feather2pixels

Special guest blogger Andrew J. Shal.

It’s time to get this shit off my chest: The Vietnamese salad at Kim Sơn restuarant in the Outer Richmond is fantastic.  You know, a lot of people didn’t want me to say this, but the Vietnamese salad at Kim Sơn restuarant in the Outer Richmond is actually a new favorite SF dish of mine. The last time I ordered it I was so inspired that I promised myself I would articulate my love in this very post.  So what you see here is the sweet dressing getting soaked up by a bed of snappy vegetables while the perfectly fried tofu ensures that I don’t miss the meat.  A small mountain of peanuts adds some booming bass notes to the crunch, and the deep fried garlic slivers just push the whole goddamned pile over the edge. Seven bucks.

Click at your own risk:

Kids receive their Little Opera tees:

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Everyone likes tee-shirts, most people like cute kids singing, and a small number of folks like opera.  That accumulates to a fairly good reason to make tee-shirts for Little Opera, San Francisco’s newest all-kids opera company.

In discussing the design with Little Opera CEO and supreme empress Erin Bregman, we decided each year’s shirt would feature a figure from the sordid history of Opera. This inaugural year’s mascot, Engelbert Humperdinck, was selected mostly on the strength of his mustachioed headshot on Wikipedia.

Tonight we made a dark print on light shirts for kids. Stay tuned for the exciting follow up I think I will call light print on dark shirts for adults.

You will note the exquisite detail one can attain with a fine mesh screen.  Note it!

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Another winter, another drawn out slog though ever shortening days.

This year, in addition to the usual pattern of increasingly diminishing daylight,  I have for whatever reason also been paying attention to the actual path of that low December sun.

And until recently I was doing a good job of keeping this new routine rooted in tangible, real life experience.  Then the internet seized hold.

Did you know that in these parts, the sun goes from reaching a maximum angle of elevation in the sky of almost a 70°  in June to less than 25° now.  Not only that, but the total travel of the east to west path from sunrise to sunset goes from well over 240° in the summer to 150° now.  (The sunset doesn’t even make it past due west after September).  All the details can be interpolated on this chart:

The positive trade off is the angular, more horizontal moving light.  The sunset lasts a lot longer and the golden hour is like an hour long, even if the hour in question starts at 4:30.  And of course one of the best things about the west coast is that the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean, the biggest thing in the world.  It’s been pretty striking to watch this year and I have collected some photos.  I suppose that’s the point here.

Cue the clickable content:

I just finished a commission for a new print.

…On metal!

In what could be described as a compressed period of time, the entire feather2pixel operation has been thrust into the Bronze age, though The Raw Steel age might be more accurate as bronze actually turns out to be too expensive.

Like many recent decisions, I accepted this challenge without a good understanding of what it entailed. Like many recent consequences, my ignorance was punished.

For example, I thought quarter inch-thick  steel seemed reasonable for this project.

Funny, I never realized that you can’t return one hundred and fifty-four cubic inches of machined metal just because you didn’t realize it would make an absurdly heavy art piece before you bought it.  Metal is heavy.

After I obtained a more reasonable slab of steel on my second try, I was introduced to enamel screen printing inks, which are toxic, extremely flammable, and are known to to cause cancer in California residents.  These inks, which resemble nail polish, are what you use to print on basically any non-pourous material.  My studiomates loved it.

The project depicts the home of the commissioner, on the aptly named Hill Street.  Here’s what happened:

(Hill Street on Steel on f2p Objects page)

Big fire in my previous apartment last night.  Woah.