The vegetation is finally turning green here, which means it's jorts season! And update crayon tin season! I limit the number of crayons I take with me because premixed colors get muddy very quickly if you use too many of them. There's a lot of abstraction involved (3 or 4 different shades of green in a scene will get condensed into 1 or 2, for example).
Color selection is a new "problem" for me because I'm used to mixing colors from primaries. I used to exclusively mix accurate colors for paintings, but my experiments with limited palettes have helped push me out of my comfort zone. The crayons have sent me further in that direction because I really have to think about what I want to communicate with color (vibes, if you will).
I never had a specific interest in vintage pens until I went to the Colorado Pen Show last year. (Here, I'm loosely defining vintage pens as any model that is no longer in production, mainly from the 20th century.) I had acquired a few here and there before then, but I didn't truly understand the sheer range and appeal of these pens until I saw tables and tables full of them in person. There was the usual garage sale thrill of finding cool old things, as any secondhand enthusiast would know, and I really enjoyed listening to people ramble about the pens they were selling.
I have a particular interest in pens from the 70s-90s because they usually feature cartridge/converter filling systems, which are less fragile and picky about ink than pens with built-in filling systems, but I've become increasingly interested in lever fillers because you can find a lot of interesting flex nibs in those pens. In any case, I've found that older pen nibs have a certain character to them that modern mass-produced nibs usually don't.
This is an excessively deep look at the vintage pens I have at the moment.
I am a certified serial killer. During the last two months, I killed a handful of plants and drove others to the precipice of death. I regret my actions immensely and will be issuing a Notes app apology in short order.
There's some shame associated with all these killings. Some of these plants were ones I've had for years — it was active negligence that did them in, not incompetence. My personal life hasn't been going great, and to say nothing of the clown show that is the US right now! I knew the plants weren't doing well, but it was easier to ignore them in light of everything else.
I finally did clean up all the carnage and put the survivors into rehab. In the end, the downsizing came as a relief. I'm busier than I was 4 years ago, and it's drier here than it was in my previous location. Even in the best of circumstances, I figure high-maintenance tropical plants aren't the move anymore.
I selectively bought some replacements that I wouldn't need to babysit as much. And the surviving plants appear to be salvageable, since 1. they haven't died yet and 2. they have new growth, which I would like to think is good.
Drawings of houseplants in pen and watercolor crayon. The crayon was used dry before being brushed with water, so there are dry, textured areas left on the page. Only the plants have been lined with ink so they stand out from their pots.
The first page has drawings of a Philodendron Brasil in a terracotta pot and two Haworthias in ceramic turtle pots. The philodendron is a bright green trailing plant with heart-shaped leaves. The leaves have lime green markings on them. The haworthias are small succulents with fleshy leaves that form rosettes. One is darker green, while the other lime green.
The second page has two drawings of the same Peperomia Metallica plant, one drawn in crayon and one drawn in brown ink. Written underneath the ink drawing: "Nice shape for drawing, but not for maintenance!" This plant has long magenta stems with dark olive-colored leaves.
My new sketchbook, which uses the cover of Shivers by William Schoell. The cover features a painting of a gargoyle on a roof done in a warm grey palette. A green mist winds around the gargoyle and down to the bottom of the cover. The title is printed in large gold foiled lettering behind the gargoyle.
I love making book covers out of things that otherwise would have ended up in the trash, so I couldn't pass on one of these handmade book-sketchbooks from Arsenik Press. I don't have the time or energy to bind a new sketchbook right now, so I was happy to buy this one because it's still handmade and (importantly) it looks cool.
I love the ridiculousness of 80s book covers: the typography, the painting style, the corny catchphrases, the whole thing. The jacket synopsis is as follows:
Deep beneath the city streets lurks a creature hideous beyond description, powerful beyond imagining, a creature so dangerous that it can destroy its victims by the virulence of its thoughts.
The emanations of its computer-like brain invade every sanctuary, searching for those it would destroy. It is remorseless, cunning and inhuman. The pitiful human weaklings it has chosen as prey shudder with terror and disgust, but there is no escape from the ultimate torture that is far worse than death, unless...
The first spread of the new book. I've drawn some of my supplies on the first page. The book also came with an informational insert, which I taped to the endpaper.
Transcript of insert
Cover Shivers
William Schoell 1985
Cover artist Uncredited
Paper Fabriano 1264 Watercolor 140lb
I stole the idea to draw/paint an overview of my current favorite supplies on the first page from Apple Pine. I always struggle with what to put on the first page of a sketchbook, so I like this exercise. There's no pressure to make a masterpiece, and it helps give the sketchbook... context? I guess? My previous big sketchbook was a little more clinical because I was still relearning how to use one, but I'm hoping future books will be a bit more diary-esque.
My current supply rotation includes some stuff that I haven't found the time to talk about yet, so I'll merge that into this post while it's relevant.
I haven't posted any new coding projects in a very long time, but I've been gradually chipping away at a concept that longtime readers will know by its working (joke) title of "Walmart Toyhouse," from the character management website Toyhouse. In theory, Walmart Toyhouse is a self-hosted character management script with enough automation that it's easy to maintain without being unnecessarily dense or hard to customize. I say "in theory" because progress on the code stalled for a while.
For me, the ideal character management system needs the following components:
All information is pulled from a central database
Page templates that you can reuse and reformat for multiple characters
Some form of organization (folders)
Galleries auto-populate from one central image database
It's not a complex idea on paper, but I didn't make much progress on it because I got stuck on implementing stuff like custom fields into a database. I also thought I had to code a browser interface for the whole thing, and that's a can of worms that I didn't have the energy to open (especially for a project with this many moving parts). So Walmart Toyhouse has been languishing in development hell for a very long time.
Cut to December 2024. I saw a post from Armaina floating the idea of a PHP and CSV character repository, and it singlehandedly solved nearly every problem I was having with my original conception of this code.
