Nothing much

I’ve had a few non photogenic days in the studio. I worked in my sketchbooks, cleaned up a bit, and organized my oil paints.

I had a plan, to keep working on the small paintings I started, but they’re still wet. Like, not dry AT ALL. The thing I forgot about oils is that if you use linseed oil as a medium (which I did) they take forever to dry, where forever = up to a week. I used to have some quick dry medium (liquin), but I believe it’s all gone/dried up. Quick dry, in the context of oils, means hours or a day, but that’s certainly better than a week. I really love the look of paint thinned with linseed oil, though, especially when working with glazes. So I may need to change my process of working – basically, to have a lot of small paintings going at the same time. I’d also need a lot more space to dry these small paintings – I figure I can probably construct a drying rack that will hold 40-50 paintings pretty easily.

November Studio Time #4

Another thing I need to think about is my choice of substrate. I’ve been working on primed illustration board, which is nice because it is cheap, sturdy, and easy to handle. But the downside is that it’s harder to frame/display. What I want to do is to make some cradled wooden boards. These can be hung by themselves. I suppose it depends on whether I think I’ll be giving the artwork away or selling it – and I’m still not much in the mood to sell stuff. Cradled boards would be too expensive to ship for giveaways.

November Studio Time #4

I spent two entire evenings going through my oil paints. I’ve been given a lot of oils by people who don’t use them anymore, plus I had a lot from getting an art degree and working in an art store.

November Studio Time #4

This is what I ended up with. I painted a bit of the paint on the tubes, which will be nice for choosing colors, but this’ll take another few days to dry. sigh.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on my sketchbook for the sketchbook project, and I’ll post some selections soon.

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Oil! (Day 3)

(I wrote this post yesterday but then forgot to post it. oops.)

November Studio Time #3

Today Wednesday I worked with oil paint for the first time in a long time. I wanted to switch back to oil for a few reasons. I’ve never worked with oil on a small scale, only on pretty large paintings. Another reason is that oil is actually a bit easier to work with when one doesn’t have easy access to water. On a more practical level, I am out of some of the acrylic paint and acrylic ink I need, while I have tons of oils in every color.

There are several qualities I love about oil paint. One is that what you paint will look much the same when wet as when dry. This isn’t true with acrylics – paint becomes darker, more level, and sometime duller when dry (the cheaper the acrylic, the more this is true). Another is that long drying times mean more time to blend and correct mistakes.

November Studio Time #3

November Studio Time #3

Mostly, I just love the absolutely brilliant colors.

November Studio Time #3

I am not really sure where I am going with this. It’s definitely not done, but I’m not quite sure of the next steps. I’m thinking maybe a lot of glazes on the purple – alizarin crimson, thalo green, ultramarine blue, indian yellow – which should combine to give a lovely dark muddy deep look. After that? not sure.

November Studio Time #3

My process with these small paintings has been to just start working and then to see where I end up. This isn’t always working out so well. I need to have a bit more of a plan, especially if I am going to move to working with oils. Since oils take so much longer to dry, I can’t just try something and then paint over it immediately if it does not work.

As before, you can follow my process on flickr on the collection page.

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In the studio, day 2

November Studio time #2

First I started with pastel on some watercolor paper.

Wait, let me start with why you should never ever buy a roll of watercolor paper. I bought this roll of watercolor paper years ago, and have since used it a few times. But even if I tape it down and wet it, it never loses its curl. So I tried unrolling it all and piling a bunch of heavy stuff on it. That made it less curly, but still unworkable; I couldn’t keep it taped to the table without using tape that would rip the paper.

So anyway, I gave up on the pastel drawing, and tried to reroll the paper in the other direction. I decided I would do this with my other rolls (I cut the watercolor paper into 6′ x 4′ sections when I was trying to flatten it). It’s harder than you’d think to roll a big piece of heavy paper in a direction it does not want to go.

November Studio time #2

In the end, I only got three pieces of paper re-rolled.

So next I used another piece of watercolor paper that had already been primed on both sides. Ah, much better. I worked from a sketch, and ended with this:

November Studio time #2

I didn’t finish though, had to let the piece dry. I’m not sure what I think of it yet.

Then I carried my brushes downstairs to wash them, a practice that is really getting old. I *really* wish I had a sink upstairs.

I’m not sure exactly what my goals are for my November art project thing. So far it has amounted to spending time in the studio and taking pictures of what I do. That’s nice, but I feel like I should be working towards something. I started this as a project because all my write-y friends are working on NaNoWriMo. I’m hoping I’ll get my sketchbook from the sketchbook project soon in the mail so I can work on that.

I think writing about what I have been doing in the studio may be a bigger component of the project than I originally realized. It’s not often I pause to reflect on what I am doing, and I have never consistently put what I am working on “out there.”

You can see the pics from today on flickr, and the collection of sets here.

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November Art #1

November Studio time #1

Instead of NaNoWriMo, I’m creating something once a month. “Creating Something” gets a very liberal definition. Basically, I’m going to go into my studio every day and do something. In this case, what I ended up with is a photo set and color palettes (at the end of the photo set).

I fully intended to paint something when I headed into the studio, but these color cards were out on the table and I wanted to start playing with them. The cards were leftover from my husband’s art school days – he had to buy this expensive set of color cards and then cut shapes out of them. (I’ll leave the rant on art school making students buy expensive one use supplies for later.)

I first sorted the cards into three color sets, setting aside all the colors I did not use.

November Studio time #1

November Studio time #1

I then photographed all the three color sets. In the middle of this, I played around some with my camera settings and found that the white balance setting for “Florescent H” matched the light from my knock off ott style lamp pretty well. I messed around with custom white balance without great results.

After that, I just rearranged the cards for a while.

November Studio time #1

At some point, I started sorting the colors.

November Studio time #1

And I made a color wheel.

November Studio time #1

Later at the computer I played with the color wheel. Above-

Top left: Grayscale
Top Right: Filtered B&W Green
Bottom left: Filtered B&W Red
Bottom right: Color

Finally, I created color palettes from the photos I took. These might come in handy later and if not, hey, it was fun.

color 003

You can see the pics from my color playtime on flickr, and the collection of sets here (only one in there so far, will hopefully have one for each day eventually!)

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Screened in Porch, part 2

This was the concept we began with when designing our screened in porch. We wanted a nice outdoorish place we could relax with our cats. We decided to just add on to the existing deck because it was in good shape and a good size.

deck_design

Here is where we ended up at the end of day one. My Brother-in-law Andy came to help us with the project, and I am really, really glad he did – he has a lot more construction experience than we do and helped us avoid lots of mistakes.

Screened in porch, day 1

Here it is at the end of day two. We used cedar to build the frame, because it is so much lighter than pressure treated wood. Also it smells *really* good.

Screened in porch, day 2

Besides Andy, we had a little animal help in the form of neighbor animals.

Screened in porch

Screened in porch

Here it is mostly done. We still have some trim work to do, and need to seal it.

Screened in porch - mostly finished

The cats quite love it, and so do I!

Screened in porch - mostly finished

Supplies for this project came in at about $2200 – plus we paid Andy for his time. So we saved about $14K over the professional estimate. yay! Soon we will have a party to celebrate.

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Non-English Music

I recently asked for suggestions for non English music via Twitter. I like to listen to music with lyrics I don’t understand while writing or coding. I got lots of responses, listed below. I didn’t do any editing for duplicates, but there didn’t appear to be many.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions!

Twitter

¡Que Corra la Voz! – Spanish ska (@rossnelson)
Bad Shakyn – a bit more just ska, lots of English some German (@rossnelson)
Selda – Turkish revolutionary folk music (@littletinyfish)
Camille for French pop (@sgillies)
La Caravane Passe – French gypsy/klezmer wierdness(@sgillies)
La Disparition,” by Keren Ann – A French-pop album (@jrep)
Tinariwenone – a group of Taureg musicians from Mali (@J450NK)
Kurt Weill in the original (@benwbrum)
Sigur Ros – they sing in a made up language (@junker1244)
Keren Ann – (early stuff) (@Fiona_Bradley)
Benjamin Biolay (@Fiona_Bradley)
Emilie Simon (@Fiona_Bradley)
Yann Tiersen (@Fiona_Bradley)
Tocotronic – German and pretty good rock n’ roll. (@redheadkitchen)
Ivri Lider – good Israeli pop (@jwiltshire)
Tim Maia and Elis Regina – Brazilian classics (@jwiltshire)
Bossacucanova – is good… (@jwiltshire)
Ravi Shankar – sitar music (@dejah_thoris)
Acoustic Brazil – good guitar music (@dejah_thoris)
The Rough Guide to Australian Aboriginal Music – digeredoo music, including rock music (@dejah_thoris)
Seu Jorge is amazing, in Portugese. http://bit.ly/9F8KoL (@gunderson)

Friendfeed:

Souad Massi has a lovely voice (@Kirsten)
Kiran Ahluwalia (@Kirsten)
Kitka (@Kirsten)
Yael Naim (@cavlec)
Camille (see on youtube) (@Pierre Lindenbaum)

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Not dead & screened in porch

Well, mostly. I have neglected all my blogs lately. Which makes me wonder why I have more than one, but oh well.

ANYWAY

So I have been dreaming of a screened in porch lately. I made a sketch of what we want:

The desire is no doubt driven by the mass of mosquitoes this year and my desire to be outside without getting bitten 10000 times. We got a quote to add a screened in porch, but it was $17K. (Actually, we had 3 companies out for estimates, and only one company got back to us.) So, we’re going to try to do it ourselves (with, as they say, a little help from our friends.)

Should be fun.

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A rant about humans

So I read a few things today and it got my mind going in a million different directions. Here are three mini observations with a point of sorts at the end.

“Women in Tech” organizations

The other day I watched “Adriana Gascoigne @ Big Omaha 2009.” While I agree with much of what she said, I had a vague sense of unease with the whole idea of “women in tech” organizations. Today, while reading Hillary Mason’s post Stop talking, start coding I started to get an idea of why I have a problem with them:

Many groups have popped up that support women in technology, like Girls in Tech, She’s Geeky, and many others (enumerated in Digiphile’s thoughtful post Why Including women matters for the future of technology and society). More often than not, these groups are the canned food drives of the women in technology movement. They make you feel better, they might do a little good, but they offer no fundamental change to the system that created the problem in the first place.

The NY Times article Mason was responding to, Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley, contained this choice quote:

“Women tend to network with women, and men tend to network with men,” says Sharon Vosmek, C.E.O. of Astia. “It plays out on the golf course, in the boardroom and it’s certainly playing out in high-growth entrepreneurship.”

I then looked at the organizations mentioned in the previously mentioned blog post Why including women matters for the future of technology and society by Alexander B Howard. Some seemed to do serious good – providing grants for startups led by women. Some were a roundup of links and news about women in tech. But I noticed a prevailing theme in many of the about pages. See if you can pick it out:

… As young women with the capacity to inspire, we made it our personal desire and passion to create and sustain an organization that focuses on the collaboration, promotion, growth and success of women in the technology sector. … (Girls in Tech)

… As young women with world-changing aspirations, we recognize entrepreneurship as the means to fulfill our life goals. After attending numerous local networking events for entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, we asked “Where are all the women in the Silicon Valley?” … (Women 2.0)

… We’re young women with the power and passion to make a difference. We believe in the potential of computing to build a better world. (dot diva)

OK, I realize tech, as a field, belongs to the young. But maybe that is part of the problem. Maybe if we stopped focusing on age and more on experience and desire to learn, we can reach more people. Maybe women, especially – who may have a late start after having a family – could use help no matter what their age. And maybe we can get rid of that damn “so simple your mom can use it” stereotype while we’re at it.

Maybe if we stopped focusing on age and more on experience and desire to learn, we can reach more people. Maybe women, especially – who may have a late start after having a family – could use help no matter what their age.

On genderized assumptions:

We are socialized our entire lives to live up to predetermined roles. These have to do with gender, but also race, age, how we dress, what color our hair is, who we are with. This isn’t surprising – humans interact with tons of people, and to simplify things, we start to group them. Fair enough. Trouble is that we don’t realize we’re doing it, and that many of the stereotypes we base our assumptions on are misleading (movies, TV, other popular entertainment), or are outdated. Example:

Today I got an estimate for an addition we’d like to make on our house. I contacted the contractor, yet he spent most of the time talking to my husband, asking him things like “can you lay tile” (n.b., I’m the one that bought or registered for every power tool we own) and, after I told him our budget, said “tell your husband to make more.” None of this is that bad, but it’s also not unique. It’s pervasive, the sort of thing that women hear every single day our entire lives. I don’t think it’s stretching to guess that many women have experienced this in tech careers, math and science classes, etc.

Things like these couldn’t possibly be the reason that women don’t put themselves out there and take chances, right? Subtle indications that women are less capable than men at some things are lifelong and pervasive.

To go back to the New York Times article mentioned above:

But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.”

Another potential backer invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes. When a third financier discovered that her husband was also a biking enthusiast, she says, he spent more time asking if riding affected her husband’s reproductive capabilities than he did focusing on her business plan.

So despite many comments about how there is no problem, there IS overt sexism and subtle signals throughout our lives telling us what we are and are not good at.

On Self Confidence:

Finally, I read this bit on self confidence on the Geek Feminism Blog and I TOTALLY related to it:

It seems like a certain amount of “irrational” self-confidence is necessary for success in geeky fields. STEM work usually involves a lot of failure before you figure something out. While you’re failing repeatedly, you have to keep believing you can do it and you’re smart enough to figure it out. But the repeated failures, to me, always seem like evidence that I’m not smart enough. From a scientific perspective, I demand proof: what evidence is there I can do this? And there seems like a lot of evidence that I can’t.

Thing is, when I shared it, I got many men saying they could identify too. So it isn’t a uniquly woman trait after all.

The point

OK, remember that story I told above about the contractor and the estimate? Let’s pretend a different scenario – say, one where a couple is planning a wedding and consult a wedding planner. Obviously a good wedding planner would involve both parties equally, but in practice, he or she might address the woman more even if the man is the one that’s most interested in the details. Or imagine a guy dragging his girlfriend to a cooking class. Or a couple choosing a day care. In all of these situations, there is a good chance that the woman would be addressed more than the man. And that gets to the heart of the problem. We can’t assume that women are into family and men their careers, that women need confidence boosting and men don’t.

Maybe the problem is more like this: some people aren’t very good at promoting themselves. Maybe more of those people tend to be women, but the problem exists for those that aren’t women as well. Maybe some of us humans tend to downplay our accomplishments and let others take the spotlight. Maybe some of us humans don’t want to let work dominate our lives, want to spend time on other pursuits (like, *gasp* our families, or our communities).

Maybe we can figure out how to make the workplace work for lots of differnt types of people. In the process, we’ll probably draw in more women and minorities – because who wouldn’t want to work in a field where their accomplishments are valued and their opinions respected, and employers realize that yes, there is life outside work?

This is not to say we can’t recognize the disparity of women in tech. But we might want to take it in context of a larger problem – our inability to see each other as humans fist, and gender, race, whatever else – second.

(title is a nod to Clay Shirky’s “A Rant About Women“)

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Creativity and lawsuits, or, "I should sue"

This post was prompted by the article Color: The Next Limited Resource? at Six Revisions. The article is pretty much chock full of misinformation (though well intentioned).

To point out a few things:

  • The article confuses copyright and trademark. Common mistake, but worth mentioning. You can’t copyright a color- if you could, every color would already be copyrighted by painters, photographers, etc. since copyright does not to have to be applied for. Whether you can trademark or patent a color… well, you can patent a process for making a color, and you can trademark the use of a color in a certain context. But I have yet to see a trademark on just a color, with no other design elements. (Please correct me if I’ve missed one).
  • “Every color you have ever seen used has been indexed and named by Pantone.” The human eye can perceive a lot of different shades and colors. Most estimates put it in the millions, though it depends on how good your color perception is. Furthermore, just because Pantone has named colors, it does not mean it owns them. What they own is a trademark on certain designations (numbers) associated with certain colors. You can still use any of the Pantone colors, you just can’t distribute a list of Pantone colors + designations. So their business doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what colors you can use.
  • Brands have been trademarking color for a long time. This is nothing new.
  • TMobile did not “[sue] companies like a book-on-demand publisher, and most recently, in the blog Engadget Mobile” as stated in the article. As can be easily determined from the article’s links, both companies got a Cease and Desist letter. This is miles away from a lawsuit. Even if they did sue, the lawsuit would hinge on a lot of things, not just color. Is the company selling a similar product? Does the logo look similar? Is the accused infringer even in the same business?

Anyway, a glance at the comments is enough to tell me that people are taking stuff like this seriously.

Don’t get me wrong. I think our copyright system is broken. But if we jump at every little thing, we’ll miss the really big stuff.

The truth is, if you create anything today, you are at a risk of being sued. It’s probably going to be unusual to go through a creative career without at least one C&D letter to your name soon. People have simply done so much that the chances of your doing something truly original are reaching nil. That doesn’t mean we should stop creating. It means we should arm ourselves, know our rights, and fight for change where necessary.

It also means that, as designers, we should try to avoid becoming the assholes misguided companies we decry in our inflammatory articles. Don’t make “I should sue” jokes. Don’t think about suing when you see designs vaguely similar to yours. Don’t look to lawsuits as a potential future cash cow. Remember that creativity is built on other creative works. That’s not to say you shouldn’t stand up for yourself if someone out and out steals your work, but don’t jump to conclusions, either.

Bonus points: Release some of your work under a creative commons license. :)

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Almond cupcakes (recipe)

I find myself talking about these cupcakes a lot, so I’m putting the recipe here so I can point to it in the future. I make these cupcakes all the time. Quick and easy, and I just love the nuttiness. Recipe is linked here, but I don’t know if that is where I originally got it from.

Almond Cupcakes

Ground almonds give these cupcakes a rich flavour and a nice moist crumb.

Servings: 12 cupcakes
Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup (125 mL) butter, softened
  • 1 cup (250 mL) granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 tsp (2 mL) almond extract
  • 1 cup (250 mL) all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup (125 mL) ground almonds
  • 1 tsp (5 mL) baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp (1 mL) salt
  • 1/2 cup (125 mL) milk

Preparation:
In large bowl, beat butter with sugar until fluffy; beat in eggs, 1 at a time. Beat in almond extract.

In separate bowl, whisk together flour, ground almonds, baking powder and salt,  stir into butter mixture alternately with milk, making 3 additions of dry ingredients and 2 of milk. Spoon into paper-lined or greased muffin cups.

Bake in 350°F (180°C) oven until cake tester inserted in centre comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer to rack; let cool.

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