On the plane rides back to Montana from Cuba, I whiled away the hours in my pencil journal. Here’s one of the results:
A few of my favorite things seen around the Interwebs recently
Sometimes I find myself keeping a browser tab open because I want to look at it one more time. In the interest of tab tidiness and also sharing, here are some interesting things I’ve read on the internet lately:
Toiling Toward Mastery – an essay by Erin Mickelson about the “lifelong exercise in patience, and paring design elements down to their most essential forms”.
Susie Short for Daniel Smith on working with a split-primary color palette.
An introduction to “the ancestors of the Book of Kells”, four 5th/6th-century Irish manuscripts that have been repaired and digitized. I wanted a better look, so I went looking. Trinity College Dublin has more information, specifically here and here.
And, for those of us who love libraries, this post about photographer Thibaud Poirier who has traveled the world to photograph the world’s incredible libraries. Via Colossal.
More … even more … pencil lettering, this for Big Sky Scribes
Here’s the cover of this year’s membership directory for Big Sky Scribes. Amity Parks’ pencil workshop is still alive and kicking in my studio, all right.
It looks nothing like the 4 or 5 or 6 layouts I tried during the actual workshop. Here you see me getting by with a little help from my friends 🙂
Everything papyrological (is there an adjective for papyrus?)
Big data! These days, I tells ya – you can stumble across the most interesting collections of information.
Trismegistos , an organization dedicated to the study of ancient texts from the ancient world, has created a searchable database of nearly 220,000 documents. You can click on a map or type in a name or location. I haven’t examined the rest of the site, but you can find collections of texts, people, and places in antiquity as well. Amazing.
Portfolio project – Nurture
Today’s portfolio page brought to you by the letter N:
More, even more, pencil lettering
I’m simply addicted to pencils now. Here’s one I did in mid-April:
We just returned from a trip to Cuba, which is why it’s been so quiet around here. Look for the Cuban influence in succeeding posts. This yuma had a great time.
Another page (unfinished) of the portfolio project
I’ve been so enamored of the pencil since Amity Parks’ workshop. I’m starting to think about moving back to the wet stuff. I still like drawing the letters, though; I may take that back to gouache and sumi ink.
Art books online from the Guggenheim
The Guggenheim has put online more than 200 books about modern art! You can download most of them in a variety of formats: ePub, Kindle (MOBI), PDF, plain text, and more.
There are a lot of books on Kandinsky, some Klimt, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a great catalog on Jenny Holzer … and some great Guggenheim collections.
Check the whole list of offerings from the Guggenheim at archive.org.
Portfolio project
Remember this post? wherein I claimed to be making progress. Hahahahahaha.
I’ve scrapped those pages, and the minuscule progress I’ve made since then, to make it a pencil-only portfolio. Here are two completed pages. We will make portfolios for our projects in August, so I really do have to get cooking on these.
Mystery (bookbinding?) tool
I came across a drawer full of these next to bone folders, awls, and other bookbinding tools. Does anybody know what this is?
Update: I posted this question to the Book-Arts-L and immediately got the answer: it’s a scalpel handle. So now I know. I just happen to have a scalpel blade.