I feel like I've been doing a lot of whining here lately, so here's some slightly more cheery news:

1. My mom's office regularly has summer interns, who need temporary housing, and she's given the people in charge of coordinating these things my info. A summer grad student intern would be a perfect renter for my space -- all I'd have to do is get it minimally furnished, which basically means begging my parents for stuff from one of their guest bedrooms, which they've pretty much already agreed to.

And she emailed me! YAY!

2. I made actual factual progress on my mailbox last weekend. I feel kind of idiotic about it, because it was one of those art lightbulb moments where you realize you've been doing it all wrong for the last day/week/month/year, and doing it right takes... fifteen minutes. STILL, progress!

Basically, I was trying to work up the same super-rich color layering that I do for my Sheep in Space, which require even painting of translucent colors, and I was finding the size of the thing plus the quicker-drying properties of the medium I'm using (to make it adhere to the metal) really, really annoying. I just couldn't get it even, and it took FOREVER. Adding drying retarder just made it all MORE translucent. Then this weekend I remembered that I have a 1 inch sash brush -- a house painting brush -- and I took my new wet palette, dumped a TON of paint on there, and loaded up. I'd been using a 3/4 inch art brush, but the giant reservoir in the housepainting brush means it delivers a lot of paint at once, which means it stays WET, and suddenly I had the final color. In ten minutes. After painstakingly spending an hour doing a few inches at a time.

I could feel the Walrus* standing over my shoulder, laughing at me, but it was totally worth it. I got it all so-deep-it-looks-black**, repainted Mars, and added the bottom half of Marvin the Martian (top half to come. I got distracted by dinner).

3. One of my good neighbors wants to rebuild the fence between our lots, and while it's a bit legally complicated (technically it's in the alley right of way), it'd be pretty cool to have a section of the fence done, and she's easy to get along with and I imagine will be fun to work with.

4. I've finally been writing, albeit in a one step forward two steps back kind of way.

*The Walrus was my uni painting teacher, and he was a big proponent of big brushes. If he knew he'd give me so much crap for trying to do things the hard, stupid way.

**Some people would have just painted it black, but I say FAH!

At my annual review my boss gave me permission to practice figure drawing for 15 minutes a day as 'professional development', since we never get any training opportunities back here in design land*.

I haven't actually managed it every work day, but it's still better than I had been getting. I'm saving jpgs of all the sketch pages so I can look back at 'em later.

Today I cheated and took a full half hour, though:



The really funny thing is that it took me about two weeks of this before it occurred to me that I was looking at nekkid people pictures at work.

*Technically HR is supposed to pay for any training opportunities if we go out and find them, but there aren't any classes in town that would really add to my level of CS knowledge, the time we tried to organize a trip to Seattle for an official Adobe workshop HR dropped the ball on our registration, and I've been begging for a Lynda.com membership for YEARS. So: No professional development.

In not very long at all I'm off to emony42's house for the weekend (on the train, yay!) to help plan her garden -- which is quite ridiculous and presumptuous given the sorry state of my yarden, but she seems to like the idea.

I love trains for many reasons, but one of them is that I don't usually get car/motion sick on the train if I try to read, write, or draw, and I do on buses and in cars. Since my imagination usually takes flight when I'm rolling along in any kind of vehicle, being able to do something with that is awesome. Of course now I have such a huge list of Things To Do On The Train that I'd need more than an hour and a half train ride. :P

One of the Things To Do is think about composition with regards to my forever-unfinished fan-art work (a twitter conversation with regeener reminded me of this. Hi, Geener!). I make my bread-and-butter doing graphic design; in theory I can manage composition. In practice I do just fine if I start the 'right' way (thumbnails! Always thumbnails!) and quite poorly if, like with this piece, I really only set out to do a figure sketch/study, and it kind of grows into a picture. It's just not set up 'right' from the get-go -- it's an awkward middle-distance PoV, too close to be a scenery shot and two far to be a close-up, with the figures a bit too straight-on to the viewer. Oh well - even if I don't figure out a way to frame it/background tweak it into 'art', it'll still have served the purpose of teaching me to paint digitally, but it'd be nice after all this time spent if I could bump it up to the next level.

I also want to try the 25-expressions meme, which is an excellent one for anyone who draws, and just have to decide which character to start with.

And of course I could get started on writing the next chapter of Star.

And then, if I can figure out the pose, there's always doing a character portrait of the as-yet-unnamed protagonist for That Sci-Fi Idea Without A Plot. I've been wanting to draw her for awhile.

EDIT: Ooh, I could sketch ideas for my mailbox, too.

Man, sometimes in the morning the world feels so full of creative possibilities I'm just boggled. Wish I was better at hanging onto that feeling throughout the day.

Sometimes someone pays to to paint something.



acrylic on board, 12"x12"

I just spent an enjoyable half hour talking to the buyer in the parking lot at my work (because art deals, like drug deals, should go down in a parking lot. In cash). She said she was a patron of my art; I told her she was The Patron of my art, as far as I could tell -- other people have bought my work, but the only other people with more than one painting are my aunt'n'uncle (commissioned nursery art, again) and my parents (who're storing the stuff that's too big).

Really, I've been very lucky. Not only did a gallery downtown agree to show my Sheep in Space a few years ago, the one person who totally fell in love with them happened to visit the gallery at the right time and happened to be married to an orthodontist (orthodontists make bank). She bought about half the work I had up, then commissioned me to do a painting for her then-on-the-way first kid's room (a black sheep, white sheep, and little gray -- well, violet -- baby, to match their family). This is the second commission, for kid number 2, in which she stretched my artistic limits by asking me to paint them on the ground.

They don't even have helmets. It is not the natural order of things.

On Sunday E came over early and made a delicious breakfast for westrider and I, which I suspect was partially by way of apology for the evening before. The three of us had a nice visit until he took off, at which point Westrider and I continued to have a nice visit. It was really low key, which was perfect after the prior few days. I got some cleaning and painting done while we chatted (yes, cleaning the living room is low key for me, and I'm fairly certain Westrider's used to that by now. Poor guy used to live with me).

When he left in the afternoon I switched from acrylic painting (on the sheep commission) to digital painting (on one of those Rhi/Joker things I abandoned months ago). I started working on it again Saturday, with a total change in process and style that is going much, much better. A whole bunch of things just fell into place at once, and I'm really enjoying it again.

Anyway, I went into the week with a clean living room and an almost-clean kitchen, which is far better than normal, and a weekend that was productive both musically and artistically. If I hadn't stayed up until midnight I'd say it was a pretty damn perfect start!

New years are for unrepentant self-reflection, right?

Epiphany-the-first: This too shall pass
My first real employer's only complaint about my work was that I got defensive when criticized, and I took it to heart. It's importance was drilled in again when I was studying art and graphic design. It's the second most useful thing we learned, I think, after how to give constructive criticism.

I've had ample opportunity to put my practice to the test, and I've realized something: I never learned how not to be defensive. I'm not sure if I can. What I learned was how to make that defensive reaction pass in a shorter and shorter amount of time. It's quick. At most, I have to sleep on something before the negativity transforms into glee (someone paid enough attention to offer me critique! I have direction now! TO THE DRAWING BOARD! etc). Sometimes it only takes a single deep breath.

After more than a decade of conscious work, I haven't managed to expunge this negative trait from my character -- but it has become (usually) such a fleeting thing that it doesn't affect anyone around me.

Today during yoga I realized that a reduction in duration, rather than intensity, applies to some other negative reactions, too. After a few weeks of missed practice, and the usual winter-sedentary knee issues, there were a few poses that left me quivering, feeling the same flood of total infirmity that I used to feel in physical therapy, or when I tried that awful spin cycle class in school. It's like being hit by a freight train carrying a shipment of industrial strength 'I can't.' I know I'll experience the same thing in spring when I get back on my bike. Despite having biked a frickin' century.

This time, though, like in yoga, it will pass. It's still intense, but it's not crippling because it doesn't hang around.

So. Manage to be motivated not by 'not being negative' but by letting the negativity come... and go. Here, let Alan sing to you:



Epiphany-the-second: I am an Expert Beginner:
I have some friends who are so good at what they do, and have been good at it for so long, that they're very bad beginners. It'stoo jarring for them to go from a position of expertise to one of bumbling newbie. I have the opposite problem.

I first realized how freeing it was to be a beginner when I took a fiber arts class. Not having any background in it, it was the least stressful art class I'd ever taken, because I didn't have standards for myself beyond 'don't dye myself blue' and/or 'don't get caught in the loom.'.

I'm a good beginner, too -- in my early twenties a few switches flipped, and I went from that awkward nerdy "must hide my ignorance" to a gleeful "I'm a beginner: Teach me!" attitude. People like being set-up as the expert, and you can learn a lot that way. It's easy for me to enjoy, because I really am a fast learner -- at the beginning.

I'm not so hot at follow-through. The lure of trying something new, where I'll have no reason to judge myself, is trong, especially compared to how reliably awful I feel once I move to the intermediate level, or feel I should have moved to the intermediate level.



It's most noticeable with art, esp. drawing. I should be better than I am. I took classes, I have a degree, I've been doing it for years, but I'm still at the 'talented beginner' stage. I believe it's mostly my lack of regular practice, but it's discouraging.

Luckily, this is where Epiphany One comes into play. Two nights ago I spent two hours coloring a picture. I spent most of those two hours flipping back and forth between "I have no business pretending I can make art" and "Ooh, this is fun!" If I'd spent the whole two hours in the glum stage, it would have been awful, but when it comes and goes in flashes, I can handle it -- at least enough to keep going.

For someone who's already a Jane-of-all-trades generalist, an addiction to being a beginner is a problem. The next level of anything requires focus and practice, and the more new skills I half-have, the more scattered I become. There's a distinction between "generalist" and "easily distractible," but you won't find it by lookin' at me.

I'm not giving up on my addiction to being a newbie: I just made arrangements for a month of vocal lessons, for fishes' sakes. It's something I'll be thinking about, though.

Aaand here's a little colored comic-me:



I started the sketch with light blue, and then each time I wanted to refine it or change something I used a darker and redder color so it would stick out (yes, I take the shotgun approach to sketches -- the right line is in there somewhere, I swear!). By the time I got to dark red/purple it was a sketch I liked, and I just went with variants on that for shading.

...and THEN I realised that I was fast approaching mauve, which happens to relate to the screenname I picked for fandom schtuffs, so I left it.

I have to write, but I want to art.

Well, more specifically, I kind of want to color. That's not quite as six-years-old as it sounds, because damnit, I have a functional knowledge of color theory (and I no longer worry about coloring in the lines).

Unfortunately, the projects I want to work on use the tablet (which is at work) and preferably the files I already started (also at work). I'm excited about figuring out a new process, though.

On Thursday I took a brief stab at the method where you use one layer for local color and another for shading/light effects. It was... weird. I was intrigued because it seems like it'd allow me to be faster, and my slow arting is a problem, but I'm not sure that's actually the case -- I'd have to relearn how I think about coloring entirely, because I do not think in terms of local color.

Next thing to try is taking the smooth, local color layer I already made, and using that as the background for a more painterly shading layer -- more like how I'd work in traditional media, only with the ability to keep the back layer 'protected'. Quite possible the back layer won't show through at all, but it can be used to define edges.

It all sounds nicer than writing at the moment. It's kind of problematic when you keep checking the clock, the word-count, and the page count on writing you're doing for fun. :P Have to keep reminding myself that it's not an assignment, I just have to tell the right bits of the story, and THEN I can be done.

I really think I'm going to have to cave and buy myself a tablet.

I haven't been working on the snugglin' picture because the file and tablet are both at work, and work has been busy busy busy. Perhaps I'll be able to steal a moment or two next week.

(I did have fifteen minutes or so today, but I was inspired on a different project. Oops).

Speaking of cuddles, last night was very cuddly, with E, me, and both cats making for a snuggly-warm tripple cuddle. Quadruple, if you count the fact that E snagged my teddy-bear, too.

I really wish Calliope would sleep through the night. I love having my little feline footwarmers on the bed in the winter, but I can't handle the 2 a.m. Calico-Chorus-o-Love*.

*Now with extra furry-butt-on-your-head! It'll keep you warmer!