Marlo here. It's Monday evening, the day after the final day of Polar Week. We of Pixel Movers & Makers have been making all sorts of things and even writing polar haiku! (#PolarHaiku) Have you checked out Kev's coding posts yet? It's mind-bending stuff. Amazing what numbers and symbols can do when you understand how to manipulate them, eh?
Look at one of the things we've made on the way to making our ultimate first thing!
Just imagine how it will look when we have final art and all the movements exact. It's enormous fun to see things I drew or painted coming alive. (I break into delighted chuckles every time Kev sends me new iterations.)
Meanwhile, I've been practicing watercolor techniques and creating more art for the Polar Ice Sketch Project. (The banner art on this website is part of this project.)
I'm about to show you how I painted the piece above from start to finish. Don't laugh. I've gotten a little bit brave, and I talk my way through it, explaining what I'm doing at each stage. (This is my sixth attempt at this, and most times I push the wrong button on my phone and awkwardly wax poetic, only to find I've recorded the ceiling or nothing at all. Pity about the Mr. Squiggle anecdote, but you've missed out. Or have you?)
My point (apart from Mr. Squiggle being one of my early heroes) was that I often turn my paper while I'm painting. Gravity is a key player, as are the paper itself (Arches hot press, expensive but unparalleled) and the paint (Windsor & Newton, the professional grade stuff). Skimping on the quality of paint and paper is self-defeating. (For me, watercolor is all about letting the water, medium, and surface take over. It's fun and freeing and a real meditation at the end of the day.)
Hope you enjoy this window into Pixel MnM's US base. In which paint craftily defies gravity (and I learn to feel more comfortable in front of my phone). It's very loooong, but it's very real.
What I most want you to know, though, is that our polar ice — our glaciers and our ice shelves, our icebergs and our sea ice, our snowy polar places — are beautiful.
They're extraordinarily beautiful, and it's critical that we're aware of and care for them.
