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10-29-02
Found the time to slow down.
If you walked in my shoes, you'd know how hard that was. I've
been working here at the laptop all morning. It's been foggy
since eight, but the sun just came out, reminding me that
winter isn't quite here yet. I've heard from some old friends
lately and it reminded me how lucky I am to have a job at
all in this grim job market. Especially a job doing creative
work. Monday my lesson on drawing faces turned out pretty
well. I was afraid I'd freeze up as I demonstrated a self
portrait for the class but my long years of painting on location
at popular tourist spots gave me the chutzpah to carry it
off. I was even able to explain the process as I completed
a simple pencil sketch in about 20 minutes. Later several
of the students volunteered to model and we all had a fine
time drawing each other.
Despite my lecture on the importance of drawing the basic head shape with the standard proportions marked in
before beginning the real drawing process, most of the students simply began drawing blindly, making a hash out of the proportions. I wonder sometimes what happens to the words.
Do they simply pour in one ear and out the other? On the positive side, several of the students did excellent perspective drawings based on last weeks lesson. Maybe my words are just seeds, and need time to take root.
10-27-02
This is madness. I've not had
a weekend off in so long I've lost count. I don't work Friday,
but I have a gallery show coming up and spent the day framing.
Saturday I created a lesson plan for my ImageReady class.
Sunday, today, I created a lesson plan for my Illustrator
class. While I was doing that, N came over to work on my client's
web site, since I didn't have time. He is overly qualified
for the job, and zoomed through the work in a few hours while
I labored over lesson plans.
After he left, my kids took over on
the two computer network doing homework while Sue and I went
out for a walk. As I plodded along I complained about how
hard I was working. Sue reminded me that at least I was working
day shift in a job with a future, and that people appreciated
me in this field, versus printing where I was always in the
doghouse for being too slow. She speculated that the reason
I was working full time at a part time job was my notorious
tendency to be too meticulous.
The very fact that my students compliment
me on the great education I am giving them is directly reflected
in working weekends. She also brought up the hopeful thought
that eventually I am bound to repeat a class, at which point
I can re-use my meticulously created tutorials and skip all
this excessive lesson plan preparation time.
After dinner, I again sat down to
do a lesson plan, but this time it was for my favorite class:
Drawing. I spent thirty minutes reading the chapter on the
proportions of the face, did a few quick sketches then set
up my mirrors. I put two mirrors at 90 degree angles to each
other, rather like sitting in the corner of a mirrored room.
I squeezed my easel in between the mirrors and sat down under
a spotlight shining down over the top of the right hand mirror.
By looking in the left mirror, I could see my face from the
side perfectly. I drew a lopsided egg shape, then I roughed
out the face using the rules of proportion:
- corner of the eye is midway between the top of the head
and the chin.
- the horizontal distance from the back of the eye to the
back of the ear is the same as above (one half the head
height)
- the top of the ear lines up with the eye.
- If you draw a line bisecting the distance from the eye
to the chin, it intersects the top of the upper lip, the
bottom of the ear and the spot where the back of the neck
leaves the skull.
- the distance from the back of the ear to the back of the
skull equals the width of the ear
Once I had those basic shapes defined I began customizing
for my facial peculiarities. I did the first pencil sketch
in 45 minutes, enjoying myself for the first time all weekend.
I took a break, then set my timer and did another one in 12
minutes. I think I am ready to demonstrate for my students.
The only question in my mind is whether I can talk while I
draw. I would like to talk about how I am following the simple
rules of proportion as I draw, but it remains to be seen whether
I have the ability to access both the right side of my brain
(the drawing side) and the left side (speech) simultaneously.
If I do, it will be quite a coup. If I don't, well, let's
see what the power of positive thinking can do....would that
be right mode or left mode?
10-24-02
Served on a high school advisory
board last night up in Silverdale. I was asked if I would
like to do this back in January while I was looking for work.
I'd been out pounding the pavement, making cold calls on all
the web shops within commuting distance. I happened upon a
well run firm in Port Orchard called Communicreations
who were kind enough to shoot the breeze for a while. When
they found out I was a former printer with 25 years in the
trade, they said they had an opportunity for me. It wasn't
a job, but was a great way for me to network and do a good
deed for the community.
Shortly after I signed up to be on
the board, I began teaching nights at the college. The board
continued to send me notices every month, which I regularly
tossed in the garbage. Tuesday they called me on the phone
and asked very sweetly if I would come. As I walked down the
parking lot toward the main entrance, I heard a roar from
the football stadium, and thought back on my own days in high
school. The advisory board turned out to be me and another
printer sitting at a table with the graphics program teacher
who ran down a prepared list of subjects he was teaching his
students. He was a former press operator who had seen a job
advertisement for a high school printing program instructor:
"No teaching experience required" and found a way
out of a boring job running a copy center.
It looked like he really loved his
job, and as a result, was doing a great job with his students.
His class has one two color AB Dick, but primarily produces
the pre-press for the high school yearbooks. He had a very
refined system of sending scouts out to the junior high school
year book staffs and recruiting talent. As a consequence,
he is able to bring in sophomores who already know how to
put together a yearbook using Pagemaker. During the three
years he has them, he builds on their skills until, by their
senior year, they are teaching the sophomores and he supervises.
He's had eight years to refine his system and I was very impressed.
As a teacher in web design, and a printer
myself, we had a tremendous amount in common. Even more, he
is looking for schools where he can place his students, and
we (my college) are looking to recruit kids out of the high
schools. He was relatively new to Flash, and I offered to
share some of my painstaking created tutorial handouts. I'd
even brought along one of my Photoshop handouts, and as I
handed the 7 page tutorial to him, I could tell from his expression
that I was not his ordinary advisory board member. I'm looking
forward to going to the next one.
10-18-02
My participation in this journal
is falling off. Ten days is the longest I've gone in the four
years it's ran. I've been writing in my drawing sketchbooks
much longer....probably since my teens. It would be entertaining
to post some of those entries here. I wonder how some of my
heart wrenching tales of love lost and found on the hitchhiking
circuit of the early seventies would play here:
"Met a girl on a freeway exit in LA. Stole her from
her boyfriend, began hitchhiking back to Olympia to introduce
her to mom and dad where she had plans to support us by dealing.
Another hippie stole her from me somewhere on the southern
coast of Oregon - Winter, 1973"
I can remember it all like it was yesterday.
If only my memory of last week was as good as my memory of
30 years ago. I've been very wrapped up in giving my students
a good education. People have told me that I take teaching
too seriously, that I shouldn't pour my heart into each lesson.
Yet the feedback I get from my students after a well prepared
lesson is almost worth the time I put into preparing them.
They come up after class or meet
me in the halls and thank me for the things I've taught them.
They say they never thought they could learn to (insert appropriate
words here: draw, animate, Illustrate). One student told me
my handouts, painstaking created from scratch and as long
as 9 pages, should be submitted to a publisher because they
were better than the textbooks. He commented on how my handout/tutorials
were easy to follow, unlike the textbooks that skip steps
and leave beginners lost in the software.
Writing runs in my family. Dad was
a newspaper man for many years, then worked in public relations
for the state. After he retired he published a book on an
oil spill. My brother is the city desk editor for the Spokesman
Review. Our most famous family author was my great great grandfather
who was the first person to write write a Chinese American
dictionary. He also published a book available on Amazon called:
"Chinaman As We See Him and Fifty Years of Work for Him"
ISBN: 0405113056.
He died around 1901. My Grandmother
used to tell us stories about him. He was one of many early
members of my family who felt so strongly about their religion
that they felt they had to "spread the good word".
He and his wife traveled to China on a clipper ship around
the time of the Civil War to work in a mission spreading Christianity
to the Chinese. Dad still has the letters he and his wife
wrote to the family back in the states. Without telling us
kids, dad donated much of the stuff to the Presbyterian museum
back East somewhere, although he did keep a few things. The
missionary, Ira Condit, had a sister named Mary Carpenter
who was the last known artist in my family (other than myself)
and is listed in a book called "Who's who of American
women artists before the turn of the century". That would
be the century before last century.
10-08-02
For those of you who don't spend
large portions of your lives in a software program called
Photoshop, this entry won't make a lot of sense. That said,
I had an interesting experience this morning while preparing
a lesson plan for my Imageready class. I've been refreshing
my memory on the Actions palette. The Actions palette allows
you to automate certain complex tasks within the software.
For example, when I take pictures with my digital camera that
I plan to put on the Internet, they come out of the camera
as 350 kilobyte images, far too large for those poor souls
still living with dial-up (like myself). I've used actions
extensively in the past, but had forgotten many of the details
due to a lack of recent use.
I'd worked most of the bugs out of
my lesson in how to record a new action, and had the software's
recording function on as I ran through the process of resizing
the camera's oversize images down to 40K jpegs and 3K gifs,
saving them out to new folders without altering the original
images. In the middle of this process, the microwave bell
rang. I walked over, pulled out my bowl of stew and sat down
again at the computer. I glanced at the software palette and
saw with satisfaction that it was still carefully recording
each step in the process. As I raised spoon to mouth, one
eye on the actions panel, I wondered idly how that would read
in the recording process....raise spoon to mouth, open mouth....stick
tongue out...hmmm.
The mind is a curious thing, and multitasking can be carried
too far.
10-06-02
Went for a bike ride and a skate
today. I spent the day on the computer yesterday, Saturday
and decided I needed a nice long break today. When I got home
from skating I positioned the lawn chair in the 10 square
foot patch of sun that travels across our back yard every
afternoon and drew for a couple hours. It could be called
lesson planning, since I teach drawing tomorrow, but I look
on it as simply drawing. I did a lovely drawing of my hand...hand
drawing number 49 and counting.
The book I am using (the new drawing
on the right side of the brain-Betty Edwards) advocates setting
a sheet of 8x10 plastic over your hand and tracing on the
plastic with an erasable fine point marker. She also advises
drawing a simple grid on the Plexiglas. Once you have your
"tracing" done, set the plastic down on a flat white
surface and observe the magic.
Next, set the plastic on a sheet of
paper and trace around the edge of the plastic. Draw the same
grid lines on the paper as are on the plastic. Set the plastic
"tracing" off to the side, and copy the points on
the paper grid where the tracing crosses the plastic grid.
It's a one to one transfer, so it's easy to do visual estimations
of size and distances. Once you have enough reference points
on the paper, pose your hand again, without the plastic over
it and begin connecting the points and redrawing the hand
on paper. It's OK to look at the plastic drawing, but 90 percent
of the time you should be looking at your posed hand. This
is called semi-blind contour drawing.
It's a pretty cool trick, designed
to convince nonbelievers that they really can draw. It works
like blazes for me, so I am hoping for good results with my
students. Clint is also taking drawing in high school and
seems intrigued by the tricks I am learning in this book.
I finally have my network sorted
out. Windows 98 to XP Pro has proven to be an unreliable peer
to peer network. I never figured out why it would be down
one day and up the next. Plus I was never able to get my 4
year old hp to print over the network from the laptop, which
runs Win 98. My guru friend loaned me an old external US Robotics
modem that he no longer uses (Am I the only one still on dial
up?) and told me to buy the SMC7004ABR router/print server.
It can handle up to 4 networked computers
on what ever kind of connection you have, from my old external
dial up (serial port in, on the router) to cable or DSL. It
has a built in Print Server, which means I plug the old printer
into the back of the router and it doesn't matter if one of
the computers in the network is off, or at work with me. The
printer, and the Internet always work. It no longer matters
whether the network is in a good mood, or the phone wires
are hooked up to the base computer or the laptop. The router
handles it all. The best part was, I set it up myself....didn't
even have to call my guru. It comes with excellent built in
help files, a well written book with great screen shots and
was clearly designed with "network challenged" people
like myself in mind.
One interesting facet of the external
modem is that it is a much better behaved modem. It dials
extremely fast, and seems to surf a little faster as well.
Best of all, unlike the built in modems, which have an annoying
habit of auto-dialing at inopportune moments, like when I
am talking on the phone, this one dials only when I turn it
on. To disconnect, I simply flip the rocker switch to off.
There may be a way to make it behave more like an internal,
but I've not figured it out yet. I need to download the manual
from US Robotics.
10-01-02
The swelling in my arm is finally
receding...slowly. Saturday the mystery bite on my wrist had
swollen to 5 inches in three hours. By Sunday it was hot,
swollen, itchy and red up to my elbow. The doctor at an Urgent
Care prescribed an antibiotic and an anti-itching drug. On
Monday, the clearly demarked red stain and swollen area had
reached the middle of my upper arm. I had a class that morning
and could barely hold the magic marker as I illustrated a
point on the whiteboard. After my class was over I noticed
that the puffiness over my elbow was reaching extreme proportions.
Normally, when I touch my hand to my shoulder, and touch the
point of the elbow with the other hand there is only a very
thin layer of skin over the bone. Yesterday, there was a tightly
inflated one half inch of puffy skin over the elbow.
I freaked out and drove to the doctors office. My primary
care physician of course, not the ER room. We managed care
victims have to cross our T's and Q's. My Doctor is a great
guy, and usually unflappable, but as he looked at my swollen
limb I could see deep lines of worry form on his face. He
said it was a good thing I had come in, as I would likely
have ended up in the hospital in a couple days on intravenous
antibiotics. He changed the antibiotic, since the first one
was having no effect and prescribed a regimen of home care
which included elevating the arm to drain the fluid, and periodic
hot wraps with a hot, wet towel to soak out the inflammation.
I have an old microphone stand in the garage and stood it
by my computer. I put on my bicycle glove, then hooked the
glove over the top of the microphone stand. TaDa! Elevated
arm. Too bad I was right handed. I spent a few hours typing
and mousing with my left arm while I awaited results. It seemed
less hot when I went to bed, but I was still worried. He had
told me that if I woke up in the middle of the night spiking
a fever, I should drive immediately to the ER room. During
the night I felt the elbow a few times and it seemed to be
returning to normal with no signs of fever. I need to remember
this hot wet wrap and elevation trick. I get one of these
mystery bites about once every 10 years and they are always
a nightmare.
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