Gone to Gowanus

I actually played games at GC last night — Cube Farm, Switch, Xactica, and Kahuna (though I misread the rules on the last, and we wound up playing it wrong). Xactica is really tough; most of the players wound up with negative scores. It seems like an odd design to come from the makers of Set, a game with a very broad appeal. Set is a good game for kids, Xactica isn’t. Chris showed up, and acted only slightly jealous when Q left a big, dark lipstick smooch on the top of my head. Baldness has its rewards.

I got home around 5:30 AM, woke up today around 3, actually got out of the house sometime after 4. About a third of the artists showing in the Gowanus Artists Open Studio show are located in two buildings, so I went to one of them, 295 Douglass Street. Lots of good stuff. Ella Yang blew me away. She’s got an amazing sense of atmospheric perspective — that’s using color to indicates distance with distant objects tending towards gray. She does lots of rooftops. In fact, quite a few of the artists did some rooftop paintings. There’s probably a master’s thesis waiting to be written about New York’s role in the portrayal of rooftops in the arts — not just painting, think about comics!

On the way back home I stopped off at Patrick & Teresa’s to drop off something I’d borrowed, and Teresa greeted me with “Had dinner yet?”. She makes a good london broil and brussels sprouts, and I wound up hanging out there till around midnight, chatting about Ken MacLeod and comics and saints and relics and the Head of Vecna and various things.

And then I got home and found copies of Take Out in the mail. This is a minicomic series by Raina Telgemeier (who really needs to get more stuff up on her website). I picked up #4 at Cosmic on Wednesday, liked it a lot, and emailed Raina about getting the others. Number 1 isn’t available, but she sent me 2 and 3. It turns out that Forbidden Planet has all three issues too (or did on Thursday).

More art studios

Back to Gowanus today, for more art. Some pretty amazing stuff.

I’ve been fiddling around with Photoshop, tryng to get the hang of the new painting engine. I’ve figured out how to make and save brushes, so I’ve got a brush palette that’s enough like the old one that I can still use it, while still having a few of the new brushes that the new engine allows. It’s not a substitute for actual physical painting with real pigment molecules, though. Some of the deep oil glazes I saw in the open studios had me almost mesmerized, and I want to see if I can get those effects in acrylic.