I’m a big fan of all things strawberry/rhubarb. For Father’s Day, I made this strawberry rhubarb crumb pie with sour cream. The sweet and tart fruit compliment each other, while the sour cream makes a perfect custard type filling in the pie. Continue reading
A couple years ago I wrote about the stash of non-photo blue pencils I have all over my house and why I use them:
Non-Photo Blue pencils are a particular shade of blue that could not be detected by a graphic arts camera like a photostat camera. I ran stat cameras in the era when graphic design was an analog pursuit involving rubber cement, illustration board, razor blades, rubylith, waxers, zip-a-tone and a lot of manual labor. It also involved Non-Photo Blue Pencils which I have a bunch all about my house. I do a lot of my initial sketches with these pencils and work over top of them with graphite pencils or ink.
I was afraid that these pencils were going to disappear. A few years ago I asked a clerk in an art supply store for non-repro blue 2mm leads for a clutch pencil. Her response was, “What do you mean by non-repro blue?” I thought my days of enjoying these pencils were numbered. Fortunately, that’s not the case. They are not necessarily easy to find, but non-repro pencils and leads are still available. The Caran D’Ache at the bottom of the photo is a recent acquisition and the Swiss make a very nice pencil!
I continued to use them vaguely roughing out drawings with them before finalizing the sketch in graphite pencils and ink and I sharpened them down to useless stubs.
I was doing that until today. Continue reading
I’m back with It Came From the Sketchbook and once again my subjects are The Teenage Beast and the hapless punk rock gal. I’m piecing together a story via sketchbooks which is fun and much more effective than jotting down notes in notebooks. In the notebooks which I have been keeping for decades, I’ll waste a lot of time pondering a character’s motivation or background. With the sketchbooks, I get right to the heart of the matter which is the scene. You don’t need to know what the punk rock girl had for breakfast that morning or that she got dressed in her AMC Pacer in the parking lot of the punk club, but I have decades worth of notebooks filled with what I call “Look, Ma, I’m clever!” details that come to life and die unread in cheap composition books. The drawing says monster closes in on girl and the details tell the rest of the tale.
It’s also a lot easier looking back at sketchbooks than it is reading the chicken scratch in my old notebooks some of which date back to junior high school. They are all “Look, Ma, I’m clever!” Continue reading
I’ve been itching to make a blueberry pie and this one did not disappoint! It’s a bit of a cross between a pie and a cobbler. Blueberries baked in a sweet sour cream filling, with a delicious crumb topping. Continue reading
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