The Monkey And The Plywood Violin

This is the most interesting thing I have encountered today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
That and four other things make a post!

- I have learned to make pan pizza in my oven.
- There are mulberries growing along the bike trail in the park and they are purple and delectable.
- Past Grace should not have pushed today's quota off as late as she did, even if she did have wonderful walks by the lake.
- Past Grace should also be faster at painting.

Part the first: I have problems with color. I'm bad at picking colors for painting, and often end up with serious mismatchedness. This only gets worse when it comes to digital stuff, because that little palette with millions of colors makes it hard to even see what I'm getting. I always err too far toward the saturated.

Part the second: I've been painting a bit more, and doing some illustration work this week. The illustration is in my nice, safe friends black and white, so there's no worry there. The painting is an egg tempera piece I pick up from time to time (tomorrow I'm going to get some walnut or other drying oil at the market and it'll be tempera grassa, mwahaha) and since I make my own tempera, I'm limited to a small range of colors. This is particularly so given that there are pigments I consider too toxic to use (orpiment, vermilion, realgar) and I'm limiting myself to pigments used before 1600 (no chromes (not great for you), cadmiums (still pretty toxic anyhow), Prussian blue, modern organics, etc). The end result is a much better painting. I'm discovering that I can put together a decent pale European skin tone with green earth, burnt umber, red ochre and a little lead white (toxic but not actually that bad for grownups, and I never eat or touch my face while I'm using it.)

The inevitable conclusion: I should start limiting my palette elsewhere, including on the comp. Since the historical pigments have been working so well, and my head's currently in the 16th century, clearly I should limit myself to these colors. That makes perfect sense, right? So tonight I spent far too much time putting together a palette file. ( witness my lunacy - uncompressed JPG for your enjoyment )
I have no idea if this'll actually make my art better, but anything's worth trying. I'd feel bad about wasting time, but I did the base lineart for three full illustrations, had a nice sitdown with one of the boythings, sewed one vertical seam on my skirt, went shopping and walked almost two miles today. So it's ok to do something braindead and useless. Tomorrow, it's back to the wordmines!

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010921.html

*stares at YouTube in fascination*

Been having a horrible day and yesterday, including motherboard issues, some ram going dead, and discovering my computer case is even smaller than I believed. Also, crushing depression. The kind where I don't want to move. And I had the rat dream again (where I have more rats than I think, and I've somehow been starving/neglecting a huge cage of them for a ridiculous period of time, and now I have to find cages for them and whatnot. Rats just keep coming out of the woodwork.)

Then, there was upsetting Russian art. Now I am merely traumatized.

Also, if you want to make LJ stop being stupid when you hover over a link: http://spacecowb0y.livejournal.com/281574.html