Two drawings of sunflower bouquets in brown ink and alcohol marker. The marker was used in single-colored rectangles surrounding each of the flowers. The drawing on the right features black eyed susans and uses yellow, light and dark green, and orange. The drawing on the left features lilies and uses yellow, pink, orange, and peach. The author is bad at flower identification and can't tell you much about the rest of the flowers.
I've been faffing around with a Sailor fude nib I bought a few weeks ago. Fude nibs are bent upwards so they provide line variation as you change your pen angle, similar to a brush or brush pen. I'm still pretty bad at using the nib intentionally, but it does cool stuff if you mindlessly draw with it. You can block in color really fast with it, which is awesome but also requires frequent dipping, even with the built-in feed it comes with, because that is a fuckton of ink.
I think fude lines are bold enough to stand on their own, but I plonked the marker on top to make things more fun!
Don't talk to me or my son or my other son ever again
My training to write more stuff on paper has been successful enough that I was able to justify buying a passport-sized Traveler's Notebook in March! And then... another one last week. The passport is perfectly pocket sized and more conducive for carrying around everywhere.
An ink and watercolor painting of a plate of dim sum. (Clockwise from top left: pork bun, pan-fried dumplings, snow pea leaves, barbeque pork, and shrimp dumplings, with chili oil). A pair of black chopsticks rests on the edge of the plate, which is porcelain with floral patterns glazed on in blue.
The paint palette and pen used on this painting are pictured beside it.
I picked up a box of Platinum Carbon Black cartridges at a local art supply store yesterday. It's waterproof, so I thought it would be a good tool to have when I'm out and want to draw something to paint later.
I was holding out on trying Carbon Black because it tends to dry out from neglect in speedy fashion, and I'm a professional art supply neglecter (real title, it's on my resume). Fortunately for me, Tina Koyama's idle testing found that Platinum pen caps seal tight enough to keep even pigment-based ink wet for months. I had a spare Platinum Preppy laying around, so it's the designated Carbon Black pen now (and until the end of time, probably)!
I got lazy mixing colors, so I used a whopping ten paints (not counting white). I panic-added yellow gouache at the end because I didn't feel like the chili oil was orange enough, and I don't have yellow watercolor... Perks of only using secondhand tubes!
It's officially Blaugust, so here I am, blogging! Whatever else happens, I've narrowly avoided crushing failure because I posted this one time.
I'm Kale. I've blogged sporadically over the past 10-12 years but haven't been able to hold one down for very long. I'm still not sure where this one fits into that pattern. At this point, it's more or less just a hobby journal, which mainly involves me talking about my stupid little crafts (and attempts to do them without spending money). I also do some horrible programming on the side — this blog runs on a homemade backend that's specialized to my own bizarre use case.
I'm not very interesting, so I spend some of my free time facilitating things with people who are more interesting than me. There's The Salad Bar, my Discord server (and the most social media-adjacent thing you'll get from me), and Salad Magazine, a quarterly web zine that accepts virtually any creative work you throw at it.
I don't have any ambitious plans for my blog output as my day job is back into effect with the new school year, but I'm aiming for once a week. Anything more will be a fun bonus surprise.
I'm surprisingly down to Earth and very funny, but only if I'm engaged with first. Feel free to drop something in the comments or my email inbox!
After experiencing some success with plein air drawing (as detailed in the tree-drawing post), I was consumed by my own hubris and set out to assemble a field painting kit. This is a well-tread road, but I wanted something small enough to stuff into a backpack or fanny pack.
I cobbled together a kit with a mint tin palette and a small tupperware container for water. These are attached directly to the book with magnets: I used a pair of small neodymium magnets for the water container and a magnetic metal clip for the palette. This setup has been working out really well, even in situations where I'm sitting on the ground or somewhere similarly uneven. It's not great for standing work, though, since the water needs to stay perpendicular to the ground.
A gouache painting of a pine tree. The underpainting is burnt orange and visible underneath the layers of green. The sketchbook is also displayed with the palette and water container attached.
