Welcome to 2021

Hoorah for getting through 2020!  Let us all hope that 2021 is a huge improvement, though I think we all know it will take a long time yet to get to a happier place all round.  So let's all keep those fingers crossed, please.

I started 2021 off by putting together a small bookcase in order to solve a decor issue in the living room.

Pippin tried to help....

The decor issue is that door you can see behind the finished bookcase here--it's a utility closet, and it's what I see when I sit on my sofa..

I found the view unappealing.  So I did my best to hide it with the bookcase and some plants (two are real, and two are fake):

Here is the new, improved view from the sofa.  Still some door showing, but nowhere near as displeasing:

Of course, I also spent time in the first few days of the new year drawing.  I thought I'd drawn all the Good Omens pictures I wanted to, until I found a photo of Aziraphale and Crowley from one of the historical scenes, and decided it would be fun to try making it look like an old-fashioned sepia drawing.  

I used only one colored pencil, a dark brown, using varying pressure, to render this piece.  I think it turned out quite nicely, if I do say so myself:

The Zoom sketch group met several times last week, and I did a couple of the drawings using the iPad with the Adobe Fresco program.  This octopus was one of those:

I don't think I could have drawn the lovely sand texture the old-fashioned way:

For the drawing below, I went back to non-digital means, using some water-soluble ink pens with a little colored pencil:

I returned to the iPad for a digital painting of these lovely flowers.  I doubt that I could have gotten that translucent look otherwise.

Finally, there should always be adorable dachshund pics on this blog, so here is a series that I call the Belly Rub Pleas:

Pippin is the absolute master of the belly rub pose:

Look at the cuteness!  It is too much to stand -- that belly WILL get rubbed!

Truman, on the other hand, has much to learn from Pip.  While he understands the basic Belly Rub Plea theory, he had yet to master its practical application, with this sort of half-hearted effort:

Though oddly enough, he somehow manages to get a belly rub anyway--so maybe he does know what he's doing....

That's it for now -- hope you all have a great start to 2021!

Books Read in 2020

In 2017, I read 101 books.

In 2018, I read 82 books.

In 2019, I read 88 books.

Well, last year, the grand total came to forty-six.  What happened, you may ask--after all, I had more time at home than ever before, so why wasn't I reading a whole lot more?

Possibly the low count is due to the fact that I only count books, and not short stories.  I spent a good portion of my reading time consuming short Good Omens fan fiction stories.  Lots and lots of them.  What can I say?  It sort of took over my life last year--a wonderful, albeit too short, TV series based on a wonderful book I've loved for thirty years.  I was having FUN with that.  (And still am!)

So.  46 books.  Turns out most of them were re-reads of old favorites, including most of William Marshall's wry mystery series set in Hong Kong, Yellowthread Street, and Janwillem van de Wetering's philosophic mystery series from Amsterdam.  Plus a couple of Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce mysteries set in 1950s Britain which feature an 11-year-old sleuth who could give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money.  Speaking of whom, I've also been re-reading the entire Holmes oeuvre.

And of course I re-read Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, as well as my second favorite of his, Stardust.

Thirty-two of those 46 books were re-reads.  I was in a mood to revisit the glorious past.  Hm.  I wonder why.

The new stuff was often disappointing.  Several history books sounded quite promising, but turned out duller than watching paint dry.  I slogged through them to the bitter end anyway.  The most entertaining of the new books were all travel/memoir/travel-history things--not sure how to categorize them, but basically, the authors lived or traveled in intriguing places and wrote wittily about them.  See annotated list below!

2021's first book is Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, as I continue to make my way back through the Holmes canon.  Good old Sherlock holds up quite well, I'm happy to say.  

My second excuse for not reading more in 2020 was the loss of my volunteer gig at the Friends of the Richland Library used bookshop in March, due to the pandemic.  I used to get a lot of my reading matter there.  The Friends hope to re-open sometime this summer.  My fingers are duly crossed.

THE LIST

Fiction (EVERY single one of these was a re-read!)

Adams, Douglas  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"                           Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"                           Life, the Universe, and Everything

Bradley, Alan     The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"                          The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

Doyle, A. Conan  The Lost World

"                           The Return of Sherlock Holmes

"                           His Last Bow

"                           Case Book of Sherlock Holmes

Fforde, Jasper   The Eyre Affair

Gaiman, Neil    Good Omens

"                        Stardust

Marshall, William   The Far-Away Man

"                               Road Show

"                               Yellowthread Street

"                               Gelignite

"                               Skulduggery

"                               War Machine

"                               Head First

Van de Wetering, Jan  Outsider in Amsterdam

"                                   The Corpse on the Dike

"                                   Tumbleweed

"                                   Death of a Hawker

"                                   The Japanese Corpse

"                                   The Blond Baboon

"                                   The Mind-Murders

"                                   The Streetbird

"                                   The Rattle-Rat

"                                   Hard Rain

"                                   Just a Corpse at Twilight

Nonfiction

Adams, Mark   Tip of the Iceberg (travel/history of Alaska)  This author was my favorite find from last year--entertaining, informative, and amusing.

Adams, Mark  Turn Right at Machu Picchu  (Ditto)

"                       Meet Me In Atlantis

Cunliffe, Barry  Europe Between the Oceans 9000BC - AD1000  (less tedious than other stuff I read, though not by much)

Edwards, Betty  Drawing on the Artist Within (a RE-READ)

Ferris, Timothy  Coming of Age in the Milky Way (history of astronomy; enjoyed early sections but more recent stuff was too difficult)

Harkness, Deborah  The Jewel House:  Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (a disappointingly dull history)

McAuliffe, Mary  When Paris Sizzled (tedious history of 1920s artists/authors; disappointing!)

McKenney/Bransten  Here's England: A Highly Informal Guide  (travel book from the 1960s, amusingly written with lots of historical tidbits)

Mayle, Peter   Encore Provence  (life in rural area of France, wryly entertaining)

Sugg, Richard  Fairies: A Dangerous History (quite good look at the darker aspects of fairy lore)

Toth, Susan  My Love Affair with England (a RE-READ, did not hold up well.  Sigh.)

Wainwright, Alfred   Coast to Coast Walk (British travel guide)

Williams/Breen  The Luck of the Irish (couple's adventures on a rural Irish farm.  Good!)

Uncle John's Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader

Uncle John's Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader  (hey, they're fun!)

When Planets Collide (or look like they might....)

 I got to see the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction!  Whee!!!!

The skies had been dismally overcast every night for weeks, with no letup in the forecast last week.  So even though I spent part of December 21 basking in the backyard in sixty degree sunshine...

...I still had little hope of seeing anything, with cloudy skies predicted.  Imagine my surprise when, on going outside at 5:30pm for some reason (I never go out then...what was I doing?  I HAVE NO IDEA), the skies were mostly clear!

So I looked over the tree line to the SW, and saw two bright starlike objects which appeared to be practically on top of each other.  PLANETS CONJUNCTING!  I grabbed my binocs and the lights turned into Jupiter and Saturn.  I have no way to take night photos, but it looked a lot like this one I found on the always-helpful Internet:

So that was a thing.

Yay!  I saw planets!  

Okay, so that was an exciting way to end the first day of Winter, when it was sunny and warm and did I mention sixty degrees.  A few days later things changed:

Eep.  From sixty to thirty!  We got about an inch of the white stuff, but neither rain nor sleet nor snow shall stay Pippin from his appointed Squirrel Watch:

After making absolutely certain no fluffy tree rats were trying to invade their snowy domain, the Hounds retired to a comfy, cozy nap on the sofa.

That was it for Nature's bounty last week.  Whew.

On to the art!

Our sketch zoom group did these cypress bonsai trees, which I drew the old-fashioned way with pen and colored pencil:

On a non-group sketch day, I decided to practice more with the digital painting app, Adobe Fresco.  I watched a tutorial in which an artist painted some mountains and trees, and got only about ten minutes into it before deciding that would be fun to try.  So I invented my own scene like that, perhaps channeling a bit of Bob Ross and his happy little trees, and drew it on the iPad in about an hour and a half:

That was a fun exercise.  And I had so much fun drawing and painting digitally that when the Zoom sketch group met again the next day, I decided to use it for our practice piece.  

We chose this rather complex Japanese scene, with loads of challenges.  I tackled it the same way I would had I been using my non-digital tools -- I used a pen tool first to do a quick sketch to get all the elements in the right places, and to add a few details.  Then I chose a couple of different brush tools similar to watercolor round brushes to paint over my sketch (though I left quite a few ink lines showing), and then a tool that mimics colored pencil fairly well, followed by the blending tool.  

It was all done very fast, as we have a one-hour time limit.  I wanted it to look like a sketch rather than a finished piece, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

That's all from here in the hinterlands.  See you in the new year!

Old and New

I made art both the old-fashioned way and the new-fashioned way this past week.  First, for one of our Zoom sketch practice sessions, I used pen and colored pencils to draw these seed pods:

The photo we worked from had a dark background, which I didn't have time to put in (we meet for one hour):

I decided to add the background later, though, because I had spilled some colored pencil solvent on the piece and stained it.  Covered it up successfully using dark sepia colored pencil:

The next session's photo was of this rather creepy tree:

I came up with this colored pencil and watercolor sketch during the hour-long meeting:

I liked it, but I wondered if I could get something closer to the original by re-drawing it later using my new-fashioned toy, the iPad, with the Adobe Fresco app.  This is all digital painting:

I think it is closer to the photo, though not quite as creepy looking as my watercolor version.

Finally, I used the Adobe Fresco program to draw a wacky thing from a dream I had, about seeing a Giant Platypus Bird (because hey, why not?).

I have no idea how that entered my brain while dreaming, but there it was, soaring through the skies, and my friend Connie was in the dream too, explaining the field marks in case I couldn't tell what kind of bird it was....uh-huh..  WEIRD.   But fun to draw.

Okay, in non-art news, I got a delightful present from my friend Michelle:

Some people read it as, "I am an angel, you are a lemon..."  The design could have been a bit clearer, I suppose, though those of us who are over-the-top Good Omens fans recognize the quote instantly as "I am an angel, you are a demon.  We're hereditary enemies."  After which, the angel Aziraphale politely invites the demon Crowley into his bookshop to share a few bottles of wine, because they are also best friends.

Speaking of best buddies, I have been remiss in posting cute dachshund pics of late, so here are a few shots from Sunday morning of pals Pippin and Truman relaxing on the sofa, their favorite spot in the whole world.  

Enjoy!

A New Toy

Before I get to the new toy, here are the drawings done this past week in our group Zoom practice sessions.  First, a lovely blue gate in front of an adobe home, done with ink and watercolor.

Next, some bonsai, also ink with watercolor:

And here is a wonky door/steps -- the original photo was truly odd.

I tried livening it up with some wacky colors -- not entirely successfully, but oh well.  It was fun.  This one was done solely with colored pencils.

Okay, time for the new toy!  

I got an iPad Pro 11 tablet to play with, along with a drawing/painting app called Adobe Fresco.  I had never used any kind of digital art software, though at least some of the options were familiar from Adobe Photoshop, which I've used to adjust photos.  Still, there were a LOT of menu choices, and I had no idea what I was doing.

The brush tool menu offers three different main categories and dozens of brush styles within those, plus you can change each brush via dozens of adjustments. For example, when I selected the "canvas" brush, I had adjustment options that I understood -- size, opacity, flow strength, etc., -- but was also faced with mysterious things.  "Blend" modes offered such choices as "linear burn", "color dodge", "difference", "exclusion", and "subtract"-- there were TWENTY-NINE options for this one adjustment alone!

GAH.  I was lost.

When a brush is selected, and then a color, one uses a stylus to draw on the tablet, and the magic of computers allows the stylus to mimic a real brush.  So I just started playing around with various brushes, and quickly became utterly frustrated.  I came up with truly crappy stuff like this:

What I'd been using were brushes called "live", because they imitate watercolor or oil paint--the colors mix/blend with each other in a very similar way to wet-in-wet painting.  I found them hard to control.  I wanted to do stuff that was more like the colored pencils I've been working with.  

So finally I gave the regular brushes a try instead -- they don't mix (though I believe you can make adjustments to do so), and I was much happier with the control I had over them.  And then I discovered the "smudge" brush tool.  Ah!  It was a revelation.  This tool allowed me to blend the colors exactly the way I wanted to -- lots of ways to adjust it to get precisely the effect I wanted.  

The feel of using the smudge tool was very similar to using the solvent on colored pencils.  Once I figured out how to mimic the colored pencil blending experience, I was so much happier--and off and running!

After a few days of practice, the next time the Zoom sketch group met, I used the iPad and Adobe Fresco to draw this bizarre beetle, in about one hour:

The hardest part was trying to match the colors -- not exact, though not too far off.  

Feeling more confident now, naturally I decided to tackle some Good Omens!

I practiced on this photo of Crowley, which was not high quality.  I imported the photo into Fresco, and drew over it, and then tried to improve the details, just for practice.

My redo wasn't perfect, but it taught me a lot about using the tools.

And it gave me a chance to create parts of the image rather than just copying over them.  For example, here is the eye in the photo:

Not much detail there.   I pretty much painted it out and redid it from scratch:

Next, I got the idea to "correct" some of my colored pencil drawings.  This one, for instance, had textures that were too rough in areas despite the solvent blending, especially in the faces. 

This didn't bother me, actually -- it gives the picture that hand-drawn look that I prefer.  But when I printed it out (for calendars, for example), it looked too blotchy.  So I used Fresco to smooth everything out so I would have a photo I could print from:

Next, tackled an early portrait I did of Crowley before I learned how to blend colored pencils.  It definitely had way too much rough texture:

And it needed a background.  He's talking to his plants in this scene, so I used Fresco to smooth out the portrait, and then drew in some plants:

I'm having lots of fun with my new toy, that's for sure.

The Hounds, however, are not thrilled.  I have clearly been spending far too much time paying attention to that strange device instead of them, and this is how they feel about that:

Well, I'm sure things will settle back into a more normal routine soon.  I hope so, anyway, because my arms are sore!

That's all from here.  Have a great week out there!