Two pale blue-green boats (27 April 2026)

 Boats come in so many shapes....

Battery greens

The mix of greens is pleasing... 

Feeling tropical

Pan watercolor assembly - first try

Back when I slept less in my youth, I experimented freely with watercolors, and even tried turning dry (chalk) pastels into less dusty paint after reading of Monet's efforts with that.  I had some success, but it was still a dusty process.  Having pigment bound in pan or tube watercolors is still much neater for me.

I enjoy colors and can mix new ones well (thank you, architecture school color theory classes!), but can only get so many colors.  Prepared, professional watercolors are often expensive, and only the most popular colors are economical to mass produce.  So I was unduly excited when I realized I could make obscure colors into paint by hand using gum arabic plus pigment from the gorgeous and famous shop called Pigment Tokyo.

I've watched some videos online, and there is a risk of making too dry a mixture: this can result in a failure for the paint to bind to the paper/medium when used. I've picked two colors to test for now: if the paint sticks, I'll continue on!  I took a spoon full of pigment and an equal amount of prepared gum arabic (diluted sap from an acacia tree), mixed them with tools (including the glass muller), and put them into pans to dry.  The 'matsuba rokusho' felt a little too wet, while the 'koikushi yaki rokusho' was very dry, and needed more gum solution to blend at all.  

I hope to learn some fun things from this experiment - and get some novel shades of paint, too!

DJ John Robinson at Madarae (18 October 2025)

My Saturday night was colorful!  A colleague brought me and a friend to Madarae to dance the night away to fun old school music (including music that was only popular in the Philippines, which I was unfamiliar with, but which was fun to hear). 

Colors and other house frosting (5 October 2025)

 

So many colors!

Union Square Station (Powell) Public Art in Greens

 

Paintings on a Green Wall

 I love the lighting and the colors in the galleries at the Asian...

The left piece is Mountain Beyond Mountains by Liu Guosong from 1967, and feels completely contemporary to me.

The middle piece is Landscape in Clouds by Li Huayi from 2007, and has amazing textures that make me realize why granulation in watercolor is increasingly popular.  

The right piece is also great, but the leftmost pieces felt most relevant to me.

Green, such a gorgeous green

And the sheen on it...  *swoon*  (oh look, I already have a tag for hanbok in my directory, who knew...)

Nursery plants

My cousin needed some plants, and I got to ride along!  

Fun in Kobe 2024 - Waterfalls and Emerald Streams

Nunobiki Falls called to me, so I took a cable car up to a local decorative garden, and then hiked to it.  This was a long hike with few other people around, and signage only in Japanese for most of the route.  I was concerned I was lost, but it turns out there is an all-uphill route that visitors favor, while I had chosen the long downhill route.

It is LOVELY.  And the color of the water that goes to Kobe for drinking is GORGEOUS. 

Green and Cream (SF Muni Bus in classic colors)

The shiny waistband for the bus! The cream on the wheel! I'm surprised the wheel wells didn't have rounded corners, but that is likely wise not to for safety.

Glowing green (21 August)

 I would have preferred an artificial blue, but no one asked me. :) 

Fresh Hellebore

 Isn't that a great center?  It's really excellent.

Field of Clover

 

Hydrangeas as light as sea foam

Nearly matched mint

Verdigris Swirl

Artificial coloring, don’t ask about the flavor

The water in the fountain at Justin Herman Plaza is often an algal green, but not this more blue/vivid one.

Those greens I adore

Verdigris, which I had thought was only French for green-gray, not for green of Greece.  (Thanks, Oxford dictionary.)  It's a copper carbonate (usually, there are other forms), but very close to the iron oxides I adore in Asian ceramic glazes now called "celadon" in English.