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Continued from [Forest in Summer - 12] | Starting point of the thread is [Forest in Summer - 1]

Here are the next few impressions.

It's going a bit slowly - the main reason for that is the extremely high humidity here this week. The rainy season was 'officially' declared over in the Kanto region a few days ago, but somebody forgot to tell the clouds!

We've got one of those stationary fronts parked over Japan at present, and the rain has been pretty much unceasing; down in the west end of the country there have been dozens of fatalities from floods and landslides. No danger here in the urban area, but it does make it difficult to control the moisture in the paper. Especially with these wide impressions, the paper really tends to get soggy.

So after each impression, I put slips of dry paper in between the printing sheets to try and pull some of the excess moisture out. It's difficult to get it exactly right ...

Anyway, here is the third tone on the tree area:

... and the fourth:

It looks interesting, doesn't it! Makes me think I should abandon all the other colours that I have planned, and make this a 'sepia' print!

But now that I've got the tree this far, I can see that the depths on these tones are not all correct, and - because I am an experienced hiker! - I know which way to go to fix them ...

Hiking?

[Long item has been trimmed at this point. The full blog entry can be viewed here]

Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war.Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities.

Members of the beloved Baren Forum, and its council, have been debating how we should keep up (or catch up) with the times. You won’t be surprised that social networking brushed aside the other suggestions like an opera diva with a following wind.

Mike Lyons recently created the ‘Friends of the Baren Forum’ page on Facebook, which boasted over 100 members at last count. If you are a Facebook user and even slightly interested in printmaking, look it up.

A few of us have also built a dedicated Baren Forum social site, using the ever-expanding Elgg platform. You can find it at http://www.barenforum.org/barensocial.

Why roll our own? A number of Bareners don’t use, or just don’t get, Facebook. Whether or not we agree with them, it’s their choice to make. More importantly, Baren Social allows us to build a space around the interests of printmakers.

No ‘you might be interested in’ ads. No messages from sponsors. No attempts to make a buck from the user’s content. No sharing content or feeds with external sites unless the user explicitly allows it.

That’s a long list of negatives. Turn the coin over and you have: customisable discussion groups, private chat, personal blogs (public or private, to taste), an events calendar, and the ability to add any function we want from a growing list of Elgg extensions.

So far this has only cost the evenings of a few volunteers. I installed and tested the software. Julio Rodriguez took it from there and added much of what you see on the site, cleaned it all up and announced the live site last week. What happens next is up to the users. We hope that Baren Social and the Facebook page will become long-standing assets to the Baren Forum community: places to share visual content, how-tos, videos, and get to know their fellow Bareners a little better. Time will tell.

See you there?