Clare Mackie is a Scottish illustrator who lives and works in Brighton, England. She renders her rollicking cast of whimsical animals, vegetables and quirky humans in a bright, cheery palette of watercolors with some pen and ink. Her style is in the venerable British tradition of Quentin Blake and Ronald Searle.

Her online portfolio is easy to explore online and she offers an encouraging page of FAQs for young readers who are inspired by her work. Mackie’s blog offers monthly updates to her professional activities.

Check out Clare Mackie’s site anytime you need a day brightener!

January has been designated National Glaucoma Awareness Month. Glaucoma is one of the leading preventable causes of blindness, according to the Glaucoma Foundation.

The basic mechanism of glaucoma is high intra-optic pressure. The eye is filled with a viscous fluid, which maintains the spherical volume and shape of the eye. The amount of fluid is regulated by drainage via the Canal of Schlemm. When drainage is inadequate, internal optic pressure increases, and eventually causes nerve cells in the optic nerve to die off. Vision is lost from the periphery into the central field of vision as the optic nerve slowly dies, causing a narrowed “tunnel vision.”

The main types of glaucoma are open-angle glaucoma, where the drainage canal meets the front of the eye at a normal angle, but drainage is inadequate; closed-angle, where the drainage area is narrowed where the eye and canal meet; normal-pressure glaucoma, when nerve death occurs even though eye pressures are well within the normal range; and congenital glaucoma, found in newborns and requiring immediate emergency surgery to save whatever optic nerve function remains.

There are 70 million people with glaucoma worldwide, 4 million of them in the US. 120,000 Americans are already blind due to the disease. High risk factors include extreme near-sightedness, old age (>60 years of age), immediate family members with the disease, diabetes, and having African American or Hispanic ethnic heritage.

Annual eye exams with eye pressure measurements are recommended for these risk groups and for everyone over the age of 40. Treatment initially consists of a daily regimen of one or more types of eye drops that reduce the internal pressure. As the disease progresses, various types of surgery, including drainage stents, are recommended. The Glaucoma Research Foundation provides more information and resources on its website.

Here is another link for people with an interest helping others improve their vision and eye health. The Lions Club International is a volunteer organization founded in Chicago in 1917 by local businessmen. Today the Lions Clubs spearhead a wide range of locally based initiatives to improve communities. They are best known for organizing and running programs that provide eye health care to the needy worldwide.

If you have an old pair of prescription eyeglasses that no longer fit your eyes, why not consider donating them to the Lions’ eyeglass donation program? It’s so easy to dramatically improve the vision and life of a needy person.

The party's over, and 2012 has begun.

I’ve decided to go offline this month, except for emails. But fear not! I’ve prepared a few amuse l’oeils to entertain and inform while I’m away from the digital world. To prevent an overflow of spam, comments on the blog will be turned off January 1-31. Happy New Year, and I look forward to returning to the blog in February.

Once again the immense, empty calendar space of a new year stretches before us. And once again, if you’re like me, you have a long list of all the amazing things you want to achieve this year, yeah, this year for sure.

Researcher Heidi Grant Halvorson offers handy advice on how to set and achieve goals. While she repeats the time-honored tips we’ve all heard from our mothers, fourth-grade teachers and business gurus, she does offer some new, inspiring angles on the classic rules.

Heidi Grant Halvorson wrote “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently” for the Harvard Business Review. She also gives strategic advice on fulfilling goals on her blog, The Science of Success. Halvorson points out that even the most passive underachiever makes good on some commitments, while even the most successful and driven people have their own nagging bête noir. Just think of President Obama and his on-again, off-again smoking habit.

Halvorson differs from many other self-improvement gurus in her bluntness about the degree of effort required to change a habit and reach a milestone. In fact, she explicitly lauds grit and willpower as the the two most necessary virtues that anyone must develop in order to attain one’s dreams.

She describes willpower as a mental muscle. Just like a bicep, willpower gets stronger when forced to work at slightly more than its current capacity. She points out that this high degree of effort can only be maintained for a short period of time, but that strengthening this mental muscle requires frequent repetitions of  training, with a bit more load added each time.

Grit is another mental muscle that must be trained with increasing difficulty levels. She defines grit as perseverance when confronted with setbacks. Halvorson acknowledges the discouragement and even momentary failure that await anyone who is trying to achieve a lofty goal. In fact, she argues that one of the criteria of a worthy goal is that it must challenge you beyond your current skill level, although it should not be unattainable.

Finally, Halvorson suggests that you should look at a goal as a process of doing and learning new skills, rather than achieving a new state of being. In other words, when you set a goal, you should focus on a dynamic process, rather than a static existence.

Halvorson’s essay is not only useful now when writing up those 2012 resolutions: You might want to re-read it in early April when you need a pep talk after you’ve derailed your diet with yet another tiramisu or torpedoed your triathlon training by sleeping in three weekends in a row.

A page from my sketchbook, done in a looser style.

While working on the leaf project, I discovered several botanical artists who were also participating in the painting challenge. Many I found through their comments on Mindy Lighthipe’s blog.

Renata Barilli is an Italian botanical illustrator who completed the SBA distance diploma course. Her blog, Aperta Mente Botanical Art, is written in Italian. She writes about her current projects and the inspiration she finds in nature.

Dianne Sutherland lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her blog highlights her current projects, while her portfolio site contains some lovely work.

Jarnie Godwin is also UK-based. Her blog is whimsically named Sketchbook Squirrel.

Jessica Rosemary Shepherd works at Kew Gardens and blogs at Inky Leaves.

I found Shepherd and Godwin through links on Katherine Tyrell’s Making a Mark blog.

Eva-Maria Ruhl offers glimpses of her poetic botanical work on her eponymous blog. I’ve been following her blog for about a year now, after a Google search brought up her name.

Enjoy!

Happy painting, everyone!

Botanical artist and blogger Mindy Lighthipe has announced a painting challenge on her website. The challenge is called, “30 Leaves/30 Days,” and the goal is to paint one leaf every day of the month of October.

This challenge is also being sponsored by the Botanical Artists blog. This group of botanical artists and illustrators are a private group on Facebook, and also have an invitation-only group on Flickr for critiques and comments. While both the Facebook and Flickr groups are by invitation only membership, anyone can post comments on the blog. Images on the Flickr page are available for viewing only by non-members, no posting or comments.

I’ll be taking part in this challenge independently, since I’m not a member of this group. Of course I need the practice in observation and rendering—who doesn’t?—but I’m really hoping this will increase my speed. Working on a series of small works with straightforward composition in a limited time period should conquer perfectionism and overthinking.

Will you be joining in the fun? October is a great month for colorful foliage, if you live in zone 8 and northwards. We here in zone 9b will have to get acquainted with some of our tropical transplants.

Looking forward to seeing everyone’s works online!

Update: Mindy Lighthipe has mentioned in the comments section that applications are welcome to the Facebook/Flickr groups. She has graciously offered a contact link on her blog for those who would like to apply.

I learned about the site from a blog post by co-founder Eduardo Bajzek, who maintains Perspectivas e Sketches, a blog of his own sketching and professional architectural rendering projects.

While I lived in Rio, I was very impressed with the huge numbers and amazing talents of the artists and designers working in Brazil today. While the country is justly famous for its contributions to world music, it deserves to be much better known for its visual arts and design. Beatriz Milhazes and Vik Muniz are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the contemporary art world in Brazil!

The website is divided into sections devoted to MacEvoy’s diverse interests and obsessions. There is a presentation about Wittengenstein and his philosophy; an essay analyzing Shakespeare’s sonnets along with the sonnets themselves; information about observatories; a snarky version of the infamous enneagram; and a rewarding discussion about the physiology and physics of color perception.

For artists, the sub-website dedicated to the analysis and review of watercolor paints and papers is a research treasure trove. This portion of Handprint also contains portfolios of MacEvoy’s watercolor paintings and his memoir of how he developed as an artist.

A site well worth noodling around when you ought to be doing something more constructive!

The Twitter book club is marked as #ladypainter. Stanfield is also hosting discussion about the book at her Facebook site. Author Patricia Albers has been invited to join Stanfield for an online conversation about the book later this month.

After downloading the book from Apple’s iBooks app, I plowed through it this weekend. Albers selects colorful verbs and very direct phrasing to emphasize her portrayal of this pugnacious and poetic painter. I’ll review Albers’ Joan Mitchell bio later this month, but for now I’ll just say it’s a gripping summer read, worth packing in the beach bag.

Apparently a lot of people have this same set of problems.

But this hasn’t stopped them from pursuing their dream of a well-furnished, organized home, oh no.

Ikea Hackers is a blog devoted to the customization of Ikea furniture by enterprising consumers bent on tailoring Expedit bookshelves to their requirements. The results range from surprisingly elegant to Frankensteinian.

On the elegant side, kudos must be given to Ritch Holben and Ken De Loreto for designing and constructing a slick-meets-organic double workstation for their graphics business using Besta kitchen cabinets and a 12-foot slab of raw bubinga wood.

I also quite liked the kitty-litter hider made from a Hol open-grid side table. Moggie gets privacy for her morning constitutional, and your guests aren’t confronted with the visual slap of a cat box in the powder room.

Then there are projects that make you wonder why no one said, “Just put the drill down and back away slowly.” Let’s not embarrass anyone, just scroll around, you’ll find them. These kludgy masterpieces are a bracing cup of coffee to wake you from your delusions of Ikea carpentry grandeur.

Enjoy!