The local schools are closing tomorrow, the governor has banned restaurants and similar establishments from offering dining-in services, and the library is maybe closed--their website has conflicting information. My husband's employer is having everyone start working from home soon, which is going to force us to upgrade to faster internet.
No one seems to have a plan beyond the next couple of weeks. The present measures are not so much "flattening the curve" as they are just delaying it a few weeks. From this post by The Silicon Graybeard, it appears that we had better be increasing our medical system's capacity to cope with coronavirus cases as quickly as possible. That is possible, with a focused mobilization of resources.
I am viewing this season as something like an unplanned sabbatical on a large scale. The difficulty is that our society is not at all set up for it, and instead requires a regular income to pay for debt and all the other services that people and businesses are now dependent on.
Being reasonably well-supplied on food and toilet paper, I spent a very small amount over the weekend to stock up on intellectual stimulation for the coming weeks. I went to the library's book sale area, which I had all to myself, and bought a German-English dictionary and the only other book in German that they had, which appears to be a collection of articles by Sigmund Freud on the unconscious mind. I've never gotten very far with German; we have one book on the language, but it's from the 1940's, with Gothic-like type that is difficult to decipher.
I also looked at craft and decorating books, but didn't buy any. I did pick up some ideas for projects, both from the books that I looked at, and the thrift store that I visited next. It was also sparsely populated, with one cashier in a mask and gloves.
Yesterday, I mixed a little red craft paint with some shaving cream that we had, and we made marbled shaving cream prints. We learned that the technique works even when the paint is mixed evenly into the shaving cream; you just have to swirl the shaving cream around, and the paper picks up irregular amounts of color from the irregular surface.
Mostly we printed onto sheets of paper, but I also tried printing directly onto a white cardboard box that I had, and a piece of white fabric. These prints came out, but they were affected by the surface textures: the paper surface of the box is slightly coarser than office paper, and the fabric's woven texture visually competes with the marbling.
Showing posts with label typography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label typography. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Meaningful wall art
My word for the year gave me a direction for the two art projects I had in the pipeline.
For the painted-over canvas, I played with one of The Nester's techniques: dumping paint colors on the canvas, and then swirling them around. She uses craft paints in her chosen colors, but I prefer to buy only red, yellow, blue, and white paints, and mix my own colors from those. So I dumped and mixed and covered the canvas in long, diagonal strokes. Then I started playing with elliptical swirls, which led to a simple Lissajous figure that covered most, but not all, of the diagonals. No one need be impressed by my painting technique.
But for all that messing around, the painting turned out to be much more profound than I expected. It is abstract enough that you are not going to see much more in it than what you bring within yourself, but I do see something there that really speaks to me. Not bad for a free used canvas and a little paint.
For the small photograph and frame (which was originally taken and framed by professional photographers but cost less than fifty cents at a yard sale), I discovered that the back of the photograph that I didn't like was a shade of green that I do very much like. Related to my word for the year, I had lyrics to a song that I wrote a couple years ago, about longing for my real forever home in Heaven. So I wrote the title and the lyrics in marker on the back of the photograph, and framed it. I referred to 1001fonts.com for inspiration about how to write the title. I have been craving some good typography expressed in good colors.
For the painted-over canvas, I played with one of The Nester's techniques: dumping paint colors on the canvas, and then swirling them around. She uses craft paints in her chosen colors, but I prefer to buy only red, yellow, blue, and white paints, and mix my own colors from those. So I dumped and mixed and covered the canvas in long, diagonal strokes. Then I started playing with elliptical swirls, which led to a simple Lissajous figure that covered most, but not all, of the diagonals. No one need be impressed by my painting technique.
But for all that messing around, the painting turned out to be much more profound than I expected. It is abstract enough that you are not going to see much more in it than what you bring within yourself, but I do see something there that really speaks to me. Not bad for a free used canvas and a little paint.
For the small photograph and frame (which was originally taken and framed by professional photographers but cost less than fifty cents at a yard sale), I discovered that the back of the photograph that I didn't like was a shade of green that I do very much like. Related to my word for the year, I had lyrics to a song that I wrote a couple years ago, about longing for my real forever home in Heaven. So I wrote the title and the lyrics in marker on the back of the photograph, and framed it. I referred to 1001fonts.com for inspiration about how to write the title. I have been craving some good typography expressed in good colors.
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