Hard drives and sketchbooks
Apr. 30th, 2006 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramIt’s been a low-accomplishment weekend, just taken care of a couple of chores. One of them is important, if undramatic: I bought a new external hard drive, for backing up my laptop drive. My old backup drive was five years old, and not even capacious enough for half of my new computer’s backup needs. So I picked up a LaCie 300gb d2 drive, which supports FireWire 800 (as well as 400 and USB). I also spent $28 on a copy of SuperDuper, thanks to this comprehensive review of Mac backup software which rated SuperDuper as the only software that fully backed up all OSX file attributes, including metadata like file creation dates, BSD flags, Finder comments (which I use for Spotlight tagging), and so on. I am now fully backed up as of last night.
Hudson County Art Supply is moving (just a few blocks, over to First and Coles), and has discounts on all merchandise! I poked around for a bit last week, and bought a pack of small canvas boards and a Winsor Newton leather artist’s journal. (Normally $15, on sale for $11, but you can get them for $7.50 through that link.) These make nice little sketchbooks — slightly larger than a pocket Moleskine, with 70-lb paper that you can use both sides of without bleed-through. I discovered that it’s a bit too slick for watercolors (or my common substitute, Caran D’ache Neocolor II water-soluble crayons and a Niji water brush), but they’re wonderful for Faber-Castell Pitt markers.
The binding will allow the book to lie open flat for scanning, is stiff enough that you’ll have to work at it a bit. And there’s a pocket in the back of the book, but it opens at the page-edge end, instead of towards the binding like the Moleskine rear pocket does. The book has a flap that wraps around the open edge, and fastens with an annoying pair of buttons and string tie. I solved this by snipping the buttons off and installing Velcro.
As you can see here, the “watercolor” goes on streaky:
But Pitt markers turn out great:
Hudson County Art Supply is moving (just a few blocks, over to First and Coles), and has discounts on all merchandise! I poked around for a bit last week, and bought a pack of small canvas boards and a Winsor Newton leather artist’s journal. (Normally $15, on sale for $11, but you can get them for $7.50 through that link.) These make nice little sketchbooks — slightly larger than a pocket Moleskine, with 70-lb paper that you can use both sides of without bleed-through. I discovered that it’s a bit too slick for watercolors (or my common substitute, Caran D’ache Neocolor II water-soluble crayons and a Niji water brush), but they’re wonderful for Faber-Castell Pitt markers.
The binding will allow the book to lie open flat for scanning, is stiff enough that you’ll have to work at it a bit. And there’s a pocket in the back of the book, but it opens at the page-edge end, instead of towards the binding like the Moleskine rear pocket does. The book has a flap that wraps around the open edge, and fastens with an annoying pair of buttons and string tie. I solved this by snipping the buttons off and installing Velcro.
As you can see here, the “watercolor” goes on streaky:
But Pitt markers turn out great: