My Word with Douglas E. Welch

The John Muir Laws blog features lots of educational resources about nature journaling and sketching in a variety of mediums, intermixed with conservation information. Also offers resources for educators.

Some of the good stuff (a sample, there’s too much to link, the whole blog archive is a treasure trove)

5 minute landscape in watercolor pencil

How to draw: birds mammals plants

Step by step: watercolor iris in colored pencil, northern parula with watercolor

Nine artisans on secluded Gabriola Island in Canada reveal the differences between mass manufactured and authentic locally handmade crafts through intimate portraits of their work and lifestyle.

Warning: This is an unapologetic ode to gated reverb drums

Here’s a Spotify playlist of some of the best gated reverb songs,

Over the past few years a general nostalgia for the 1980s has infiltrated music, film, and television. I deeply love those gated reverb drums of the ’80s – you know that punchy percussive sound popularized by Phil Collins and Prince? So for my second episode of Vox Pop’s Earworm I spoke with two Berklee College of Music professors, Susan Rogers and Prince Charles Alexander, to figure out just how that sound came to be, what makes it so damn punchy, and why it’s back. 

Each person should find time to have a break and think about what is bothering them. Mindful journaling will help to figure out what is in your heart.

Our hectic lifestyles lead to stress, depression, and other similar problems. Nearly all people have this feeling when everything seems to be fine, but something is wrong. You can be successful, you can have a great life and no complaints, but some event or even conversation might leave a trace in life. Mindful journaling is a practice that is targeted at finding out what is wrong.

When you can’t get over something bad or negative, mindful journaling is supposed to help in soothing your mind. You need to find time for yourself, to focus on what is bothering you, and to figure out why you are experiencing certain feelings. Such a practice will help to categorize your feelings, to understand yourself better.

At first glance, you might see a jumble of weeds, a thicket of twigs, a heap of dying leaves. You might be inclined to stop looking at this point.

Janelle Lynch invites you to look closer, and slower. She’d want you to see each image as a world in itself — not an accidental grouping of plant matter, but a well-ordered composition created by nature and fixed in time and space by her 8-by-10-inch large-format camera.

This is a quick summary of how the film Klaus was lit and colored based on research and a few clips demonstrating the technology used.

Please keep in mind this is based on a handful of interviews and demonstration clips I’ve found online and may not be 100% exactly how the process was done, but I’ve tried my best to summarize the process as clearly as I can. The whole process is still being kept rather secretive and the information is limited.

I freely admit I might be wrong about some of the finer details.

Take some time to review the photos that you’ve taken during the past year. Pick out the ones that you like the most and try to think about why they make you feel that way. Are they perhaps full of happy memories? Or did they mark a moment when you understood a new technique?

Consider turning your favorite photos from the year into a photo book to permanently make a record of what you achieved. Think of it as being like a journal of your hobby that you can look back on in the future to see how much your approach to taking photographs has changed.