Check Up

GROWING WELL: Thought it was about  time to check in with our garlic plant project. You may recall, back on January 15, we planted some sprouting garlic cloves for the fun of it. The 'before' photo is below. 

Fast forward a week and a day, and you can see the garlic seems to be happy so far, especially that one stem of green that's risen well above the planter. I might just have to harvest some for our stir fry tonight! 

ART UPDATE: This afternoon, Annabelle put a new art kit she was gifted for Christmas to work. She was happy to see it had watercolor pencils. I'd not heard of those before. You color with them like 'normal' colored pencils, but then you can blend the colors with water, like watercolor paints, in a way. 

That's what she did on the "You" below. I think it's pretty pretty.

Speaking of art, we continued our "How to Draw" class today via Great Courses. Today's lecture was a little bit about ways of drawing (observation, construction and abstract), and a fair amount about how lines are used together to compose a drawing. We had a couple of really helpful exercises employing phantom drawing, which is a technique where you make strokes above or very lightly on your paper before actually committing to drawing that linear or curved line. Why have I not done this before?! It sure would have saved a lot of erasers over the years. ...

Our professor, David Brody, MFA, of the University of Washington, also talked about how to view others' artwork, and how 'active analysis' where you ask 'how did they do that?" and so on is important. I said to Annabelle, "So, when do you and I often do that?" 

She immediately responded with what I had in mind. "When we're looking at other people's cakes. We talk about how they did it, what we like, what we'd do differently," Annabelle described.

The rest of today's lecture was kind of a syllabus for the course. Yowza, it's super comprehensive. He said the material covered would take about four quarters of a standard college course. So it looks like you'll be hearing about "How to Draw" for months to come. 

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: We've seen headlines the last couple of days about new photos from the far side of the moon, taken by their Chang'e-4 lunar lander.

You can visit the Chinese website with all of the images here: http://moon.bao.ac.cn/pubMsg/detail-CE4EN.jsp#

Just an FYI: The site is *really* slow to load and I was unable to download any of their images, which maybe is a good thing ...

You're probably best off going to Doug Ellison's website, where he has downloaded and processed many of the images, including this one, where you can see the tracks from the rover where it left the lander. (Ellison is the engineering camera team lead for the Curiosity Mars Rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)

For a fullscreen slideshow of Ellison's work with the images, follow this link:
https://dougellison.smugmug.com/frame/slideshow?key=fPwwkL&autoStart=1&captions=0&navigation=0&playButton=0&randomize=0&speed=3&transition=fade&transitionSpeed=2&clickable=1