once with a very wet Q-tip, then left as-is. The only other thing I did to the sketch was to add a tiny bit of black to the shadowed area, blended with my fingers.
I also carved two new eraser stamps for this one.
Morning Clouds
This is what I woke up to–bands of clouds stretching all the way across the sky. The bands have broken up now, and the sun is trying to shine from between the cloud drifts.
Bosc Pear
Bosc Pear (detail)
I had some small scraps of denim left over from the book I bound yesterday, so I used one in this spread.
Again, I spread a thin ground of acrylic matte medium on the paper with a credit card. I find it fiddly to work with watersoluble crayons on top of acrylic, but I love the effect. This time, I used Neocolors II, because they harden to a more durable, waxy finish than Portfolios. I also find them easier to work with in most situations, because they aren’t so mushy.
For the first, all-over layer of color, I used a really wet Q-tip to blend. The second layer–medium and dark shadows–was blended with a damp Q-tip. The third layer–dark shadows only–was just smudged with my fingers.
You can see the pencil sketch through the crayon, especially in the light areas, but I kind of like the way it looks.
The Nerve
I got an e-mail from my web hosts, asking me to complete a survey on my experience with their tech support. What tech support?!
Oops!
A few words of advice:
If you’ve only gotten three hours of sleep the night before, and it’s creeping up on 1am, you probably shouldn’t try fixing a couple of broken links on your website. Because, if you do, you may find that you’ve accidentally saved one file on top of another, obliterating it completely. No biggie, you can just grab a fresh copy of the code from your website, right? Well, no, not if you didn’t notice until after you’d uploaded the file and overwritten the good copy.
Thankfully, it was only my links page, which I don’t care (too much) about. The bare bones of it exist in a text file somewhere, if I ever feel like reconstructing it. It’s not a priority, though. If it had been anything else, I’ve got back-ups, but they aren’t properly coded, so losing the current copies might have made me weepy.
November Clouds
It’s been varying degrees of overcast for the past few days, which is typical for November in this area. At 7:30pm, it’s 63F. That is not so typical. It’s supposed to cool off, though, and maybe even snow.
Duck
Duck is swimming in a drift of fallen leaves
Tacket Binding
I did my first tacket binding today. I was inspired to give it a try by Dennis at Cai Lun. He gives a simple, straightforward explanation of how to do the basic stitch and cord packing. It was more time consuming than the Coptic binding I usually do, because I couldn’t just slap together bare board covers. The cord packing takes more time than a simple chain stitch, too, but it’s not at all difficult.
This is a super sturdy binding. It’s stiffer than a Coptic bound book, because there is almost no wiggle room. It opens flat, though, which is an absolute must for me. I really like the end product.
Since this was my first go at this type of binding, I made a few mistakes. Next time, I’ll mark the stitch lines on the outside of the spine with masking tape, to keep them even. I marked the inside, and tried my best to keep the stitches straight, but they’re a little ragged. I’ll also start further in from the cover. My outer two signatures are sewn too close to the edge, so the book wants to fan open. That will change, I think, as it settles and the denim spine relaxes a bit.
I think it would also be best sewn with thread, not twine. Hemp is super strong, and I love it, but I think the unevenness of it makes it a poor choice for packed cords.
Denim Book
tacket bound with hemp cords, denim cover, and star map end papers
8 x 5 3/4 inches
7 signatures of two sheets (28 pages) of 140lb Cartiera Magnani hot press watercolor paper
Grrr!
As suspected, my web host says that the problem is with my gallery software, and that I will have to take it up with the Coppermine folks. IDTS. The problem is a database corruption issue, which the Coppermine folks can do fuck all about. So my brain nearly implodiated, and then I cried. I don’t know why I was surprised, because I was expecting my web host to give me the brush off. I should have been prepared for it.
Anyway, there is no way in hell that I’m going to be able to unsnarl the mess, so I think what I’m going to do is try to point everything at Flickr. Of course, that makes me want to cry, too. I got a hundred posts done, which leaves 1062 to go. I think it may take me awhile!
On the bright–but no less frustrating–side, this means that I don’t have to try to keep any sort of unified theme going between Coppermine and WordPress. I spent some time weeding out my existing theme templates, and I uploaded a few new ones that look promising. The one I settled on seems to be pretty stable, though, of course, it doesn’t behave properly in IE. Instead of two sidebars, y’all will see just one. Be thankful that it’s not in the middle of the page, because at this point, I’m so fed up that I just don’t care.
I like the basic look of this template, but I can’t stand the weird line spacing after image files, so I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it.
red paper boat 