Days of Shades

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.

I don't feel like filling a year end meme, but if you care to read my meandering introspection, jump to the bold subject that interests you most (or bores you least).

Mass Effect Fandom has been one of the defining points of 2011, which is odd since I haven't been a part of any fandom for over a decade. I dove in because I was inspired/upset by a disability issue that hit me much more strongly than I expected. I've met some really cool people (hi, masseffect!), jump-started my flagging creativity, and gotten more involved in broader social-justice-in-media discussions in numerous venues.

It's also been one of the most disappointing parts of the year, since my particular issue... isn't fairing so well. It's strange to not actually share the excitement about the upcoming conclusion to the trilogy I'm a fan of. I'm still interested in seeing parts of it (especially side character development; I've always preferred character-driven fiction over plot-driven, so the fact that I care more about characters than the end of the world should be no surprise) but I'm not enthused. The story I care about isn't happening there anymore; it's happening in my head.

...and I've been writing the story in my head. I've learned that I CAN write that much, that people seem to like it, and that I can turn fiction into a vehicle for things I think are important without turning into an author rant. It feels like options opening up. Now, when I have an idea worth writing, "can I do this?" won't be the thing stopping me. I know I can, and I know roughly how.

By the time it's done it will have taken at least a year of consistent work. That will make it my most time-intensive creative project yet, claiming the record Quartet has held since 2005 (the four paintings of Quartet took about nine months).

I also think my writing has improved, though strangers are the better judge of that.

I've realized I'm a sucker for instant gratification feed-back. It works for me as a motivator. If I hadn't been posting fic chapter by chapter I'd have abandoned the story months ago. I suppose it's a weakness I should try to get over, but meta-gaming my own weaknesses seems to make for better results, so until I discover a secret trove of willpower, I'll just find ways to get feedback at regular intervals.

Creatively, it's been a good year. I haven't done nearly the things I want to do, but I'm moving again. I've let some old over-worked ideas lie fallow to focus on new things. Experiments are happening, ideas are fermenting in the compost pile of my brain. It's a promising feeling.

I've been trying to abandon the perfectionism that says something isn't worth working on unless it's going to be great. Fandom helps, as does the Creativity Challenge and the discussions around that (thanks, stasia), and all of you who give me that feedback I so adore -- which encourages me to let go of perfectionism long enough to post absolute crap on LJ, so that I can get crit, so I can keep motivated.

I know it's a battle I'll have to keep coming back to, but at least I'm fighting on the right side at the moment. I'm still working on the problem of making time for art when I feel like art is play and should come last. I may try a stricter 30-day type challenge sometime in 2012 to try to break that.

I played a lot of music this year, though it doesn't really feel like it. Pinniped continues to get better and try new things, at our own slow pace. I don't really feel any pressure for it to go faster, which is fine by me. As long as we're growing, I'm not worried about the kinds of gigs we are or aren't getting or how soon we can make a CD. I don't think I'm growing as a fiddler as fast as we're growing as a trio, but after almost twenty years of playing music, I'm okay with the fact that my enthusiasm for personal practice is cyclical.

I got more done on my yarden than I'd expected to (patio! Raised bed! Tree!), and less done on my studio. Most of the hold-up is due to indecision. I knew what I wanted for the yarden; I'm still perfection-paralyzed with making decisions about the studio. I've finished other, smaller house projects, though, and hopefully I'll make more progress on the big one now I've pinpointed the culprit.

On other fronts, year-end summaries don't seem productive. Work is work, family issues are family issues, my sweety is not really food for the blog (though I have to say, we've butted heads less this year than ever before, and he's been far more supportive of my random creative endeavors than I'd ever imagined -- I suppose since he's working on a full-fledged conlang for no particular reason, he's too geeky to throw stones). In 2012 I'll have a few more hours at work and therefore a bit more money, which is nice, but the only thing I really need to deal with on my end is that I've gotten absolutely awful about getting up early enough to get to work on time. THAT has to change to accommodate the new hours.

In short -- No life-changing events, but I'm not stagnating. I'm pretty sure I even leveled up in at least two areas (writing and wiring. Apparently I sort skills alphabetically), which is a pretty great feeling. There are things I need to be better about, as there always are, but I'm looking forward to the New Year.

So many skills are slipping away. It's especially obvious since I've been spending more time in fandom, which seems to be populated with people who can not only draw, but draw fast (which has always been hard for me). Incidentally, that also makes it clear how far away from the cartoon/illo/most-fan-art style I am, and how far towards classical fine art.

Those of you (Hi, fenmere!) who know how far I've always been from fine art will find that pretty funny, I'm thinkin, but the fact is almost all of my recent drawing has been sketch portraiture/gesture. In theory that kind of practice should help you draw beleivably alive people from imagination, but no. I can't tell if my skills have gotten that much worse or I've just gotten more critical; possibly some of both.

I'm still a reasonably good critic. Finding stuff to fix in other people's work is always easier! But I kind of despair of my own skills.

On a rational level, I realize that I have a house, a yarden, a trio that's getting more and more gigs even without putting any time in marketing or a demo, and a for-fun writing project that has become both more time-consuming and more fulfilling than I ever thought it would be. Something has to give.

But art's the thing that's given for so damn long.

I suppose it means I should knuckle down on the studio project, but that's seems so damn far away.

Read On the Importance of Stabbing Your Readers in the Brain.

Oh, and happy new year!

An idea's been wallowing in the back of my brain for awhile now, an idea about a near future earth where music and art has been critiqued out of existance, where no one creates any more. It's about the outcasts who recreate creation, who make music, art, dance, and in so doing, intentionally or not, lure away the children of the masses.

They live, at least at first, in an old, closed-down theatre called The Hamlin.

It came to me all at once at Folklife a few years back, and since then I've done nothing with it. On Tuesday I remembered it, and I remembered it at the same time as I remembered that Erik and I had talked about doing some kind of worldbuilding project together (Calenthe is far too much mine for me to ever share). I haven't worked with Hamlin enough to really feel posessive, and it's really about everyone being capable of some kind of creation - I picture it as being open to all sorts of music/art/novel/comic contributions once the stage is set - so it seemed pretty perfect for a joint venture.

He liked it too! In half an hour on the phone we came up with different ideas about the world, three or four character concepts, internal and external conflicts -- now, why I am I sitting here at work when I could be creating?

As everyone knows, I've been stressed/busy enough that when I get home after school/scurrying I'm approaching burnout. I can't focus enough to work on 'work' - writing grad school essays, coding two websites - and neither can I quite chill enough to read a book or snooze. Hence, lots of wasted time online.

Well, yesterday in the middle of wasting time I reminded myself that i needed more stuff for my portfolio. This means it is OKAY to sit and draw...for an art major, I have an absurdly hard time telling myself that it is OK to do that. Crazy, no? The Puritan Work Ethic thinks drawing=fun, therefore you do it AFTER everything else is done. But anyhoo, decided to work on enlarging one of my nekkid element ladies into a watercolor. Stupid enlarging, never looks quite right until I cheat with a photocopier. I was at the time gazing in rapt addoration at Mucha prints online, and so I decided to try to sketch something on the cut off of my watercolor paper, which happened to be just the right size to stick in the letter to J. I set out to do a stereotypical Mucha type peice - the almost complete circles, lady, nudity, and drapery - and it took off with a will of it's own. I'm really happy with this drawing, and the only difficulty now is sending it off as planned...perhaps a photocopy enlargment so I can work on it as a painting later.

( Sketch )

This weekend I need to do (architecture) portfolio oriented stuff - life sketches, etc. Though I am consdiering expanding this one into either a much bigger, better drawing, or a painting (right now it's less than three inches wide).

Anyway, that little 'incident' of art inspired me and made it all look a good deal less hopeless. Perhaps I am a bit artistic, after all. :)