Category: something else

Today’s creative endeavor was an Asian Dinner for 8. My daughter came back from a semester overseas determined to learn how to cook. So we’ve been cooking. Today’s meal was a birthday celebration. The recipes all (or nearly all) came from Epicurious.com:

Egg Drop Soup
Lee Wan Ching’s Chinese Broccoli with Ginger Sauce
Jasmine Rice with Garlic, Ginger, and Cilantro
Jade Dumplings with Soy-Sesame Dipping Sauce
Vegetable Stir-Fry
Steamed Sea Bass, Cantonese Style
Tea-Poached Pears with Tapioca Pearls and Satsumas
Five-Spice Fortune Cookies
Bubble Tea

It was quite a spread. No matter how much I reminded myself to take photos, I forgot it all in the midst of preparations.

A mysterious depiction of a alien nest? An excavated cave drawing? No, just the hodgepodge of brush strokes that are the result of working through the first 40 pages of Adobe Photoshop CS2 Studio Techniques. It’s a great book. It’s not so much that there are too many pages on brush options and settings … it just seems that there are too many brush options and settings. It’s pretty amazing.

Madeleine L’Engle, one of the creative gems of our world, has died. I’m doubly grateful for the written word: without it, we may have lost her wisdom forever.

The New York Times reported:

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Charley Parker has blogged an interesting post about the Etch-a-Sketch, one of my favorite childhood toys. Did you know that the gray stuff inside is actually powdered aluminum? You learn something new every day.

Over at the Book-Arts-L, there’s been some discussion about book artists who blog. As a result, I’ve updated the blog roll at the right for some of the interesting blogs that have been mentioned there. Especially, check out Riverlark, Rag & Bone Bindery. Also, for a long time I’ve been subscribed to the feeds for Dennis Yuen’s blog (Cai Lun) and the podcasts from University of Alabama’s Book Arts Program, but somehow never added them to the blog roll. All these deficiencies have been remedied.

Check ’em out.

A collection of mail art links:

• A brief history of mail art
• Mail art, the wiki
• Ray Johnson, the father of mail art — his estate gallery
• Mailart.org, a resource for calls for mail art and a database of small art
• A visually painful resource listing many, many mail art websites internationally

Click the title of this post to go to a YouTube video which morphs a 500-year history of female portraiture. It’s mesmerizing.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

This luscious image of the earliest example of miniature Sumerian writing illustrates an interesting article entitled “A Minor History of Miniature Writing” at Cabinet. Cabinet is a quarterly magazine that looks so interesting I’ve just subscribed for a year to check it out.

This brings to three the total number of magazines I subscribe to; the other two are Letter Arts Review and Bound & Lettered.

Anybody got any magazine subscriptions they can’t live without?

Thanks to Notebookism for the link.

A quick photo of my light table, still set up for the broad-edge calligraphy I was doing on some wedding invitations earlier this week.

The easel is lightweight and adjustable, and folds down so I can take it to classes and workshops. (The link is to a selection of similar easels at John Neal Bookseller.) On the easel is a piece of Plexiglas — bought at the local glass store — covered by a clear mat with 1/8″ grid printed in red on it. Every 5 years or so I replace this grid, and it’s always a struggle to find it. It’s made by C-Thru Ruler Company, and it’s Item No. 158. They also make other gridded mats, but that one’s the most useful to me. You can see the light from the fluorescent strip on the desk behind the easel; I bought that at the local hardware store.

Despite the missing apostrophe, this very cool website provides all sorts of useful information for calligraphers and web designers alike:

• standard sizes of envelopes, folders, CD covers, and postcards;
• glossary of proofing marks;
• a “lorem ipsum” generator — useful for web designers struggling with, oh, CSS, for instance;
• legal documents which freelancers need, such non-compete agreements, copyright statements, and so on.

Be warned that the actual templates and legal document files require registration (online, that is, not the kind needed for 4-color separations — isn’t the English language a complicated thing?).