Delay

Sorry about the long delay in posting. I have encountered a barrier, and I must now use a circuitous route to get things posted. I think we have developed a method, so I can get back to sharing things with you.

The term "web filter" meant nothing to me as a child (nor even as an adult until quite recently). In general, I think they are good things. I'll not complain about them, even though they crimp my style at the moment. To my children, they are just a normal part of life. They cannot remember when "web" only meant either what a spider does, or a trap that one person makes for another (with words, events, etc.).

Thanks for your patience.

Borders for Scripture and Letters

Somethimes I am compelled to take one drawing and turn it into a border that I can use for illuminated Scripture, but I also use them for love letters to my wife. On average I write her two letters a week, and having a pretty border makes it that much more meaningful to her.

I drew a large flower, and the contrast was pleasureable, so I repeated around the page.

Intensity

While most of my doodles leave plenty of white space, I got the idea to cover a page. I remembered a picture I had (may still have somewhere) of some primroses. Every spot that wasn't flowers was leaves. So I decided to replicate it (except the picture had purple flowers, and the leaves were a darker green). The effort above took about eight hours of effort, but it has drawn more comments than the usual. Because of that, I will probably do more of these - different colored flowers, different sizes, etc.

YOU can do this. Look at it. All it is is a bunch of lines. The flowers aren't symmetrical - not as good as God does day in and day out all over the globe; the leaves are irregular; the shading doesn't always go to the boundary line, or sometimes it goes past. Those things don't matter. You can create something similar by getting one or two basic shapes down and just shading them in, over and over and over again. I'd love to see what you come up with. I'd especially love to see something quite different that uses the same basic concept of repeated pattern. Send me a link to your drawing; send it to RickHolmanArt@yahoo.com

Chalk Boards

My children are sooooo deprived!

When I was young, we didn't have white boards. At home we didn't have anything that we could erase (except pencil on paper). At school we had chalk boards. These were mostly deep, dark green, but some were black. They had a slightly rough texture - just enough that running your fingernails over them produced an extremely annoying sound that drove most teachers crazy. For some unknown reason, this noise affected few, if any, of the boys. You can't get that sound out of a white board.

Just like a white board, though, when you were done, you had to erase the chalk board. Unlike the white board, erasing the chalk board produced a large amount of chalk dust. After only a few uses of the eraser, it was so full of chalk dust that it could not erase well. The teacher would get a volunteer to take a couple of erasers outside to bang them together (like beating a rug) to get the dust out. Most of the boys volunteered, but that was just to get out of the classroom. None of us minded the dust if it gave us the chance to miss a little bit of class. But banging those erasers together produced enormous clouds of dust - choking, smothering dust. The wise student learned how to do this wihtout having most of the dust blown into their faces. The unwise learned quickly. Some of us refrained from volunteering when there was no wind at all, since that meant the dust cloud had nowhere to go, thus enveloping you in a deadly haze, from which one returned only with permanent breathing issues.

When someone says in a movie, "like fingernails on a chalk board," my children just don't get it.
When a boy in an older movie has breathing problems, I think chalk dust, while my children think weak lungs. My children are sooooo deprived!

Medium

Several people have asked what I use to do my drawings. The majority of them are done solely with felt-tip pens. There are several manufacturers for the fine-point pens, so it is not difficult to find different colors in a fine-point felt-tip. I have noticed that Wal-Mart carries a sufficient variety. If you want a bit more, then Office Depot, Michael's, or similar stores should give you more choice than you can handle. At one point I also invested in a set of Sharpies with quite a few different colors. These are not quite as fine a tip (notice the difference between the purple and the blue above), they spread a little, and they bleed through more. However, for doing art on porcelain or tile, they are magnificent.

In the above drawing, I also used a crayon for the blue sky background, and then I added the rain in pencil using a straightedge to keep me in line. Most times I don't care if all the lines are not quite parallel, but this time I chose to keep myself straight.

Almost all of my drawings are done on plain printer paper, most of which I have rescued from the recycle bin (some even from the trash can). I am appalled at how much paper (etc.) is thrown away when it is quite good.

Although I also use colored pencils on occasion, as well as the above mentioned media, I much prefer simple fine-point felt-tip pens.

Having said all of that, I have an admission to make. I may return to regular pens. When I use a pen, I only carry the 0.2 mm rolling ball pens. It would be fun to use them for my drawings, and I did at the beginning, back when I was developing my form, but they are not always reliable. But I recently met someone who had a 0.08 mm pen - and envy welled up within me. They ARE avaiable. Maybe some day soon! (if I can find them in several colors)

Illuminated Scripture

I promised that I would post an example of my illuminated Scripture. I have started with the book of Romans, since it combines the context given by the old testament with the amazing message of freedom we have in Christ - not freedom to sin, but freedom from the penalty and the power of sin over us.

Illuminating anything - whether Scripture, books, or a letter to a friend - is a lot of work, but it is fun work that bring pleasure, not just when completed, but every time the item is read.

Here is my sample: (above).

Taking On New Shape

Sometimes I just like to create something with a different shape. This one is from last year, but most people who see it still react to it positively.

Art With One Person in Mind

Sometimes I like to create something just for one of my children. Here is an example:

Children, Calculators, and Agile Brains

Our children are so deprived!

When I was young, there was no such thing as a "calculator." [Well, okay, there was, but it was a person who made calculations, usually using pencil and paper.] We were taught to add, subtract, multiply, and divide by memorizing the basics and applying them to larger and larger numbers.

The only device available to help with large calculations was a slide rule (you might be able to see one in a museum, or else ask your grandfather is he still has his). Even with a slide rule, you had to keep the decimal point in your head and put it in the right place afterward.

Calculators were not even mass produced until I was in college, and a four function calculator (add, subtract, multiply, and divide) sold retail for $99.99. They couldn't make them fast enough. I know, because one of my summer jobs was on the production line where these first calculators were packaged. The line could not keep up with demand. While in college, there were rules that barred us from using these new devices on tests.

Throughout my school years (both secondary and college) almost all of my mistakes in math classes were arithmetical. I used the correct laws to combine or split terms, integrate or differentiate, distribute or commute. But I sometimes made a mistake in my arithmetic.

Now that some of my children are into higher math, I see that they are making the same mistakes. Should I allow them to use a calculator when they are doing exercises? I don't, for only by keeping in practice does one maintain the ability to work those problems. It keeps the mind agile. My son almost lost all of his arithmetical ability before I banned him from using his calculator for anything other than checking his work.

You might see this same principal in drivers. I know of one person who almost forgot how to get from home to a known destination, because they used their GPS every single time they got in the car. WAIT!!! GPS is a different discussion!

I do have to admit that there was a device called an Adding Machine, and it could handle fairly large numbers, but only businesses had those (in their accounting departments). We learned our arithmetic by rote, then applied it to larger and larger numbers (even ones that those early calculators and adding machines couldn't handle). The ability has served me well.

My children? They are soooooo deprived!

In addition to drawings of various kinds, I received an inspiration last year. I was doing some research and found some copies of illuminated manuscripts, including some several-hundred-year-old Bibles. Most of these manuscripts and Bibles have one page in five, or one in twenty, illuminated. They are pretty, but I began to think that it would be nice to have a Bible with every page illuminated. Of course, not every illumination is what I would like. So, of course, I thought, I can do that. So I started creating page borders that I could use. Above is one of the samples. Later this week I will post one of the sample pages.

Have you illuminated something, even just a note to a friend? I'd like to see it. perhaps we can inspire one another!

Older Art - Rougher Work

I wanted to give you an idea of what my doodling was like before it took form. The early ones were intended merely to fill up a page while enduring a meeting. I have some from six months prior to this one, and they have even less form and substance. Each one, though, was a training ground for future drawings. Few artists begin with a refined style. Nobody would accuse me, based on this doodle, of being refined. Some have, however, accused me of being an artist based on later works. I accept the title reluctantly. to me, it is just another reflection of God's grace.

You can do it, too. Start with what you can do. See where it takes you. Share the journey with me; I'd love to watch your progress.

Typewriters

Children today are so deprived! (Okay, many are also depraved, but that is not where this is going.)

My children have never had the pleasure of trying to prepare a written report on a typewriter. They have heard of them, and they have seen them in movies, but they have never had to use one. Those of us who are older remember such wonderful things as:
- the shift key actually lifting the entire carriage of the mechanism so that the upper case character would strike the ribbon instead of the lower case;
- getting our hands horribly messy trying to change the ribbon (it's what had the "ink" on it that formed the letter on the paper;
- going so fast that more than one lever tried to strike the paper at the same time, thus jamming the mechanism (okay, I was so slow - 30 words per minute - that I had to TRY to jam the mechanism);
- the fact that our modern keyboard was designed to slow us down; with the lever mechanism, even with this design, a good typist (one who could hit 50 ro more words per minute) would often jam it; almost any arrangement of keys, even a random one, once learned, would improve the speed; but to prevent jams they came up with this one; inertia prevents us from changing it;
- "correcting" mistakes by hitting the Backspace key, typing over the character with a different character, Backspace, another different character, etc.;
- the joy of that wonderful new product invented by the mother of one of the Monkees (truth) - that amazing little product that allowed us to correct mistakes that were ALMOST unnoticeable - White Out;
- carbon copies; when you "cc" someone on your e-mail, it stands for "carbon copy"; typing the same thing twice was a royal pain; for those of us with ten thumbs it was impossible; it wasn't long after the invention of the typewriter that someone came up with the carbon copy; if hitting a key against an inked ribbon could put the character on the page, then placing a thin sheet of inked paper between two sheets of paper would cause that same strike to place the same character at the same time onto a second sheet; carbon paper was also messy, but it saved a lot of time when you wanted to keep a copy of a business letter or such (even though White Out did not work on the cc);
- triplicate forms were tricky; you had to strike harder to get the character to come out readable on the third form;
- getting paper fed into the the typewriter was an art form - one that few of us ever mastered;
- some important parts of the typing lessons that I had in high school were about NOT looking at what I was doing - neither at the keyboard nor at the paper being typed; the teacher wanted us to look only at the handwritten item we were supposed to copy into type (more often it was a book that we were copying); looking back and forth from book or letter to keyboard or typed paper slowed us down - bad, bad bad; the problem was that the typewriter didn't tell you when you had run out of the paper; you were somehow supposed to know that without looking; I don't know how many sentences I typed that only had a portion of the characters on the paper and the rest on the cylinder against which it rested (and there were more that were typed only on the cylinder);
- having a manual mechanism that you pushed and pulled to place margins and tab stops;
- no Ctrl key; no Alt key; no Delete key; no Home or Enter; the carriage moved the paper to the left - one character each time you struck a character (fixed width font, like Courier); there was a large lever that you pushed to return the carriage to the right and advance the paper to the next line (thus the ASCII character "crlf" - carriage return / line feed);
- the bell near the end of the line (five characters away) to warn you that you could not get another whole word in, so you had better do the carriage return line feed thingy if you wanted to continue;
- ignoring the bell and typing a whole sentence on the 80th space on the line;
- not relying on electricity to get the job done;
- not losing anything when the power went out;
- remembering to cover the typewriter when not in use (or not remembering); they get horribly dusty if not covered; the dust jams the mechanism and gets on the stike levers, which in turn can mess up a character.

Okay, what have I forgotten? Let me know what other interesting aspects of typing I have failed to mention here.

More Reasons

Occasionally, I mix my styles. The above picture is not true Hiada art, although it is Haida style. I took the outline of a horse, stylized the mane and tail, and then filled in the body with Haida and non-Haida symbols. The sun is very much Haida.

I did a similar running horse with different internal designs (almost all Haida), and I placed both sun and moon in the background. I like both pictures, even though they would not qulify as Haida. Some things I do just for the fun of it.

Reasons for Your Subject

Sometimes, I have an image in my mind I want to get down. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the blank paper suggests something, and I try to bring it out. Sometimes, someone has a specific image that they would like me to create.

My dentist has asked me to create some images for his seaside home, and I am part way through that.

The image above, however, was inspired by my wife. I do some border decorations for illuminated manuscripts, and I someitmes use flowers and leaves. My wife happened to say, "You ought to do a large flower."

This one is for you, Love.

Using Tools

Sometimes I want to do something a little different. I placed the inital outer circle and one set of arc guides with a compass, lightly and in pencil. I then went over those with my pen without the compass. It is quite easy to tell that I had no help drawing the ink lines, since they are definitely "out of round". Rarely, when I start a drawing, do I know what it will look like finished. Quite often, as I go along, I see something else in the blank paper and feel the need to bring it out. I finally understand the sculptors who say that they did not "make" a statue, but rather they got rid of all the stone that was not part of the statue. I trust you'll enjoy this

TV and Movies

Children today are really missing out! They seldom experience the wonderful feeling of anticipation that we had, waiting for a movie to make its television premier. We had no DVDs, no VHSs, not even BETAs. We had an 8mm projector that had no sound. There were a few movies you could buy for those, but they were rather expensive. To see a movie, you had to go to the theater, or you had to wait for it to come to television, where it was riddled with ads. At least way back then (the Dark Ages, to my children), you only had two minutes of ads in each fifteen minute segment.

I seldom saw first run movies when I was young. We usually waited for them to hit the dollar theaters, if we were going to see them on the big screen at all. Most of my friends had been talking about them for over a month, usually two, or else they had already begun talking about the next movie. I was always hopelessly behind the times. Now, you might not even have to wait that long before the DVD comes out. It might be sitting on RedBox before I'm even aware that it has been released to the theaters.

See a movie a second time? Whoa! Now, that was radical. I never knew anyone who went to see a movie a second time. I did it once not long after I graduated from college (which was also in the dim, dark, ancient past). Most of us, if we wanted to see something again, waited for the late-night movies on TV (back when Tonight was the only live late night TV show, and the other channels ran movies).

Where's the wait? Where's the lesson in patience? Where's the opportunity to teach our children the value of delayed gratification? Gone forever! Children today are really missing out!

Crazy

When things get crazy, they get REALLY crazy.

If you're waiting for more historical tidbits, they are coming. Posting my art is so much easier, so that is what I will do.

My wife had surgery a few days ago. Hence the gap. Just enjoy the art, and be sure to tell me how wonderful it is.

You know, sometimes it's easier to draw than to write; sometimes it is easier to do work long and hard that to think.

Here is an example - just a tree, but I could sit and mindlessly add leaves or indications of sky, not having to think at all.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Haida Art

I have always been fond of very realistic art - like the grand masters (Rembrandt, etc.) or the early American classicists. But I was also a Boy Scout, a member of the Order of the Arrow, and a member of both the ceremony and dance teams. I made my own native American outfit - full leather with beadwork. During that time I was introduced to, and began to enjoy, Haida art.

Once my doodling took form and shape, I decided to try my hand at Haida art. The first one or two were weak attempts, but some of the latter I have enjoyed very much. Here is one sample. Your thoughts are appreciated.

Reminesce - 1

Our children grow up so deprived! We had to buy an old telephone from the thrift store so that they would know what it was like to DIAL a phone. When I was young, in order to make a phone call, I had to stick my finger in a shallow hole over the correct number, then turn the dial as far as it would let me turn it clockwise, then release. I had to do the same thing for each of the seven numbers.
When the dial was released, it created a series of pulses that the phone system recognized. These were later replaced by tones, and one could buy phones that could generate either tones or pulses (in case you lived where tones were not yet accepted).
On top of that, people usually told you their number was ULysses 59380 or TUlip 44345 - the first two numbers being 85 and 88, respectively. Some brainy individuals recognized the numbers and used those. The rest of us looked for the U written under, over, or beside the numbers.
Of course, there was ample compensation for the inconvenience of having to dial numbers. If you were calling someone within your exchange (852- or whatever), you only had to dial the last four numbers in order to complete the call. Now, I'm not sure there's an exchange out there that will still allow this. In fact, in most major cities, you must use the area code as well, even if the call is not considered long distance.
Long distance? Oh, my! You only used that for emergencies or extra, extra special calls (great-grandmother turns 100, or some such thing) when I was young. Why? It cost $1 / minute, and Dad only made $200 or $300 / month. That was such a waste! Why, a letter only cost 3 or 4 cents to send.
Hey! Wait! phones and letters have swapped places. Now it only costs 3 or 4 cents per minute for the phone call and a dollar to mail the letter! It's beginning to make more sense to me now!

Getting Started

I have never thought of myself as an artist. I am a software geek. As such, I work on a team of software geeks, and we have weekly team meetings. For several years, one of our team members would doodle throughout the team meeting. I don't know what took me so long, but I decided to give him some competition. At first it was just black pen on lined paper - geometric designs. Many of you have done the same thing.





Then I added a red pen. Then I switched to felt-tip, and added blue - red and blue, red and black, or sometimes red and blue and black. My designs started turning symmetrical or taking on shapes. I found a green felt-tip. I was having fun, but people were also saying the most remarkable things, like, "I like that."


You can do this. How do I know? Because I can. If I can do it, anyone can.

My art has taken several forms, and I will be sharing them with you over time. This is just one sample of the current form. I expect it to come out in several ways before I get tired of drawing.

By the way, I do sell prints of these, as well as signed and numbered prints. Contact me for more information.

Enjoy!

Welcome

Welcome to my blog.

My name is Rick Holman.

What? You've never heard of me? Well, we can change that.

I will be sharing my art, thoughts about history, some tidbits of writing, and other things that I
trust will make your day more enjoyable.

I'd appreciate your thoughts as well.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to the journey.