swap to chronological order of most recently posted
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i am starving for all the “how to art direct but not at a AAA company” content the universe can provide, certainly so i can continuously get better at my job, but also because I don’t yet have a language for what I’m doing all day every day at work and, like in this Lee Petty talk, I often unlock awareness of decisions I’m making simply by giving them a name.
Would love any recommendations! I’ve dug through gdc’s youtube archive and hunger for moooooooorrrrre
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So, some news: tomorrow I’m having surgery on my right arm – my dominant arm – my drawing arm, my writing arm, my brushing-my-teeth and typing-in-chat and unlocking-my-door arm – and will lose most use of it for years, and an unknown (but hopefully less dire) amount of use of it forever. As you might expect, this sucks so, so bad.
As you can see above, I have been trying to proactively warm up my left hand so I can still write and such once this happens. As you might also detect above, it has not felt great.
(complements on my left-handed writing are not welcome; the feel of it is so alien that even if it looked perfect, i’d be upset)
So while I go in to get that done, I was wondering if you’d be willing to reply or repost or something with a thing you like about my work that isn’t about how it looks? So I can go back to this post when I get real depressed afterwards and remind myself I’m more than my line quality?
And if you are curious, slightly more explanation with anatomical specifics below the cut:
so it turns out I have a peripheral nerve tumour on my radial nerve above my elbow in my right arm – it’s been slowly preventing me from lifting up my index finger (extending it) and more and more the rest of my hand’s extension has been weakening. scans show muscle atrophy in my forearm, so not only is the nerve weakening, it’s been weakening long enough that the muscles are getting noticeably less use.
from what we know, the tumour is benign, but it’s not possible to remove it without removing a chunk of the nerve, and likely fully severing the nerve. and though benign, the tumour has been steadily growing and is likely to continue doing so, where it would eventually effectively sever the nerve all on its own.
so this is a preventative surgery where we take the tumour out before it withers all the radial offshoot nerves farther down my arm, and graft in a spare (well, less important) nerve from my ankle, and hope that the graft takes and the nerve has a chance to heal and then let me rebuild my muscles and recover some hand and wrist extension. How much is not known. Complete recovery is impossible – some nerves in there are already dead and no amount of grafts and occupational therapy can change that, and more will wither while we’re waiting for the graft to heal.
Motor nerves can only heal for so long, so I’ll know more about my expected lifetime function in a few years. Likeliest outcome is followup tendon reassignment surgery to try and fill any dire functional gaps, and then what will presumably be a bit of a mind-fuck of physio trying to teach my brain that one of my flexion muscles will then be responsible for extension of fingers or wrist or something.
What’s confusing about this is, my other arm nerves are all fine.
Ulnar? Doing great.
Those nerves you fuck up with carpal tunnel? that I fucked up in 2008 and have spent a decade and a half taking very careful care of? really solid, healthy nerves! good job past Shel!So I’m certainly not losing 100% of hand function; I’ll still be able to curl my fingers and thumb and actively bend my wrist down – I just likely won’t be able to reverse all those movements. Hell, already I can tell how much weaker my right hand is at typing – writing this after a day of spreadsheets at work is really wearing it down.
It’s surreal how much all i feel is grief about this. There’s no one to be mad at, not even myself – it just, sucks. Can you hold a funeral for your handwriting? your markmaking language? your line quality? your ability to touch type up to 140 words per minute? your confident, trained, controlled method of self-expression? RIP, radial nerve. I already miss you.
It’s been a 13 month gauntlet of medical appointments since I first saw a neurologist about this and it’s a relief to finally have the surgery, but i do really appreciate all the other scans and tests and biopsies – they gave me enough information to make this legit horrible decision to try and save what function I can for tomorrow by making today awful. And to try and become ambidextrous, I guess, because god knows I’m not stopping making art simply because my body betrayed me. It’ll just be … not what I think of as my art, for a while, at least.
Tuesday Oct 3, 2023 Update:
life update / thanks for your sweet messages everyone / hope you enjoy speech to text because typing with my left hand is no fun
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Hey cohost I could use some help or some referrals to people who might actually be able to help or even like a really helpful YouTube video
So I’m down to one hand for typing and mousing and everything which as you might expect is making me twitchy with frustration, just constant ongoing frustration
I’ve been learning how to touch type with just my left hand on a small keyboard, the logic tech K480 – so ask number one is if you have a recommendation for a good quality mechanical not just compact but legit smaller keyboard or intentionally designed for left hand one hand only typing keyboard, but specifically one that still uses the QWERTY layout.
I enormously do not want to learn another layout. I was a very fast touch typer averaging 90 words a minute and in a flow state 130 a 140, and I know that layout very literally like the back of my hand. Before all this happened I had relearned that layout on a variety of other ergonomic keyboards, from ones that were just different proportions, to ones that were split entirely apart. I know I can relearn that layout in a different proportion, and I I don’t want to learn another layout.
The thing is I have to use keyboards other than the one keyboard I have at my desk, right? Like I have to be able to use a keyboard at the library or on my phone or my iPad or literally any other keyboard in the universe. It makes sense to me to get better at using my left hand on a universal keyboard layout instead of re learning something even something like door Jack that maybe isn’t completely unknown but still not reliably available.
I’ve been using typingclub.com training and it helps, but it’s clearly limited, y’know?
Anyways why I’m asking for help is because I really can’t find what I’m looking for right now and I could really use some help locating it.
If you’re noticing some weird errors in this post it’s because I’m using Windows dictation to write it because I’m tired. Windows dictation is not great, it has a lag because it’s using stuff on line and, because it’s using stuff on line, it just glitches out some times. I would also really really like to learn good reliable trainable voice to text software. I don’t need to operate my whole computer with it, mousing is certainly still fine, but I would love to be able to edit my own text as well. Especially I would like to be able to correct the software when it mishears me so that it can learn. Also, fun fact, windows dictation ******* sensors me.
(….switching to typing after that last sentence fully glitched out windows dictation)
so if you have any tried-and tested recommendation (please don’t just google, i am still capable of googling tyvm) please please pass them along.
sorry for the brutally irritable tone, it hasn’t even been two weeks and i am really having a Time whenever i sit down to my computer, a thing i once took immense pride in being very comfortable using.
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So I caved and bought Dragon naturally speaking professional 16. It’s the most supported and most recommended dictation software; and it’s been around for decades. So, I naïvely thought that it would be a straightforward and professional experience purchasing installing and setting up the software but no, absolutely not, it’s incredibly infuriating to deal with their website their online store customer support just the works. There are no built-in user facing notifications of any kind for failed purchases due to inaccurate credit card information, there is multiple versions of the site that all require their own login, and it turns out they haven’t even updated pages that offer deprecated add-ons. So you just sit there trying to figure out why the button doesn’t work, because there is no visible reason it shouldn’t.
Anyways, once I do get it purchased downloaded and installed, I’m reminded that to use full functionality in a browser I need to install that browser’s Dragon extension. About a year and 1/2 ago I took the time and switched my entire Internet life professional personal etc. over to Firefox. Fun fact! in July this year, Nuance who created Dragon, and Mozilla who created Firefox, had big breakup where neither supports the other any longer.
So right now my options are turn off Mozilla’s add-on block list and use the glitchy and deprecated extension file that other users have mercifully uploaded online; use Firefox without the extended support for verbally navigating and editing text; or switch everything in my life back to Google fucking chrome.
Infuriatingly I suspect that I will be back in chrome by the end of this, because however glitchy and deprecated this extension file is now at four months old, it’s going to only get worse.
I’ve already gone far enough to call and find out what’s going on which is how I found out that Nuance officially does not support Firefox-I have yet to find anywhere in their web documentation that would tell me that ahead of time- and as far as I can tell there is no intent to change that situation. The vicious little rage being in my head assumes that because Microsoft recently bought nuance, I should be grateful that it even works in chrome.
Anyways this is not a call for help or advice, I just needed to share this absolutely infuriating update with people who also care about what browser they use and spend a lot of time setting it up carefully just for themselves.
RIP my Firefox life; it was great while it lasted.
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(crossposted from my tumblr)
some left-handed gouache studies from the past week, after taking a couple months off thanks to the arm surgery and a deep fear that being bad at it would take all the fun out of it for me. painted on 12×16 paper, so I can get less mad about my wobbly left hand and focus more on larger marks and color and composition. good news! I’m not quite as bad at it as I had worried I would be, and it is mostly still very fun. bad news: not being able to draw a straight line continues to be a legit problem.
I don’t know if this arm recovery stuff is interesting to anybody besides myself, but not talking about it would make me crazy, so allow me to update you on all of the weird side effects of being able to partially but largely mostly not use my dominant hand:
- as expected, I continue to attempt to use my dominant hand for things despite the fact that it: cannot hold any weight, it cannot get my fingers out of the way when I go to grab something, portions of the back of my hand and fingers are completely numb and don’t notice when they bump against things, and despite the fact that I get weird nerve pain if I attempt to manipulate anything smaller than a tennis ball for any length of time
- I am most likely to thoughtlessly switch to my dominant hand in the middle of drawing or painting, in the middle of brushing my teeth, and while eating. apparently these are the three things I do where I get into a flow state.
- I am starting to confuse right and left, not so much as absolute directions, but as used to determine which way to tighten or loosen the lid on a jar or similar rotational acts that it turns out I absolutely do not have a logical structure for solving for anymore.
- I am starting to think of using my dominant hand for any purpose as “cheating”, which is definitely counterproductive, but that’s the ol’ internalized ableism for you.
- I am more convinced than ever that our entire society has been designed to be subtly infuriating to deal with using your left hand, and there is no way anyone who is left hand dominant needs to hear my opinions on the matter, but wow. gosh. geeze.
- I oscillate wildly between being deeply deeply grateful for adaptive tools and being deeply deeply angry about their limits. again, there is nobody out there who has been using any of these adaptive tools for more than 2 months who needs to hear my thoughts on the matter, so this message is just for able-bodied people: you cannot call a tool a successful replacement for abled usage methods if it does not allow self-determination in how you use it. Microsoft, I’m looking at you and the many useful swearwords you censor when i try using your speech to text tools.
I do still really love painting, and drawing, and writing, even though they are all now very much new challenges all over again. I suspect mostly I’m just speed running the same experience many people will go through as they age of having to modify and realign their approach to their usual modes of expression and interaction and creation, which is something people have been doing for as long as society has existed, which just means I’m going to be better at it, obviously, thanks to getting this Head start
and maybe a year from now I will have the ability to hold things in my dominant right hand for more than 30 seconds, and definitely a year from now I will have a lot more precise control over my left hand, so I guess there’s lots to look forward to 👍
in the meantime I will continue to paint my favourite things!
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Friends, I just finished teaching the last third of a course on print production, and between that and the whole thing with twitter’s crop changing (somewhere? not for me but somewhere?) I’ve found myself thinking a lot about copper etching and my relationship with the acid bath.
So, first up, copper etching is an art form where you engrave (through various means) thin grooves into a copper plate, then squeeze thick ink into those grooves, then wipe off the ink on the face of the plate, then soak paper so it’s very soft, then push it all through a press.
The pressure forces the paper into the ink-lined grooves of the plate, pushing the ink onto the paper, and you thus transfer the image from your copper plate to your paper. It’s a magnificent art form you’ve certainly seen examples of, even if you didn’t know! Here, a Rembrandt:
There’s a lot of ways to create these grooves in the plate; Rembrandt used a steel point and scratched them in, a technique called drypoint. Later, artists used a technique where a waxy resist would coat the plate, then drew lines in the resist, then soaked the plate in acid.
This is the acid bath of which I speak.
There’s a few ways to apply resist to a plate, and they give you different effects when you etch with them. First is a hard resist, which is a thick, firm wax that coats the plate and is removed by using that steel drypoint tool to create thin line work, like this Doré hatching:
You can also use soft resist, a malleable wax that allows you to press textures into it, like Barbara Smith has in her piece “Textures” here:
(my terminology might be a bit off, I’m noticing as I google, but hopefully the metaphor will still stand)
And the third method, my fav, is aquatint; a process where you add a resist that is .. spotty. Something like a light spray, or a dusting of wax, so that the plate is covered with a rough, dithered dot pattern of resist, with exposed copper in between. Example via Wikipedia:
I decided to try out copper plate etching, also called intaglio print making, after seeing David Blackwood’s work, where he works with aquatint extensively:
Aquatint lets you lay down fields of tone, which he uses in great contrast and collaboration with the linework he etches into the plate as well. It’s magnificent work, but it’s made all the more miraculous when you understand the whole thing with the acid bath.
So, when you put a copper plate into the acid bath, anywhere on the plate that isn’t protected by hard, soft or aquatint resist (also called ground) is slowly dissolved into the acid, creating little grooves. The longer it’s in the bath, the deeper the grooves – kind of.
The acid is fickle, and the more copper already dissolved into it, the slower it will dissolve new copper. And that’s a problem because you want to control exactly how deep those grooves go; the deeper the groove, the more ink it will hold, the darker the line will be on paper.
Under-etch your plate, and your lines will be faint, hold very little ink, and be extremely hard to get ink INTO when you apply it before making a print.
But you can’t know this until you take all that resist off the plate, wash it, and ink it up and print it.
OVERetch your plate, and the acid will start to eat the copper away from under your resist, widening your lines or flattening out your aquatint, so it’s easy to get ink into the lines, but hard not to wipe it back out when you try and wipe ink off the un-etched face of the plate.
Again, not obvious until you go and try printing your plate.
And with intaglio, by which I mean copper plate etching, you might want lines of varying darknesses – you might want aquatint of varying darknesses – and so you will be adding and removing resists of various kinds, and etching and re-etching your plate over and over again.
And you can do various things to get the feel for the acid bath’s … acidity … on the day you go to etch something in it, but depending on the size of your bath, you etching a large plate for a while might change the bath’s acidity. Worst is if it’s fresh and you didn’t know.
So this whole art form, whereby people produce some of the most precise and exquisite pieces in the north western historical canon IMO, is actually an absurd collaboration with a rogue chemical that may or may not do what you want at any point in time.
And by my third year of making work like this, I had concluded that you simply had to think of the acid bath as a rogue collaborator who you handed your plate off to over and over again throughout your process. You had to just take a deep breath and accept chaos as an element.
Yes, you did your best to prepare your plate, get the right resist on it, draw the right lines where you wanted them; and yes you set a timer and kept an eye on your plate and checked the etch over and over again – but in the end you were teaming up with chaos chemistry.
And I loved it! I loved the surprises you got from acid bath, even if they went against what I had planned. I loved improvising around its unpredictability! Once I accepted that it was part of the practice, I found it exhilirating.
And for me, that’s the appeal of all traditional media – I can’t predict every little thing, I’m not 100% in control at all times, and artwork has to happen despite all that.
And so I expanded this concept for myself out to my larger practice. When I send a file to print? I’m collaborating with a printer; both the person, who I can maybe talk to, and the machine, that will have its own peccadillos. I prepare as best I can and still I may be surprised.
I’m not saying I never threw out plates that got way out of hand, and I’m not saying I never had a print run of my work I had to send back or reprint – I’m just saying that my thought process around them has changed, so I allow for a wider range of surprises than I used to.
So when everyone was going on about the twitter crop finally changing, and I realized I didn’t really care, I noticed that I had expanded this concept to publishing online as well. I prep a nice jpg and then I take a deep breath and accept twitter’s chaos in collaboration.
And that’s how I discovered that, to me, twitter is just another acid bath.
One response to “Etching and Acid Baths and Surrender”
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I enjoyed this article very much! I remember you showing me the whale print years ago.
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very proud of these sketchy pencil crayon autobio comics!
and an arm update for y’all as well:
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So my day job at Bloom Digital has kept a lot of my life under NDA, and it’s a real treat to get to tell you about LongStory 2 and all the hard work we’ve been doing to make this game a reality!
LongStory was originally created in 2014 as an alternative to shallow “insert coins for romance” sims on the market. LongStory was one of the first dating sims that supported young people in exploring their gender, sexuality and identity in a safe supportive space, and we’ve had a devoted fan base since the first game launched.
And now, the LongStory 2 Kickstarter is live! We need games like LongStory now more than ever. We are looking to raise CAD $25,000 in finishing funds: https://bit.ly/4a8p7Jm
Your support will help us make a full new season of a diverse and LGBTQ+ game that our players have already fallen in love with. At Bloom we believe the world needs games that create that hopeful and loving future: You can help us continue this story with our signature compassion, curiosity, conversation and, occasionally, sarcasm.
Backing this project gets you access to the sequel, the original game and some sweet LongStory swag! Not to mention the satisfaction of knowing more inclusive, safe, consent-based emotional gaming content will be available for players new and old.
Also, did we mention, we’re live on Steam with a demo for Steam NextFest? You can take a good look at LongStory 2 for free right here:
It’s a gorgeous, heartfelt, funny game and it has the potential to really mean something, especially to any queer kids in your life; getting to be a small part of making it a reality has really meant a lot to me!
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Ceramics
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posted to: arttagged: celadons, ceramics, crystal islands, glazing, learning, palette, sculpture, structure, underglazeI’ve been learning ceramics in a casual ongoing way now, enjoying getting out of my comfort zone, and playing with a new medium. Much like printmaking, kiln fired and glazed ceramics are really a collaboration with chemistry and physics as well as a personal creative act, and I love that aspect so much.
Below I’m sharing my work in reverse chronology – the newest stuff is at the top. I think? you can see some real progress, but it’s amazing how much more I have to learn! I really love the feeling of being at the start of a long journey into a medium — it’s gotta be one of the most inspiring feelings I encounter as an artist.
In January 2024, I took a local intro class that included both wheel and handbuilding – I had to relearn everything left-handed and, in the case of the wheel, one-handed, so I set my expectations low, but I really feel like I was able to push myself and make things I am very proud of! The crystal island above was not planned — the instructor simply inspired me after he demonstrated his own whimsical sculpture approach, and I couldn’t resist trying! It feels like a miracle that it stayed together, stands up on its own, and looks this good, and it’s left me starving for the chance to make infinitely more islands!
Wheel throwing single (left) handed (above) was certainly a new challenge, and while I didn’t manage to work things as thin and delicate as I had earlier with my right hand, as you can see below. But they had such a wonderful range of glazes; and that small-mouthed shallow bowl is, it turns out, my dream water cup for painting – impossible to splash, easy to reach the bottom to wipe the paint off. And despite an s-crack in the base, it holds water fine! A miracle.
Below are five little cups I made over a three day workshop. First time making handles! As is traditional, none of these hold over 200ml of liquid due to shrinkage when firing – they’re so little! But I do still use them – the handles actually turned out lovely to hold, even if hilariously out of proportion with the little mugs themselves.
My first ceramics class, back in January 2023! Two functioning hands made learning the wheel a fun and exciting challenge, though at the time my handbuilding was frustratingly clumsy. Regardless, I got a functional (tiny) lemon juicer and a functional paint palette out of it, and I learned so much about throwing and glazing.
My favourite of all of this first batch is definitely the bubble glazed cup with the seagull silhouettes. Sadly the clear glaze on top crawled, but it’s a visual design idea I’d really love to try again soon.
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