"Mr. Ice Cream Lady"

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”  Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet). 

Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here

A Wikisource entry can be found here.

I'm going to do another mokuhanga artist in residence program in little over a month. I had to submit a project plan for my application, but for that I only needed to describe what I wanted to do. It's based on the picture below I made in Hamarikyu gardens in Tokyo.

I'm sure there's time to sketch and stuff during the program, but considering the fact that I like detail and thus it will take a while to carve out each block, I thought it best to start now. This is a quick sketch to see of the separation and layering of colours I planned works. I think it does! If this is correct I will need six wood blocks (or three when I use both sides) for eight colours.

I'm not done sketching though. I want to experiment with the shape of the clouds in any case. I think it might also be smart to make a digital sketch, because with watercolours I can only add shapes and colours, and a digital drawing will allow me to simulate carving stuff out.

brushbug banging out the tunes

please

please please please

please stop putting crosses on literally everything.