My parents' gave me this book, The Daily Book of Art: 365 Reading that Teach, Inspire & Entertain, for Kids Day this year (a holiday my family invented between seven to ten years ago, that has since been made into an actual national holiday). I've really been enjoying it! Since it's really slow at my job during the summer I've been reading more than one of the entries per day, and I've also been going deeper into research about the topics they touch on. For instance the book has one page with maybe 200 words about Johannes Vermeer, but I went and read the very thorough Wikipedia page about him, which also led me to this list of all his paintings, as well as here, a really well done website about Vermeer where you can hover over his paintings and learn fascinating details about them. I am such an art nerd that when it mentioned on the wiki page that he was unique at his time in his use of natural ultramarine (very expensive) I had to read all about ultramarine here, which also then led me here, which is a Google Earth view of a factory in France that makes synthetic ultramarine. I think it is just so cool that you can see the blue all over the roof from the chimneys even when you zoom out several times.
ANYWAY. The point in all that is that I chose for yesterday's art to make some illustrated notes about Vermeer since I was finding it so exciting to learn about him. (Ignore my horrid sketch of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter; I had her face pretty good then erased it thinking I could get it better, and of course I couldn't.) Also, the weird looking Meer at the top is how he signed Woman with a Pearl Necklace, and is similar to how he signed his other works, as you can see here.
(Click on the picture if you want to see it larger.)
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