Author: splicer

This arti­cle first appeared in All This Is Mine issue #12 and appears here as it did in print, with the excep­tion of minor fac­tu­al and typo­graph­i­cal corrections. 

In the pub­lished ver­sion, I described the nib size «Extra-Broad» or «EB». The more com­mon des­ig­na­tion is «Dou­ble-Broad» and com­mon­ly abbre­vi­at­ed «BB». I also amend­ed the des­ig­na­tion for «Extra-Fine» to include the abbre­vi­a­tion «XF» in addi­tion to «EF». Both are in com­mon use. Punc­tu­a­tion has been changed to fit splicer.com’s style­book, … Read the rest

The lat­est por­trait to come off my draw­ing table is titled The Hunter Watch­es Over You Always. It is the por­trait of the father of a friend whose father died when she was nine. She is one of sev­er­al peo­ple I’ve known who have expressed a con­nec­tion or affec­ton for the con­stel­la­tion Ori­on. I’ve always liked Ori­on; it’s about the eas­i­est con­stel­la­tion to find in the North­ern Hemi­sphere. But it was­n’t until hear­ing a num­ber of dear friends tell … Read the rest

After a long cou­ple days at the stu­dio (almost done with a new piece) I’m relax­ing at home with a cup of Gin­ger Twist tea, my Omas Emot­i­ca foun­tain pen, a new bot­tle of ink (Noodler’s «Galileo Man­u­script Brown» made exclu­sive­ly for Foun­tain Pen Net­work), and the newest episode of the new Ter­mi­na­tor TV series. It’s pret­ty decent pulp TV, which is to say that part of what’s good about it is that it’s not real­ly that good. Also, … Read the rest

I hate to make excus­es for a web­site’s appear­ance. It sounds very much like the Web of 1995 where near­ly every site had an oh-so-clever icon of an «under con­struc­tion» sign. But hav­ing migrat­ed Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look to a dif­fer­ent con­tent man­age­ment plat­form, I’ve found that some of the fea­tures will take more time to migrate than I’d antic­i­pat­ed. My book reviews in par­tic­u­lar are look­ing ugly and are bad­ly organized.

I will update and fix this and oth­er issues with … Read the rest

I’ve been test­ing ink col­ors for some time. I actu­al­ly wrote only with black ink until a lit­tle over a year ago when I had a con­tract in a depart­ment of a com­pa­ny that col­or-cod­ed sig­noffs in their work­flow. The depart­ment I was work­ing in had green for our col­or and we were all giv­en hor­ri­ble green ball­points so that we could sign our parts and approvals. Actu­al­ly, it was a pret­ty good sys­tem; the work­flow sheets were intu­itive and … Read the rest

For a long time my draw­ing work has been done with pre­cise tech­ni­cal pens and lots and lots of cross­hatch­ing. I’ve done very lit­tle in the way of loos­en­ing up into a more car­toony style. So when I was approached by the Life’s Work Cen­ter to cre­ate a sin­gle-frame car­toon to accom­pa­ny an arti­cle in Open Exchange (one of the local free newsprint mag­a­zines), I was­n’t real­ly sure I should take the assign­ment. I like Tom and the pro­gram they … Read the rest

The iBook was always just a lit­tle bit loose. That’s how I bought it. Every­thing in work­ing order, but cos­met­i­cal­ly you could see some gaps telling the sto­ry of an occa­sion­al brush with grav­i­ty. The pieces just did­n’t fit togeth­er the way they sure­ly did when they came from the factory.

All that changed when it slid off the draw­ing table in my stu­dio and crashed into the floor.It would still turn on, but the screen and its hous­ing … Read the rest

The most hack­neyed blog­ger line in all of his­to­ry: sor­ry I haven’t been writ­ing much recent­ly. I would have thought that being injured and keep­ing my foot up would have giv­en me more rea­son to write. In fact while I may have had more time to write in the last two months, I haven’t had a lot to write about. Not real­ly proud of all the tele­vi­sion I’ve watched in the last two months. I’ve done some oth­er things, but … Read the rest