February 2013 – Nathan R. Yergler

Hieroglyph Improvements

If you’re using Hieroglyph for generating slides with Sphinx, you may want to use the version in git rather than the release. A few things have landed there recently:

tjadevries contributed fixes for incremental slides in Chrome.

It seems that a recent change in Chrome caused the incremental slide Javascript, which originated in the Google HTML5 Slides project, to stop working. master has a fix for that.
Proper pruning when autoslides are disabled.

If you have autoslides turned off in a document, Hieroglyph will now properly prune the document when generating slides to only show explicit slide directives. This was broken in 0.5.
Fixed header sizing for slide directives.

The slide directive allows you to specify a level attribute. This is supposed to be used for determining how to render the slide title (for example, a level of 2 should render the title as an <h2>). This was broken in 0.5, and is fixed now.

I’m using Hieroglyph for my PyCon tutorial, “Effective Django” [1], but the way I’m using it is pretty different than it has been previously. The slides and HTML output differ more, so I’m not relying on automatic slide generation the way I was initially. I expect I’ll make a new release around PyCon (mid-March) when I’ve done an entire talk in this manner.

[1]	I’ve started practicing my tutorial with the engineering team at Eventbrite in one hour chunks, once a week. I’ll probably post something about that experience once I have an opinion about how it works.

author:	Nathan Yergler
category:	hieroglyph
tags:	sphinx, hieroglyph, rst
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New Work: Untitled (Bay Bridge)

8” x 10” four plate linocut print, printed on Rives BFK

Shortly after I finished “Golden Gate” last year I decided I needed to do a companion piece depicting the other bridge in San Francisco. I pulled the first prints of the new piece on Wednesday, and I think it’s pretty interesting how it turned out. Just like on “Golden Gate”, I tried to stretch technically. One of the plates — the sky and water — is cut in two so I could ink the gradient the way I wanted to. When carving the water I limited myself to a rounded edge carving tool to try and make it more “shimmering”. And the cables on the bridge are represented using carved lines against the sky. All three experiments feel pretty successful to me.

When I was printing “Days Getting Shorter“, I experienced how much fun printing multiplate prints can be when the registration is loose. The loose registration on those plates meant that I could focus on inking, colors, and other things, and the registration just sort of happened. The registration on this piece is much tighter, and of the five I printed I only got one where it’s really right on. But even the ones where’s it’s a little off don’t feel like failures to me: I think because there’s so much going on, it’s easy to enjoy other parts of the image. And working on tight registration is something I can practice in upcoming work.

author:	Nathan Yergler
category:	printmaking
tags:	linocut, multiplate
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“Golden Gate”, Linocut Print with Watercolor

8” x 10” linocut print with watercolor, printed on Rives BFK

In the process of working on Golden Gate last year, I printed the black plate on its own a few times. I’ve been experimenting with watercolors recently, and this is my latest attempt at mixing watercolors with my printmaking. I like how different it feels from the four plate print version. In Art & Fear, the authors talk about how every piece necessarily contains within it the seeds of what comes next: something you want to experiment with, try to do differently, take a little further. Part of what’s been so satisfying about experimenting with watercolors is that that seed is obvious, and at the same time I’m able to enjoy where I am today. That balance, appreciating what I’m doing today while at the same time feeling energized about where I’m going, is difficult and often fleeting. So I’m trying to enjoy it while it’s here.

author:	Nathan Yergler
category:	printmaking
tags:	linocut, watercolor
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