New Experiments

For a while I’ve been wondering about watercolour pencils. It seems like a great way of carrying around some strong colour that can be applied in a simple way and not too messily while out and about.

You’ve seen me quickly splash colour onto a line sketch digitally, by scanning (on on the road, photographing) the result and pulling it into the iPad and using Brushes, (see e.g., here, and here) but that’s… something else.

Also, even at home/work, if I want to do a quick colour study before doing a whole page for The Project, it is nice to be able to play with colours I can apply in a more tactile way, and step back from the result and see how it looks. So, I got a set of watercolour pencils (made by Derwent) and a portable water-fillable brush (made by pentel) and grabbed a ball point pen and looked around for something to experiment with. I settled on an issue of Vogue Patterns Magazine (I get it for the craaaaazy weird poses of the models… well, really I get it for my sister) and did a quick series. Line drawings of a model, then apply pencils (mixing experimentally to get something that resembles skin tones from a set of pencils that don’t come close), then brush with water in various ways to get some rough colour, and highlights.

The results were fun! I made some mistakes at the start since I did not know just how […] Click to continue reading this post

Flyover!

[caption id="attachment_12548" align="aligncenter" width="499"] Space Shuttle Endeavour and escort, flying over the California Science Center, its new home where it will soon be on display.[/caption]
Wow, that was amazing. So a group of us (Aimee, Amy, Tameem, and myself) decided to go down to the Rose Garden, across the street from the USC campus and in the grounds of the Califorina Science Center where the Shuttle will be housed. Of all the places in LA where there will be a flyover, surely we ought to get a good view from there. Also, the Rose Garden gives access to a large piece of sky, so even if it does not come super-close, we ought to get a good chance… That was the thinking. (A major landmark here was that this is the most USC people I’ve ever seen in the lovely Rose Garden – not counting people on their way to a game at the Coliseum…)

[caption id="attachment_12549" align="alignleft" width="300"] Shuttle Endeavour and escort, with the Natural History Museum just in view below. It is approaching the California Science Center.[/caption]Well, it worked far better than we imagined. The shuttle eventually appeared from the West, and people began to cheer and wave, and snap pictures and so forth… We all felt very lucky that they did that pass…. you could see the fighter plane (?) escort, and there it was appropriately (sort of) over the buildings where it will live out its days… We’d talked about what it meant to see the very last transport flight of a shuttle, the end of the shuttle program, the future of manned spaceflight, and so forth. We, and the […] Click to continue reading this post