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Plotting like there’s no Tomorrow

Raytraced Sphere (reinder @ turtletoy)

Digital render

 

Analog render

 

Close up. The imperfections of ink flow is 80% of what makes pen plots appealing

 

Curl noise (reinder @ turtletoy), playing with a color changing pen.

 

When I don’t know what to plot, I can always browse through the hundreds of cool mandalas people draw on Mandalagaba every day. By happenstance, my life is set up such that a steady stream of plotting material is pointed at me.

Hava, by far the most advanced user of Mandalagaba, never hesitates to mix tessellations, radial symmetry and then fine tune the parameters of each resulting cell.

 

Simple mirror symmetry is often used to draw fauna.

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Decisions from Winter Stupor

Every year in January, we spend one evening dreaming of greenery and raiding nursery websites. Then we forget all about it and random trees & shrub show up in the mail through April and May.

7 plum trees, 2 apricots and a few more shrubs not pictured here

We are starting to have a lot of fruit trees around. We try to pick a good spot for them all, but some just don’t make it. Since we put an emphasis on variety, we couldn’t possibly know and cater to all the optimal conditions needed by all. So our strategy is more on the carpet bombing side, imprecision and loss are part of the equation.

I rarely post about the garden as it has mostly become Nicole’s project, but it’s starting to be seriously amazing. I’ll have to post more pictures of it this growing season.