About This Website

The look of this website is the way things look around my drawing table, where I sit now to write this text. The sheets of paper, red and blue pencil, asterixes and arrows— are what I use for the many notes, lists, drafts, and so on, which I see here around me. And what I do most here at this table is draw.

The table is a turn of the century steampunk drawing desk with a very heavy cast iron base, with gears and levers to control the height and the angle of the old-growth-wood drawing board. I generally feel lost in computerland, but I find myself here, at table with my tools in hand. I sat here a few years ago to write my entire M.Div thesis. Watching the graphite dust and wood shavings fall into a bowl, and then skratching that pencil across some yellowed old thrift-store paper, ideas start to move in ways I can work with.

Before, I had a website on wordpress which I never figured out how to manage. So it sat there unmanaged for over a decade, and I grew to hate it. It would send me spam and show people ever more outdated photos of my work. One day, sitting here at the desk, it hit me what my website should be like. I made most of the pages for it right then. But it gradually dawned on me that I had no clue how to make these pages 'become' a website. So, it sat in my filing cabinet for a year or two.

Last week, a friend told me that AI could do that part. I had never used AI, but to my surprise it was a piece of cake, so here's the website. I will have more, generally negative, ideas to share about AI in future musings if I get around to it. But I'm happy with how it worked for this. (Note: the doodling on the pages are things I scanned from my sketchbooks and put onto the pages in photoshop. AI just made it all 'become' a website, and, for example, made certain drawn things clickable, etc.)

The one thing I didn't draw myself is the comic panel on the Contact page. I have always wanted to use that panel from a 1940's Krazy Kat Sunday comic for my contact page. If you've never read Krazy Kat, it is a beautiful experience.

I hope "musings" will be a place where I can share ideas informally, broadly about iconography. I can't guarantee I'll actually keep up with it.

Yours, Seraphim