Rachael Moore

So today I spent many hours ID-ing my houseplants. I knew I had the cat grass and a Pothos, but those were the only plants that I had ID-ed.

( More riveting houseplant info )

More photos here.

Also, High School Reunion.

So I finally overcame my purchase anxiety and bought a drawing table last week.

It came in the mail on Friday and it turns out my anxiety was unwarranted because it showed up in one piece! (Well, many many pieces, but they were all intact). My boyfriend and I assembled it and a quick visit to Staples later, I had my table, a chair and a clipy lamp. I feel like a real artist!

Due to a nature excursion on Saturday, I didn't have any time to experiment with it until today. It tuns out the glass top is useful as a lightbox and you can see TV through it!



Over the last few months, I've been slowly working my way thorough the original Star Trek episodes because they are important for nerd cultural literacy. Today I learned that Khan wasn't a Klingon. Why did I think Khan was a Klingon?

Also, there is a "pencil tray" but it is more useful for holding papers and chocolate.

I found a blog through the comments of a Boing Boing thread called What's That Bug?

I looked a few pages in and found that the little caterpillars on my boyfriend's grape plants we were calling "Resistor Caterpillars" are really "Western Grape Leaf Skeletonizers". Usually when I name things I prefer the name I chose, but in this case the real name is pretty awesome. Beware the Skeletonizers!

Anyways, the blog often references BugGuide.net. Armed with this new depository of information, I set about looking up the crazy grasshopper I found a few months ago while hiking.



It took me a while but I found it. It turns out it is not a "Klingon Grasshopper" but a "Dragon Lubber", another acceptable name for an insect.

Here are a couple paintings from my painting class I just completed this week.

The first half of the class was color-wheel sorts of assignments. Pretty boring.

This next assignment was to make a collage and paint it. Also not quite up my alley but I tried to make the best of it.


Finally we got to choose what to paint. This was a photo that I found on Flickr while searching for cactus pics.


I did one other but I haven't finished it, so I'll upload that when I get done with it.

All in all it was a good class. However, I think I hate acrylics. My first impulse is to blend everything on the canvas to get the color I want and acrylics dry too fast to make this possible. I ended up layering layer upon layer of paint to get the color I wanted. I felt like I was in Medieval times using old fashioned tempuras or something. Bah!

So I've been thinking about getting a drawing table for a while. Up till now I've just used one of those pillowy lap boards while lounging on my couch. I suspect that if I get a drawing board it will be easier to get into and stay in "drawing mode". And it seems like every photo of a webcomic artist's workspace has one. However, I don't know what to look for.

I'm sort of tempted by this one:
http://www.dickblick.com/products/studio-designs-futura-craft-station/
Since I transfer my pencils to inks with a lightbox, it would serve two purposes. I would need to get it shipped though, and I'm not sure if the glass top would stand up to the process.

Also, is the texture of the drawing surface a big deal? I draw on top of a few pages of paper to begin with.

Any recommendations?

So it looks like the Jesusita fire has claimed a bunch of the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens, including a historic building. I adore the botanic gardens *and* old houses so this is pretty awful. Much of the garden is a showcase of the native vegetation, so it didn't stand a chance.

My thoughts go out to the biologist I met on Santa Cruz, who, my coworker had informed me, lived inside the botanic gardens when he wasn't on the island. At the time it seemed like a charmed life, but it has got to suck hard now. News reports like to focus on the sensational - million dollar mansions burned! and the like - but fires like this claim just as much from the less resilient as well. C'est la vie.

Where did my Sengi painting go?

It is portfolio time in my art class and I can't find it. That's what I get for trying to organize my possessions. I should have just left everything in a big pile on my coffee table like nature intended.

I hope I didn't throw it away :( At least it is on the internet.

I just spent 5 minutes trying to find the correct spelling of "dezien" but it appears there is no such word. Apparently, I am looking for "denizen", which has an "n" and is pronounced as such, the vowels are different as well.

But I've heard it pronounced "dezien" before, and a bunch of other people on the internet have made the same mistake. What is up with that?

Some photos from the last couple months.

Sand canyon hike


( More under cut )

So my boyfriend and I have started taking a painting class at the local community college. It is a beginning class but we are using acrylics, which I haven't really used before. Unfortunately, that means our first assignment is a color wheel, which is pretty boring. I half-assed one than doodled this little guy for the last part of the class.

I love sengi. I wish they were native.



If you have any advise on acrylics, I would love to hear it!

I went on a work trip to Georgia last week. For the most part I was stuck in an ugly old Air Force base, but I convinced my coworkers to humor my architecture fetish for one evening.







More here.

Also, pics from our emergency landing in New Mexico!



It took us 18 hours to get home!

I am completely incapable of hearing the names Pico, Sepulveda, or La Brea without singing the song Pico and Sepulveda to myself. It's completely pavlovian.

I first heard it during the time in High School that swing music made a brief comeback. (Was that just in Southern California? Or a nationwide thing?) It's pretty easy to remember but I haven't heard it since then.

Until today.



Thanks internet!

So it turns out the difference between mediocre potato soup and awesome potato soup is about 15 cloves of garlic.

Rachael's cheap and lazy potato soup

Fill a big ol' pot full of water
Add 2 or 3 vegetarian bouillon cubes (MSG ftw!)
Peel and cube about 10 medium potatoes - put in pot
Boil for about an hour
Chop a couple heads of broccoli really fine - add to pot
Chop 15 or so cloves of garlic really fine and add to pot (yum!)
Boil for about another hour (the potatoes should be disintegrating and the broccoli soft)
Salt to taste
Eat some and freeze the rest
You now have soup for the next six months!

I got my copy of the Kingdom of Loathing 2009 calendar today!



You can get a copy for yourself here.

The background is loosely based on a photo I found on Flickr, but then subsequently lost. I think it's somewhere is South America.

I seem unable to use saturated colors, which makes me sad. Whenever I do, they don't match with each other and the results are garish. So I end up with stuff like this, with muted colors.

On a similar note, I've lost any desire to work on my comic and haven't done anything on it this month at all. Maybe I'll be more exited about it when Girlamatic gets updated.

The protest was fun, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have a better time than these two:



More photos here.

Tomorrow, my friends and I are making a trek down to Riverside to protest prop 8. It's a nation-wide protest that will be held at the same time all across the country. Check the website for your local gathering.

http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/

If you're in Riverside give me a call and join us! We're making signs tonight.

( What the title says. )

Fuzzy wuzzy!

Yay on the president! Boo on prop 8!

However, I think it is a good sign that nearly half of Californians are for gay civil rights. I think if a black person can go from not being able to vote at all to voting for another black person as president in her lifetime, eventually we will accept all people regardless of how they were born - as long as the economy keeps improving. Being wealthy as a society makes people more accepting of others, especially if there is a generational upward trend in wealth. So here's to the economy getting better in the future! A bunch of downtrodden people are counting on you.