Ollie Fern

posts brought to you by “large portions of my face went numb from working on my tax spreadsheet”

I’m very sorry you’ve had migraines recently! I generally find antihistamines helpful with mine (especially dramamine for some reason), and they oddly seem to make other treatments more effective. The area around my eyes is so much less painful/tender since I started the h1/h2 thing.

A small breakthrough: Because dramamine helps me but taking it long-term is prob a bad idea, I’ve been trying the h1/h2 histamine blocker thing (zyrtec and pepcid), and since I started, the current migraine flareup began to recede? Which is probably some kind of useful information for me.

Dreaming of the day when I can reliably use a computer for long intervals

thank you very much!! that’s what I was going for, in terms of negative space and the movement of the brushwork!

Blue-toned print of a flock of swans flying past the tip of a mountain silhouette, with a misty marsh in the foreground. The image is contained in serpentine brushstrokes.

a recent print: trumpeter swans flying past the North Cascades. cyanotype on gampi paper, originally photographed at Fir Island in the Skagit Valley.

One entrance is near the big apparatus for lowering boats into the water! One does have to be careful there isn’t a boat overhead when crossing that section of dock (which is gated).

a large gull on a rocky beach, its windblown feathers sticking out at odd angles

the same gull, the wind blowing its feathers like fluffy pantaloons

the majesty of windblown gulls 🪶

realized this is the first time I’ve seen a wild octopus in the pnw 🐙

when the ramen fights back

the absolute largest boi

Hi!! I’m glad to see you, too!!! (Also, I have found the accessible dock in Edmonds Marina! I’m not sure how creature-y it is yet—I suspect it’s a “good around the pilings during a lower tide” dock—but I glimpsed feather duster worms aplenty, which I’m always happy to see up close.)

ohhhh the little snoot-tuck!!!

Huge sea lion biting a red octopus

huge sea lion with a mouthful of tentacles

Huge sea lion who just caught an octopus

the biggest sea lion we’ve ever seen surfaced with an octopus in his teeth, looking like he’d picked up an over-ambitious mouthful of noodles

hello, I told @nemerevermore.bsky.social I’d pop up and show you the monumental sea lion we witnessed, so I am here despite my anxiety about being on the internet

OH YUPPPPP

white-breasted nuthatch rising up and spreading its wings to become big and scary

white-breasted nuthatch swaying back and forth with its wings spread, terrifying its enemies

the Nuthatch Intimidation Dance is a masterclass in chutzpah. objectively they are just pointy little anger puffs way outmatched by the average woodpecker, but BOY do they sell it. 🪶

micah referred to the bird feeder as “Ollie enrichment”

a tufted titmouse chases a downy woodpecker off the suet feeder

a white-breasted nuthatch spreads its wings in an intimidating posture at a tufted titmouse, who screams back

Back east, my mom put up a suet feeder, and the drama was incredible 🪶

It absolutely does! And your trial prints/misprints count toward the materials cost of the finished prints.

Anyway, it was a weird, exhausting holiday weekend, and if any of the handful of really nice people who stopped by my table are on bluesky, thank you for buoying my spirits.

In my case it’s a little like asking a woodblock printmaker how long it took them to make a print, but telling them not to include the time they spent drawing the design or carving the block, only the time spent on that individual print. (Though probably people do ask block printmakers that too.)

I never know what people are looking for when they ask how long a piece took to make. Some are clearly just curious about the process and want to chat (I’m happy to!), but often it’s asked a little suspiciously, like people want to sniff out whether a piece is really worth what I’m charging.

people keep asking how long a print took to make, *not counting the photography*, and going forward I think I will simply decline to exclude that from my answer. While I loved spending three hours in a frigid lake with <5 feet of visibility, the print wouldn’t exist without that effort.

YESSSSSSS

Thank you!

(My example prints are of wildlife because that’s most of my photography, but we can work with anything from family photos to landscapes to pet pictures 🐕🐈‍⬛🦜)

I’m really hoping I get to teach it again! Also, I’m hoping to visit SF sometime in the next couple of years (I have family there)

Cyanotype is a lovely way of creating something physical and one-of-a-kind from your photographs. We can work with any kind of photos, including cell phone photos. To keep the workshop beginner-friendly, I’ll make everyone’s transparencies ahead of time, then walk you through the process in class.

cyanotype blue and white print of a flying gull reflected in still water

cyanotype print of a gathering of puffins on a rock in the mist

cyanotype print of a harbor seal surfacing, with a side-eye expression on its face

Seattle: I’m teaching a photo cyanotype workshop in October! After learning the basics, students will use their own photos to create fine art cyanotypes, and also take home their transparencies for use in future printmaking. The class is beginner-friendly 🦋. www.studiopianonobile.com/shop/the-cya...