I have completed my second exercise! It is awful, well at least it doesn’t look anything like it was supposed to. The prompt for the second pre-instruction drawing lesson exercise was to draw, from memory, a profile of a person you know.
I found while doing this exercise that I had a lot of trouble remembering the direct features of anyone’s face in my mind’s eye. When I though of the person from a global or full perspective I could see their face and features, but when attempting to zoom in on any particular feature without the global perspective I completely lost all detail.
I will say though, that I spent considerably less time on this drawing than I did the first one. I just couldn’t sit and wait for the image to become clear in my head. So I started drawing with the vague impressions in my mind.
The outcome of my efforts…
After finishing, I wanted to do this exercise again, but I think I will let this stand and move on as it’s part of that beginning snapshot of my current skills. The book has hinted at teaching the skills of observation. So I assume that I will be taught how to focus on that detail and capture it in my mind. Or, I suppose, I just have to be more patient.
The picture was supposed to be of my sister, but it didn’t quite make it there. I will have to draw her at the end of the book lessons and see if I get better.
Let me know if you have ever experienced this when drawing and how you dealt with it.
::nathan::
Hey All-
In this post I present the results of my first exercise. I am moving rather slowly, it appears, on this new adventure, and I would just assume it will keep this pace. I hope to present work once a week, but depending on the week that may be a bit too much.
The first thing this book suggests is to create three drawings. The first of which is the topic of this post, and is a drawing/portrait of myself. The instructions are: sit in front of a mirror and draw myself. The book has obviously hinted to numerous techniques for drawing, but in this instance we, the learners, are not given any tools or approaches. Thus I present to you my first work.
First drawing.
My initial response is that I’m surprised that I can draw this well. I anticipated a drawing with a few lines and ovals for eyes and an overall simplistic representation of myself. I think the biggest thing I learned while drawing was that it requires great patience, but given enough time, and of course learning the necessary skill set, one can definitely draw well. I also learned that noses are hard and hair is easier than expected. I didn’t do too much shading and my eyes are a bit weird as well.
The next exercise is to draw a portrait of someone from memory. Yikes! Sounds a bit scary (as I know how often I needed to look at myself in the mirror).
::nathan::
For quite some time I have desired to learn how to draw, and thanks to my lovely wife, I now have a really cool book to learn from. The book that I will be embarking upon this journey with is “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” by Betty Edwards.
This book focuses on teaching what the book calls the perceptual skills of drawing:
- The perception of edges
- The perception of spaces
- The perception of relationship
- The perception of lights and shadows
- The perception of the whole, or gestalt
The book is supposedly used in the academic setting. I’m very excited and intrigued to start learning how to draw. It seems quite odd to me to use that language “learn to draw.” Nevertheless, I am going to learn how draw and will take you on this journey with me. I will be hopefully commenting on the book as I go along and providing an active view on the methods of the book as practiced.
::n::
Today my son completed his first year of life! I generally have an indifferent feeling towards birthdays, but this one is worth distinguishing. It has been a year full of the wildest ups and downs. The most challenging and also the the most rewarding. I’m very proud of him, and all that he has learned and achieved. It is amazing what a baby learns in that first year. Knowing nothing but the warmth of mommy’s womb and being fed then out of nowhere he is thinking, perceiving, talking, crawling, laughing, crying, and loving. This is his experience, and it is truly amazing.
This picture is our first time in the swing on his first birthday! Yeah baby!
So my son I hope the best for you in the second year of your life, and I pray that I will never be too focused on other things to really experience you. You are precious to me and nothing is more important than you (although some just as important, like your mommy 
).
::n::
Hey All!
We had mice… yesterday. Today, hopefully we have none. That is because last night I set up some mousetraps for the first time. It was a bit weird. I have never done anything like it and felt kinda bad for the little guys, but alas they were threatening to eat us out of food and home. This morning when I woke up we had caught two of them, but there appeared to be evidence of more. Tonight we will execute mission Mousetrap II, wish us good luck.
Onto other news, the banze has his first tooth breaking out! It’s really exciting to see him grow. It is both a great joy and a bit sad. Sad because he is our little baby and I want to keep him this size forever. There is a bond and intimacy that only last for a while. We will miss that, but it is a joy to see him learn new things and become a person capable of changing the world.
The last portion of this post is about my sadness that the big 15 inches of snow didn’t happen, as you can see in the picture. Note that it did sleet for a very long time yesterday, which reduced the total accumulation. The snow was really cool though. It was like a dense wet sand. You couldn’t make any snowballs out of it, but really neat. I was expecting to wake up this morning to the several inches of thick snow, but it appears as none ever came.
::nathan::
Learning from mistakes is really exciting isn’t it? Well today I learned a valuable lesson: if you want to ride your bike after some extended time in weather such as this photo make sure everything works.
Last winter I underestimated, or rather didn’t know, that in the midwest metal rusts, fast, especially bike chains. I got on my bike and this awful clicking and lack of motion hit my bike. So this winter I was prepared for the chain issues and have been keeping it well oiled. One thing I did not consider though is that shifting functionality could be affected by the freezing temperatures as well.
As I first tried to shift today I quickly found the err in my way, but was too far along on the trip to turn back (< 1 minute in). I’m pretty determined like that. So I write this post to tell you if you want to ride your bike after some extended cold weather time off, make sure to check that your bike is capable for the next trip. I’m hoping next year I don’t need to learn the same way for my breaks .
::nathan::
Okay, so I went home for the holidays and attempted to make a family favorite plachintas. Well, for some reason the whole thing was a mess. I couldn’t get the amounts of the ingredients right and the thing just didn’t work. At that moment I committed myself to overcoming my failure and make amazing plachintas someday. Well tonight was the night and it was awesome! I still have no clue why the plachintas failed in NM, but for whatever reason I have now succeeded and do not feel so bad. The Banze had a very interesting response to my success, “yay daddy! that was an exsquisite example of how to cook plachinta!”
On a side note I have looked into what exactly a real plachinta is, and it appears as though I have been a bit confused. A plachinta is a German Southern-Russina dish that is a turnover like pastry thing with filling. You can see a description of it over at fastrecipes. What I had been calling a plachinta is something a bit more like a crepe. So I’m sorry to all my friends who I have confused with my plachina talk, but nonetheless I will still considered them plachintas.
::nathan::
I write tonight to inform you, my readers, as well as make a commitment myself, that I’m going to start blogging in a different style. I think one of the reasons (one of many that is) I haven’t blogged for so long is that I was concerned with the fact that I was putting information onto an open forum that other people will read. As such I think I raised the bar too high (as another post discusses) and made it more about work and not about relaxing and just talking about what’s on my mind and heart.
Therefore, I am going to focus more on just blogging. Blogging about what is going on in my mind and my view of the world. This viewpoint is indelibly and ineludibly going to be fraught with frivolous and incorrect statements, but I’m not too worried about making that mistake. I think in life we are in a constant state of uncertainty — if not on the minor scale there certainly exists larger issues and concepts — and in such a state we must take each of the inputs in our lives and use those to come up with some type of worldview; an idea of how we perceive, think about, and react to the things we are seeing. This is the approach I intend to take on more things in life. I must begin to live in the now and not be concerned with the mythical concept of a perfect or right way to do things. I simply must be and do the best that I can.
I also want to explore language too. I really like the use of the exact word, and hopefully I will achieve these results in my writing. So if I use something terribly, please let me know. Okay?
::nathan::
Hi all!
Yes, it’s been around a year since I last posted. But, don’t fear, for I shall post again. Right now in fact. I just performed a major upgrade to my Gentoo installation and also switched from Apache to the Lighty webserver. I will say that it is a bad idea to attempt two major changes in your system at the same time. I instantly had some tremendous errors that appeared to be the problem of the webserver switch, but in fact turned out to be a PHP linking issue in Gentoo.
I decided to switch to lighty mostly because I heard it was smoking fast, and I’m a systems guy that likes to try new stuff out every once in a while. I’d like to offer up some notes on the process and what I think about Lighty.
Lighty has a simple configuration approach. I suppose it isn’t too different than that of Apache’s, but I liked it a bit better. I should be careful in how I state why I liked Lighty because most likely all of the things I configured could be done in Apache as well. With that said I liked how the Lighty configuration file is parsed as though it were a programming language. In fact it appears as though the config file is/can be parsed as straight Lua code. This felt more intuitive for me as I set up the virtual hosts. Lighty uses something called conditionals to test the current requested host for matches. To set up a virtual host all one has to do is put code in like the following:
$HTTP["host"] =~ "nathanandaudrey.com" {
server.document-root = "/var/www/nathanandaudrey.com/htdocs/"
}
As you can see that is the vhost configuration for nathanandaudrey.com.
In migrating, I had to deal with two major problems. The first, was to deal with permalink issues and the second was a problem with a plugin, which I promptly deleted. It seems as though permalinks cause issues with Lighty because there isn’t an .htaccess file for access control. I’m not sure why this is a problem. It appears as though WordPress uses these in some way to control symlink following and such. To solve the issue I reviewed the solutions at http://blog.forret.com/2007/03/urlrewrite-for-wordpress-on-lighttpd/. I was unable to get the full site working, so if you find glitches please be patient as I attempt to figure things out.
Overall, I’m not using any complicated configuration or dealing with massive performance needs. Lighty does extremely well under heavy load, but will be left untested in my system.
::nathan::
As I write this I’m holding my son in my arms, and I must say it is the most amazing thing ever (of course right next to marrying his mamma and staring into her eyes)! I am in awe at the tremendous opportunity that rests in my arms right now. Little Noah is sleeping deeply, and I really hope this moment never goes away. Sad to say it will eventually grow into new moments as as my boy grows up, but for this one moment, it is just him and I and nothing else. Its as if time is standing still.
I was just putting him down into his bassinet a moment ago and he just stole my heart away. I couldn’t stand to part with that preciousness, so I brought him back to work with me . He, of course, is sleeping away in the moby wrapped around dad.
I know I haven’t posted lately, but I figured this was a cool moment that I wanted to capture, which is as good as any to introduce my new child to the world. Noah was born on April 6th, 6 lbs 12 oz, 18 inches, at 2:55 pm. Welcome to the world son.
Now I’m going to return to the endless sweetness that it is to stare at my son’s beautiful face. Goodnight!
::nathan::
