The Old Red Barn

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Photo #276: Old Red BarnLocation Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

There’s an old red barn on my Grandparents’ property.

It was around when my Grandmother was a little girl, growing up here on the family homestead. My great-great-grandfather (perhaps with another great, I’ve lost track), Billy Stubbs, was a civil war veteran who moved to the area to settle and farm after the war was done.

And settle and farm he did, and so did his descendents. Well, at least a few of them. The land stopped being a farm long ago. Well, aside from the old pine plantation, which still gets pruned every so often, but even then, tree farming is just plant and ignore. My Grandmother has a large garden that produces a nice quantity of fruits and vegetables each year, but while it’s quite impressive for a garden, it’s nowhere near farm size.

The land really isn’t that suited to farming anyway. It’s sandy soil, blown in from the nearby Lake Michigan. And there’s not much space between the dunes at my Grandparents. In older days, when everything was done by hand and oxen, it would have been a decent size, but in this era of large tractors and massive farms, well, it’s not worth the effort.

I think the barn held livestock when my Grandmother was a kid. I seem to recall something about cows. Or I could just be confusing things. I’m actually not sure what it holds these days. There are other outbuildings for the lawnmowers and work tools and all that. I’ve never been inside. Partly from a strongly placed feeling of “dangerous!” drilled into my head when I was a little girl being sent out to play. One of the keys to letting kids run around on their own is making it very clear what will get them hurt, and old buildings full of who-knows-what are right in that category.

Still, whatever is stored in there, the barn is well maintained and regularly painted. If what I read in some book somewhere is true, barns are traditionally bright red because that red paint was cheap and lasted well, not because it looked good. Now, it’s become so stereotypical that it’s gone through the other side to a well kept tradition. Just like my Grandparents maintaining this barn might be more cheerful tradition than sheer practicality by now.

  

Unseen Enemy, Bored in Class

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Photo #275: Unseen EnemyTime Created: Fall 2006

A large part of why I got into art was being bored in class. Well, I also had a talent for it from a young age, and I also got a big boost from when I started watching anime, but still…

I’m one of those people who learn really fast. Far faster than average, even when the average is the Gifted and Talented classes in high school (yes, that’s what they were called), where everyone was a smart cookie. And well, if I’ve figured out something by halfway through the subject, I get bored and mentally wander off a bit. I also am a kinesthetic learner, and taking notes and doodling vastly increase how well I learn the subject, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m learning.

Add in the fact that the teachers didn’t mind at all (I did excellent on the tests, and the only reason I didn’t do well in some classes was because I hated homework), and I spent most of my classes drawing. I carried a sketchbook along with my school books, and usually filled it by the end of the school year.

A lot of my drawings are associated with one class or another in my memory. Some classes are more prone to my doing full drawings, since they have more time sitting around learning and less time taking notes (I got to the point where I only needed to take detailed notes in data-dense classes) or, say, making other art. This one I associate with my Human Geography class, and just looking at it brings back memories of what I was taught. We had a lot of discussion sessions in that class, where we all sat in a big circle and talked out the nuances of the subject, whether about population density or age diversity by region or the dynamics of outsourcing. Being the introverted social phobe I am, I generally dislike such classes, and don’t really participate. Which made it a great time for drawing, especially since aside from a few basics, what we were discussing never made it to the tests.

As for the piece itself, I’m only half-happy with it. Mechanically it came out pretty well, though I can easily spot the issues with perspective and proportions that were common in my art of the time. I certainly went overboard with the textures, but they all came out nice. I’m especially proud of that textured carpet. Drawing all those tiny lines took a long time.

Composition and comprehension is where it starts to fall apart. I didn’t really establish any focal points, so it’s easy for the eye to wander around lost. As for comprehension, I got a few comments from friends and classmates along the lines of “so that girl shot the other one?” And here I’d gone and tried to put in all sorts of clues that there was a gunman off screen that the living girl was hiding from!

I’ve got the gunshots all over that wall, far too wide spread for a close shooter. The two girls are wearing the same outfit, a uniform of some type, and there’s a tipped over chair that the living one had been using. She’s also hiding behind the filing cabinet, the only thing in the picture that blocks the sight from the direction she’s anxiously looking at.

Nowadays, I can see how I could fix this. For one thing, make the emotion on her face more clear. I’m still not that good at showing strong emotions on faces, but I can manage it with references. There’s the general cleaning up of perspective and proportion that would make it a cleaner piece overall. And, perhaps most importantly, adding shadows. I think I was planning to color this on the computer, and left out all but the darkest shadows intentionally. But just adding the shadow of a human coming from off screen would instantly make it clear where the danger was.

With all the other issues, I’m not going to spend the time to fix it now, six years after I drew it. But at least I can now spot where I went off, so I can look for it in the future. Though I don’t get quite as many pieces of art done these days. Something about not having classes where I sit around bored so often…

  

Paint with all the Colors of the Earth

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Photo #274: Artist's PaintpotsLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012

There’s a wide variety of interesting volcanic features scattered through the immense Yellowstone park, and paring the list down to what would fit in one day was tough.

Some things were easy, the big features like Old Faithful. And I’ve always loved the pictures I’ve seen of the Grand Prismatic Spring, so that made the list. And then, while looking over the map we got at the front gate, I spotted a little dot with the words “Artist’s Paintpots” written after it.

Since I’m an artist, well, that got on the list immediately.

It’s an interesting place, tucked into the hills right at the edge of the caldera. It’s a bit of a walk to get there, but as you come out of the pine forest and see the steam rising from dozens of bubbling pots of mud scattered across the face of a hill.

It’s called “Artist’s Paintpots” because the colors of mud and water some of them produce would belong in any artist’s set of paints. I have another photo that shows this brilliantly. But a lot of them are a beautiful off-white, or surrounded by plants to the extent that you can only see steam coming out of the ground.

And oh, was there steam! Great billowing clouds of it! In the cold air of late October, every hint of heat in the air turned to steam. It made it tough to see a lot of the features, but it was beautiful in its own right.

And the heat turned the land around it into a colorful display as well. With the first frost well in the past, the grass had turned dry and brown in most parts of the park. But the steam keeps the ground temperature at Artist’s Paintpots above freezing for much longer, and swaths of green grass littered the hill. And even the brown grass had far more variation, as different plant types could survive the steam and heat better than others. The Paintpots were obscuring themselves, but brought color to the world in a different way.

  

I’m So Over Atlanta – See, there it is down there!

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Photo #273: Over AtlantaLocation Taken: Above Atlanta, Georgia
Time Taken: October 2012

The world looks so different from above. And yet, so familiar.

I’ve only taken a handful of flights in my life. There was one out to Denver when I was in middle school, a one-way flight that we drove back from. There was a pair of flights in 2008 out to Seattle as part of my sister’s search for a good grad school. And one this past October, to fly out to her graduation from said school, again driving back from it.

…I think that’s it. Four flights in my life. Seven if you count the separate airplanes I flew on, since it’s cheaper to do two-part flights with a layover than a direct flight if you’re heading all the way out to Seattle.

I tend to consider myself pretty well-traveled, and these days that’s almost synonymous with “on airplanes a lot”. But not me. I tend to do my traveling by car. I’ve driven from one side of the continent to the other three times now, and been all the way out to Newfoundland which is so far east it practically counts as a fourth time. Now I just need to drive to the westernmost part of Alaska and I’ll really have been from one side to the other.

Oh, and if train is a viable possibility, I’ll take that over cars and planes any day. I love train travel. I keep wishing that the US had far more train coverage than it does. And that I could easily pack my bike on more trains. That would make things so much better…

Still, I do like plane travel. It does take a lot less time than the other possibilities, and the actual flying part is nice. Well, at least it is if I have a window seat. Otherwise I’m disturbing the people I’m sitting next to by constantly craning my neck trying to see the ground.

It’s a touch surreal taking off from the local airport. I watch the world around me shift and shrink away, the familiar landscapes changing into the forms I see on Google Maps’ satellite view (which I’ve spent a very large amount of time looking at…). And then, even before the seatbelt sign is even considering turning off, the patch of land I spend my days on falls behind us, and new terrain opens up.

I suspect it’s my experience with satellite maps (and my general aptitude with geography) that makes it fairly easy for me to figure out what I’m looking at on the ground. It’s more difficult at night, mind you, but I love that the flights I’ve taken have had screens on the back of the seat in front of you that will display a map showing where the plane is. Makes it downright easy to figure out that that large blob of light I’m looking at is Des Moines, or Billings, or Spokane. Also really showed how much more of the land you can see if you’re that far up, since some of those cities were fifty miles from where the map on the screen was telling me the plane was.

Landing is also a bit surreal, though not as much for places I don’t know as well. Landing in Atlanta on the layover at sunset was nifty. I’ve never truly been to Atlanta, just its airport. So it was really nifty seeing just how far the city and its suburbs spread. I’m sure the area between Baltimore and Washington DC looks similarly populated, but that’s my home turf and I’m too busy looking for familiar landmarks in that area. And landing in Seattle at night was downright pretty. I got a really good view of downtown Seattle as the plane was landing. The Space Needle looked really odd when I was looking down at it at a 45 degree angle. The perspective just didn’t quite look right. And then, after that really quick eternity that is waiting for the plane to actually land, the boring parts of air travel reasserted themselves.

Airports are really boring, ya know. Not sure why, since there’s lots of shops and nifty art and the fascinating tech behind air travel to think about. Maybe it’s just that most of the people there are just sitting around waiting and being bored, and all that accumulated emotion just kinda bleeds over even to people like me who aren’t at all easily bored. And there’s all the standard complaints of air travel too, though since you’ve heard them, I’m not bothering to repeat them here. Security always worries me, though, since there was one time I missed a flight because we spent about twenty minutes too long in the security line (pro tip: never join a security line that you can’t see the end of, even if just because it turns around the corner right before the end. It will be twice as long as the other lines and you won’t realize it until far too late.)

  

A Rare Twinning of the Geysers

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Photo #272: Two GeysersLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012

I’ve mentioned that one of the great advantages of hitting Yellowstone right at the end of the season is that there are very few other people around doing the same thing.

Which is why we had front-row seats for watching Old Faithful go off. Usually it’s standing room only on the large platform right by the most famous of geysers, but on a cold Halloween day, everyone who wanted to sit could, with lots of room to spare.

People gather about fifteen minutes before the predicted time, for the simple reason that the geyser timing has a ten-minute margin of error plus an extra five minutes to find a spot to watch.

So there we were, people just chatting lightly and waiting for Old Faithful to waken when we heard the fwoosh of a geyser going off in the distance. The Beehive geyser had decided that it was time for one of its three eruptions a day.

As people spotted the tall spurt of water in the distance and the news spread, the whole crowd rose to their feet to get a better view of the surprise show. And it was quite the show, too. A nice high spurt of water vapor, the wind pulling the steam away at a rather nice angle.

And then Old Faithful woke up as well.

It wasn’t quite as good a show as the Beehive. The winds weren’t quite right there to clear away the building steam clouds, so it was a bit of a blurry mess. But it was as strong and tall as expected, and right on schedule.

And the Beehive geyser kept on showing off as well. I’m not sure what the probability is of two geysers doing their thing at the same time, but it’s probably not that high. I heard a few comments along the lines of “I’ve been coming to see this for years, and this is the first time I’ve seen two at once!” I could do the math, but I don’t know all the tricks for figuring out a two-factor probability like this. Whatever the case, for my first (and possibly only) viewing of Old Faithful, it was quite special.

In case you’re wondering, the Beehive geyser is the one on the far left of this photo, and Old Faithful is on the far right. This was the closest I could get to having both in one photo without putting together a panorama. I did take the photos needed for that, but it does take a lot of time to stitch together photos, so I haven’t done it yet.