Given the drift of yesterday’s conversation, I couldn’t resist showing you this Sunday example of reality-bending from five years ago. Speaking of yesterday’s conversation, I would like to set the record straight about one thing. I do not draw my comic strip digitally. Far from it. In fact, I recently experimented with felt-tip pens, which most cartoonists—the decreasing number who do not draw digitally—have favored for years. I drew with felt-tip pens for several months, but I didn’t care for the results. I have gone back to pen nib and India ink on 100% rag Strathmore paper. In fact, they don’t make the pen points I use anymore. I have to watch for them on eBay, where they’re sold as antiques. I figure I have a two-year supply on hand right now. Only after I finish drawing an A&J strip do I enter the digital world by scanning the artwork and creating a file.
153 responses to “Fowl Story”
Vellum. I want to make vellum. Although I have no idea how to source calf skin.
Jackie:
‘Don’t ask why, I have no idea!’ Me too. [Wife and] I have painting reproductions all over the house, but I’m a drawing freak, perhaps / it’s a medium I have some competence in. Haven’t done any in years, mostly because ‘writing’ [keyboarding] is my current outlet, one others can actually appreciate.
Peace, emb
Dear Ghost, I’ve got a feeling that making vellum is a messy, smelly business; best left to the peasants. (I don’t mean to offend the modern day leather workers, I’m thinking of the medieval ones.)
Bryan, you described the first computer I bought myself, an Apple 2e. I later bought a 5 MB hard drive for it and an AppleSoft Basic compiler. It really flew! And it’s fun to calculate such things as:
The typical 4 GB flash drive you can buy for under $10 holds as much data as 34,952 5.25″ floppy disks for that Apple 2e.
Reread the “Travails of Debbe” and the chicken house. It may take more than an exorcist to fix the gremlins that are plaguing her and the chickens. It may take $$$ and an exorcist might be the cheapest way to go over new equipment and parts. If said parts can even be bought for old machinery.
I am Episcopalian, so don’t have an readily available exhortations, but I think some very sincere appeals are in order. Unfortunately, I would probably resort to profanity and fowl language!
Debbe, I cannot crack an egg anymore without thinking of you and those infernal machines.
Love, Jackie Monies
Among things I kept when Mike’s elderly aunt died (she had no family except us really) was a document of indenture that I can only assume belonged to an ancestor. It has all the original seals intact, all the satin ribbons still there, florid writing I can hardly read but ink is not really faded. Written on parchment/vellum (?) and signed by King George III before the American Revolution.
This is not very valuable, only a few hundred dollars, but it just intrigues me that it is still so clear and undamaged after 300 years. Not printed, all hand written with a pen and ink.
Love, Jackie Monies
And a lot more portable than a chiseled stone tablet!
You know, with the discussion above on making your own paper, there is a possible brand name for a tablet. Call it the Papyrus, but don’t use hieroglyphics for the operating system!
Oh, Jackie, look up Wacom tablets to see what you can draw with electronically.
You are undoubtedly correct, Charlotte. Also, I checked with the big box office supply store and found they sell an Inkjet Translucent Vellum Paper, which sounds pretty neat. It goes for $10.99 for a pack of 50, which I’m sure is less than a calf skin would cost. Now if I could just figure out what to do with it. Although I think it might make an awesome report cover or section dividers, since it’s translucent.
That’s a cool sounding document, Jackie. I never thought about monarchs signing “routine” documents. Not a lot to occupy their time back then, I suppose. Or perhaps they had “people” to do that for them, the 18th century version of an autopen.
Mark, there are already online hieroglyphic translators. We could easily build a hieroglyph UI to overlay a binary OS. All input could be done via a stylus. Error correction would be a finger smudging over of an area. While doable, there is little web content in hieroglyph and, other than a couple of our professors no one in the Village speaks it. Would you settle for Greek?
Hieroglyphs would be Greek to me. And vice versa.
Good morning Villagers…
GR 😉 When I first read “Vellum. I want to make vellum” I thought I was reading “Valium…I want to make valium……where’s the bifocals? I didn’t know vellum was made from calf skin though. See learn something here every day. Oh, and thanks for the Canned Heat…I am out in the country.
Ah, the plagues continue at the henhouse….Boss man is just going to $$it when he gets the bills from the hardware store when he gets back. Andrew is quite the mechanic and is overhauling some much needed overhauling. Hey, if Boss man wants to stay in the egg business, you got to stop using duct tape and spend that money. I hope he enjoyed his $$$ vacation in Canada.
Like his soon to be ex son-in-law said “a poor man can’t afford a one week vacation, let alone a two week vacation”
Thanks for thinking of me Jackie when you crack an egg, and that’s no yolk. And yes, I do utter a fowl word every now and then.
…..and it’s PAYDAY!!!!!
ya’ll have a blessed day
Indy Mindy….just how are you doing with getting in and out of your apartment complex?
Mother Nature’s artwork:
http://cheezburger.com/8250048256
I find it interesting to hear how cartoonists do their work. I remember one (forget who, but I have one of his/her books) who, talking about the process only said, “For the technically minded, I use white paper and black ink.”
Apparently emb is out of the loop again. What is the point of this one?
http://www.gocomics.com/that-is-priceless/#.U7_m22dOXUM
Ghost:
‘Not a lot to occupy their time back then, I suppose.’ This is a constant background theme in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ by John Fowles. It’s more recent, 1860s or so, but the gentry still had time on their hands. Good book; we used it [along with other books] at least once in our team-taught freshman Honors course.
emb, Paul Rudd is an actor who resembles the guy in that painting, especially if he were acting in a period piece as Henry VIII.
Dear emb, I’d say the point is that some (unfamiliar to me) movie star looks kind of like the man in the portrait, who is fancifully imagined to be Henry the Eighth. He looks bored.
Trucker, Charlotte: Thanks, emb.
Good morning, friends and neighbors.
No, sandcastler, I’ve not grown papyrus (not sure it would do to well in the high desert) but I have made a sort of mock vellum. I used goatskins that you buy for drum heads or furniture as a starting leather. Once I was done, other than the thickness, it was a very good substitute for actual parchment and about 1/10 the cost.
That does sound like a great document, Jackie. It is amazing how well many of the old manuscripts have held up over the centuries. Look up the Book of Kells or the Lindesfarne gospels. They are both from the 8th century and are still amazing looking. Kells even spent many years in an Irish bog but most of it is undamaged. Also look for Books of Hours, little prayer books quite popular in the Middle Ages. Some of them are amazing.
^°^°^°^°^°^ agrees with both Charlotte and TR. It is a cultural reference that probably lost on many, whatever their age.
Bryan, you sound like a true Renaissance Man.
Just as I was going to sleep last night, I began to think about colored illustrations (or comics) things we take for granted. Once printed books became more common, illustrations followed. Color did not.
So color was supplied by mostly women who sat in garrets and did the colors for the floral botanicals, zoological illustrations, the “exotic” locales in those early (and expensive) colored books.
This of course followed history of the monks who painstakingly drew and colored their manuscripts on the “papers” we are talking about. But illustrations were colored in greater quantities.
In college I worked in a botanical library doing specimen mounts but the interesting part was we had a pretty good library of early and rare botanical books. Sometimes these were not identical in coloration for same flowers.
Today many of these pages have been ripped from the books and are sold as “botanicals”. Genuine ones are not cheap. Maps, animals, native peoples, scenic drawings, all fell prey to the ripping from the books for sale.
Funny, we seem to think of interesting subjects here?
Love, Jackie Monies
About George III signature, I could not believe it either. A King’s signature? Heck, an American President’s signature goes for a ton of money if it is real and not auto signed.
Wanted to take this to Antiques Roadshow and of course, could not get tickets. So I called Christie’s or Sotheby’s or whomever was doing Road Show evaluations and asked if I should haul it to their offices?
They very nicely put me through to the correct department who then very nicely told me I had exactly what I thought I did, letters of indenture ship for a British citizen being indentured in colonies. They said the signature was indeed King George’s, along with a slew of other dignitaries required, it sounded like mine was in great shape since it had all it’s stamps, ribbons, etc. and it’s worth was about $300.
There must have been a LOT of people being indentured in America because they said they were quite common. The darned thing is pretty large, about as big as a map when unfolded but is folded up to size of large letter.
Love, Jackie Monies