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Turmeric Anthotypes and beyond
In about 6 weeks, I will be leading a workshop featuring “nature art” at the Oyama Senmaida harvest festival. Last year we explored a variety of ways to get color from plants and earth. This year, something different: anthotypes. (antho, flower + type, print) It’s a fancy word for capturing shadows by sun-bleaching botanical emulsions.…
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Festival Spider
When my sister read my previous post, she wrote some encouragement to me. Not a classic “you can do it” message, instead it reframed my perception of my role at Kozuka Art Festival. You are the spider of the festival. You have put yourself in a shady spot where there are trees and tenderness to…
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Kozuka Art Festival 2026 (first half)
Art festival in the forest! A magical week full of artists arriving and displaying their wares and their work. Restaurants come to us on a daily rotation. There are performances and impromptu encounters. Workshops, crafts for sale, art on display. It’s very cool. But from my point of view, its been a lonely four days.…
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Inserting My Voice in Art Writing
When I write my workbooks for Drawing Meditations, I make them more like a series of worksheets than a book: spare and succinct with emphasis on instructions over descriptions of the outcome. It clearly reflects how I teach art. My teacher’s instinct is to let the student discover their own path to creative insights. I…
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What it’s like to Vibe Code
Vibe coding is when you let AI write the program while you direct the UI. If you are working with an AI to build an app and you don’t know what programming language it is written in, then you are definitely vibe coding. If you are tweaking the code your AI writes, then maybe you…
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Dandelion Color
This week I spent creative time in the shed, making color and paper. It began when I took a walk and gathered dandelions on the roadside of the route between home and Tod’s office. When foraging, I never take everything I see. I am not the only entity using these resources; there are bees, butterflies…
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Depicting Women’s Empowerment
I was deep in a design job over the weekend making an infographic for a corporate client. One section depicts corporate community activities. Along with nature preservation, youth programs, and disaster recovery, I needed to find an icon for “women’s empowerment.” It was more challenging than I expected. What kind of empowerment? Economic? Education? Work-life…
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Drawing the line
Here’s a question I frequently ask myself: when teaching a creative topic, is it best to have students copy your work and use your ideas, or is it better to let them roam free in their own style? I’ve done both and I don’t have a definitive answer. It depends on the students, mood of…
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Studio for Happy Experiment and Discovery
It’s taken me a year to get the studio shed under control. A couple weeks ago, Tod helped me cut some shelves which I immediately filled with all of my botanical inks and glass labware. I made a lot of inks this autumn and I want to paint with them but the clutter of bottles…
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Two red-blue color sources
Roselle and Red Spider Lily are interesting autumn flowers are full of anthocyanin, a pH sensitive compound, so what you see isn’t necessarily what you get when you make color with them. But the changes are predictable. Anothcyanin Colors If you’ve ever added lemon or vinegar to your red cabbage to help it keep its…
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