TwentyFour

There went another one. A whole year gone and if it wasn't for the photos I took I doubt I'd remember most of it.

What did I do this year? I got the workshop finished, I drew and painted things, I went to a few places, I did lots and lots of quiet ordinary domestic things I'd never post online about but yet made up the bulk of everything. Ups, and downs. Some stress, some unhappiness, but mostly happiness and contentment.

We had an election and that was a good result. Other places had elections and they weren't so good.

I discovered Manben on NHK, and all the episodes are on the Internet Archive. It's very inspiring. If you want to get better at drawing there's no substitute for practice, but it really, really helps if you can watch how other people do it.

Drawing and Painting

I want to get better at drawing and painting and the only way to do that is to do more of it.

I'm really pleased with these sparrow drawings. I do them in Affinity Designer as vectors, so every little line and dot is exactly a line or dot I drew by hand. Then I get a pen plotter to hold a pen for me and actually put ink on paper.

Doing it this way is a bit strange. I get an interesting creative restriction: the pen plotter can't do pressure or vary the tilt of the pen, so when I draw, I have to keep that in mind. The advantage for me is that I can choose which pen to use after I've drawn it, and I can change how big the drawing is. I also can make as many copies as I have the patience for: the pen plotter can take hours to create a single copy of a drawing. The wasp one below took about 6 hours for the pen plotter to draw. Considerably less time than it took me to create the original, which was more like 30 hours, but still. These aren't casual prints.

I also don't use any algorithmic tools to speed things up. I want every line to be mine. Does that sound defensive? Maybe a little bit. I enjoy doing these but they are work, they take time and effort.

I made a post about these six paintings.

I spent a little time in hospital just before Christmas so I didn't have as much time as I wanted to make Christmas cards. I drew the robin using Procreate and then used the laser cutter to engrave stamp rubber. I made a stamp for the black and another for the red. The red didn't work because there was too little of it to create a clean print. The black did reasonably well. I needed a much deeper cut and maybe to have set up the press. I still like them though!

Flowers and Leaves

I felt like I neglected the garden this year. It rained so much and I felt pretty down about it all. I did take some photos and we got a good harvest of grapes and tomatoes, so not so bad.

Travels

I had a couple of work trips, one to Windsor and another to Boston. I got to see one of my favourite buildings, Boston City Hall. I posted more photos I took while I was there.

Garden, etc.

I'm not one for competitions, but I was watching a snooker final and they were doing the bit with the trophy and I realised I'd never won a trophy. I don't feel sad about that, but I thought I'd like to have a trophy for when I feel like I've done something well and I can award myself it. Today it can be the award for writing a blog post about my 2024. It's silly, but feels good nontheless, so I recommend doing it. This trophy is an ex display model too.

All Very Celestial

There were some auroras visible really far from the poles this year. There was a big one on the night I flew back from Boston. I didn't have a window seat and the plane was packed, so I didn't get much chance to look for it. When I looked out the window I couldn't see any of it. Thankfully there was another chance in October and I did see that. Like everyone says it looks more vivid in photos, but I did actually see it with my own eyes. Also, these photos could have been anyone's because they all looked exactly the same (but I did take these).

I like taking pictures of the moon. I have a super zoomy Nikon p1000. It's a ridiculous camera and I love it.

It's been rainy and foggy, just for a change. I was outside and using a flashlight and noticed how visible all the droplets were so took some photos. It was nice.

Fonting

I redid this site, and made two typefaces for it. Both are variable and I learned a lot from doing them. The header font has a single axis, weight. It also has three variants for every letter, and a lot of ligatures (often with multiple variants too). It was a big complicated thing to do and I really enjoyed it. It's very much a personal project so I'm still tweaking it as I use it.

The other typeface has two axes, one for weight and another for 'neatness'. It can go from light to bold, and from a neat and tidy script like I learned at school to a scruffy one that's more like my actual handwriting. It's not exactly my writing and it's not exactly as I'd want it because of the compromises of making it a variable font. Roughly, you make the extremes for each letter; in this case, one neat and light, one neat and bold, one scruffy and light and finally one scruffy and bold. All four need to have the same bezier points otherwise you can't have all the in-between stages. I was going to use this as the text face for this site, but I didn't think it was readable enough and went with the amazing Monaspace instead.

What's Next?

I don't know what 2025 will bring. The world is scary, it seems scarier than it's been for a very long time. I hope we make it through OK.