Another Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty

I found another use for poster putty that I'm sure wasn't originally intended. I was working on a drawing that used gear in gear in ring and involved moving the gears in opposite directions when the simple pattern completed. Plus I was using a specific sequence of colors repeated in different patterns.

Strange Attraction

Recently Aaron wrote in the Wild Gears blog about a new technique pioneered by u/HomegrownTomato from the Spirograph subreddit that Aaron called "Center Secured". I won't go into the technique in this post because it's quite complicated and just a contributing factor to what I'm writing about here. Plus, Aaron covered it rather thoroughly in his blog.

Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty...

Well, greenish-blue, actually. This may seem a somewhat odd post, but I want to talk briefly about putty. Poster putty. The stuff many of us use to hold our rings to the page while we spin gears around them.

Compound Patterns, Part 1

I want to talk today about patterns, specifically about some of the oddities. For simple patterns, those created with a gear inside a ring, the formula for determining the number of loops that will result is well known (LCM(RingTeeth,GearTeeth)/GearTeeth) and with a little experience it's usually not difficult to have some idea of what the pattern will look like before you begin. There are usually not any big surprises with simple patterns. 

To mark or not to mark --

...that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the confusion and disorientation of unlabeled pen holes, or to take marker against a sea of invisibilities and by labeling, end them. 

A Tale of Two Gradients

Today I filled a gap in my 0.5mm pencil collection so I took the set out for a spin. Literally. 

I was just playing around with light to dark gradients and came up with this.

Can you have too many colors?

We'll get back to talking pencils in due course but I'd like to bring a bit of color into the mix. About a year ago I took a chance on a set of color pens I'd never heard of before. "100 Unique Fineliners" by Shuttle Art. Unfortunately, real life has kept me from using them until very recently, but I've finally had a chance to take some of them out for a test drive.

Fifty Shades of Gray

Let's talk lead. Well, actually graphite, but everybody still calls it pencil lead. In a previous post I talked about using mechanical pencils with Wild Gears and touched briefly on the variety of leads available.

If you're not familiar with grading of pencil leads, take a look at this excellent primer from Jet Pens. (TLDR: B is softer/darker, H is harder/lighter, larger numbers indicate greater hardness or softness. 10B is incredibly soft and dark, 10H is so light it's basically invisible. HB is "normal", between H and B, about like a standard #2 pencil. F is an oddball, sitting between H and HB.)

Aside from 2mm drafting leads used a lifetime ago when I took drafting class (and we actually drew things on paper), my experience with mechanical pencil lead has been limited to the Pentel brand. There are others. Some of them are probably quite good. Pentel is readily available and hasn't disappointed me so I've stuck with it. 

Gears Noir

I know that most people using Wild Gears probably got their start with Spirograph, even if that was more than a couple decades ago. Spirograph came with pens so that's what everyone used. When I got my first set of Wild Gears I also bought a set of Stabilo Point 88 pens. And less than a week later I bought a set of Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens. I'm fairly confident these are the go-to pens for most people using Wild Gears.

In addition to the pens, though, I also bought a cheap set of mechanical pencils. It had been a long time since I'd used a mechanical pencil and couldn't remember what size I preferred so a pack with three different sizes, 0.5mm, 0.7mm, and 0.9mm, made a lot of sense. For reasons that now elude me I mostly used the 0.7mm pencil.