Dragonsept Arts & Publishing Blog

For Father’s day, two of my girls got me a Masterson Sta-Wet Super Pro Palette.  I have had a few chances to use it, at home and at class, and so far I like it a lot.

Description: The Sta-Wet palettes are all pretty similar.  “Super Pro” refers to the size.  12″x16x”1.75″.  It’s easily large enough to hold your favorite pad of palette paper or a rectangular palette for oil painting.

The Sta-Wet palettes come with a sponge-and-film system for keeping acrylic paints wet.  The idea is that the thin sponge stays wet, and the paints can leech that water out of the sponge through a specially prepared palette film.  I have tried this in a smaller model, and can confirm that it greatly improves the wet time of acrylics – even low-viscosity and craft paint.

The palette comes with “feet” on both sides so you can turn it upside down for watercolor.  The lid (from an oil-painter’s perspective) is formed with wells and divided mixing areas for watercolor.

Performance: The Sta-Wet palette has performed like a champ for me.  I go to class once a week, so my oil paints are always dry in between.  When I came back to class this week, the source piles of paint on my palette were completely wet.  There wasn’t even a skin on them.  My mixed paint did not fair as well, but there was still a fair amount of usable paint left over.

The two halves of the palette come together with a seal you can hear and feel.  Taking the pieces apart requires a small amount of effort to overcome the vacuum, but shouldn’t be a problem for anyone healthy enough to stand up and paint for any length of time.  Painters with particularly weak hands might want to look into the more Tupperware-like “Palette Seal“.

The unit comes with a sticky-backed sheet of eight transparent rubber feet, four for each half.  They do an excellent job of holding the smooth-bottomed palette still on slippery tables.  I have only used half of them, since I never paint in watercolor.  I was considering using the extras on my 11″x14″ glass palette to hold it still in the center of the Sta-Wet palette.

Value: The Sta-Wet palette has an MSRP of $25, and costs only $20 at DickBlick.com.  I have paints that cost up to $50 for a 37mL tube.  Anything that reduces the amount of paint that I have to scrape off my palette because it’s dried up is a great value and will pay for itself fairly quickly.  When you add in the additional features of portability, multi-functionality, and stability, it’s a great buy.

I’m going to change the site code to automatically forward requests for the home page on to this blog, until I decide what else I might want to do with the place.

I started my next painting in class yesterday. It’s a monochrome painting of a white plaster cast. The idea is to work on my improving-but-still-too-tight sense of value.

Last week I did my drawing. This week started with transferring the drawing to a smaller canvas (it was sort of lost on the 11″x14″, so now it’s on a 9″x12″). Then I had to tweak it a bit. Once I had the lines the way I wanted them, it was time to start painting.

My painting consisted of four blobs of the darkest darks, followed by adding white and blending to start the transition to lighter colors around the darkest areas.

This is going to take a while. But I am already enjoying myself.

I have been using Kindle on my Samsung Moment for about a day, now.

In general, it’s a good app. It opens quickly – much more so than several other eBook readers I tried on my phone. Page scrolling is smooth and responsive. It has a wide range of font sizes, and three color options to choose from. I like the white-on-black setup. It’s easy on the eyes and uses less battery.

I had no trouble at all connecting to Amazon and downloading my books. The “Kindle Store” button takes you to the browser. It’s not a bad interface, but I was a bit surprised.

The only issue I have had so far is putting non-Amazon content on the system. I have a ton of Kindle-compatible content that didn’t come from Amazon. Stores like Baen Webscriptions and authors like Cory Doctorow, who allows downloads and sharing of his books for free, have seen to that. I tried copying .azw and .mobi files into the “kindle” folder on my SD card, but so far there’s been no luck. With the .mobi file it looked like it might have joined the list of books, but it was hard to tell because of the endless Force Closes that resulted. I wrote an email to Amazon support, so hopefully they will have something interesting to say soon.

I have had a Kindle since the first generation, and I really like the convenience. Being able to read my Kindle books on my Android phone is great, too. However, if something doesn’t change to allow me to use my non-Amazon content on the system, I’ll have to look into another solution.

Anyone know if Nook for Android is on the way?

Updated 07/01: I received an answer from Amazon support.  Currently there is no way to load files via USB, nor to have files converted and delivered by WhisperSync with Kindle For Android.  That’s pretty disappointing.

Updated 07/26: Acting on a tip from a reader, I tried manually adding .mobi files again.  It worked perfectly.  To add your .mobi files to Kindle for Android, just copy them to /kindle on your sdcard.

You know what they say, practice makes perfect better.

I started my next painting yesterday at Brushworks. This one is a plaster cast (taken, one assumes, from a statue of some kind) of one quarter of a face. It contains the eye, cheek, and eyebrow.

It’s really quite similar to doing a still life.  The difference here is one of focus.  In still life, you’re interested mostly in composition.  There are also questions of color, shape harmony, negative space, etc.

Casts, on the other hand, are all about value.  (insert Barenaked Ladies reference here)  My own value scale is pretty tight, particularly in the mid tones.  This means that I have a tendency not to make the steps in value in my paintings large enough, resulting in a flat-looking, boring image.  Since the cast is white, all you have to worry about are the values as shadows proceed across the surface.  This ability to focus will be very useful, I think.

Yesterday I did the initial charcoal drawing.  Once again, I learned fun new things.  My charcoal is way too soft and dark for initial underdrawing; vine charcoal is on my shopping list for the future.  I have definitely gotten faster at the initial drawing.  I’ve also gotten far more accurate.  When I did my first sight-size drawing for the still life with vases, I had to redo almost every measurement by the time it was over.  This time, I really only had one set of measurements that were off, and the most complicated part (the eye) was fine after the first try.  I’m pretty proud of myself.

Next week, I should start putting paint on the canvas.

My netbook has a RaLink RT2860 wireless chipset. When I upgraded to the newest kernel for Ubuntu, the connection died on me completely.

Luckily, choosing the old kernel from the boot menu takes care of it.

Zach over at zach.stuff has written and posted an excellent little Python script to generate the XML files necessary to set up a rotating background in Gnome.

Just put your backgrounds in one directory, point the script at it, and voila, one background.xml, ready to go.

After that, it’s just a matter of selecting the XML file.

1. Start the Appearances dialog by right-clicking on the background and choosing Change Desktop Background
2. In the lower-right corner, Press the Add button.
3. When the file browser pops up, navigate to the directory that houses your images.
4. change the File Type from “Images” to “All Files”.  The background.xml file should now be visible in the list.

   

5. When you have added the background.xml file, your image “stack” will show up in the selection dialog:
   

That’s all there is to it, friends and neighbors.  So go out there and enjoy a bit more change in your life!

My wife has requested a painting from me. A large one. She basically wants a semi-abstract mural. 36X48 or something. Sheesh.

No pressure, though.

I actually think I have an idea. Instead of a single large mural, I think I may paint a four-piece work (quadriptych?) with one panel each for the family members. Right now I am thinking a 2×2 arrangement.

Maybe I will break out MyPaint and/or GIMP later and do some mock-ups.

This week at painting class, my teacher told me, “I think you’ll be signing this tonight.”

Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men, yadda yadda.  When we got to the last step (painting the horsehair burn marks on the tan vase,) we discussed a few approaches and picked one that would probably work best.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have the tools we’d need.  So, the final coup-de-grace will not be delivered until next week.

I have been working on this painting for more than six months, now.  Considering that I am only in class 2 hours per week, I am given to understand that this is not a particularly long time for one’s first still life.  It is long enough to start to feel like it’s just the way life is, and that you’ll never be painting anything different.

Next I am going to work on a black and white painting of a cast.  The cast in this case is of a man’s eye, eyebrow, and the bridge of his nose.  My value scale is very tight, so this cast painting should help with that immensely.  Once that one is done, I think I may push for something a bit more expressive or even impressionistic.  Just for a change of pace.  Maybe some small alla prima paintings.

A friend of mine got a new Android phone, and wanted to listen to her favorite radio station (Z103.5)on it.  Z103.5 uses StreamTheWorld.com as their streaming radio provider.  Unfortunately, their online player is Flash, and their handheld app is only for iPhone.  What’s a Droid user to do?

I was able to help her through a bit of snooping, and a few Google searches.

Step 1: Find your station’s call sign.

Click the link to open the live streaming player, and check out the page source.  (Right click on the page and choose View Source in just about any browser.)

Look for an iframe element that points to StreamTheWorld.com.  For example:

<iframe src=”http://player.streamtheworld.com/liveplayer.php?callsign=CIDCFMAAC&bgcolor=1d1d1d” ….>

The text I have highlighted above is the station callsign.

Step 2: Build Your Streaming URL

Every one of the StreamTheWorld streams is available in a normal .pls stream, but not everyone exposes it.  However, if you know the URL and the station callsign, you’re good to go.

To get to the stream, your URL will look like this:

http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/[station callsign].pls

So, my friend’s station is accessible here:

http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/CIDCFMAAC.pls

That’s the hard part.  The rest is cake.

Step 3: Add Station to Your Favorite Player

If you don’t already have one, download an internet radio streamer for your phone.  Personally, I like A Online Radio, but any of them that allow custom URLs should work.  (If you don’t want to go to their website, these URLs will work just fine in Rhythmbox, Amarok, WinAmp, or any other desktop streaming client, too.)

In AOR, Press the “Live” tab and select “Add Channel.”

On the screen that comes up, you will see a text box marked “Channel URL.”  Type in the URL we built in step 2, and press “Add.”

There you go!  Your radio station is set up, and added to your Favorites.