DragonRose Castle

I am part of consumerist western culture.

Oh, I’m not blindly so. I eat local where possible (very hard to do during a Wisconsin winter) to cut down on pollution from transporting food and to help local farmers. I avoid the worst of the individually pre-packaged over-processed foods to cut down on packaging that just goes in the landfill (and because that crap is really bad for you and doesn’t taste very good anyway!). I walk around turning out the lights when they’re not needed. I recycle what the local government will pick up.

But I’m part of it nonetheless. I’m a little too sedentary (with the decline in health that comes with that), a little too quick to jump to the easy route, and my footprint on the planet is a few sizes too large.

In other words, I’m not too far ahead of the average American when it comes to my negative impact on the world. Read the rest of this entry »

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Plant: 1/4″-1/2″ deep after danger of frost is over or 6-8 weeks before last frost if starting indoors.

Sprouts in: 5-10 days (10-15 for Blue Star)

Thin to: 12″ (3″-6″ for Blue Star)

Conditions: Full Sun, well drained soil, water frequently

Height: 8′-10′

Type: Annual, Climbing vine, great for a trellis, arbor or fence.

Blooms: summer to fall.

Before planting, soak overnight and/or cut the seed slightly. The outer casing tends to be very hard and doing so will help the seedling to sprout.

Notes

My current crop of Clark’s Heavenly Blue Morning Glories (Ipomoea Purpurea) was sown from Livingston Seed Co, 830 Kinnear Rd, Columbus, OH 43212.

* Clark’s Heavenly Blues: Packed for 2009 run a, origin tanzania

* Blue and white below are “Blues Brothers”, which is a mixture of Clark’s Heavenly Blue and Blue Star (Ipomea Tricolor) from Livingston Seed Co.

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Screen four. The blue lines are a rough guide for when I start drawing the threads of the knots. At this stage, it’s still more important to make the relationships of the lines clear as they weave in and out of each other than it is to make them “pretty”. Now, some knots, I take great pains to ensure that it’s a “true” knot — all one thread looping in on itself hundreds of times. That takes a deep level of contemplation and deliberation that I’m not finding at this point in the digital version. The easiness of correcting a mistake may play into that, though at this stage in a penwork, I’d still be using a soft graphite pencil and every mark you currently see would be erased before painting the final knot. I’ve been sick and in deference to that, I’ve forgone part of my usual setup because it includes rain incense, so I’m not sure how much that plays into it. The tactile sensations of course are also different, though the careful pressure of the wacom pen is surprisingly similar to using a regular stylus and nib with ink. Biggest benefit I’ve found so far to the digital version? Zoom! I usually work with quarter inch squares, which means eighth-inch threads. Photoshop lets me blow up the picture so I can see what I’m doing more easily without sacrificing the intricacy of using eighth-inch threads.

Digital Illumination Screen Four

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Screen three. Finished planning the knots, and masked out the windows, something I always wished I could do on paper. The large square in the middle has been rounded out, and now I’m ready to move to the next phase: roughing in the threads of the knot.

Digital Illumination Screen Three

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Screen two. This fairly plain looking two-color sketch is where all the magic comes from. The red lines are the edges of the knotwork, the green lines are divisions within the knots, what makes it a knot and not just a line. I still don’t know what I’m going to put in the windows (the four quadrants that have no green lines), but it will be picture, not knotwork. Hell, it’s digital, maybe I’ll even use photos.

Digital Illumination Screen Two

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The first step in any form of knotwork is creating a grid. In my penwork, I’ve progressed beyond a simple grid of squares into curves, circles, even tree branch shapes and grid cells with more than four sides. Here however, while I’m still learning to do this on a wacom, I chose to stay with the basic quarter-inch squares. So far, I’m liking not having to spend two hours drawing my underlying grid (you can just tell Photoshop to overlay a grid), but though it’s time consuming, grid creation is also something of a focus, making each knotwork as much a meditation as a drawing. Still, I can’t deny the appeal of not having my hands covered in graphite and being able to move right to planning the picture.

Digital Illumination Screen One

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My best artwork has always been knotwork and illumination with stylus and ink washes on parchment substitutes (usually a low-texture form of watercolor paper). Though I’ve been using digital media for nearly two decades now (ouch) to create pictures and for design, I’ve never been able to make a serious foray into doing a knotwork-based picture digitally. Now I have all the tools I need (loving my wacom), and I feel comfortable enough with them to give it a go. I’ll be chronicling the process from initial grid to final picture, with new shots posted as I go.

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So I spent the day working with my plants, which I haven’t done in a long time. I got to one container of aloe in particular (of the 9 pots of aloe I have…) and I was cleaning it up… and it decided it wanted to be repotted. So I now have 13 overflowing containers of aloe plants! If anyone wants a few shoots or just wants some of the leaves, let me know!

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Aloe Flowers

I have one Aloe that’s a couple feet long with these gigantic leaves. This winter, it grew a stalk about four feet tall and then budded!

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Early morning in the harbor

An early morning on the lake at Escanaba, Michigan.

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