Some interesting gleanings from my massive attempt to catch up on my Google reader. I'm behind because (for one thing) my friend Helen was over here trying to get her new pied-a-terre into habitable shape. She's picked some fabulous fabric for her custom-made bedframe but we had a hellish time trying to find bedding to match it, and still haven't succeeded. There were things I thought matched that she didn't and things she thought matched that I didn't. Since she's got to live with it, her opinion obviously has more weight than mine, but it got me thinking about how we perceive color. I know that as our eyes age, they tend to yellow up: hence the wild rouge and lipstick you see on so many older women. So when I stumbled across this color perception test on Extreme Cards and Papercrafting (a great blog, BTW), I jumped at the chance to see how good I was. I ended up with a score of 16 on a scale where 0 is perfect and 99 is, well, partially color blind, I would guess. Go take it and see how you do.
Then Blue Tea mentioned a great, royalty-free textures site, CG Textures, that I'll be referring back to for backgrounds for photomanips. I'm always on the lookout for royalty free stuff, but many of them place restrictions on using their images for commercial work; this one doesn't, as long as you're not reselling their textures as textures, i.e., competing with them.
You know that fab 500 Handmade Books that just came out, that everyone's drooling over (including me)? Lark Books has a podcast of one of the jurors, Steve Miller, the head of the University of Alabama's Book Arts Program, talking about the jury process. (H/T to Cai Lun). Very illuminating, if you're thinking about submitting your work to any juried show at any point.
Hearkening back to days of printing presses, Green Chair Press has a great kit for making "single sheet" books, where all the pages are laid out on one sheet of paper then printed, cut apart and fastened into a signature. If layout mystifies you, as it often did me until I got the hang of it, this will clear things up for you. For $10, you get instructions for five different books, 3 different books to make, and a Word template.
And I'm now completely captivated by the blog Wynken de Worde, which takes its name from one of the earliest medieval English printers. It's written by Sarah Warner, director of the undergrad program at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which has got to be one of the top ten jobs in my former field. It makes me sick with jealousy. Lately, she's been writing about the marginalia in various books in the library: sketches, notes, huffy responses to the author. I find marginalia endlessly entertaining; it's like having a conversation with your books, and with their future readers. Someday, I'm going to do a book that's nothing but collected marginalia.
Okay, all caught up. Let's see how long that lasts. ;^)
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