Even a 9×12 sheet can’t fit a 3″ brush without ligatures and a pile of failures.
At this point, it’s only remarkable when I’m satisfied after a few attempts.
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Years ago, we bought a toy bird for the girl that records and repeats short snippets. The boy is now well past her age then, but two fresh batteries and it squawks again.They’re upstairs, talking, singing. and laughing at distorted tweets.
In the other ear, Mama is on the phone, searching nutrition labels for high protein, high calorie foods to stem Grandpa’s weight loss.My mind searches for anything to thread these competing conversations across electronics, but I come up empty.
This year roughly followed the seasons, with one big break.
Winter started with a monthly focus on new scripts—finally bearing down on Italics, Gothic, Copperplate, and Roman Capitals.
We bought the boy Paul Jackson’s Cut and Fold Techniques for Pop-Up Designs which I promptly commandeered. It completely changed Spring as I cut and folded through all the designs in his book.
Pop-ups are fun, but I hate photographing them, so I returned to the ruling pen in Summer, focusing on cursive. Splatters are addictive!
Then a big break September with a week in the hospital. Not fun, but I’m grateful for the wonders of modern medicine.
Autumn started with my recuperation through Inktober and then walking through the NATO alphabet. It officially became a challenge season when I dived into Callivember with the kids’ watercolor sets.
The last weeks of this year are closing out in two directions.
I’ve graduated from Crayola watercolor pans to a tube set of gouaches. OMG, I love opacity! Gouache works great on colored construction paper, and I’m now painting my hand, which pairs nicely with old hand sketches for the NATO alphabet series.
With free release of Affinity, I also started making zines. We even purchased a color printer now that I discovered the existence and efficiency of tank printers. So now I need to publish some zines to justify this purchase!
And for 2026? The good news is that I finally got traction on the 2024+2025 theme of “Catching Up”, plowing through my old blog drafts. I’m only halfway through those drafts and never got around to dormant home projects, but it’s time to move on.
“Curation” is my word for 2026. Life is packed full of interesting things and I need to make some hard cuts—”if it’s not exciting or veggies, then NO!” Even more than the past few months, I hope to embrace the cult of done (or trashed).
Aside from my “exciting” calligraphy, blog, and zine projects, I got the usual list of “veggies” that everybody else has with the new year—a never-ending list of home projects, controlling my diet (nutritional and digital), and creating a regular exercise routine.
So yeah, goodbye to 2025 and here’s to a fresh start in a couple of days, just like every morning!
I occasionally moan about taking multiple attempts to lock in a piece. Since I’m only doing this for fun without professional obligations, I quit when I run out of steam in a session. Otherwise I’d be taking exponentially more shots to get something right.
After testing Scorpio a few times on pre-used sheets, I had a decent run of attempts on blank sheets. I took them all downstairs for final selection, but my deciding brain wasn’t working that morning.
So I scanned them all for this blow by blow commentary.
I’ve need to practice the foundational hand again. But a rounded script wasn’t right for this prickly creature.
Still, you gotta try an idea a few times, to make sure it’s a dead end.
I next tried a sign script. It was a fun challenge to morph the blocky S into a swoopy tail. I was hoping the contrast might look cool, but it felt chunky.
I love the transition on this S to the swoop, but you can see where I lost concentration on the last O.
On the top piece, I tested compressing the script, but it felt even more chunkier. I went spiky with gothicized italics, but with a twist by going wide. I’ve been trying to figure out wide pointy O’s, but that wasn’t getting solved that morning.
I like how the glitch at the stinger makes sense for a scorpion but left too much space between the R and the P.
I dipped a bit too much water for the O, otherwise I might have picked this one even though I don’t love the joint at the S.
I preferred the stingers from the previous two examples, but the letters and spacing came together nicely, which is are the most important aspects in this digital age. Once scanned, I pushed the color towards a punchy rust orange instead of the faded brown from the children’s watercolor set.
So there’s 10 attempts at a word. I suspect more folks should share their process and their failures. So here is my contribution to rectify this absence. Maybe I’ll get really good one day and won’t have to take so many attempts for each prompt, but that’s a problem for next year.
The end of the second week and start of the third weeks the a doldrums of a month-long challenge. Engagement falls off as people slam into reality. That’s why I did it all in September.
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blunder
I started by cribbing Arthur Baker’s brush script. I have a hard time with the verticals of his b (skinny at the bottom to wide on top) but that’s gonna take focused practice.
It will likely take a month of pure brushwork to drill into my hand and brain that the flat brush can make different shapes depending on how hard I press (unlike a steel nib).
Ultimately I decided to give it another go after getting a big fat hake brush (which also inspired my retake on “sting”). I’m a lot happier with this one than the original blunder.
10/17
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10/18
Ornate
Three versions of Ornate, the top two different surfaces of the Handwritmic ruling pen, the last one the Dreaming Dogs Aldus ruling pen with a curved edge.
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10/19
DEAL
One of the pieces that went from straight from brain to paper. It still took several tries to get good enough, and of course I still have my quibbles, but I got my fun out of this one.
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10/20
ARCTIC
There are three types of color inversion in GIMP. This one was the “value invert” where colors keep their main characteristics. After that, I nudged the curves to highlight the overlaps to better define the letters.
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10/21
rivals
I had a rough time with this one. Words are inherently cooperative things. The letters patiently stand in line, more or less in teh right order.
At first, I tried something competitive within the word that just didn’t work.So I settled on gothic, harkening to sports team logos. But that was boring.
A few days later, I thought of going upside down. The capital R is so distinctive that it still reads upside down, and the flourish on the l makes it read both ways. The upside v is forgiven cause it’s in the middle, plus it resonates in the graph as an apparent capital a.
So again, third time was the charm.
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10/22
Blast
I clearly have a blast with ruling pen cursive. But this time, print letters felt right.
Then again, the as lives on the cusp of cursive. With calligraphy, I have finally started understanding the weird cursive conventions that was drilled in 2nd grade (such as the weird-s shape).
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10/23
Button
More cursive, with a circle.
With any concept, there are still so many little choices in the execution. A medium-small buttOn felt right.
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10/24
FIREfly
More cursive+block text. Even though I try to let each word speak on its own, the line of thought from piece to piece becomes obvious in retrospect.
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In August, we visited Springs Preserves and my dad let the grandkids play with his SLR.
I then spent September celebrating an unplanned liver party at UMC.
I finally took the photos off his camera, which reminded me to dig up my old camera.
While looking the Nikon D40, the boy asked “so you’re looking for a real camera, like without a phone?“
Cya next time!
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PS—Magic: The Gathering Arena
Twenty-three years ago I joined my first poker night. It was also my last poker night. It was so fun that I quit on the spot.
Two decades later, I came across MTGA, getting all the gambling kicks without spending real money.
Like any online game, there are plenty of ways that Hasbro can steal your cash, but you don’t have to give it away.
Having been an adult through the rise of social media and freemium mobile game evolution, I see exactly what’s going on with multiple currencies, regular rewards, multimedia stimuli, and daily prompts. Like any sucker, I can see all the warning signs, but it’s so fun.
It teaches compassion towards the victims of con-men. Many of these marks must know they are onto some bad stuff, but do it anyways.
We’ll see if this kick holds up after a few months. It’s mega fun, but it’s not building towards anything bigger in life.
Is the time worth it? I know it’s not. Maybe it’s my subconscious rebelling against the pandemic.
—September 2021
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PPS—Ominous Roost
I’ve been playing so much MTGA that I need to go cold turkey.
But first, I brewed my own deck—a case study of why the game is so alluring in an online environment.
In this game, I love having lots of creatures and things that make them for free. So this card is perfect, since it is all about creating free creatures.
At first, I started with what I had in my digital collection and added all the relevant cards.
After playing it a couple times, I realized the concept was workable so I used a couple precious “wildcard” tokens to buy a few extra copies. Then I pushed the deck wide, using a copy of all the cards with the special ability “Disturb” to explore how they interacted together.
Once I sensed how the individual pieces worked together, I culled the deck to the to the bare essence. In constructed Magic, there are many great cards, but only 60 slots. Once the goal of the deck is decided, it has to be refined.
This deck tried to build lots of flying creatures to kill the opponent before they killed me. The engine was a couple of card draw / discard spells that would simultaneously create more creatures and build up defenses. For interaction I had a couple surprises to mess with the creatures in play.
Thus arises the central paradox in deck building. One is limited in engine cards because the engine requires fuel. This deck relied heavily discarding “spirit” cards, but all my engine makers and surprise cards are not spirits.
This is where the online part of MTGA kicks in. It’s fascinating to slowly refine this deck. The entire library of Magic is at your fingertips so you can tinker endlessly and your opponents won’t get bored because it’s a new player each time.
With each test, the wicked question comes up. Did my most recent changes improve the deck or was it a lucky card draw?
I’m not sure. Let’s play again!
—October 2021, I quit MTGA a few weeks later. It was too obsessive! Four years later, I remember nothing from this deck except what’s written here.
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PPPPS—Sid Meier’s Civilization, 1991
Every decade or so, I get sucked into this game for a couple nights of mindless clicking.
Of course I played quite a bit when it first came out. And then in Berkeley, Houston, and now Las Vegas.
This time on an online DOSbox emulator on the Internet Archive (a legit site, I’ve donated to them in the past). But I must be getting old—I got a bad headache and I’m still hungover the morning after.
Like much of my entertainment, I stick with what I know, so I’ve only played the original version. It’s just the right balance of challenging but actually pretty easy.
I always focus on a high infrastructure strategy, going heavy on research, connecting all my cities by (rail)roads. Once I have an edge, I defend with strong military unit and buy off cities with an army of Diplomats, strangling the other civilizations.
You’d think it gets boring, but a little randomness keeps it fun, just like Hollywood recycling the same formulas to entrance the world for a century.
Coda: I got sucked in for a second night. Fun enough, but not the best use of February 18-20, 2022. Now I need to avoid this program till 2032. Maybe I’ll finally try out Civ II (1996).
The boy gave me three vials filled with colored water. She followed behind, shooting photos with a wide angled lens. I’m not sure what they were scheming, but they were giggling the whole time.
I can’t believe how quickly time flies. Last year, work was grinding down my body and psyche. Fortunately I only had three weeks left before jumping out to the airport.
I was trying to do right for the Division on the way out, but it was time to decouple.
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We played Marco Polo at home
Marco’s white cane was a roll of old drawings.
She started next to the bed I walked circles around Marco until cornered by the bathtub.
He cheated, hiding in the closet, standing on the toilet.
Never said Polo!
Finally caught, he grabbed Marco’s shirt and followed her around, a little red caboose.
We finally made him Marco He squinted, not blind, swinging his cane as a baton.
Last summer we visited the Big Bear Zoo. It was HOT! The wolves thought so too.
There were actually three in the exhibit and on this platform, but I needed two, so I picked this photo.It was a moment of wonder to be half an inch from these majestic animals.
While viewing the wolves, the kids named them Sesame, Vanilla, and Cloud. So the full name of our wolf stuffy from the gift shop is “Rocky, Sesame V. Cloud”.
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Two little fish harass the shark.
My arms clap like a crocodile—clap! clap! clap!
Eeeeeeee!—they jump off the boat-bed into the carpet-ocean, only to race back on deck.
They hide under boxes—he can’t eat a turtle!
The second they step out, this shark drags them into the deep, black bathroom.
Clap! Clap! Clap!—I stalk the cook in the kitchen.
After months of craziness at work I picked up the pen to draw my hand again. As the pen meandered across the page I was impressed with the magic of marks in 2D turning a white sheet into hint of fleshed out reality.
At the time I was also one story from finishing Calvino’s Cosmicomics, thanks to M. E. Rothwell ’s encouragement to pick up the book.
A few weeks later, I picked up a new badge and swiped in at the airport.
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I forgot lunch at home. No matter, I keep sardines in my desk.
Mama had a bright idea. She came to the park near the office.
They played on the structure in the golden sun. I ate my lunch at 4.
Homeless guys surveyed for cigarette butts. One coughed.
The boy slipped off the steps and cried. Blamed his sister.
We lectured about personal responsibility. He moped.
They drove off to violin class. I worked till 8 (these four day weeks run long).
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—2/20/2025
Hat tip to Hazel Burgess who encouraged me to try blind contour drawing!
