Whenever I want to produce a half-tone effect in Photoshop, I invariably have to look up how to do it. It should be more straight-forward than it is, but we don’t use half-tones in images as much as we did in the pre-digital days.
Below is a good tutorial for the halftone effect that’s been online for a number of years now. (HT Dylan M. for finding this.)
https://www.thegraphicmac.com/create-comic-book-halftone-dot-effect-your-photoshop-images/
A two-year project, drawing on the collections of the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has made 800 manuscripts from the period 700 – 1200 available online for the first time.
https://www.bl.uk/news/2018/november-2018/800-medieval-manuscripts-now-available-online#
I finally made some new ink drawings. I haven’t done this since last December. It felt good to have ink and brush in hand again. I’m pretty rusty, though.
I was watching this interview with singer/songwriter John Prine, which is wonderful in itself and I recommend watching it. But the host of the Prine interview was also so familiar. Who is that guy? I wondered. Then at the end of the interview, John Prine says, “Thank You, Ted Kooser.” Of course, I know who Ted Kooser is.
Years ago, I read a book by Ted Kooser about writing poetry. I even tried doing it for a while, but I didn’t keep it up. But this morning I wondered where is Ted Kooser now? In searching for the answer to that question, I found his homepage with this short documentary video about Kooser and his life and work.
Ted Kooser says a great deal about the creative process in this piece. Every day, he gets up at 4:30 am each day and works until seven. A part that really struck me is his statement,
Once or twice a month I come up with something that was worth my time—the rest of the time, I’m failing.
I was drawn to the video because I often give my students the assignment of making a mini-documentary about someone interesting. How can you introduce someone to the world through video? Do it like the video Passing Through from Straw Hat Visuals on Vimeo.
This gif caught my eye. This sequence is kind of mesmerizing.
More here: https://giphy.com/BEATVN/
These were the first drawings we made in the Writing the Unthinkable Workshop with Lynda Barry on November 23, 2019 in Evansville, Wisconsin. We started by drawing a full breakfast table setting with bacon eggs, and a cup of coffee… with our eyes closed. I forget the time we had to do these drawings, around one or two minutes, I think. I first heard about doing blind contour drawings from Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book.
The next thing to draw is a giraffe.
Followed by a mermaid.
The Statue of Liberty.
A skeleton.
Drawing blind is a great way to free up the mind. We were drawing in $1.00 composition books, the kind with the marbled black covers, which Lynda explained is useful for drawing because they are so inexpensive you don’t worry at all about messing up something expensive and nice. If you mess up, you can keep going. The thing about drawing with your eyes closed is that there is absolutely no wrong way to do it. You just use your mind’s eye and go for it!