Monochromatic Outlook

I’ve start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with black and white and a sec­ond ink col­or. This draw­ing was done with Water­man Havana, a red­dish brown that turns just a lit­tle too pink when spread too thin. Still, it adds some warmth and char­ac­ter to the draw­ing while still retain­ing the B&W character.

The draw­ing itself pre­sent­ed a num­ber of chal­lenges. The light and shad­ow rela­tion­ships were dif­fi­cult, and the her­ring­bone pat­tern in the jack­et was as well. As usu­al I’m trou­bled by how … Read the rest

Of all the unex­pect­ed sources of inspi­ra­tion, this morn­ing takes the cake. I was read­ing a six-month-old copy of Read­er’s Digest with an inter­view with Will Smith. Some­thing he said brought me back twen­ty years:

RD: You work hard­er than the next guy?
Fresh Prince: I con­sid­er myself to be of basi­cal­ly aver­age tal­ent, right? What I have that oth­er peo­ple do not have is a sick, obses­sive, raw ani­mal drive.

I used to resent being told I have tal­ent. To me, tal­ent … Read the rest

In 1998 I pur­chased a fine point Rotring 700. This was my first for­ay into what some would call the realm of fine pens, although Rotring has tend­ed to make pens that are more prac­ti­cal than the ones that usu­al­ly get cat­e­go­rized that way. Until then I had used the Park­er Vec­tor, which gen­er­al­ly gets clas­si­fied as a «stu­dent» pen, and I was ready to see what spend­ing a bit more would get me.

In part I want­ed to test … Read the rest

For years I’ve been singing the virtues of the Pilot Var­si­ty, which is a sort of odd duck in both of the worlds it strad­dles. It is a dis­pos­able foun­tain pen, and so far as I know, it is the only dis­pos­able foun­tain pen. It is by far the most inex­pen­sive foun­tain pen on the mar­ket, but please, lets not call it cheap.

The Var­si­ty is a feath­er­weight of a pen, weigh­ing in at nine grams full of ink and with … Read the rest

My apolo­gies to the vis­i­tor who arrived here after googling «Cham­bers Ency­clo­pe­dia 1884». Mine is actu­al­ly the 1883 edi­tion and my rep­re­sent­ing it as 1884 was an error which has now been corrected.… Read the rest

I hear all the time about John Law. He’s the guy with a long arm, who will catch you when you do bad things. I became curi­ous: I’ve heard about him many times, but I don’t real­ly know who John Law is. For­tu­nate­ly, I have my set of Cham­ber­s’s Ency­clo­pe­dia, 1883 Edi­tion handy. Yes, I could have googled it, but that takes all the fun out, does­n’t it?

Turns out John Law was born the son of a Scot­tish banker and … Read the rest