Category: blog

Fake Art School is my attempt at learning from the old masters using primary sources freely available on the internet. Download the book from the link below and join in! Discuss and share your work on Twitter. Textbook: Elements of pen-and-ink rendering Assignment: §1 pp. 1-2, Introduction (PDF pp. 19-20) Chapter Overview The introduction to this section is short and to the point. But it also provides definitions of the major concepts discussed.

This is an experiment, something I’m calling Fake Art School. The name is to poke a little fun at how art education has gone from an apprenticeship to a pay-your-money-get-your-degree system. It’s also a way to organize a series of upcoming articles about going back to basics using old instruction books. Use the Fake Art School page to quickly find all these articles. Digging around in the Internet Archive, I ran across several books on pen and ink drawing:

I took a walk around downtown Mesa the other day and wandered into the Arts Center there. It was a blustery and cold day and it was all I could do to get the line work done before I had to get up and move around. I did the watercolors a bit later after I warmed up. Mesa Arts Center, Jan. 2016 This was also posted to my Instagram but the phone pic didn’t turn out that great.

I’m really starting to wonder about the wisdom of plugging everything into the internet. This also includes the need to create another online account to go with each device. So for 2016 I’ll be asking myself the following question before buying anything network enabled: Does the convenience of having this device connect via wifi, mobile data, or bluetooth outweigh its inherent lack of network security? I’m also going to guess that in most cases the answer will be “no.

In researching the how-tos of podcasting one of the more interesting things is the amount of data used in downloading files.1 I also noticed that audio is seen as the poor cousin to video. Video files are much larger, but very few people pay for their own video hosting. I doubt YouTube would be as popular if it required a monthly fee to keep your videos online. The usual recommendations for podcast files seem to say to encode the episode file (MP3) at 128kbps.

Today protesters in Minneapolis shut down the airport and the largest mall in America. Of all the protests so far, I think these two events are the most high profile yet. I also don’t know if they are as effective as they were a year ago. City governments don’t seem to be any more responsive than they were before the protests started. In reading today’s news I had to wonder, will the protests ever get so big that the city decides clearing the streets is more important than not hurting people while they do so?

This morning I ran across a little tongue-in-cheek project called the National Novel Generation Month or NaNoGenMo, where the goal is to write a program that writes a novel. It’s an offshoot of the more well known National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that replaces the author with a programmer. The results are about what you’d expect from a niche-hobby project: odd to just plain weird. The fact that it exists is a signpost on the road of machine learning.

Podcasting has always interested me. Over the last ten years or so I’ve had the thought of starting one cross my mind. But two things have held me back: choosing a topic and the “usual podcast format/formula” has always struck me as a bit boring. While stories told on public radio held my attention, podcasts seem to leave the tedious parts in. That’s one reason for the relative silence on this blog lately (the other being health related).

For your enjoyment, the sounds of rain falling in the desert. We really weren’t expecting much out this storm. They tend to be more sound than fury when passing through the Phoenix area. [audio https://jennifermackdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/phx_rain.mp3] Tech note: I recorded this with an Olympus WS-823 voice recorder on my front porch. I converted the 44.1k/16bit .wav file to .mp3 with GarageBand.

I’ve recreated the various Copic marker colors and also made set of brushes that mimic the various marker tips and placed them for sale on Gumroad. Why Copic? Copic is known for a wide range of color markers, and it’s not a stretch to say they’re the gold standard of the industry. They’re also expensive. It’s also easy to rack up over $100 in markers. At the usual prices of $5-6 for each one (buying sets doesn’t provide much of a discount) the cost adds up quickly.