Category: Blitherings

Water Birds

Water birds – wading, fishing birds – are a common theme in many Asian paintings. These include cranes, herons, egrets. There is something incredibly beautiful and fierce about these birds.

Seeing these birds is an incredible experience. When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, my dormitory looked out over the lagoon. Great Blue Herons nested in the eucalyptus trees. One day, an escaped pink flamingo began living in the water! Hiking in the Matilija Creek area of Ventura County, I sat down and suddenly, within inches of my head, whoosh! – out flies a heron! Egrets wade in the marshy areas of local rivers.

Imagine yourself as one of these birds. Suddenly, your legs bend forward at the knee, not backward. You don’t have hands. You have long, wide wings, with feathers rippling out from the sides of your body as you bring them forward. Your nose is now long, longer, longer . . . how long is a bill? Is it a bill or a beak? And your nose is also your mouth – snap! A fish, a frog for dinner. And then, there is your neck. Long and undulating, suddenly your head is able to turn to look behind you, it goes up and down a long distance (certainly longer than mine!). And eyes on either side of your head, not looking out in front of you. How does it affect your vision? Lack of depth but awareness of movement?

Take a walk in your new bird body . . . feel how your shoulders hunch, how your wings expand, how you walk in the water . . . expand the crest on your head, fluff your feathers . . . launch yourself into the sky like a rocket, stand still and then, faster than can be seen, snatch your fish from the creek. How do your claws feel as they dangle when you walk, when you come in to land, when you launch from your nest in the reeds? What do you see around you? Leafy trees, swamp grasses, other birds. What do you hear? Rain on water? Wind in the trees? What do you feel when the wind rustles your feathers or rain pours off your back?

Photos are incredible resources for studying birds. There are many public domain sites from which photos can be copied. The snowy egret above came from the digital library system of the US Fish & Game site: http://images.fws.gov/. Take a look . . . imagine . . . think about how your brush can create a feather, catch a movement. What shades of grey? White? Ink only?

Knitting Offenses

The other day, I was over at the local bookstore, and decided to grab a few knitting magazines to peruse with my coffee.   I saw some great designs in texture combined with lousy garment construction and finishing techniques.  The biggest offenders are the shoulders, sleeves, bodies, and necklines.

Garment Design. As an example, not too long ago, I bought a pattern booklet from a famous yarn maker.  The cover hat and glove set caught my  eye.  I bought it, without reading it.  When I read it, I was stunned.  The hat pattern – the same as for the back of the glove – was   knitted back and forth on two needles, and then seamed!  The gloves were knitted on four needles, in the round.

Huh??  Am I missing something here?

Necklines. I always look at the construction of the neckline, and I read the pattern.  Is there sewing to be done?  Is it knitted and attached as you go along, or done separately and then sewn on?  Is the neckline shaping capable of supporting the rest of the sweater body?   How does that V-neck or scoop neck look?  Too low?  Too high?  Do the edges of the neckline have a finished look, or do they look sloppy and stretched out?  Is it flattering?  Does it make the sweater fall off the shoulder?

Badly Designed Sleeves. Under this heading, you can find poorly sewn sleeves, at the shoulder and into the armpit, and along the length of the arm.  First question:  Who did the finishing?  Next question:  Why would you design a sweater with sleeve seams?

In one of the magazines I looked at, it was pretty obvious that the person who pieced together the sweater could not do the job.  The sleeve seam was messy and ragged.  The knitted pattern did not add to the offense; some stitches make it difficult to knit a “sewable” edge, but the designer can eliminate this problem if they must have sleeve seams.

Another picture in the same magazine showed inset sleeves with the same crappy finishing.  Puckers, uneven sewing.  This destroyed the sweater.  Here, the knitting designer was at fault to a degree because the pattern stitches used did not make the sewing-up easy.

Finally, photography.   A lot of magazines show evidence of pinning and pulling to make an item “fit” the model.   Here is when design flaws can really show up, as well as poor finishing techniques.  Thank the photographer for this!  It may make you re-think doing that pattern.

Body. This has been written up by some rather famous people.  Elizabeth Zimmermann said it all.  She documented this issue quite well when she sold her seamless Fair Isle sweater pattern to a famous magazine.  Said magazine rewrote the pattern to have side seams, shoulder seams, and sewn-in sleeves, even though it was pretty obvious in the picture that there were no seams at all – or that the seamstress was superb!

Poorly designed sweaters can result in sweaters which can never be sewn together well, no matter the talent.  I have some ski sweater designs from the 40s and 50s.  The raglan sleeves are sewn in, and the patterns – snowflakes, elk, stars – are placed in the middle of the raglan seam.  Not nicely sewn in the photos, and not worth doing, unless it is in the round.

What to do? Well…what can you do?  If you really like something, is it something you can do?  Do you have the skill, creativity, know-how to fix problems?  Do you want to take the time to do it?  Do you want to learn to do it?

If you answer yes, then have at it.  If you answer no, then look for another pattern!  You know your own personality, so why make yourself crazy and frustrated to the point of misery?

IMHO. I am a frump and a snob.  I don’t wear trendy clothing, and I don’t make fashionable designs.  I like well-tailored, comfortable clothing.  I like good shoes.  I like good materials and craftsmanship.

When it comes to knitting anything, I really appreciate good construction design, good finishing, and elegance.   Most of this can be done with a minimal of sewing.

Line & Color, vii

The Final Pictures

The final decision was to attempt to darken the middle flower and create more light / dark contrast. Don’t think it works. The other choice was to move from more warm at the base of the painting to cooler on top. Washes of yellows and yellowy-pinks went in, from bottom to top. Purple-blues were overlaid the very top flower.

To a degree, I think this warm-to-cool saves the painting, but the lost contrast in the middle flower weakens it as a whole. The contrasts between the red and green of the leaves helps, but doesn’t save it. The B&W below shows this quite clearly.

The Great American Yeast Starter vs. Smack Pack Experiment

Yeast starters are widely advocated by homebrewers for all batches. The purported benefits include faster starts, quicker finishes, and more complete fermentations. This is a test to see if these benefits can be counted on for beers of normal strength and if the results are worth the additional work.

Yesterday, as planned, I made ten gallons of beer, which went into two separate fermenters. Both fermenters got exactly the same wort out of the same boiler, and both got the same yeast strain using two smack packs that were manufactured on the same day. OG was 1.056, which is toward the upper end of the range recommended by Wyeast for straight pitching of a smack pack. The date on the smack packs was March 3, several weeks prior to brew day. While I have occasionally found smack packs at my FLHBS that were only manufactured several days prior to purchase, several weeks seems pretty normal. Jamil’s starter calculator tells me that a smack pack of this age should have about 81% viability.

One fermenter got a smack pack that had been smacked at the start of the brew day. By pitching time about six hours later, it was good and puffy. I poured this directly into the fermenter and attached an airlock.

The other smack pack, though, I had smacked the night before and used to make a starter. I used 150g of light DME in 1500mL of water, boiled in a 2000mL flask and then cooled. I pitched the smack pack into this and placed the flask on my home made stir plate, where it spun until brew day was complete – about 20 hours. The entire contents of the flask were added to the fermenter, and an airlock attached.

This morning, about 16 hours after pitching, I checked the fermenters, which have been resting in my ferment fridge at 65 degrees. Both fermenters have a good solid inch of kraeusen, and both airlocks are bubbling actively. It seems like the airlock on the fermenter that got the starter may be bubbling a little more frequently than the other.

So, did one fermenter start more quickly than the other? Without having checked the fermenters hourly all night, I can’t say definitively that one started before the other. However, the lag time on both was short enough that they are well into high kraeusen the next morning. I would feel comfortable with the start time in either case.

I will continue to check the fermenters daily, and will report back on the questions of quicker completion and lower FG.

Fundamentals of Orchid Painting – Notes from The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, ii

Flower Petals, Flower Stems, and “Dotting the Heart”
Petals & Stems

According to The Mustard Seed Garden, each flower should have five petals. The smaller, narrow petals curl and the larger ones are broad and straight.  Stamens are indicated by dark dots of ink. When the flowers face the viewer, the dark dots are in the center. When the flower is viewed from the back, the stamens are seen on either side of the middle petal. When stamens are on the side, the flower is being viewed from the side.

As illustrated above, the flowers are in different positions – facing toward you, away from you, as well as to the side. In addition to different positions, the flowers are also seen in different degrees of development, from new flowers to older ones more fully opened.

Painting the orchid petals is a lot more difficult than it looks! A written description is not the best, but let me try:

  • Hold the brush upright,filled with light to medium ink.
  • If starting at the center of the flower, start with very gentle pressure, and then increase it slowly as you curve the brush a little, to curve the petal. Near the end of the petal, raise the brush up, and back over the petal you have just painted.
  • If starting at the the end of the petal and moving toward the heart of the flower, begin with pressing down and then curving toward the center, raising the brush as you move until the tip glides up off the paper in a gentle arc. You may want to retreat a little over the narrow part as you lift your brush.

Painting the stems is rather like dancing the waltz – a dip, a sway. If you look at the picture above, you will see that the stems have a bit of a bulge at either end. This is done with an upright brush put straight down on the paper, a little pause before moving it, and then a slight pause with light pressure at the end before lifting the brush from the paper. Do it to the beat of a waltz – a one, two, and a three – or to the equivalent of ONE (push brush down) two (pause and begin lifting brush and moving toward the end of the stem) THREE (push down, and lift, retreating over the painted area).

The fact is, describing how to use a brush for sumi-e is difficult. The only way to do it. If you have never taken a class where you can watch the instructor, the next best thing can be a video. There are a lot of good videos on You Tube and elsewhere on the net. Here are a few that came up when I put in “orchid painting” on Google, and chose video.

In particular, this one is good for how to paint the flowers themselves:

The painter is listed in YouTube as “yanghaiying” if you care to do a search for her.

Dotting the Heart

To “dot the heart” of the orchid is to bring the flower to bloom. To do this, dark ink is used. A brush that is relatively dry is also best, as then the ink will not bleed into the brush’s bristles nor onto the paper. Waiting until the petals have dried also helps.

To create the stroke, I begin with the brush upright, push the tip down gently, and then curve and lift the bush up at the same time. Observe some videos to see how the artist moves the brush – and watch it over and over to observe the movement of the artist, how the brush bristles are manipulated, how the brush is turned. Be patient – that little flick! is tricky! Once you accomplish that, you will be able to create some incredibly beautiful dots.

As can be seen in the above picture, there are all kinds of dots. Some begin with downward pressure, rise and push down again. Others are a dot, with a flick and a turn. Some curve, some are straighter, some are dots which are curvy – pressure and a turn – before the brush is slowly lifted up from the paper and turned as it leaves.

Just remember – it takes practice. People don’t “just paint”! Practicing all these little steps, leaves, petals, dots, and lines will give you the skill, knowledge and dexterity to create a seemingly simple painting.

Putting all these steps together will give you a lovely orchid!