a useful link for art types

Want to have some good books on drawing? Go here and start clicking. Standouts for me are the infamous Andrew Loomis 'Figure Drawing for All It's Worth' and the Bridgman stuff; I am curious about the Harold Speed book he lists as the most awesome drawing book ever, as I've never encountered it. (thanks to dv_girl for the link!)

The Bridgman tends to be available from Dover Books and it looks like the Speed is as well; the Loomis is, of course, sadly out of print despite it being endlessly reproduced for art students from ragged, treasured hardbacks.

And while I'm mentioning classic texts let me direct you to a few pages from the unprinted first version of the classic Preston Blair text on drawing for animaton, with links to a suggested lesson plan by John K.

If you don't have these you should. And if you can get hardcopies you should. Print these out if you gotta, it's great to get the hell away from the computer and just fool around in your sketchbook with this sort of thing handy!

I've mentioned this stuff before, so this may be mostly old news for a lot of you, But if you haven't heard about it and like to draw... get these things and inhale them. Repeatedly.

twenty-nine years of progress

For instance, on some computers there are marvelous text-editing systems
which allow pieces of text to be "poured" from one format into another,
practically as liquids can be poured from one vessel into another. A thin page can
turn into a wide page, or vice versa. With such power, you might expect that it
would be equally trivial to change from one font to another-say from roman to
italics. Yet there may be only a single font available on the screen, so that such
changes are impossible. Or it may be feasible on the screen but not printable by
the printer-or the other way around. After dealing with computers for a long time,
one gets spoiled, and thinks that everything should be programmable: no printer
should be so rigid as to have only one character set, or even a finite repertoire of
them-typefaces should be user-specifiable! But once that degree of flexibility has
been attained, then one may be annoyed that the printer cannot print in different
colors of ink, or that it cannot accept paper of all shapes and sizes, or that it does
not fix itself when it breaks...

- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)

After dealing with computers for a long time, most of these things are now malleable. But nobody is surprised when the machine breaks, or that it cannot repair itself...

the year in review

First sentences from the first post of each month. Slightly fudged with regards to a couple one-word opening sentences and a private post or two.

january Is Matt Groening still doing this in 'Life in Hell'?
february I need to just spend a day or two sitting around with the sketchbook and drawing.
march I decided that today, I would experiment with taking one of the six or seven old PCs lying in the kitchen and putting FreeNAS on it - so we can centralize a lot of our large files.
april I'm definitely on for the exhibit, now.
may Getting back in the groove after a week and a half down in New Orleans is hard.
june We played a couple hands of "Race for the Galaxy" tonight.
july I got reminded that my birthday is in a few days - I'll be 37 on the 5th.
august [post opens with an image]
september "Following groups of Boston's art scene around the gallery and eavesdropping on their conversations was great fun..."
october OMFG BEANWORLD IS COMING BACK!!!!
november "I can still fit into the robot dragon costume from when I was 40!"
december My new Mac came with an Apple-branded buffing cloth.