The piece was installed! Woah! The stroke thicknesses looked fine! It looks good! It was cool to watch people see it and then go into the exhibit.
One thing I started looking at this week was the colors used by ornithologists in the 1800s. Jer Thorp mentioned it, and then the Audubon Society’s Instagram posted about it to go along with the Pantone Color of the Year announcement.
One thing with bird-watching is how quickly we become aware of colors I’d never heard of before, like “rufous”.
I’ve done a color talk before, where I talk about how to map wavelengths to RGB. This is a little different, where we go before the 1931 color standards to color swatches, and once again, the incredibly difficult job of making sure everyone agrees on what neural stimulation “blue” is. Some early swatches were used by naturalists to report what color feathers or fossils were. “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours” in 1814 was created from fossils and was used by Charles Darwin.
Robert Ridgway, out of the Smithsonian ornithology department, created a new version, which I started looking through the Ridgway swatches by downloading it from Project Gutenberg (with nicely named files containing the swatches! ❤️)
I did feel like I saw something new! The typical HSL color-picker I use kind of blends everything, but then when I just looked at “ferroguous”, I thought of its redness like pine needles. I had an experience of going to the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s taxidermy bird collection and getting stuck on the exact shades of blues and reds.
I’m also still in awe that living creatures’ bodies convert the chemicals from their diets and decay make the colors of the natural environment.
I’d been working on a catbird for a while, and its articulated tail was adding new features to the bird drawing system. I was flipping through the Phaidon Bird book, and it showed the Eames house bird. It’s a nice collection of curves, and I realized that if I just added the little curve under the tail, I could draw it now.
Now that I’ve added that curve under the tail, I’m noticing it on birds. I thought I could simplify it away, but now it’s a key part of the body.
I read more about nature, like watching a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy. It helped to see him carefully build things as opposed to just the results. I also read John Berger’s Why Look at Animals and picked up Birds of Temptation, which has led to a lot of good references.
I hopped down to NYC to get a visa, and also got to stop by CCNYC. When I got back to Boston, it was 20 degrees, and I had a sore foot and a head cold. I did my thesis oral critique, the last assignment of the semester, and then just rested for a few days.