swap to chronological order of most recently posted
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I painted this one on sanded paper, the much admired pastelmat type, and found it desperately unintuitive. The grippy surface could be nice, but it’s completely unabsorbant, and i found myself unable to layer the way I’m used to on rag papers, or honestly even on wood. that said, you really can blend infinitely on this stuff, so if that’s your jam you might get more out of it than i did!
Subject-wise this is based on my own photograph from a recent roadtrip, and it was a delight to get to zoom in on something I shot myself and try translating it into oil pastel! I’ve been playing more and more with macro lenses and extreme depth of field, and have been meaning for a while to experiment with translating that effect into paint of some kind of another.
That said, abstracting, blurring, and softening things is both really easy to do with oil pastel and really tricky to add nuance to. I can see some places in here where the effect is really landing, and others where things feel almost into only two planes, rather than the three or more I’d like to have had throughout. So, much to learn down this path, but I’m excited to keep going with it!
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Just playing around between work and comics and life.
Neocolor iis and watercolours!
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Get scrungled, as they say.
Watercolour and carbon ink.
I decided go back in and see if I can’t push the clarity on this further with gouache and I think it really helped!
My photodocumentation is such shit in the winter with no natural light available, sorry. Maybe I’ll scan some sketchbook pages this year! But don’t count on it.
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7 x 10″ gouache on hot press, referencing my own photos from seeing Leprous in Toronto back in September 2024.
The photo itself is much more blue than teal, but bright, saturated light blues are such a challenge to mix with gouache! So i turned the background teal and was able to get the relative saturation and values I needed, and keep the moody vibe of the photo.
My concert photos have certainly improved over the years, as digital photography tech got better at low light and phones started including physical telephoto lenses, but it’s rare i get close enough to get clear shots of performers’ faces.
In parallel, it’s usually tough for me to allow myself not to fully render a face in a painting, but given the absolute absence of details in my reference I was able to keep things very abstract here, and honestly i think it was good for me! I loved the hand pose in particular and i think it really kind of stands in for where a portrait would go .
Additionally, to talk for a minute about my painting process, I was taught still life and study painting via the Hawthorne method, which i would summarize thus:
put the right shapes in the right colours in the right place
It’s deceptively simple and forces you to sometimes forget what you’re painting and focus entirely on the graphic abstraction of what’s in front of you. People joke that you don’t need to know how to draw to paint like this, and I often think that’s oversimplified at best, but: I’m very happy with the hand anatomy in this piece and i definitely did not approach the hands through a drawing mindset. I just looked at the shapes of the colours and placed them as accurately as I could.
Intriguing.
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this is a repost from the cohost times, and explicitly is a short thought I meant to expand further upon. maybe someday I will!
Regarding the latest from Cory Doctorow (though it will be out of date tomorrow, as he writes a terrifying amount every day it seems): https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
While not explicitly about it, this is the first I’ve read of someone that touches on the absolute nightmare that is trying to have any agency around your own consumption on the internet these days. The algorithmic feed, the recommendation tech, the refusal to give me exactly what I ask to see and instead to serve up things that are similar in ways a machine understands but not, usually, in ways that are helpful to me, a human, who wants to keep tabs on their friends’ work or a particular band’s career or that one webcomic or what have you.
Whenever I click an X on something and the website interprets that as me saying “show me less of this” or “snooze this for 30 days” or such shit… it’s hugely disempowering. It contributes to a sort of learned helplessness online, I think. A kind of “fuck it, whatever” attitude because it is so exhausting to constantly be negotiating with platforms to see the things I have subscribed to seeing. Negotiating being the wrong word. Begging has been more the feeling.
And I am ranting about this on a service that promises to never do that to me, and I love it, and that’s a big part of why I’m here, but I know – I know deep in my bones – that I have infinitely more patience for learning new services, wrestling with technical fiddly challenges, weathering bugs and glitches, and – in the case here – of summoning to mind all the markup and css I have learned over a lifetime on the internet, than the majority of the people I care about.
So I’m pretty interested in there being some pushback against The Algorithm as a way to experience the digital world, for many of the same reasons mentioned in that link above, but also because I really do believe it removes users’ ability to properly consent to what they experience by measures that they can understand. And that can and will destroy their relationship with the internet.
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practicing writing and drawing with my awful terrible no good left hand moodboard
posted:
updated:
posted to: life
i’m gonna relearn how to enjoy this if it kills me.
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Since moving apartments, I’ve been feeling a kind of spring cleaning urge for all of my things physical and it turns out, digital. Since my physical belongings are an unmanageable mountain of family heirlooms in the form of bankers boxes full of loose photographs, and artifacts from my grandmother’s childhood that nobody can identify but also nobody ever threw out, I’ve been feeling like I should try something a little bit more manageable first.
By that I mean, my digital life. I have maintained a personal website on the internet since 1997; for the majority of that time, my personal website has served primarily as a portfolio of my artwork. However, that’s not necessary right now, for a couple of reasons:
A) Careerwise, I’m working as a salaried, permanent art director at a videogame company. I’m not only not currently looking for a job, but my prior approach to jobhunting, having a collection of examples of my concept art and illustration, probably isn’t the best way to find another salaried art director job in future. While it might be one part of that hunt, I suspect I will also need examples of the finished games, as well as all the other things people use to get real jobs like references, etc. This means that a personal portfolio site won’t be the make or break in my future job hunt at this time.
B) Perhaps even more importantly, though, I don’t know that a portfolio of my prior work is going to be a particularly accurate demonstration of what my work going forward is going to look like. Since my arm surgery, I’m learning to draw with my left hand, and since I don’t have anywhere near the physical control over it that I did over my dominant hand, my approach to making art is being forced to change. And it’s very early days, right now I’m still teaching myself to write legibly, and building the muscles it takes to do that. Line control and mark making with appeal are simply not on the short-term schedule. So much as I am proud of, and attached to my prior work, my prior style, and my prior process, it feels dishonest to promise those to future clients. Or to myself, really. So a portfolio format just asks a lot of questions I have no answers to at this time.
Other reasons for having my work on the internet include selling it, which I certainly love to do, but between moving and my arm and paperwork, right now I’m just selling PDFs in a pay what you want capacity on my gumroad store. I do hope to get back into designing products and selling playmaps and so on, but it’s the right choice right now to keep that on hold.
So I’m a bit at a loss for what to do with my personal website, is the TLDR of all this. I really got out of the habit of blogging or writing personal thoughts on the Internet when we entered the everything is problematic phase of cultural conversations; I would like to reclaim that but it might be safer to do so in the less personal/more anonymous space of cohost or tumblr or such. I’m certainly curious to hear people’s thoughts on that!
One angle I had thought of was approaching my website as an archive, as opposed to a portfolio; I can be a bit obsessive about tracking the chronology of things, why not take advantage of that? But I don’t know if that has any interest to anybody aside from myself, though I guess that’s reason enough to do it. I had considered blogging about the process of learning to use my nondominant hand/retraining my dominant hand once we know what its final capacity will be, and I have been keeping personal notes on all of this, but I don’t think this is something I can share publicly in real-time. It’s a bit intense. Maybe years down the road I’ll be able to condense it into a simpler narrative that I’m comfortable sharing?
Unfortunately all of this is tied up in my process of relearning to create right now; I’m not sure that I really need outside help figuring this out, as much as I need just the space to dump thoughts out of my head. But if you do have thoughts, or stuff you’d like to see from me, or questions, certainly let me know!
Thanks for reading this hot mess!
(dictated but not read)
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as I continue to chip away at my website, and get a feel for wordpress’s new full site editor capacity, I’m more excited than ever about what I can do with my website and also having some decision paralysis around what to do next, you know?
I think I mentioned this in an earlier post but I’m not in dire need of a portfolio site right now; for various reasons I’m not actively courting freelance art gigs, including but not limited to the state of my dominant hand, and the permanent salaried art director position I currently hold. it also seems likely to me that should I need to find a new job, I would likely seek out another art directing job; and the professional materials required to land one of those are not nearly as dependent on a portfolio of paintings as prior jobs in my career have been.
however I do really love sharing the work I’m doing, and have done, on the internet. and some of my work has a structure on its own, like my watercolor maps forming a pretty cohesive collection, or my crystal islands, or my comic work. I think those can all be their own sort of raison d’etre on the internet. but 99% of the things I make are much less organized than that, so I was wondering if it would make sense to simply approach things from an archival standpoint.
the nice thing about WordPress is the amount of metadata you can include in a post by having both the posted on date and the most recently modified date, as well as any custom Fields I choose to include, as well as tagging things like the medium or subject matter, and of course categorizing things. I feel like I would enjoy having a chronological archive of my own creative work on the internet in a way where I could find things if I wanted to share them in particular, but also in a way where it would be straightforward to do some curation to form a narrative around my own development or exploration of different mediums or ideas. like I think it’s pretty funny that I have almost three decades of my own artwork and that despite this depth of time and a huge range of skill, it’s all clearly made by the same nerd.
but I also have a little voice in my head that says this is hilariously self-centered and self-aggrandizing – and I have a slightly louder voice in my head that points out that this is maybe not something that I want to share publicly on the internet? but maybe that is easier to judge on a Case by case basis. like no, I’m not uploading my grade 9 handwritten novel, hahaha, can you imagine, dear God – but some of my grade nine drawings feel like important parts of my creative journey? God that’s so pretentious. anyways if I’m going to talk into the void on the internet I guess I can talk about whatever the hell I want, but I am curious if there’s a precedent for people maintaining archives of their creative lives publicly, and of course if there’s any interest from anyone else in this sort of thing.
living through this dominant hand stuff has certainly made me more self-reflective about my art right now anyways so, maybe this is something that feels like the right choice today and then in a year or two or three I will either choose to take down or feel deeply embarrassed by having done ever. future me will just have to deal though.
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