breakfast first

Brace yourselves

I've been sitting on secret for a few months, but it's time to spill the beans: Miss J is pregnant! Yes, friends, we are actually going to be parents!

We were just as shocked as you probably are right now -- it completely took us by surprise. One of the reasons we moved to Seattle was to prepare for having a family, but this was way ahead of schedule. We had only been in Seattle for two weeks when Miss J suddenly said, "You know, I think I might be pregnant." So she took a home test, and the results were positive. Surely it was a mistake. She took another test: positive. Clearly a manufacturing defect. And another. And another. And another. The only logical conclusion was that Miss J has a rare disorder that generates these false positives. So we went off to a doctor who confirmed that she was pregnant, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

We spent the next two months simply stunned. "Pregnant? But we haven't even unpacked!" It does seem a little out of order, doesn't it? Underneath our stunned facade, though, we were (and are) thrilled.

Following tradition, we decided not to tell anyone until things settled down. It didn't take long for friends we see regularly to figure it out, though. If Miss J wasn't drinking on Thanksgiving, there could be only one explanation. It was fun to watch that unfold (over the course of about thirty seconds). It was difficult having some people know and not others, so I'm really happy it's finally all out in the open.

Suddenly our lives are on fast-forward: everything we thought we'd have at least a year to do -- get to know Seattle, buy a house, that sort of thing -- has to be done much sooner. Consequently, we haven't really settled in to our lives up here. Our apartment feels less like home and more like Base Camp Baby.

Of course, with a baby on the way, there are thousands of new things to put on that to-do list, too. Things you wouldn't think of. Did you know that you can go on tours at hospitals to find the one where you want to have your baby delivered? I sure didn't. But that's the (comparitively) easy stuff -- the thing that keep me awake at night is trying to figure out how to raise a good, healthy, well-adjusted human being. (When I get too stressed about that, I ease my mind by trying to think of baby names that won't totally scar the kid for life. This is especially difficult since some people have just taken what I'm suddenly sure are the only good names out there. Damn you!) Despite all of the stress and anxiety (and for poor Miss J, the morning sickness and general weariness), I'm sure we'll look back on these days very fondly.

For the record, Yes, it freaks me out to think that my child will one day be reading this.

Drawing class, take 4: Nude and Rude

Tonight marked the half-way point in the drawing class, which is a mere eight weeks. It seems that the student population has settled down into just five students (myself included), which is a nice size.

Tonight we started off by looking at the drawings of old shoes that we were to do for homework. I remember the instructor saying that this was supposed to be a line drawing, and yet three of the five students did shaded drawings, and to be honest, they were pretty great looking and quite evocative. I did the best I could with a simple pair of square-toed dress shoes. The results were...uninspiring, to put it mildly. Manolo Blahnik, you have nothing to worry about.

Then we launched immediately into the exercises. For the first one, the instructor sat on a stool on a raised platform while we spread out in a circle around him. He told us to take five minutes to draw him with our non-dominant hand. Although this was difficult, especially under that time limit, the result turned out better than I would have expected -- at least you can make out what it is, even if the individual lines looked like the sloppy path of a drunken driver.

After the five minutes were up, the instructor came around to look at our drawings and told us to circulate and look at each other's drawings. Once again, I was amazed at how good everyone else's drawings looked. Are they progressing while I'm not, or are they just drawing sharks who knew what they're doing all along? I haven't decided.

For the next exercise, we had to do a two minute blind contour drawing of the instructor. This involves setting your pencil on the paper, and drawing the subject without lifting your pencil and without looking at your paper. Had I not heard about this before from Dave Bort, I might have just given up right there. But I took a stab at it, and after two minutes had a Frankenstein head and torso attached to a pretty good rendition of a leg from the Charlie's Angels logo. And the shoe was pretty damn good, if I do say so.

The instructor felt differently. He came over and said, "This is all you have after two minutes? No, no! You need to go much faster. You need to loosen up. Maybe you should have a shot of whiskey before you draw." I told him I was absolutely game for that. Meanwhile, he liked everyone else's contour drawings.

So we did it again, only this time, we switched poses after one minute -- although we were to continue drawing the contour. I tried to go faster this time, and the result was even more chaotic, and met with more complaints about how I needed to go faster and loosen up. Hey, I agree, but I think it takes time.

Onto the next exercise. For this one, we first divided our page up into six equal panels. We were then told that we were to draw the instructor, head to toe, in six poses, one in each panel, and had two minutes to complete each pose. We would move immediately from one pose to the next. Needless to say, my results were laughable -- not more than stick figures. Once again we circulated and examined each other's drawings. I couldn't believe what other people were able to accomplish in those same two minutes. One guy in particular, Mark, produced really nice, artistic images, although he beat himself up over not fitting the entire scene in the panels. I felt no pity for him.

Next exercise: same as the previous, only one minute per pose. Results: more laughter.

Next exercise: same as the previous, only thirty seconds per pose. Results: hysteria.

Next exercise: same as the previous, only fifteen seconds per pose. Results: uttery lunacy.

While I struggled under the gun to figure out where to draw a single line, my fellow students were refining their drawings like Picasso's bulls. How humiliating.

But then came a twist in the plans: the classroom next to ours was occupied by another, but large, drawing class, full of actual art students (taking that class for credit). They were using a live model and were doing gesture drawings, so our instructor asked if we could join them to do sketches, and so we did.

This class was completely unlike ours. The room was enormous, and the thirty or more art students, mostly college aged, worked on large easels in a circle around a nude woman holding a seriously contorted pose while music blared. The model -- a fairly fit, late twenties platinum bleached hipster with large barbed wire-ish tattoos running across her shoulders and down her leg -- shifted from one crazy, unnatural pose to the next crazy, unnatural pose about every 30 seconds. We were to draw each of these poses.

Hell, if I couldn't draw a man sitting on a stool in 30 seconds, I pretty much knew I had no chance at this. And, surprise! I was right. However, I did discover one thing: after about 15 minutes of drawing, I changed from using the point of my pencil to the side of the lead, and that made a big difference -- somehow that caused me to loosen up a bit, to draw more flowing lines, and to produce drawings with a least a tiny touch of style. The other discovery I made was that by concentrating first on the negative spaces, like the gap between a bent arm and the torso, I produced better results. "Better", not "good", but still.

The live model drawing only lasted about 30 minutes or so, since the real art class finished earlier than ours. So we went back to our old classroom and went over the drawings from the model. After that, we drew a negative space image of the instructor sitting on a ladder, which was a relaxing way to wind down.

Our homework for next week is to draw a perspective image of a room in our home, since we'll be working on perspective for the next two weeks. Why we have to produce a drawing of a type we haven't studied yet, I don't know.

Now that's perspective

These images of sidewalk chalk art are amazing.

This Modern World

Here's a tip I've been meaning to post for a while: When you move to a new city, one thing that always takes a while to figure out is where to order good delivery from. If you're not willing to just accept the menus shoved under your door, there is a better way -- provided you live in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, or DC: Just decide on the type of cuisine you'd like, search for it on local.google, then search for the restaurant's menu on Amazon's restaurant service. (Confidential to Jeff B. in Seattle: I absolutely love you for providing this service.)

This works surprisingly well and takes no time at all, especially since I have a firefox quicksearch set up for local.google searches near my home address. For example, if I feel like having Korean, I just type "loc korean food" in my browser, check out the results and pick an interesting name, and look up the menu on Amazon. Fabulous!

I'm sure it would be easy to tie these two things together with a bookmarklet or other device, but it's so handy that it would be far better for Google and Amazon to work it out together properly.

Drawing class, take 3

I just got back from my third drawing class. More shake-up in the roster tonight: only five students; the two original women, two of the original men, and me. Gone were the young girls from last week, and still gone was one of the original men. Anyway, it made for a small, quiet class.

We started off once again by looking over our homework from last week. The assignment was to draw one of your hands in four positions. I found this to be a very difficult assignment, but I tried to compensate for my lack of talent with a bit of originality. Miss J knows how to sign the alphabet, so I thought that would be a good angle. We thought about four letter words to use, and after the requisite jokes, she suggested I use "love" (she also suggested "hate", just like Meatloaf in The Rocky Horror Picture Show). That lead me to think of making a sign language version of the famous love stamp.

We had a busy weekend with out of town friends visiting, so I didn't get start on the assignment until Monday night, and found that it took me forever to get down even a badly drawn cartoon hand. I sketched a page full of small hand "studies" -- that word is definitely too grandiose for what I did -- and then drew two more hands on a second sheet (the letter E and the letter V). I liked the way the E and the V looked, despite being pretty small, and decided to just go with them as part of my assignment. So on Tuesday night I finished up, stranglely spelling love backwards in small, signed hands.

When we looked at them in class tonight, the instructor pretty much beat me up over their size, as I expected. Because some people were late to class, we only looked at two other students' drawings -- one was okay, the other was good (although he cheated, it turns out: rather than draw his own hand, I heard him tell another student that he drew hands he found in photos on the internet).

After a little discussion, our first exercise of the night was about working in negative spaces. So the instructor threw large painting easels in a haphazard pile (so there were a lot of intersecting straight lines) and told us to draw not the easels, but the space in between the easels. You start by picking some enclosed geometric figure in space in the pile, draw the outline on the page, and shade it in. Then you draw an adjacent enclosed geometric figure, shade that in, and continue. what you end up with is the contour of the easels in the white of the paper. This was a tedious and slow exercise, but I really got into it and did a pretty good job. The instructor even complimented my drawing -- definitely a first.

After a break, we went back to the easel pile, but this time we were to draw both the negative and the positive. I found that the work I had done with the negative spaces definitely helped me on the second exercise, although my results came out quite poorly. My sense of proportion and perspective definitely leaves a lot to be desired.

The best part of class tonight was getting to see some of the instructor's work. He brought in three pen and ink drawings, since a student had asked about them last week. The drawings were just amazing -- so beautiful and so detailed. One was of a barn-like house, another was of a station wagon sitting outside a cottage, and the last was of a body of water under a bridge. He told us he'd made the drawings in the field; each one had taken about an afternoon to do, while he sketched from a canvas camp chair. They were exactly the type of drawings I hope to be able to do someday.

Our assignment for next week is an odd one: take an old pair of shoes, arrange them any way you like, and draw them in as much detail as possible. We'll see how that goes.

Today's Front Pages

This has been around a while, but I just learned of it: Today's Front Pages is a project that lets you view, as PDFs, the front pages of newspapers from around the world (322 from 37 countries, when I last looked at it). Apparently the newspapers submit their front pages, in some standard format, every morning. In addition to this neat website, the Newseum selects 68 front pages every morning, prints them out, and displays them outside in downtown Washington, DC (at the future home for the Newseum).

This display makes you realize just how wonderful a format for conveying information print newspapers are, and just how crappy websites -- with the same information -- typically are. I think it would be interesting if they also generated a PDF of the main page of the newspapers' websites in the morning, and displayed them side-by-side with the print version.

Drawing class, take 2

I attended my second drawing class tonight, and overall, it was much better than the first one -- far less rambling by the teacher, although his pace remained about the same. There was quite a change in the student line up. Two men from the first class weren't there tonight (dropped out?), but two new women arrived, and with them the average age of the students plummeted. I am now the oldest student in the class, or at least a close runner-up.

We started the class by tacking up our self-portrait homework from last week, and the teacher critiqued them and marked them up a bit. He started with mine, which provided quite a bit of fodder for discussion. Head too wide. Eyes too high. Nose too long. Lips too low. And so on. Mine really was the worst in the class, I have to admit. Only one person, the woman I was paired up with last week, received praise for her work (and it really was good).

Next we had a quick recap of the proportions of the human face from the front, then we looked at the proportions of the head from the side. The main trick is this: the distance from the center of the eye to the chin is equal to the distance from the back of the eye to the back of the ear, so that's how you figure out where to put the ear on the head. Easy enough to understand. Nice how it all works out like that.

So then it was on to some exercises. We were to pair up as model and artist again, first doing a frontal portrait to warm up, then a profile portrait. I paired up with one of the new women, Ms. C, who is essentially fresh out of high school and new in town. She was sporting a shirt that read, in rhinestone script, "Forever Juicy, XXOO". (When the teacher asked her the "How do you pay for this class?" question, she answered, "I have a trust fund that takes care of that.") I acted as the model first, and it turns out that Ms. C is pretty good at drawing faces, and pretty fast, finishing before the fifteen minutes allotted. I capitalized on the extra time and got a head-start on my portrait, which I desperately needed. I just couldn't get going -- I had trouble even drawing a reasonable oval for her face. I think I need to warm up before the next class.

My profile drawing of her worked out a little bit better. Rather than critique at the end, the instructor came by the desk where we were set up and marked up the drawing while I watched, holding it up to Ms. C's face to show me how he was making it more accurate. Watching the way he improved the drawing was the most valuable part of the class.

For the final exercise of the night, the instructor climbed onto a stool, on top of desk, got into a pose, and asked us to sketch him head-to-toe. "Fifteen minutes, let's see what you come up with." I barely knew where to begin. How to tackle something that large? I spent most of the fifteen minutes fumbling around, but towards the end I start to put some lines down of things that caught my eye. I ended up with a sketch that was out of proportion and lacking in detail, but I was in some small way happy with a couple of elements I had captured. This may sound really stupid, but I felt the way that I noticed those elements and put them on the paper really made the image mine, rather than just a generic copy. The sketch is barely recognizable as a human, but I do feel as if I've accomplished something small.

Our homework for next week is to draw one of our hands in four different poses -- holding a coffee cup, gripping something, or whatever. I can tell it's going to be a killer.

Dirteee!

Miss V pointed me to this great wrong-number story in the New Yorker today:

Russell Jones is a forty-four-year-old art director who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In the early winter of 1996, he and his wife began to receive some unusual phone calls late at night. They would pick up the receiver and a voice would shout “Yo, Dirty!” or just “Dirteee!” and then hang up. Jones was mystified; he thought that maybe his number had been written down in a bathroom stall somewhere. A few weeks later, Jones’s young cousin, who was conversant in hip-hop, stopped by.

“You know that rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard?”

“Uh, not really.”

“His real name is Russell Jones. That’s why you get those calls.”

You should definitely read the rest.

"Hella rock," as they might say

This photo of a boulder that rolled into a road in Malibu, California is unbelievable. It looks photoshopped. Imagine coming around the bend and seeing that!

Apparently calculated before I rolled into town

According to the folks at Men's Fitness, Seattle was the country's fittest city in 2004, trailed by Honolulu, Colorado Springs, San Francisco, and Denver. Personally I find this rather amazing, since the dark, wintery weather (hey, it snowed here yesterday) makes me want to hibernate more than go running. I was, however, impressed to learn that Seattle has more sporting goods stores and gyms than fast food restaurants. That's great.

(via Seattle Bon Vivant)