Wednesday/ the Pike Motorworks Building
Wow .. the new Pike Motorworks Building looks quite nice, I thought as I walked by on Tuesday.


Friday/ another Grimm for my book shelf
I saw this Grimm’s Fairy Tales book in Hamburg and loved the pictures in it .. but it was so heavy, and a little pricey.
Luckily, Amazon had a used one for me that I could order (from a book dealer in England; shipping only $4), and earlier this week, it landed on my porch.




Monday/ First Light’s art installation
Here is another picture from Sunday, of the art installation on the corner of 3rd Ave. and Virginia St. at the sales office of the future First Light condominium tower.

Wednesday/ last day in Oslo
Today was my last day in Oslo.
I will return to Amsterdam tomorrow, and then go home on Friday.
I made it to the Munch Museet (museum) today, and hey! I found the Tintin book I was looking for in a great bookstore called Tronsmo.







Sunday/ the Deichtorhallen
There was a persistent rain today, that made walking around without an umbrella, and not getting really wet, impossible. So I checked into the Deichtorhallen (“the levee gate halls”) art & photography museum.
These halls were built from 1911 to 1914 as market halls, on the grounds of the former Berliner Bahnhof railway station (Hamburg’s counterpart to Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof). Wikipedia says they ‘constitute one of the few surviving examples of industrial architecture from the transitional period between Art Nouveau and 20th century styles’.






Friday/ U-bahn stations
Here are my favorite U-bahn station photos, so far.
There is a brand new station at the end of the U4 line that I will go and check out tomorrow.

















Saturday/ book store treasure hunt
My friend and I went on a second-hand bookstore treasure hunt on Saturday.
I am looking for a few out-of-print Afrikaans books from my childhood.
It looks like I will have better luck scouring the offerings of local online booksellers – but it is still fun to browse through the shelf inventory of second-hand booksellers!


Friday/ a dystopian Seattle

The mural shows several Seattle iconic signs and objects awash in seawater. I guess it could be seawater that had swept over the city from a tsunami .. or the elevated sea levels from Earth’s melting ice caps.
Some signs are from beloved businesses that had closed years ago, and others are from places that are very much still around.
Wednesday/ a kaleidoscope of colors
Here is the result of another experiment to make artwork with my Wild Gears.
• Draw a wheel-in-a-wheel-in-a-ring pattern with a black needlepoint pen on white paper.
• Scan to create a .jpg picture (I used my document scanner).
• Color electronically with a basic editing utility such as Windows Paint 3D. (Yes, hand-coloring it would look more authentic .. but man! that’s a lot more work. Maybe next time).
Thursday/ red & blue
Here’s one more spiro-graphy twirl, for now.
The design took several attempts to get a clean drawing without any slip-ups. It was done with repeated wheel-in-a-wheel-in-a-ring runs.

Wednesday/ on a (gelly) roll
I bought another fistful of Sakura Gelly Roll® pens at the Blick Art store as I walked by it on Broadway, today .. and came home to realize that I had bought some duplicates (of course).
So! Time for a phone picture that I can have handy next time, to make sure I know which colors I already have.


Tuesday/ my first new spirals
Here are my first colored spirals with the Wild Gears. I’m still getting used to the gears. They are a little harder to use than Spirograph, but they can produce very different results.
Smooth-finished, heavy paper (card stock) works best, and I have discovered Sakura Gelly Roll® pens which even come in metallic colors.






Friday/ here come the Wild Gears
I discovered a manufacturer of Spirograph-like gears online, and ordered a few sets of gears. It started out as a Kickstarter (publicly funded) project in 2013, based in Vancouver. The gears are laser-cut from acrylic.
So! I’m just getting started, and I will have to pick a few of my favorite patterns and add colors in and embellish them.






Wednesday/ ready to draw hypocycloids
Alright!
My new set of Spirograph has arrived, and I’m ready to draw up a storm of hypocycloids: the lines formed when tracing a point on a disk, while running it inside a circle.

Tuesday/ new Spirograph set .. can’t wait
Here’s a spirograph set I had ordered on Amazon. It should land on my porch by tomorrow night.
It sports 12 outrageously shaped, geared wheels: barrel, trapezoid, pentagon, heart, egg, square, hexagon, star, teardrop, ellipse, shield and star.
The biggest reason for getting it though, I think, is the perfectly round ring (168 teeth outside/ 120 inside), that I expect to be able to use with the 18 round wheels that I already have.
For more than 50 years, Spirograph enthusiasts had two rings to work with: the 150/105 and the 144/ 96. Now there is a third one.
Sunday, sans sun
It was a gray Sunday, with a little rain, here in the city today.
I did run out to go check on the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s gradual disappearance (on-going demolition), and the new buildings under construction nearby.






4th of July 2019
Monday/ warm weather on the way
We have warm weather on the way for the city: we will touch 90 (32 °C) on Wednesday.
Time to let cool air in at night and in the morning, and keep the shades on the windows down in the day! (I don’t have central air-conditioning in the house).


From the Musée d’Orsay website: When he returned from England in 1871, Monet settled in Argenteuil and lived there until 1878. These years were a time of fulfilment for him. Supported by his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet found in the region around his home, the bright landscapes which enabled him to explore the potential of plein-air painting. He showed Poppy Field to the public at the first Impressionist exhibition held in the photographer Nadar’s disused studio in 1874. Now one of the world’s most famous paintings, it conjures up the vibrant atmosphere of a stroll through the fields on a summer’s day. Monet diluted the contours and constructed a colourful rhythm with blobs of paint starting from a sprinkling of poppies; the disproportionately large patches in the foreground indicate the primacy he put on visual impression. A step towards abstraction had been taken. In the landscape, a mother and child pair in the foreground and another in the background are merely a pretext for drawing the diagonal line that structures the painting. Two separate colour zones are established, one dominated by red, the other by a bluish green. The young woman with the sunshade and the child in the foreground are probably the artist’s wife, Camille, and their son Jean.