Chore Day, December 7, 2019 -- The Surface Area of the Small Intestine and Apartamento Magazine

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I spent the morning thinking about the importance of food. That led to reading about our amazing small intestine — I learned that the surface area of our small intestine is an area as large as a sidewalk 600 feet long. I learned that there are trillions of bacteria, mostly friendly, some unfriendly, living inside me. These facts are inspirational. I want to learn more. The sources of my inspiration are Becoming Vegan and Becoming Raw by Vesanto Melina and Brenda Davis.

I also subscribed to the Spanish magazine, Apartamento Magazine, a biannual magazine about how people actually live, not about celebrity photo ops and not about sterile cookie cutter interior design.

Of course, I also cooked food for next week. I made a cheese-like sauce made with cauliflower and nutritional yeast, and some spaghetti sauce with lots of onions, mushrooms, and lentils.

It was a rewarding chore day.

Chore Day, November 30, 2019 -- Cooking and Krita

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It was another chore day around here, with lots of important tasks on the agenda. Since the refrigerator was looking abandoned, I restocked with a week’s worth of meals — yellow rice with lentils and broccoli, muffins, some baked sweet potatoes, and lots of v-dog burgers for my furry friends. I usually spend about six hours cooking. By the end of the day I was ready to swear off of cooking forever.

Here’s something I made with Krita. When I look at that guy’s foot, I have to laugh. Drawing from the imagination — my imagination, at least — can lead to some very crazy poses.

Krita has so many features and options that I feel lost. There are menus and sub-menus, with a brush engine that has dozens of options, with more menus and sub-menus. I feel like I’m in a hall of mirrors. But I feel the same way when I open Affinity Photo. The truth is, whenever I learn a new program, my first impression is that I’m going to be creating works of art in minutes, and then I have to face the facts — it will take me just as much time to learn the new program as it took me to learn my way around Photoshop.

Chore Day, Nov 23, 2019 - Baking Day

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Today I baked 32 v-dog bean & sweet potato patties for my furry brethren, 8 lentil burgers for the humans, 30 delicious chocolate-oatmeal cookies, a dozen muffins, and two quarts of vegetable broth. As always, everything was WFPB. That’s Whole Food, Plant Based.

To wind down from a busy day in my tiny kitchen, I sketched this anonymous person. I was inspired by the cover of Leonard Koren’s Which "Aesthetics" Do You Mean?: Ten Definitions. The background music for this mood piece was Take Five, from Dave Brubeck’s Take Five album. Desmond wrote this famous song, not Dave Brubeck. All in all, it was a great day.

Staring at the sun

Chore Day, Nov 16, 2019 -- Under the Weather

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My usual chore day is all about cooking up batches of food for the coming week, but today I took it easy. I’m still recuperating and I’m feeling low. After baking up some goodies for my canine boys, I managed to brew a pot of veggie broth and bake some bean burgers, then I crashed. I napped, then woke up thinking of all the chores I didn’t do. Ah! Sometimes a good plan falls through.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and sketched the view from my seat at the kitchen table. Drawing always takes my mind on aches and pains. Tomorrow I’m going to go out of the house for the first time in 10 days. I’m going take my usual Sunday morning walk down to Case (that’s a coffee shop) and have a Golden Milk turmeric latte with a shot of espresso.

Rather than using Photoshop to resize the scan, I used Gimp on OS X. Works great, and it loads faster than Photoshop 2020. And, it’s free. 100% free with no annoying subscription. This is great for me because I hate having everything on the Cloud. I want all of my pictures on my computers, not on computers belonging to a Great Big Enterprise.

Chore Day, Nov 9, 2019 -- Re-inking Momma Jay

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Chore day is pretty much the same from week to week — more baking and food prep for the week ahead. I spent about 6 hours cooking tasty bean and sweet potato burgers for my canine companions, and some Bolognese sauce for myself. While I had the stove and oven cranked up, I made a pot of delicious vegetable broth, two dozen chocolate chip cookies, the Bolognese sauce, and a dozen muffins. And, I made a batch of humus.

On the Art Front, I spent some time on my children’s book cover page. The problem is that the line work for Momma Jay was drawn with a pencil, and the rest of the characters were inked with a pen. Momma Jay looked out of place among the sharp lines of the other figures. When I look at this picture from a distance, I see a problem with the weight of some of the lines. I’ll fiddle with this again tomorrow.


Chore Day, Oct 26, 2019 -- Book Cover Prototype

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This week’s chores were a ditto of last week’s — cooking lots of food. There was one difference this week: I made an extra batch of oatmeal cookies. To improve them over last week’s cookies, I added three tablespoons of date sugar to balance the bitterness of the unsweetened dark chocolate chips. They turned out to be perfectly addictive. The real benefit of these cookies is that they’re 100% whole grain, and there’s no added oil. As a former fat-eating, meat-eating, dairy-eating Standard American, I’m amazed that I love these cookies.

Now that I’ve got my day job project straightened out, I’ve resumed working on the cover image for my children’s book. I’ve been puzzling over this image for weeks — I knew that it had to be filled with details, showing as many of the book’s characters as possible, and it had to be dramatic. I finally decided that Jimmy had to be jumping down the chimney. After all, what’s more dramatic than someone deliberately jumping down an insanely scary chimney for no apparent reason?

After some tinkering, first with pencil and paper, then by photographing the image with my iPad and editing it with Procreate, I came up with something sufficiently dramatic — everyone is flying in pursuit of Jimmy, including the two mice, with Jimmy just about to enter the chimney’s maw. If it seems odd that mice can fly, remember that anything is possible in Jimmy Jay’s world. Here’s the image I’m working on.

Chore Day, Oct 12, 2019 -- Lots of Cooking, Frustration, and Other Fun

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Chore day comes around again. I was in the kitchen cooking from 8:30 AM to 1:30 PM. I have lots of good stuff to eat next week, all no-fat vegan stuff: curried cauliflower soup, Bolognese lentil spaghetti sauce with lentil and brown rice pasta, lentil and black bean rice with brocolli, vegetable stock, and a batch of no-fat humus for snacking.

After lunch I spent the rest of the day working with Linux video software. I’m planning on making some courses on Skillshare. They’ll be based on some courses I’m teaching at the local college. Since the courses are going to be dropped from the curriculum, I’ll preserve them for posterity — however long that is — by putting them on the Web.

And now, at day’s end, I’m going to chill with the family. This was a good week.

Chore Day Oct 5, 2019 -- Cooking for the Week, Going to the Art Store, and Brainstorming

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Every Saturday I cook up food for the week, usually making some bean and sweet potato burgers for my canine amigos (with all the nutrients required by canines), and some delicious goodies for myself, such as rice and beans flavored with lots of powerful spices.

The big event of the day was a trip to B&N in Medford, where I bought the latest issue of Ad Busters which asks, Can artists save the world with a Brutalist new aesthetic? That’s a question well worth investigating, I say. To prepare myself for the future, I went to Art Central I bought a big Fabriano notebook for my gouache paintings, a Kunst und Papier watercolor tablet, and four small Princeton brushes for my gouache painting. They have with eye-pleasing cerulean-colored handles.

And I did some uncritical brainstorming on the iPad — I’m trying to figure out how to do the cover image of Jimmy Jay jumping down a chimney. This is my third effort. I think I’m loosening up a little with each attempt.

Keeping Colors Consistent Throughout the Book

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Just as I feel ready to think about publishing, opened the book in InDesign and the first thing I noticed is that that Jimmy’s shirt is different colors in several images. I don’t even want to think about Jimmy’s apparent age being inconsisten from one page to another. I’ll work on these problems tomorrow, because today was Saturday, and that means it’s a chore day. As I usually do, I cooked up enough food to carry me through the next 4 or 5 days. I made a pots of three-bean chili, curried cauliflower soup, and delicious humus.

Back to Art. Here’s an example of the color inconsistency I mentioned earlier.

Chore Day Sep 7, 2019 -- Arteza Gouache Color Swatches

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Besides my usual chores (cooking for my furry friends), I went to the Coop for onions, garlic, kale, and vegetable broth. There are times when I feel disbelief that I now eat only plants. But, I do, and I’m happy with what I eat.

Besides thinking about food I made some color swatches for the Arteza gouache kit I bought a few weeks ago. There are 60 colors, most of them are convenience colors. Here are the first 20. There’s no telling when I’ll do the other 40 — I find doing the color swatches to be tedious and frustrating. I usually screw them up with misspellings, putting the wrong label on a color, irregular lettering, and so on. When I see Youtubers with Youtube smiles on their face doing elaborate and perfect color swatches, I assume they couldn’t think of anything important to talk about, so, hey!, why not do another set of color swatches using some gouache/watercolors they would never use in their own art.

Here’s my contribution to color swatches. You can see that some of the colors are transparent or semi-transparent. The Peach Red is a neon color and difficult to capture in a photograph or scan. The “Pearl” colors are mica-based to give them a shimmer, which also cannot be captured in a photo or scan.

atreza_swatches_first_20_blog.png Arteza gouache,color swatches