TS McKee

5 Tips From Mark Boedges Workshop

2023-07-21T18:31:47-04:00

Earlier this week I took a 3 day workshop with the painter Mark Boedges. It was an awesome experience and I feel like it really took my plein air to a new level. These are the biggest tips I can think of. If you get a chance to take a workshop with him it is 100% worth the money.

5 - Turpenoid and Turpentine are not the same thing

Mark's plein air process relies heavily on layering. In a medium like gouache or acrylic, layering is pretty straightforward - but oil requires some forethought to avoid making a mess. Instead of toning the canvas with a single color wash, Mark uses his washes to block in the painting. These washes serve the painting and don't necessarily need to be covered like a simple toned canvas would.

During the demo I watched Mark block in a painting with a turpentine wash. By the time he was finished blocking in, it was dry enough to go over again with another (thicker) wash. But when I tried the same technique I just kept smudging paint around. It turns out "turpenoid" is NOT turpentine - it's mineral spirits. Up until Monday afternoon I hadn't given much thought to what solvents I was using. Odorless Mineral Spirits (aka Turpenoid) stinks less than the paint thinner in my garage and it thins paint which I thought is all I needed. As it turns out though, OMS has some downsides.

For one, OMS doesn't dissolve dammar or any other natural resins (mastic, sandarac, opal) which are common in medium/varnish. Secondly, and essential for plein air, OMS dries about three times slower than turpentine. It's still possible to layer using OMS washes but you have to wait a few minutes for them to dry - not ideal. In my research I discovered that naphtha (another petroleum based solvent) actually dries faster than turpentine. In regular painting I can tell a huge difference between turp and OMS. I tried out naphtha today but I didn't notice much of a difference between turp. I plan to do some experiments with all three solvents to see just how much they differ.

Updates on my solvent exploration

4 - BRUSHES MATTER

Seriously go buy Rosemary Co. Master's Series right now they're barely even more than Michaels garbage synthetics.

I'd been putting off buying nice brushes for a long time. I assumed that the quality of my paintings was mostly dependent on my skill so dropping $150 on my LARP career really hurt my inner scrooge. Since I'd invested so much in this workshop, though, I decided I needed to bite the bullet and get some real tools. And boy was I wrong about the importance of brushes.

It's true a good brush won't make you a better artist, but a crappy brush will make you worse. The type of layering that Mark gets in his paintings is impossible without a soft brush like the Rosemary Co. Master's Series. I got an assortment of Ulitimate Bristles, Master's Series, and Eclipes Extra Long Combers. The control you get with these brushes compared the cheapos feels like the difference between holding a pencil in your fingers versus gripping it in a fist. I feel like a total idiot for not buying them months ago, especially given they cost only 10-20% more than the cheap bruhses I was burning through before.

3 - The focal point is the most important part

This one is pretty obvious but it really changed the way I approached painting "en plein air". The conventional wisdom in painting is to go from big to small and work all around the canvas. Mark follows Richard Schmid's approach of rendering from the center of interest outward. He still works big to small in layers, but after the initial block in he works on one area until its close to finished.

I'm often painting before or after work and following the standard method its very rare for me to finish a plein air painting. In the last few months I've mostly switched from plein air to small studies of objects in my house because that's all I have time to finish. Using Mark and Schmid's approach I can actually take my painting back outside again and come away with a "finished" product even if its not the whole painting. It also helps to simplify your painting down to the one thing that actually matters. It's very easy when painting outside to try to include too much in the composition. When you've got one thing to render all the way through that temptation is much less.

3.5 Clean your palette

Just a little addendum that I remembered. In the demos, Mark wiped off his entire palette multiple times. Every time he switched to a different object he would wipe it down and start over. I found not being afraid to scrap my paint has helped me stay organized a lot better. Especially with a small plein air palette, it's very easy to get overwhelmed with all the colors. A fresh mixing space is a great way to clear your head and refocus on what you're painting.

2 - Paintings don't need to be finished outside

When I was painting using the block in approach it was very difficult to continue work on my paintings indoors. If I didn't finish the whole thing outside then it would just stay unfinished. But when you have the most important part finished outdoors, filling in the rest from photos is easy. Mark starts most of his paintings outdoors where he finishes the central point but the majority of the work is done in the studio. It takes a lot of pressure off to know that I can make something I'm proud of without it being 100% finished.

1 - Color temperature is essential to realistic lighting

I've known about color temperature for a long time but I never knew how important it was to realistic lighting. In every demo, Mark spent a significant amount of time talking about the temperature of the passages he was painting. In drawing, light and shadow are primarily communicated through value. The same is true in painting but the color temperature also has to be correct in order to read properly. A warm light should have a cool shadow. Conversely, cool light should have a warm shadow. It's a simple concept but it can become very complex in outdoor scenes.

Just think of a sunny day - pretty simple right? The sun is a warm light, therefore it should have cool shadows. But the shadows are lit by the sky which is cool light. That means within the shadows the darks should be warmer because they recieve less cool light from the sky. Especially when local value comes into play, color temperature can make or break the read of your lighting. It's a lot to think about but when it goes right the results are worth it.

My Paintings

You can (hopefully) see my progression in the paintings each day. The first day (top) I was still using OMS and having a really hard time controlling the paint. I started way too thick and didn't have room to layer.

The second day (left) I was still fighting the medium but I started to understand how I was going wrong.

The last day (right) I used turp and my wash went on a lot better. I still went thick too fast and it got a little messy towards the end but I felt much more in control of my layers. All of them need more work but I think this is the closest to being done. I'm excited to get out and paint more with the techniques I learned this week. Something clicked on the last day and I feel I have a much better grip on how to handle oil.

Made a couple scripts

2023-05-08T01:22:32-04:00

Build and Deploy Script

#!/bin/bash

(cd /home/tyler/www/tsm ;
hugo ;
echo "uploading";
rsync -rtvzP ./public/* root@tsmckee.com:/var/www/tsm;
)

New Blog Script

#!/bin/bash

NAME=$1

(cd /home/tyler/www/tsm/;
hugo new blog/$NAME;
nvim content/blog/$NAME;
)

It's kind of amazing how easy it is to program on linux. Or rather, its amazing how difficult windows makes it.

Chair

2022-04-28T11:07:11-04:00

The fourth semester at VWS is a chair. The focus for the chair class is compound angle joinery. This project takes the least amount of build time (many people make two) but requires thoughful design and excellent joinery to be successful. Sloppy tenons make weak joints. While you might get away with it on an end table, the constant and dynamic forces being exerted on a chair don't bode well for "good enough" woodworking.

The Design

As I mentioned in my cabinet article, I find that drawing by hand lends better results than CAD. My thoughts on this will make it into another article someday. It's no coincidence that Thomas Chippendale (one of the most successful cabinet makers of all time) began his book with an overview of the Classical Orders.

My aim was to create a modern shield back chair that incorporated more of the straight lines and hard edges of Federal Period furniture. The design was developed on paper using traditional drafting techniques. I found the true lengths and angles for the compound angle joinery using stereotomy. "Practical Descriptive Geometry" by William Griswold Smith had a permanent place on my bench this semester.

The Renders

Certainly not as cool as my chest of drawers animation but I'm happy with how close it was to the final product. Just a couple slight proportional changes.

A Modern Sheild Back Chair

TS McKee

2023-07-27T18:46:49-04:00

blog sketch gallery

Morning Color Study

2023-05-09T08:05:12-04:00

View from my room

Quick sketch from my bedroom window. Trying to work on color.

Palette:

Ultramarine Blue
Lemon Yellow
Yellow Ochre
A very small amount of Cad. Red to grey down trees in the front.

I'm finding that the key to non-muddy colors is to actually use less color. I've noticed that most good paintings have only one dominant color. This split complementary palette of cool yellow, warm yellow, blue seems to do a pretty good job at preventing me from mixing mud. The tiny amount of Cad Red is a nice utility for muting certain colors without changing the value too much. I think if anything were to show as actually red though it would look real bad.

Beer

2023-07-13T18:45:26-04:00

Painted a beer while I waited for my baguettes to rise.

Social Media Is For Suckers

2023-05-19T07:54:00-04:00

Social Media Sucks

All social media sites are bad. Period. They are engineered to make you anxious and waste your time. I know this, you know this, everyone knows this. Yet we continue to use Facebook and Instagram because there's no other way to stay "up to date".

Except... there is.

Really Simple Syndication

Before sites like Reddit and Facebook came along and built their walled garden, there was a technology called RSS. RSS is really simple. My blog has an RSS Feed. You can copy that link into your RSS reader (more about that below) and whenever I update my blog, it shows up in your feed. It's just like a Facebook or Instagram feed except:

No "friends". Outside of the garden, friends are real people that you interact with, NOT a number on a screen.
No likes or comments. Likes are basically an anti-social slot machine. Most comments are functionally identical to likes. Instead of clicking "like" they clicked a few extra buttons to say "nice" or "cool". Neither of these are human interactions and it should be self evident that allowing them in your life is mental poison. Interaction is still possible, it just means sending an email (a non-superficial human interaction).
No shills. I only follow about 100 people on Instagram which means I run out of content I want to see pretty quick. That doesn't stop Instagram from filling my feed with thousands of hours of completely inane popcorn content to passively consume. In RSS land I see the content that I want, from people that I care about, and then I close my computer because I'm done. No ads, no spam, no tiktoks, no "news", just peace.

Feed Readers

In order to read RSS feeds you need a feed reader. Here's some options.

Mac or PC: Feeder (You can use the browser extension with no account)
Linux: Akregator (I use this)
Android: Feeder (I used this when I had a phone)
iOS: Feedly

Adding feeds

Adding feeds is pretty simple. If you see a little rss icon, just copy the link and put it into your feed reader. If you don't see a link, their platform (blogspot for example) may still automatically generate one that you can find by trying something like 'example.biz/rss'. Other common names are "feed", "rss.xml" or "index.xml". If you use twitter, you can follow twitter feeds with Nitter (this may be broken). No account needed and more importantly, none of the distractions of twitter.

Once again, you can follow my RSS if you haven't already.

And here's some blogs that I follow and you should too:

There's also a cool thing caled a "webring". It's an old fashioned way for independent site owners to share their content. These two are pretty cool:

heaventree (I'm part of this one!)
xxiivv

And these are some indie-web search engines:

My Sexy Hips

2023-10-26T17:30:40-04:00

So there's this crazy historical drafting technique called "L'art du Trait" (the art of the line in French). I've been trying to figure it out on my own using some old engineering textbooks on descriptive geometry (also known as stereotomy). The techniques use the properties of right triangles to find orthographic projections of oblique angles. That sounds like super complicated nerd stuff but it's actually really cool and "hands on". When it works out it feels like you solved the secrets of the universe. I plan to make a more in-depth article covering the basics (and maybe some youtube videos) when I have more time but for now here's some pictures of the models I've been working on.

First attempt

This first one I doofed pretty bad. You can see in the drawing theres some lighter lines that are at a right angle. Those are the lines I intended to work from - they represent the walls of a house. Lets imagine one of those walls has a roof and the other wall just goes straight up (a gable roof). That's pretty simple to think through - you can just slap a rectangular piece of plywood on the framing and call it a day. Now let's imagine both of those walls have pitched roofs on them - that complicates things quite a bit. For starters, our roof surface is now a trapezoid. Plus, theres a new piece of framing introduced where the two roofs meet and it's not square to anything. Thats where descriptive geometry, "L'art du trait", comes in. By drawing a number of projection views we can find all of the angles of the rafter between those two roofs (the hip rafter).

Now, in my drawing I made a mistake very early on that shrunk my walls to be about 40 degrees to eachother instead of 90, but the technique shows all the same. The angle cut into the top of the hip rafter is in plane with the line of the walls.

This video is how I figured out the technique: TFG Live with Patrick Moore

Rotating is cool

The second hip model shows the same principles but with a slightly different approach (and square walls this time). In the first model the hip rafter is plumb - the side facia are both perpendicular to the ground - and the backing angles are cut into the top. In this model the entire hip rafter is rotated to the backing angle on one side. There's no jack rafter on the right side but you can see how the line where the foot intersects the paper follows the wall. On the left side the jack rafter gets a compound angle birdsmouth. My favorite part of this model though (and the whole reason I made it) is that compound angle birdsmouth going into the kingpost. I'll try to update this with some better pictures of that joint because man is it cool. It's really incredible to be able to join two pieces of wood that are not square to eachother on any axis.

Stereotomy is a lost art that deserves a comeback. Sure, you can generate all the numbers in CAD, but CAD can't understand it for you. It's a lot of work creating different projections and trying to rotate views on paper - but it opens a whole new dimension of design posibilities when you can think in 3D without restriction.

Take Less Pictures

2023-06-27T22:07:11-04:00

Digital cameras have ruined photography

While out painting this winter, there were I couple times I decided to limit myself to only 10 photographs per trip.

Two things happened when I did that:

I usually took less than 10 pictures
They were all good

With no limits on what I can capture I try to get everything and end up with nothing. In fact, what I have actually worse than nothing. I have a big pile of noise. It's going to take me at least an hour to sort through all 200+ pictures that I can't even remember why I took. I always think to myself, "I don't have time now, but I could do a study of that later". The reality is, if I can't be bothered to study it from life then its not worth studying.

Beirstadt didn't need a camera to git gud.

Cabinet

2021-08-18T08:16:37-04:00

This wall hung cabinet was my second design project at VWS. My initial design for this semester was a very ambitious piece with mutlitple curves. Half way through the project I took account of what was left to be done, how many hours it would take, and I realized I didn't like the design enough to see it through. I knew I would learn more from a simple project well executed than a shoddily constructed piece with every crazy technical woodworking feature I could fit in.

Too much fun with CAD

My first design really sucks. It's a little embarrasing to post but it goes to show how more is not always better. Notice the two symetrical bent laminations on the top and the bottom. Also notice how the drawers are each bent lams riding inside of another bent lam. Obviously you could cheat this by creating a square drawer box and some runners and just have an applied face that matches the curve below - but that would be lame. When I do get around to making curved drawers they will be legit.

This was the result of me having too much fun in SolidWorks. I enjoyed putting it together on the computer. I enjoyed rendering in it Blender. I did not enjoy making it out of wood. Its' mechanical design shows through in an incoherent aesthetic. Every step of the way was littered with problems (of the most obnoxious temperament) stemming from the fact that it was designed in direct defiance of the medium.

Going old school

For round two I went back to pen and paper. The design I came up with is quite plain. It's just a rectangle with a drawer. What it has that the original design lacks is proprotion and unity. Only in simplicity of form can details shine. The pulls as well as the door stop are hand carved from walnut. It has one drawer with single-entry houndstooth dovetails. The case is finished with danish oil and the interior with shellac. (My shellac finish was admittedly not great which I resolved to make up for in my next project)

Chess Table

2021-04-26T11:05:13-04:00

I wanted to focus on joinery for my first design project at the Vermont Woodworking School. The frame of the table consists of four 3-way miter joints for the top and the legs. The sides are frame and panel construction.

Staying consistent with the Asian inspired leg joints, each mortice and tenon includes a hand cut "bird beak". The chess board is walnut and maple end grain. It floats between the top panels with a tongue and groove joint to allow for wood movement.

Fallen Tree

2023-06-26T17:06:36-04:00

Fallen tree on a path behind my house.

Jericho Stream

2023-07-23T17:58:16-04:00

Painted a little river in Jericho this afternoon. This one was a wild ride. I was going pretty steady getting in the main rock in when it started to sprinkle. I wanted to at least get the water in so I had some ideas to work from when I got home. I quickly washed it in and at that point I was actually really happy with the painting.

But then it stopped raining - great I can take my time now. I spent the next hour overrendering, wiping out, and repainting the water. As I spent all this time ruining my great block in, the light went from full overcast to spotty sunshine.

The result isn't the worst thing I've ever done but it feels a little silly knowing it looked better with about 2 hours less work.

Books are better than YouTube videos

2023-08-12T21:29:21-04:00

I recently found a public land preserve that contains some of the only old growth forest in my state. Problem is though, it's undeveloped. The state bought the land to protect the woods and then did nothing with it for the last 100 years. In order to get to it I have to bushwhack a quarter mile off trail. Once there it's surrounded on 3 sides by private property. As much as love wandering in the woods, I don't love wandering into peoples back yards. With no smartphone to guide me I decided to brush up on my orienteering skills.

Like anything online nowadays, the only useful search results are YouTube videos. I watched a few and of course got sucked down the rabbit hole. I can't fault them for being unhelpful, in fact the problem with YouTube is quite the opposite. Every video on orienteering is 30 - 45 minutes long and explains every detail with demonstrations. It's theoretically a great way to learn, but sometimes you don't need to know everything.

Books (especially old books) don't hold your hand. One of my favorite textbooks, "Practical Descriptive Geometry" by William Griswold Smith, published in the early 1900s, wastes no time getting to the point. It defines some first principles and then jumps straight into solving complex geometry problems. On top of having no filler content, there's a page at the beginning that tells me exactly where the information I want is so I don't have to look through a bunch of less imminently useful material to learn how to draft intersections of curved surfaces. On a video you have to click around at pseudo-random points hoping to jump over the b-roll and not anything important.

I spent at least two hours today watching YouTube videos and I can summarize everything I learned in about 35 seconds of reading.

Here it is:

You need to account for the difference between grid north and magnetic north when taking a bearing with a map.
Pick a target in line with your bearing to walk towards so you don't drift off.
I should get a compass that has a way to sight down to choose an accurate target.
Starting on your non-dominant foot, every step that lands on your dominant foot is a pace.
In order to get distance from paces, average the number of paces you take going 100m flat, uphill, and downhill. Knowing your average pace you can now tally 100m every time you reach or average pace.
Use ranger beads to count paces. You can also notch a stick, pick up rocks, tie a knot in some rope.
If you have to detour turn 90 degrees, count paces until your initial bearing is clear, walk along your initial bearing until the obstacle is clear, turn -90 degrees and walk the same number of paces back.

(I actually timed it; it was about 50 seconds while simultaneously proof reading.)

I was thinking about writing another article on how self help videos are the worst thing ever but this seems like a good place to cram it in. There's probably 20 identical "self-help" videos talking about how YouTube is a time sink and they're all between 12 and 18 minutes long with a midroll ad. A lot of the ideas espoused in these videos are decent, but do they really need to be said?

Before I started painting I designed the perfect pochade box for plein air based on all of my needs. When I took it out I realized all of my "needs" were either unnecessary or easily addressed in a much better (simpler) way. All of the features I worked into this pochade box got in the way and made it obnoxious to use. Self-help videos are what happens when you try to do that with life itself. People (me) are so afraid of doing something sub-optimal that they'd rather never do anything at all. But optimization is impossible before something actually works. Once you've got it going then you can ask "How can I improve this?" and it should be obvious what and how.

We need a based.cooking for other useful skills. Is outside.wiki taken?

Turpentine vs Naphtha for Oil Painting

2023-08-05T06:32:00-04:00

In my post about Mark Boedges workshop I mentioned that Mark specifically uses turpentine instead of OMS for his first layer because of its drying time. Turpentine drys about 3 times faster than OMS. Another petroleum distillate, VM+P Naphtha actually dries faster than both. I couldn't find a whole lot of information on using naphtha for oil painting so hopefully this will be useful to someone. I'll dedicate this article to my solvent experience/experiments and update it as I collect more data.

I should note here that I only paint on oil primed surfaces. I've used both Raymar double primed linen panels as well as diy panels primed with Zinsser Cover-Seal. Aside from the texture, there's not much difference in the way that paint sits on them. I would assume that most of the principles are the same when painting non-oil primed surfaces but you should expect your color to sink in more.

Also as a note, soft brushes are required for layering over wet paint. Rosemary Co. Master's series are great. I've been doing 80% of my painting with them. The first 19% is with the Ultimate Bristle and the last 1% is Eclipse Long Combers. If I were to suggest a bare minimum brush set I would pick one or two large Ultimate Bristles and maybe three or four Master's Series. All long flats plus a rigger. The Eclipse I don't really use unless I feel like my brush strokes are getting boring and just want to change things up.

Paint Thinner, Mineral Spirits, OMS, "Turpatine", "Turpenoid", "Gamsol"

All of the above are names for essentially the same thing. Petroleum Distillates. Regular old paint thinner or mineral spirits is unfiltered petroleum distillate. It cuts well but contains lots of nasty stuff that stinks and gives you a headache.

Odorless mineral spirits is the same thing but they filter out the stinky parts. Unfortunately the reason the stinky parts stink is because they evaporate quickly. That means the less stink you have the slower it dries.

Turpatine, Turpenoid, and Gamsol are all names for some companies concoction of "mineral spirits". I'm sure there's some minute differnece between them but as far as I'm concerned they're the same. All of these solvents are petroleum distillates with a slow evaporation rate. No petroleum distillate solvent will cut natural resins like damar. Keep that in mind when mixing mediums.

Turpentine

Turpentine is the classic oil painter's solvent. It smells like pine trees and it's real bad to breathe in. Really, every solvent you use painting is bad to breathe, but turp at least has the decency to give you a heads up. As a solvent to actually paint with (not just clean brushes) turpentine is highly superior to OMS. It dries about 3 times faster and cuts much better. Turpentine is also the only solvent that will disolve natural resins like damar varnish.

Varnish Maker and Painter's Naphtha

VM+P Naphtha is another petroleum distillate like OMS. It's sometimes referred to as "White Gas" and is apparently the same thing as lighter fluid (it burns in a zippo at least). It dries faster than turp and it cuts even better. It insta cures crusty brushes and palette build up and the smell isn't oppressively strong like turp can be. Sounds great right? Well there's a reason people still use turp.

Remember how OMS is made by taking the stinky part out of regular mineral spirits? Well this is the stinky part, or at least one of the stinky parts. The reason it dries so fast is that its highly volatile, meaning it gets in the air faster than turp or OMS. While it's not significantly more toxic than turp, due to the high volatility, I think it reaches toxic levels in the air faster than turp does (based on personal experience, I hope not to collect much more data on this point myself). The smell is less intense than turp but its not at all pleasant and subtlety is not really a positive attribute of carcinogens. Like OMS, it will not thin damar varnish.

Which one should I use???

It depends on what you want your solvent to do.

For thinning medium without natural resins I think OMS is still the best choice. In this case the drying time is going to be most effected by the medium itself rather than the solvent so using turp or naphtha isn't really worth the fumes. If you wan't a fast drying medium then Galkyd or Liquin will do the trick. Turp or naphtha might further decrease drying time but I expect my paint thinned with medium to remain wet while I paint so I'm not really concerned with that. The obvious exception would be if your medium has damar varnish or any other natural resin that is only soluble in turpentine.

For cleaning brushes OMS is the clear winner. I might use naphtha if I had a really dirty brush but for mid-paint rinsing there's no advantage to using anything other than OMS.

As a thinner for washes turpentine and naphtha are pretty equal, each with their own pros and cons. Naphtha dries extrememly fast which is great for painting with a time limit (the only kind of painting I can fit into my life). Because it drys so quickly I feel like I'm able to get darker washes which helps me start seeing the finished picture faster. Turp, because it stays wet longer, runs more which can create some interesting effects. It's also marginally less toxic and I think the odor is more pleasant even if it is stronger. Naphtha, while mild, has very industrial odor that is not at all pleasant. The mildness seems like a pro but in reality naphtha is more toxic than turp. Not smelling it just means it's possible for me to forget about it and wind up with a splitting headache because I forgot to cap my jar. Turpentine has a distinct piney smell to remind you to cap it before you get cancer. For the way I currently paint, naphtha is my preference, even if it means I have to be more vigilant of poisoning. I could see myself switching to turp if I were working on larger paintings with less of a time crunch.

Site Update!

2023-07-25T19:14:35-04:00

Introducing the "Sketchbook"

I've added a new section to the site!

A bunch of text links is pretty boring for a blog about painting. Now there's a separate section called Sketchbook for image posts. They're still part of the regular blog, but now they're over there too. I'll probably add something similar to the gallery when I get the time to finish up the articles.

If you want to follow only my paintings (no random stuff like this), you can subscribe to the sketchbooks RSS.

No Green!

2023-05-18T08:04:20-04:00

It's officially spring in New England and that means green. I recently did two plein air paintings, both of which I think are some of my best plein airs so far.

But when I look at them on the wall they just dont pop. There is something about green that no matter where you see it, your brain just wants to tune it out. Next time I go out I'll try to keep my colors solidly within the blue or yellow camps.

Backend Update

2023-07-27T18:46:49-04:00

Rewired the sketchbook

I originally made the sketchbook page using tags. That was kind of hacky though. "Sketchbook" isn't really a tag and I don't want to clutter my actual tags with utility tags. I changed it so that "Sketches" are in a subdirectory of blogs. This way they still show up in the blog but they're still their own section. The pages are now filtered using categories instead of tags. I messed with the Previous/Next function a little bit as well. Hopefully its not too clunky. Some links may be broken but I think I got them all.

New Site

2023-05-07T23:58:59-04:00

New Site

I've made a new site for personal stuff. Hosting images of my work is my one excuse for retaining an Instagram account. I have my other site but that one is pretty strictly woodworking and it would be kind of off brand to start posting random projects on it. The added benefit of the new site is that I've got this neat blog system. Maybe I'll actually write something with it? Anyways, I'm still working on getting this thing fully operational (and pretty). I'm gonna be pretty casual with these first few posts and they'll double as tests. Once I'm more or less done with the web-dev side of this then we'll see about generating some interesting content.

Current plan

I heard a saying once; "If you want to make God laugh - make plans".

The site currently has 3 sections: blog, gallery, and library.

The blog is going to be for traditional blog content (updates, short articles, random thoughts) and potentially the occasional essay.

The gallery will be for completed projects. I'll start to migrate some of the photos from the old site over this week. Ideally I'll have a more in depth along with each gallery item but thats still TBD. Theres some grey area between the gallery and the blog sections. Does it make more sense for them to be segregated by content (visual vs text) or finish (large projects/essays vs notes/sketches)?

Practcal Stereotomy Stage 1

2025-09-11T11:07:37-04:00

These models were made following the first stage of online courses at the Professional School of Practical Stereotomy.

Stage one covers the basics of architectural drafting and l'art du trait. The method used here involves placing model pieces directly on a full size drawing. This was a bit different from how I worked out my earlier hip models.

Strayed Hip

The backing angles on this two pitched hip rafter are offset to create equal height fascia.

Strayed Valley

This strayed valley follows the same principles with the addition of rafters and purlins.

Dont Eat Challenge (5 DAY EDITION)

2023-06-30T19:53:00-04:00

Earlier this year I read Nassim Taleb's book "Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder". One of the most important things that gain from disorder is - believe it or not - human beings. Our bodies are designed not just to endure stress, but to gain from it, and hunger is no exception. Modern people believe that fasting is extreme and dangerous. Even skipping breakfast is unhealthy. If you skip lunch too, you're certainly wasting away - probably anorexic. But historically, not eating was just part of life. The traditional Catholic calendar includes obligatory fasts every Friday of lent and a week of mini-lent in each of the four seasons. The new discovery of "intermittent fasting" is how a man from 1400 would eat without even thinking. And for most of history, food scarcity was still a thing. The modern era is the first time since humans left the garden that people have not, either for genuine lack or for cultural practices, experienced periods of food deprivation.

After reading Taleb's anecdotes about the benefits of fasting (and that certain Orthodox calendars include over 200 days of fasting) I decided to up my lenten practice this year. I fasted every day (OMAD) and did a 36 hour and 48 hour fast for the first time in my life. I ended with a full three day fast for Triduum - breaking after the Easter Vigil. When I broke fast at the end of the third day I wasn't even hungry. I had to wonder - if I'm not hungry after three days with no food... how long will it take before I am?

As much as I want to just go all out and see where I fall, I have responsibilities and I don't think others should have to suffer if I really knock myself out. After about a month of bulking, I've reached a weight that I think can sustain a longer fast without interfering with work too much. My plan for now is just five days. I'm excited to see what its like on the other side of three days. At this point I feel I'm still flying in the dark and every extended fast I do gives me a lot of insight into how my body will react. Hopefully I get enough data to be comfortable going up to seven or ten days in the future.

Day 1

I ate keto-friendly yesterday so the transition into fasting would be easier. I've done enough 24 hour fasts at this point that I don't even think about it anymore. It is exciting to go to bed without dinner though, knowing that I'll wake up in a real fast.

Day 2

Woke up with a mild hangover from dehydration. Drinking a glass of water cleared it up pretty quick. I drank a good 2.5 liters on day 1 so I was suprised to be as dehydrated as I was. I diluted my salt water a little bit (down to 1tsp/liter) to see if that helped. 1tsp ended up being too little salt and I was feeling weak at the end of the work day.

This is the first time I've gone to work with more than 12 hrs. I don't think anyone can tell, which is a good sign. Upped my salt concentration to 2tsp/liter for the night to try to recover some electrolytes.

Day 3

I felt a little tired waking up but nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly no hangover like yesterday. I drank some more of my 2tsp/liter water and discovered that's too much salt. The safe zone between feeling terrible and bathroom emergency seems to be pretty small. I lowered my concentration down to roughly 1 1/3 tsp/liter. That level seems to be safe but still keeps my muscles alive.

My hands were a little shaky when I first got to work but once I started moving it cleared up. I was afraid of fasting at work for a long time but its turned out to be no problem. Hopefully the next two days are smooth sailing. Tomorrow morning will be a new personal record.

Day 4

The day went pretty similar to yesterday. A little weakness in the morning but cleared up around 10 am. My head was a little foggy after lunch but I'd been neglecting my water. I can tell that I'm not operating at 100% but the "hunger" is no worse than day one. I am starting to have a very strong desire to eat though. I caught a whiff of an empty pizza box while taking out the trash and really thought "Hmm, I could eat that".

Theres about a day and a half left as of writing. I can't imagine there'll be any surprises but who knows. I'm in uncharted territory as of this morning. I'm going to up my salt water concentration to 1 1/2 tsp/liter tonight and see what happens.

Day 5

I was very tired this morning but not shaky at all like the last two days. I upped my salt to 1 1/2 tsp/liter and that turned out to be too much. I guess I'll stick to ~1 1/3 from now on.

Today was the hardest day so far. I am still only experiencing very minor physical hunger, but the cravings are very real - especially walking past the lunch room and smelling someones fried chicken. When I started, I was the heaviest I've been in my entire life at 142 pounds. I'm now down to 136, which is a low-normal for me and pretty lean. The excess fat I put on over the last month is entirely gone so I think I'm on the brink of eating into my muscle. The way I felt today reminded me of my 24 hour Lenten fasts. At that point, as now, I really didn't have much weight to lose. I remember getting home and just thinking "THANK GOD I CAN EAT SOMETHING". It was never a physical hunger, like carb cravings, but a burning desire to eat anything nutritious.

I saw a video a couple years ago of a crowd of starving people killing a cow with a rock. When you look at it from your computer screen with a fridge full of food, it's pretty savage. But sitting here on a Friday night, my last over meal 100 hours ago, I can say that I (and everyone reading this) am just like them. I've got food in my fridge prepped to break my fast tomorrow. But if I didn't, if I had no idea when my next meal was, the idea of killing an animal with my bare hands is completely sensible. And I'm only at day 5. If I were on day 30 and 20 pounds underweight "sanity" would cease to have any meaning.

Thank God for food. When I say Grace tomorrow I will mean it.

Baldface Mountain

2023-09-21T16:09:04-04:00

I thought this one sucked when I initially painted it. Upon further review 8 months later it's not that bad. I was annoyed I wasn't able to capture the totality of the light effects on the lake. This was a really cool scene in person and I did not have the skills to pull it off on site. Next time...

Dutch Oven Baking

2024-03-15T06:02:52-04:00

Lent is bread season.

I've been experimenting with bread recipes for a while now. It's fun to just throw ideas at the wall and see what happens. Even when the result isn't good, it's usually at least edible and better than any bread shaped object at the supermarket. But as much fun as trial and error is, you get a higher success rate with your experiments when you have some idea what you're doing. I did some research on how to develop my own bread recipes and found Ken Forkish's book "Flour Water Salt Yeast".

He uses just those four ingredients to create a number of wildly different breads. The simplicity of the recipes highlights how simple changes in process and timing can make a big difference in the final product. When I first started baking I thought it was just about mixing the ingredients together and throwing it in the oven. I've realized within the last year though, while flour may be the base, yeast and bacteria are really the stars of the show. A good loaf primarily results from encouraging cultures to ferment in the way you want, the ingredients are just a support role.

All of the loaves in the book are baked in a dutch oven which steams the dough creating the hard crust of a commercial bakery in your home oven. Last year I tried baking baguettes and "steamed" them with a pan full of boiling water in the oven. While not completely useless, the effect is minor in comparison to the dutch oven. The majority of the steam escapes out of the oven's venting and the (very annoying) process of dumping water into hot oven drops the temperature a significant amount.

(First Bread)

This first loaf came out a bit flat. It was supposed to be the weeknight version of his Overnight White Bread. I don't think I folded the dough enough and I know I shaped the loaf poorly. It had a pretty mild flavor but, as all homemade loaves, was miles better than any store-bought loaf.

(Second Bread)

My second bread, White Bread with Poolish, had much more oven spring to it than the first one. Ken's videos on mixing and shaping helped with that. I could tell the properly shaped dough ball was tighter than my first one. I made the poolish for this at 5:30am Thursday, mixed the dough at 8:00 pm, and did three folds over the course of an hour and a half. From there I departed from the book's schedule and finished the rise in the refrigerator over night. 4:00 am I took the dough out and shaped it, letting it proof until 5:00 am and baked for about 50 minutes.

As you can probably tell from the photos it's not quite as dark of a crust as the first dough. That last ten minutes in the oven really finishes off the crust, adding a good deal of complexity to the flavor, which I'll keep in mind in next time I make it. Luckily the flavor of this dough was good enough to make up for the 8/10 crust. It had a very buttery taste, which reminded me a bit of brie, and just a hint of sweetness in the crust. This was definitely the best loaf I've ever baked. I shared it with some friends and it was gone in one day.

(Third Bread)

This third bread is the White Bread with 80% Biga. A biga is like a poolish but stiffer which alters the type of cultures that will develop. A poolish uses 50/50 flour/water whereas the biga is about 60/40.

I think I should have let this one pre-ferment a little longer because I didn't get quite as much flavor as with the poolish. I left it about 14 hours as per the recipe but my kitchen runs cold (about 65) and in hindsight I think I left the bowl next to a window. Overall it was still a good bread, though. The full 60 minutes gave it a nice dark crust which added a lot to the somewhat lacking undeveloped ferment. This bread had a grainy aftertaste that reminded me a bit of Cheerios. Next time I do this I'll let the biga run a few hours extra to make sure I get all those nice pre-ferment flavors going. I think doing a long bulk ferment in the refrigerator also helped my poolish bread develop more flavor.

Update:

I bought a second dutch oven to bake two loaves simultaneously and was surprised by the result. The loaf on the left was baked in my old dutch oven (not sure what brand it is). The loaf on the right was baked in a new Lodge dutch oven. Both are cast iron, but there is a noticeable difference in the amount of heat they retain. These loaves are from one batch of dough. They were put into and taken out of the oven about 15 seconds apart.

3/6/9 - Super Simple Snake Juice

2024-04-09T17:13:20-04:00

Last year during Lent I got into fasting. I had done OMAD before but I did some real fasts for the first time - a few 36s, 48s, and one 72. Working up to my three day I had some issues with electrolytes.

At first I wasn't getting enough (fatigue). Then I found out what happens when you get too much (bathroom emergency). But by the end of the season I'd figured out enough of a schedule to try a 5 day fast over the summer. The 5 day was a success but I could tell my electrolytes were still not quite right. I was trying to cram all of my electrolytes into two bottles of water. While technically doable, the margin for error is very small. Drink a little too slow and you feel terrible. A little too fast and you're evacuating 80% of the fluid you just drank. I was constantly going back and forth between not enough and too much.

Round 2

Now that I've stepped up my baking game with an accurate scale it's time to retire the teaspoon. Per day, the average person needs about 3-6g of sodium and 3-5g of potassium. There's about about 4g of sodium in 10g of salt and 5g of potassium in 10g on NoSalt. If you eat 9g of salt and 6g of NoSalt that gives you 3.6g of sodium and 3g of potassium - both safely within the daily range. Mix that with 3 liters of water and you've got a balanced electrolyte drink that isn't a digestive nuke (I hope). Conveniently, the salt and NoSalt add up to 15g so you can easily measure out 5g for a 1 liter water bottle.

3 Liters water / 6g NoSalt / 9g Salt

Easy peasy.

The Results

I've waited until after Holy Week to finish this post so I would have some data. The results are in, and the seven day fast was a success. I felt consistently great for six and a half of the seven days. In fact, my energy levels were much more consistent than normal. I felt a little weak at times, especially towards the end, but I didn't have my usual 3 o' clock crash. The morning of Maundy Thursday was rough and I knew it would be when I went to bed feeling dehydrated. After a gulping down some water, though, I was back in action.

I averaged a bit over two liters of water per day, not the full three. I think more vigilance to stay sipping and get three liters would have lessened the morning dehydration hangovers. The best part though - not one bathroom scare. I was able to drink at a much more normal pace (ie. chug a glass a few times a day) without worrying about pooping my pants.

My biggest mistake with this fast was eating too much on the break. I broke my five day with a big steak dinner so I figured I could do the same for the seven with no problems. The real danger of reckless fast breaking comes from electrolyte deficiency. Because my electrolytes were on point I thought I could eat whatever I wanted.

That was almost true. I had ham, sourdough bread, apple turnovers, chocolate, scalloped potatoes and none of those things bothered me. But the volume was wrong.

Fat and protein are very satiating. When you've eaten enough, you lose the ability to stomach it far before your stomach is actually full. Carbohydrates on the other hand have essentially no full signal. Because I eat most of my calories in fat and protein, I never eat to the point where my stomach is full. That's not a signal I'm tuned recognize. Being in a 20,000 calorie deficit, there was no way I was going to reach my normal "stop eating" signal, and I blew right past the point where I should have stopped without realizing it.

I was a little worried what might happen but it turned out to be just minor discomfort. I was a pretty bloated the rest of the night. The day after, my bowel muscles (I guess?? I'm just speculating here) felt sore. I took it easy for a few days but my digestion was entirely normal. I was back to eating OMAD cheeseburgers and beer by the end of the week and feeling great.

So my Pro-Tip in case anyone is planning to recklessly break their extended fast - be mindful of volume because your body is not going to give you the "that's enough calories for today" signal.

Watershed

2023-06-09T15:22:52-04:00

This is a painting I did before I took Mark Boedges' workshop. I was really struggling with my solvents at that point. I don't like the way the surface turned out and it's a little dull on account of using too much OMS. The drawing was spot on though. Despite floundering with the medium I felt like I was in the Schmid-Zone the whole time.

Painting with Naphtha

2023-07-22T10:58:07-04:00

I did a little plein air yesterday to try out using naphtha as a solvent in the under layer. It worked pretty well. It dries very fast so I had no problems with lifting the paint from the block in. I think I'll keep using naphtha for a while and then switch back to turp to see if I notice a difference. Both solvents dry significantly faster than OMS and are suitable for alla prima layering. I haven't found much information online about people using naphtha which leads me to suspect that turp is better. But I haven't found anything about it being bad either so I'll just have to learn the hard way if it sucks. Anyways, so far so good. If anyone knows anything about naphtha vs turp as a painting solvent let me know!

Update on my thoughts on solvents

Field

2024-09-06T22:45:06-05:00

Another painting from the studio. I sat on this one for a long time not knowing how to finish it.

Chest of Drawers

2021-12-16T11:07:02-04:00

The third semester project at the Vermont Woodworking School is a chest of drawers. There are two main goals in this semester; learn web frame construction and get used to doing a lot of work. Most people try to go big during this semester and build a dresser or a vanity. I, in my quest for tedium and minutiae, built the smallest chest of drawers on record to house my fountain pens. The web frames are only 3/8" thick!

The renders

This is my magnum opus of rendering (though I wish it were a bit brighter). I'm happy to say the final product turned out almost exactly as I had designed it - due in part to my better Blender skills - but also to having a complete and cohesive design from the beginning.

The real thing

Because I wasn't going big on scale I instead went big on details. The case for this piece is constructed from sapele with hand cut mitered dovetails. It features five walnut drawers with single entry dovetails, satinwood applied drawer faces, and turned walnut pulls. The drawer interiors are lined with red velvet. The biggest point of interest in this piece is the tambour door on the right side. It is also made from satinwood with a matching walnut pull. As I mentioned in my cabinet post, I wanted to redeem my previous mediocre shellac finish. Fittingly, the entire chest including the tambour (wow, was that finicky) is french polished.

This was probably my favorite project at the school.

East Ridge

2023-10-26T16:11:36-04:00

Finished up this ridgeline view from one of my favorite hiking areas. Haven't been able to paint outside in a while since it's dark after work now.