Monochromatic Outlook

Remem­ber how proud I was of myself last night for exceed­ing my sys­tem resources? Well, I’m over it now. This is get­ting annoy­ing. I closed all the files and shut­down and restart­ed my machine to make sure I was­n’t using mem­o­ry from oth­er appli­ca­tions or mem­o­ry leaks or any­thing like that. I brought the sys­tem back up with rough­ly 20GB of disk space free. I tried to open the work­ing file of that one col­or chan­nel in Pho­to­shop, which … Read the rest

I know I’m being pro­duc­tive when my hard dri­ve runs out of space. 

Open Stu­dios is hap­pen­ing in anoth­er month and a half, and I don’t have any­where near as much work ready as I’d like. Get­ting prints made and framed requires a bit of lead time, so it’s not just a mat­ter of get­ting more ink down on paper. My dead­lines are draw­ing very very near. You can eas­i­ly imag­ine how frus­trat­ing it is then to have my machines show … Read the rest

In an effort to pro­mote the not-quite-lost art of let­ter-writ­ing, the USPS is giv­ing away postage-paid note­cards adorned with John Adams quo­ta­tions about let­ter-writ­ing. I’m skep­ti­cal that the «first one’s free» strat­e­gy will actu­al­ly cause peo­ple who are not nor­mal­ly let­ter-writ­ers to adopt a habit, but I have to give them props for the attempt. I’m sure that it will suc­cess­ful­ly rein­force the habit in those who already have it. Not to men­tion how refresh­ing it is to see the … Read the rest

It’s a love­ly day here in San Fran­cis­co, so I took advan­tage of the sun­light to catch up on some pho­tog­ra­phy. I have Open Stu­dios in two months (com­ing up quick­er than I’d like to admit) and a few projects that have fall­en by the way­side since my acci­dent in Sep­tem­ber. I packed up my cam­era with one of the lens­es that’s still intact, grabbed some toy dinosaurs, and head­ed to Trea­sure Island.

The shoot­ing was nice, but frus­trat­ing. My … Read the rest

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